FO:NV + Steam for $25 is ok ... for $50 is a stretch. Steam is a pain and what is with the ads every time I start Steam?? I get an ads for one of their bogus programs that i have no interest in. Also please notice there is no way to turn this off, this pushing products in your face to earn a extra buck. GMAB!
:flamethrower: to Steam!!
What ads? You mean the occasional pop up that you get when quitting a game informing you of some new release or the crazy sales they have? It's not like some stupid internet popup spam that is downright annoying or whatever, most of the pop ups are nice and inform you of great deals they have like their Christmas sales and what not. Not to mention its one pop up with several pages, its not like it creates multiple popups.
As for "bogus programs" I have no idea what you are talking about because Steam doesn't have any programs, it just tells you that something new and big got released and is possibly on sale or that they are having one of their major sales going on or maybe one product is on sale for a crapton off. But yeah, GOD FORBID that they tell you some game is anywhere from 25% - 75% off, screw those guys :rolleyes:
You do know that actually most users avoid steam at all cost?
You do know that many, many users have problem with steam on many titles (and not just NV).
Maybe as preposition: I do like the concept of steam, however the programming such bad that probably a 12 yo girl without computer experience could do it better. It is not Bethesda Code which screws it up. there may be a bug or two...[censored] happens. I didnt have problems with NV. I started having problems when steam didn't update today. Offline mode can only be turned on when going online...which is not very feasible if you want to activate it due to ISP outage.
Offline mode works pretty well? Every time i start a game in offline mode I have to confirm twice that I want to stay offline and that my games are not synchronized in the steam cloud.
I tried to uninstall Steam and did not backup my game files because I thought no programmer who knows anything about his job (i do that too for a living) and with a sane mind would deinstall ALL game files with steam. I guess I was wrong...its all gone (and i guess my save files are gone as well, although unconfirmed. They at least cannot be found in my user application data.)
Like I said: Steam would be a good thing if implemeted correctly and by competent programmers...however it is not.
Bethesda is responsible for the mess with NV because they chose Steam as a platform although it might be obvious when just looking 30 mins total on google, how bad steam may get. While I do see necessity for a copy protection or some form of DRM...driving away customers will in the end cost a lot more than any losses on copy protection. I havent gotten any game illegally in over one decade (and im against it in general). Problems with Steam or even worse Ubisoft however make me reconisder my attitude to pirating. I am quite certain i'm not alone with that. And this is a sad thing because in the end the game industry will ultimatly dig their own graves.
Except the whole part where people avoid Steam isn't true. Anyone that avoids Steam is a Luddite and wrong and I don't know of people having issues with Steam and not just the game itself being screwed up. All of the problems I've had with FONV, aside from the Cloud service not updating saves properly and waiting till midnight PST to unlock on release day, have all been problems of the game itself, which means Bethesda is at fault. Im still reading this thread and all, but how many posts did it take for someone to mention you can just tell Steam to not keep the game updated? Is there some issue with that too where it keeps updating it or something? AFAIK telling it to not keep it updated should work and I've not heard of it updating stuff that doesn't really need an internet connection to play (EG: Games with multiplayer).
As for offline mode, if your internet connection takes a crap as long as Steam was running before hand there shouldn't be an issue with going into offline mode as I've had that happen and it went into offline mode fine. Do you people stop running Steam or turn your computers off at night or something equally ridiculous?
Normal DRM is WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more likely to run people off / cause them to pirate the game than Steam ever will, mostly because any kind of new DRM is ridiculously draconian with install limits and other BS. If you actually consider pirating a game because of Steam, well there's just something wrong with you.
The PC version really requires Steam for validation? That kind of blows my mind.
Not that SecuROM was exactly a great solution, but Steam just seems... inconvenient on so many levels. I know I've had a lot of problems with Steam's platform and games. I'm all for protecting the developers, but I wouldn't have considered Steam a great way to do so.
I wonder if DRM actually has any real impact on combating piracy. The pirates seem pretty competent at bypassing those measures, then offering a less invasive version of the software through other avenues. There must be a better method to protect the developers from piracy than things like Steam or SecuROM, although I'm not sure offhand what that would be.
DRM doesn't combat squat and probably contributes to people pirating games because of how much they dislike it. Steam on the other hand probably combats it or at least people just don't care because, unlike DRM, Steam doesn't svck and is awesome.
you totally miss the point here. With games being published which force steam activation, your are bound to run into such problems as platform. While your statement that only a very small minority got issues were true before titles were exclusively published for steam, it is not anymore. The box reads: validation through steam. Most customers don't have any idea what it really means and what the consequences are.
Steam is very unstable and unreliable. And even if it works for 90% of the customers, it still fails for 10%. Again, this would be ok if those 10% it is not working for could just move on and use another platform...but now they bought the game and they cannot. When using steam as drm I DEMAND as CUSTOMER, that the platform is stable...steam is unfortunatly not. If this condition is not fulfilled i may in future look for other channels to play the games. Channels which are not only far cheaper but a lot less troublesome.
BTW, Steam added no value or whatsoever to any game i played. Just another program, which is even asking for admin rights every time I start it (there's no need to require admin rights) opening vulnerabilities on the computer, with forced updates when going online and incompetent support (you really shouldnt have a buggy platform AND bad support at the same time).
No, just no. Absolutely not. Quit lying like that just because you have an issue with it autoupdating the game. Steam is incredibly stable and reliable now, this isn't like it was five or six years ago.
All the Steam DRM accomplishes is making it a pain in the butt for HONEST GAMERS. Any thief with an internet connection and WinRAR can download and install New Vegas in 2 hours and not even know what Steam is as they're watching the opening cut scene. So tell me, how the hell does Steam prevent piracy again??? Please enlighten me. Cause, so far, all I see it doing is inconveniencing me (someone who happily paid $50 for a game that they were looking forward to) while any thief on the planet is enjoying New Vegas for free while not even having to fool around with Steam...Oh yeah, but Steam prevents piracy...
It's still infinitely better than any kind of DRM and most honest gamers aren't dumb and love the crap out of Steam.
I am not new to the concept of Steam. I first encountered it when I heard there was a sequel to Half-Life. I did some research and decided that it wasn’t something I wanted to bother with. Then over the years more and more was being done to and with Steam and I’ve occasionally gone back to see what it has become. It seems that every time Steam gets “improved” it becomes less desirable to me. To this point I have just not been playing games that require Steam, but FO:NV has been on my list of Must Have games since it was announced. I had purposely stayed off the boards about it so that I would not read and spoilers, but I heard that some people had major bugs and I decided to check out a few of these posts so that I knew what to expect, that is when I first found out it was a Steamworks game. I was actually getting ready to go to the store and buy FO:NV when I read that. I did not buy the game, in fact I still have the cash in pocket that I was going to use. I’ve looked at Steam again and seen all that it has to offer, and I still want no part of it. A few weeks ago this attitude was labeled as “old fashioned”, then it was described as “computer illiterate” but now I’m seeing that not wanting Steam makes me a “Software Pirate”? This is just the lowest of the low blows, I hope it doesn’t continue to go down from there. (By the way, if someone loves Steam but not the UbiSoft DRM does that make them Part-Time Pirates?)
I asked this in another thread but I think I should ask again:
Does it really harm Steam users to have a non Steam version of the game? If the retail DVD version had Disk Check and the Steam version had Steam for DRM, would that really cause major problems for Steam? It seems to me that the Pro-Steam crowd got their way, why insult the rest of us who lost out?
I'd really like to hear some elaboration on that because it makes no sense whatsoever. Steam is so much better than what it was when HL2 was released that its not even funny, so I really cannot understand how it became less desirable as it improved.
Whys that then do you prefer to have a soft copy of a program that could take upto 5 hours to download or a hard copy that can take a minimum of 5 minutes to install on your system.
If it's taking you five hours or more to DL a game, I'd suggest moving out of the cave you live in and somewhere where the internet doesn't svck. On my 10mb/s connection, for the largest games I have on Steam it takes like two to three hours, tops, to DL and can easily be done while I am sleeping or better yet playing some other game (thought not a MP one because the lag is terrible when doing that). I BY FAR prefer Steam and downloading something over installing it off of a disc, so much so that the only PC games I buy physical copies of anymore are ones with collector edition junk in it like FONV.
» Tue May 03, 2011 8:09 am 
