Meh. Worked fine for me.
I preloaded and was waiting for the release at 12:01 pst. I was playing by 12:20 pst without a hitch. It’s a new system, and if it works to cut down privacy, then it will be here to stay. Far more people will want the game of the century than will not buy it on principle.
They’re bullshitting you, mush. The Sale of Goods Act states that owt you buy has to be of satisfactory quality, as described and fit for purpose. A PC game that won’t let you play it on your PC because it doesn’t like certain DVD drives isn’t exactly fit for the purpose.
Pop along to yer trading standards office or C.A.B. for advice, matey.
Worked fine for me, too. That doesn’t stop it from being a ridiculously intrusive piece of shit.
You do mean “piracy,” right?
Heh. Best Freudian slip, ever!
I WAS going to buy it for myself for Christmas, but having read this thread they just lost themselves a customer.
Yes but will far more people get a cracked copy that avoids all the hoop jumping rather than pay for one. Insisting on a net connection for a computer game is a fairly bold step and one that will alienate some games (particularly the paranoid privacy freaks and the ‘what happens if Valve goes bust’ crowd).
I’ve been playing computer games on and off for around 20 odd years. I’ve seen various forms of copy protection from insane tape loaders and bizarre CD formats to multicoloured barcodes to unphotocopably manuals with keys to hardware dongles to Steam.
None of them work. None of it stops priacy for any length of time.
The only things I can think of with half a chance of avoiding this are MMORPGs and others which host a vital part of the game experience away from your machine.
When your copy protection is stoping paying customers enjoying the game then they’ve paid for then it’s gone too far, the sad thing is it probably will lose them more money than it’ll save them.
SD
If there is a Half-Life 3 and Valve is still using Steam, I will not buy it. I don’t care if it’s “game of the century” good (and wow, since we just started a new century, I guess games in the year 2088 are going to totally suck. 
). There are plenty of other games that give me just as much entertainment without the hassle. It should not take 3 hours to install a retail copy, create a steam account, register a CD key, and then have to wait for it to download and unlock even more files from Steam. I paid $60 for half a product, and that’s just wrong.
It won’t cut down on piracy. It was cracked the day it was released. On a side note, downloading the crack made the game a hell of a lot easier to start. 
Thanks for the warning. It was bad enough that each disc of NWN requires a huge PIN number (I remember something like 22 or 25 digits each). After loading the original game and all the expansions at the time, it was fast approaching 100 digits of PIN.
The fucked up thing is, as bad as Steam is, the game itself if worth the hassle. Oh My Fucking God is it ever worth the hassle. Steam could be twice as fucked as it is, and it would still be worth it.
Genius game. Retarded marketing.
Buy it. Hopefully, a month from now, they’ll have most of the biggest problems with Steam sorted.
If people keep buying the game despite the ridiculous setup, what incentive do they have to fix it?
I got the same problem as hybrid_dogfish. I forked about the same (equivalent of 30 something quid) for a brand spanking new DVD/RW drive (BTC 1008) and flashed it with new firmware. I installed the retail DVD version, played it for a few hours then went to bed. The next morning, the fucking thing is spitting out “Please insert disc” messages.
I’ve swept for viruses, and uninstalled Nero to no avail.
Now I’m left with a very expensive Frisbee.
FUCK!
Errr, the biggest problems with Steam have already happened. It made the installation an enormous hassle, and it’s still sitting there like a face-hugger on my desktop, offering me opportunities to buy all kinds of other shit I don’t want just because I want to play the game I did buy.
That kind of thing pissed me off when Sierra first started doing it, with their “Sierra Utilities” bullshit that was nothing more than marketing for the company permanently installed on my system. And at least Sierra actually had a lot of games out at the time – did it never occur to anyone at Valve that it’s probably best to wait with your multi-game launching interface until you’ve actually, I don’t know, made more than two fucking games?
Game companies need to learn: you make videogames, you don’t make operating systems. Leave that to the companies that make OS’es, and let people use their damn computers however they want to. I don’t need a big intrusive launcher in order to start your game; I just want to play the damn game.
Yes, Half-Life 2 is astoundingly good. But no game is worth all the “Steam” nonsense. People (elsewhere) keep talking about how it’s “the future” and anyone who doesn’t like it is a Luddite. That’s bullshit. I went to a retailer specifically so I didn’t have to put up with all the online crap.
None at all. I’d still play this game if it required a bone marrow sample every time you started it up. Valve has got my balls in a vise-grip.
I love HL1/HL2, and from what I hear the game kicks unholy arse and takes down names, but the whole Steam “mandatory Net connection” concept is one of the worst freaking ideas I’ve ever seen for people who buy a hard-copy CD/DVD. I can understand them doing it for the electronic-distros, but for a CD that you buy???
I understand it has already been cracked and tons of people who have bought it legitimately have already cracked it so they don’t have to deal with this bullshit. And IMHO they are morally 100% in the right to crack their legitimately puchased software in order to play it - as opposed to not playing it because they don’t have the right port open or their PC isn’t on a LAN.
The thing is, Valve knows exactly what they’re doing. They’ve not only been receiving non-stop Steam complaints from the community for years now, the VU suit surely should have made them take a second look. Instead, they’re so confident that HL2 will rule that they’re giving their paying users the big thorny shaft of mandatory net connections. I think it says a lot about their future - HL2 might be their grand finale.
Sure, you can just download it onto your games machine through that internet connection it doesn’t have.
They never expected to stop THAT. The problem with the cracks that steam helps make harder is:
- because they have to be updated for every steam mini-patch, that means downloading a new crack every few days
- Valve can globally ban your MP if you pirate their game
The other thing steam accomplished to hurt piracy is by allowing them to do a worldwide simultaneous release, which means anyone who wants it at least has the option to buy it legally: no waiting four months to get the game in Australia while Americans enjoy it and rub their faces in it. In addition, including their decryption scheme on even the retail CDs prevented, for possibly the first time in a major game in recent history, any pre-release warez of the full game.
If they want to sell games online, please explain how they’d do copy protection, cheat protection, updates, etc. without some sort of account system? A little farther down, someone complains about someone stealing their old CD key. Well, that’s exactly the problem with the old school account. With Steam, you can’t steal someone’s account unless you somehow get their password. With HL1 or anyone other game, you could just keygen into someone else’s account and ruin their experience.
While I sympathize with the complaints about the authentication servers being extremely slow in the first few days (overloaded with an unprecedented number of people and DoS’d all at the same time), I honestly can’t understand the complaints about the business model Valve has chosen with Steam. If they can work out some minor issues, this path is, I believe, the correct one.
With Steam, I can take the game anywhere, install it from content backups I legally burned myself (what other game lets you do that, even including an option to do it in the official menu?!) or download it again for free onto any computer in the world and start playing. Valve can patch any issues that crop up ASAP instead of doing long-awaited major patches that take forever to come out. Once VAC2 is up and running they can finally crack down hard on cheats. With Steam, nobody can steal my account and block me from playing MP. I can play offline, I can play online. I don’t need a CD in the drive to play (some retail people apparently do, thanks to Vivendi’s idiotic insistence, and I can’t imagine such a requirement will last too long). The price is that the game requires an internet connection during install. Frankly, I don’t think that’s too high a price to pay for a significant and positive direction in game distribution, patching, security, and so on.
I admit that I was pissed Tuesday morning (12:01am) when my pre-load didn’t work instantly, but this frustration was moderated when Valve employees personally tracked me down and troubleshot the problem until it was fixed and I was playing without a hitch. And the game is truly fantastic: setting a new standard for FPS action and game design. Anyone who misses out on it just because Steam has issues from time to time is a fool.
There are clearly issues with Steam. But these are not things central to the idea, just to the execution, and they don’t even seem to affect the majority of users. They can, and will, be fixed, so that everyone’s experience is as seamless as most people’s is.
Maybe because they WANT people to enjoy their stuff? Believe it or not, they actually do. I can’t imagine they are happy with getting bad press and fan complaints. They live on their fans.
Frankly, I find it hard to believe that a net connection, in this day and age, is as much of a hassle as many people are carrying on about. If the install took forever, that’s obviously a huge problem, but not one that is instrinsic to the idea of doing account-based online product registration. If you don’t have a net connection, well it says you need one right on the box. And Steam does more than just manage multiple games: it downloads and updates and new content for the game you have. HL2 doesn’t end with the SP game alone: it’s meant to be extended with user-made mods, user-made SP content, new official valve HL2 game content, updates, patches, improvements, online community, etc. And Steam makes sense as an idea for managing all that sort of stuff as seamlessly as possible.