Steamed
Kate bought me Half Life 2 for Christmas - not just the "ordinary" game, but the Collector's Edition including a T-shirt. Nice!
I installed the game yesterday, and the chances are it's going back to the shop. The game itself may be a masterpiece but I may never know because, despite following the installation instructions (such as they are) I can still not get it to run in "offline" mode; that is, without being connected to the Internet.
The problem is the Steam software that installs along with the game. Its primary purpose is to stop anyone with an illegal copy of the game playing it, and it does that by registering on their servers, decrypting the installed files and other things as you install. You must therefore have your network connection up during installation. While it was installing the game it downloaded about twenty megabytes of something or other (it gave no clue about what it was doing) which, because I use a 56K modem, took about two hours.
If that's all there was to it there wouldn't be a problem - it's annoying but I could live with it. Unfortunately though, that's not all. Having installed the game I tried to play it but it wouldn't start - instead, I got a message saying this game is not ready to play in offline mode.
No indication of why it wasn't ready.
No clue to what I needed to do to make it ready.
So I reconnected to the net and tried again, and this time it started downloading upgrade files which took another twenty minutes or so. This on top of the two hours of downloading that I'd already had to wait through. When that was done I disconnected and tried starting the game again. I got a message saying this game is not ready to play in offline mode.
No indication of why it wasn't ready.
No clue to what I needed to do to make it ready.
At that point it was after 11pm and I'd been messing with it for around three hours and still couldn't play. I wrote a mail to the Valve's tech support then called it a night and played Doom 3 instead.
I asked Donny about it, because he's been playing HL2 on his machine which is at a friend's house with a broadband connection. He said you have to play the game for a few minutes online before the server unlocks it and allows the offline mode. This morning I hooked up again and started the game. The first thing Steam told me was that it was going to download Half Life 2: Deathmatch - it didn't ask if I wanted it; I don't, so I cancelled the load. I got HL2 started and played a few minutes to give it a chance to unlock. I don't know if there's supposed to be some signal that says it's unlocked, so I just gave it five minutes then saved and exited, then disconnected and tried to play offline. I got a message saying this game is not ready to play in offline mode.
No indication of why it wasn't ready.
No clue to what I needed to do to make it ready.
I'm a programmer by profession and as part of that I have to perform system upgrades fairly often. At work I have never had to perform an installation or upgrade that has given me as much trouble as this game has. I'll give Valve's tech support the rest of today to come up with a solution, and in the meantime I may try giving it just a few more minutes to see if it'll unlock, but if I can't get it running today it goes back to the shop tomorrow, T-shirt and all.
Valve are shooting themselves in the foot with Steam. Gamers are used to installing a new game from CD and then playing it right away (I installed Doom 3 in under twenty minutes), and not having to spend three or four hours waiting on downloads only to find that they still can't play. If you have a broadband connection and you're always online anyway, lucky you - but not everyone has broadband, and not everyone can be burning phone time to be playing a single-player game.
I also don't like that I have to have the Steam software running on my system soaking up CPU and memory while I'm playing a game. And I don't like that Steam will leech off my narrow-bandwidth network connection to tell me about new games and even perhaps start downloading them when I don't want them.
I play games to relax. Valve have traded their paranioa and insecurity for a system that makes playing a game a chore. I think Valve are going to be refunding quite a lot of cash unless they rework Steam to have it work the way their customers want, or better still scrap Steam altogether.
So whether or not I decide to keep HL2 I will never buy another game that uses Steam, and I probably won't ever again buy anything that has the Valve label on it.
I installed the game yesterday, and the chances are it's going back to the shop. The game itself may be a masterpiece but I may never know because, despite following the installation instructions (such as they are) I can still not get it to run in "offline" mode; that is, without being connected to the Internet.
The problem is the Steam software that installs along with the game. Its primary purpose is to stop anyone with an illegal copy of the game playing it, and it does that by registering on their servers, decrypting the installed files and other things as you install. You must therefore have your network connection up during installation. While it was installing the game it downloaded about twenty megabytes of something or other (it gave no clue about what it was doing) which, because I use a 56K modem, took about two hours.
If that's all there was to it there wouldn't be a problem - it's annoying but I could live with it. Unfortunately though, that's not all. Having installed the game I tried to play it but it wouldn't start - instead, I got a message saying this game is not ready to play in offline mode.
No indication of why it wasn't ready.
No clue to what I needed to do to make it ready.
So I reconnected to the net and tried again, and this time it started downloading upgrade files which took another twenty minutes or so. This on top of the two hours of downloading that I'd already had to wait through. When that was done I disconnected and tried starting the game again. I got a message saying this game is not ready to play in offline mode.
No indication of why it wasn't ready.
No clue to what I needed to do to make it ready.
At that point it was after 11pm and I'd been messing with it for around three hours and still couldn't play. I wrote a mail to the Valve's tech support then called it a night and played Doom 3 instead.
I asked Donny about it, because he's been playing HL2 on his machine which is at a friend's house with a broadband connection. He said you have to play the game for a few minutes online before the server unlocks it and allows the offline mode. This morning I hooked up again and started the game. The first thing Steam told me was that it was going to download Half Life 2: Deathmatch - it didn't ask if I wanted it; I don't, so I cancelled the load. I got HL2 started and played a few minutes to give it a chance to unlock. I don't know if there's supposed to be some signal that says it's unlocked, so I just gave it five minutes then saved and exited, then disconnected and tried to play offline. I got a message saying this game is not ready to play in offline mode.
No indication of why it wasn't ready.
No clue to what I needed to do to make it ready.
I'm a programmer by profession and as part of that I have to perform system upgrades fairly often. At work I have never had to perform an installation or upgrade that has given me as much trouble as this game has. I'll give Valve's tech support the rest of today to come up with a solution, and in the meantime I may try giving it just a few more minutes to see if it'll unlock, but if I can't get it running today it goes back to the shop tomorrow, T-shirt and all.
Valve are shooting themselves in the foot with Steam. Gamers are used to installing a new game from CD and then playing it right away (I installed Doom 3 in under twenty minutes), and not having to spend three or four hours waiting on downloads only to find that they still can't play. If you have a broadband connection and you're always online anyway, lucky you - but not everyone has broadband, and not everyone can be burning phone time to be playing a single-player game.
I also don't like that I have to have the Steam software running on my system soaking up CPU and memory while I'm playing a game. And I don't like that Steam will leech off my narrow-bandwidth network connection to tell me about new games and even perhaps start downloading them when I don't want them.
I play games to relax. Valve have traded their paranioa and insecurity for a system that makes playing a game a chore. I think Valve are going to be refunding quite a lot of cash unless they rework Steam to have it work the way their customers want, or better still scrap Steam altogether.
So whether or not I decide to keep HL2 I will never buy another game that uses Steam, and I probably won't ever again buy anything that has the Valve label on it.
posted by Pete Ford at
1:14 PM
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