Discrete Vector

I am pissed and hence this article. In fact I am still pissed while writing this article. And it will probably remain that way for an hour or so. That’s approximately the amount of time Lost Planet: Extreme edition will take to update itself on my Broadband connection. And the last time I checked the meter it was downloading at around 190 Kbps which is very good by Indian standards let me tell you.

(Why am I, a connoisseur of fine games, playing this game so late? Its a long story. Maybe some other time. Loosely revolves around the game’s unavailability in India, play-asia.com, and the Indian postal service)

The problem is not with the update, the problem is that I am being forced to. Let me clarify. Many publishers (Capcom, Id, Valve to name a few)choose to deliver their games on a platform called Steam. Steam is like a game manager of sorts. Its a digital content and rights management platform. Its also a digital distribution system. What that means is that you no longer have to buy a shrink wrapped game CD from a store. You can buy the game on Steam and have it downloaded to your machine and start playing instantly… er… I mean as soon as you complete downloading your 3 GB game. You can still buy these games from stores but the activation is through Steam.

Ok, back to shrink wrapped games. So I buy Lost planet, pop it into my DVD drive, run the mammoth installation (4.something GB). Then I have to activate it online using Steam. Oh, and people without Internet? Losers. Now I can play the game right? Eh, well, you see after installation, Steam automatically starts downloading patches for the game without even asking you. It also downloads additional content so that your game can be played ‘offline’. And till this is done you cant play the game. Zip. Its as simple as that. Now you know why I am waiting.

Remember the Half life 2 launch fiasco in 2004? The authentication servers went down for 5 hours preventing gamers from logging in (and hence authenticating & playing). All thanks to Steam.

If you try to launch the game while the update is in progress, you will get an informative dialog very similar to the one shown below.

A familiar screen while trying to play many Steam powered games.

What pisses me off is this: I install an almost 5 GB game and I have to DOWNLOAD ADDITIONAL content to play it? Activation is one thing but forcing you to download stuff you don’t want? I don’t think so. The content I am currently downloading are multiplayer maps and some other stuff I will never use. I don’t even play online!

If I am smart I will disable Steam automatic update option for this game after this download is over. I made a mistake of not doing this after I installed Half life 2. Oh by the way, its the guys at Valve who owns Steam. Give credit where it is due. Amen. Ok, so I installed HL2, waited for the game to download whatever crap it was downloading and eagerly started the game. In the excitement, I forgot to turn off automatic update. So the next time I started my machine and went online, it started downloading more digital crap (patches they call it) forcing me to wait AGAIN. Its painfully funny because there is no way around it, once you allow it to start you have to wait for it to stop. Its like your nagging girlfriend. There is no way around it.

[A quick update on the progress of my download: The download started off at 85% (I guess the 5G installation was the 85%!!) Now its at 87% and it has already downloaded 450 MB! I have a 4GB download limit of which a good chunk has been used already. I shall not elaborate further for the fear of breaking down. Real men don't cry]

So there you have it, yet another ingenious way of warding off genuine customers and encouraging piracy. I mean whatever happened to the good old days of popping in a disc and shooting some monsters? The only reason why people are putting up with Steam is because some of the best games are delivered this way. Half life 2: Episode 3 anyone?

What’s good about the Steam Platform
• Helps beat piracy
• You automatically get important patches
• Dedicated servers and hence very high download speeds
• Pay and download games (I personally don’t care about this. Give me shrink wrapped any day)

Valve/Steam, please clean up your mess. We just want to play the game. The extras? Keep them, for all I care. Important patches? We gamers are intelligent. Really. Let us decide whether we need them or not.

[Update (27 May 2008): The download required to play LP offline turned out to be a whopping 1.5 GB. I remember days when 2GB used to be your entire hard disk capacity! Clearly unacceptable. I wonder what Capcom was thinking.]

Happy Gaming,
Alex