So after nearly seven years I have finally replaced my PC and am looking to finally play some newer games One thing that has caught my attention is the “Orange Box”. I played and enjoyed the original Half-Life but never played any of Half-Life 2 and Portal looks interesting so it is probably a good deal as far as I am concerned.
Checking, I see that the Orange Box is available both as a physical box in stores and as a digital download from Steam. The cost looks to be about the same but I notice that there are quite a few other games available from Steam as well.
Now, I like the idea of having a physical disc in my hands; I like knowing that I can reinstall the software at will if something happens to my system or if I simply uninstall it and then decide to come back to it again later. OTOH, I can see the advantages of a digital distribution.
So, can someone tell me how Steam works? If I buy a game through them will I have to buy it a second time if I have to reinstall? Do I have to be on the Internet in order to play a game? I see that Steam has a community component; is it anything reasonable or is it primarily a bunch of “We pwned j00 n00b!” types? Are there any other advantages/disadvantages to going through them? Any comments or suggestions appreciated. Thanks.
It doesn’t really make a difference if you buy The Orange Box in the stores, or on-line. Either way, you’ll have to use Steam. It’s part of their authentication process. It is possible to set up HL2 to play without connecting to the internet, but as I recall, you have to jump through an inordinate number of hoops to do it. Not my favorite design decision ever, but it’s not really that much of an annoyance. The good news about buying software over Steam is, once you’ve bought it, it’s yours for good. If your hard disk dies, you don’t have to repurchase, just re-download.
I don’t go in much for multiplayer, so I don’t know much about the community aspect of it.
My experience with Steam has been good. When I bought HL:2, I went with the download and never really had any problems. Like Miller says, when you buy it, it is yours forever. As long as they offer good new stuff like BioShock, I’ll continue to purchase from them.
My first and last (hopefully) experience with Steam was a bad one. I installed half-life 2 one day and was playing happily. Next time I tried to play, game no-workie. Why you may ask? Apparently you HAVE to be connected to the internet to play the game. I don’t always have my computer connected to the internet. Sometimes I take it to my parents’ house, sometimes the internet is down, etc. In my opinion if I bought a game I should be able to play the single-player mode without internet. In conclusion, this is a rambling post and I like pie.
I’m not sure when they implimented it (or if it was always there), but Steam has an Offline mode, where your games simply wont’ connect to the internet, designed for computers that aren’t always online (ie: A laptop computer that you take with you somewhere). In offline mode, multiplayer games (Team Fortress 2, for example) won’t work, and neither will the community features or game updates. But other than that, I THINK the games should work fine if they’d been installed and verified with the server once.
Steam had some problems early on mostly dealing with the massive amount of data they had to transfer, but the service has been gone since.
IIRC you only have to go online once to authenticate and unlock your game, and this applies to boxed or steam versions. After that you can operate in offline mode. Steam will automatically patch your games if you’re on, though.
The community thing is cool. You can send in-game chat messages to friends like an IM program, only it’ll pop up in the game and you don’t have to tab out. Your friends can see what you’re doing, and if they want to join you, they can right click you and select “join game”. We have an SDMB group going, described here:
In general, I would buy online. I’m not sure exactly what Valve’s publishing and distribution agreements are, but online distribution brings the costs down a lot - much like with music, the publisher of the game takes a significant amount of the profit from CD sales - and you’d rather see the artist/developer see more profit from purchases than the publisher/distributor - online publishing is a good way to do that.
Perhaps I was doing it wrong, but everytime I tried to open the game it asked if I wanted to connect to Steam. Selecting no closed the game.
Also, every 10 minutes or so it would ask if I wanted to connect to Steam, even when not running the game. This continued until I uninstalled the product. This is a hazy memory from over a year ago though, so I could feasibly be doing something wrong.
I was really confused by Steam at first. But then, I’m an idiot.
When I first bought a modern computer I decided that I wanted to check out some modern games as I hadn’t really played any video games since the 16 bit console era.
Since it was highly touted online, I bought the retail version of Half-Life2 Game of the Year. When I got home and installed the game, I was enraged that I had to pay for the game a second time to get it to work. Dumb dumb dumb.
Nearly a year later I wanted to play the original Half-Life which was included in the GotY retail box, but I didn’t want to have to pay for the “activation fee.” At some point I realized that I MUST have made some mistake as I’d never heard of anyone else complaining about having to pay for the same game twice. After I’d played around with steam a little I realized that the store version comes with an authentication code which you can use to activate all of the other games that came with it.
I can’t look at Half-Life2 without feeling like a total moron. Somebody make fun of me as this is the first time I’ve admitted to this particular blunder.
Yeah, Steam is okay it’s a pretty good idea, in fact. Screw the middle-man. The money should go to the developer, not the retailer.
The offline mode isn’t difficult to activate either.
I have a simple question that I’m far to embarrassed to create a thread for.
Can you burn a copy of the games you download off Steam and reinstall them later, or must you delete everything during the “uninstall” and re-download it when you want to play again?
I got bored one day and decided to change the language on Steam to Simplified Chinese, since I’m currently studying that language. Much to my suprise, Half Life 2 is re-downloaded and then only seems to play in Chinese. Is there any way to do that and have English subtitles, or is it English all the way or Chinese all the way with HL2?
There’s a “backup game files” option (by right clicking games in the menu) which dumps some files wherever you tell it on the hard drive. From there you could burn those files, I’d imagine. Never done it.
One is the fact that there are games on there that are no longer in stores over here. Psychonauts, VtM: Bloodlines (though for some reason Deus Ex is still on sale in stores here, go figure). There’s also games I’ve never seen, like the Sherlock Holmes game that’s on there at the moment.
The other reason is this - I purchased the Orange box last week. Even with the international currency conversion, it cost me about $55 all told.
I saw the Orange Box in our local EB games yesterday - $99.95. Nearly $45 more for a box and a CD. And it was still on the “Coming Soon” shelf. As in “Hasn’t been released for retail in this country as of yet” stylie.
Thanks for the feedback all. I’m a little unhappy with the thought of having to be on-line in order to play at all but that looks like it would be a problem no matter where I bought the game.
I’ll check out the SMDB group once I have everything up and running. Thanks all.
That’s weird, because over here it’s the same price in stores as it is on Steam, $50 US. It should be cheaper than the in-store version, but it’s not, which is why when I get it, I’ll get the store version, because I like physical copies and game manuals. There should be at least a $10 price cut for the download version, IMO.