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Dawn of War II - An Exercise if Frustration

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Dawn of War II - An Exercise if Frustration

THQ - how much crack did you smoke to do this?

from Stardock Forums

My retail copy of THQ's Dawn of War II has been sitting on my desk for nearly a week. It's been teasing me you see, but I've been unable to rip into its tight shrinkwrapped innerds because I just moved. Tonight I finally got my gaming rig back setup and went to install the Warhammer goodness I've been waiting to savor.

Problem is, I'm still waiting.

Why? Steam.  For some inexplicable, moronic, braindead reason THQ chose to force all Dawn of War II customers to use Steam to install, run and update the game.  Why did I pay for a retail box at all? The disc only installed the filthy Steam client (didn't even give me the option of installing to a different drive) and then downloaded the game off the Net. WTF?  I'm sorry, as a consumer I had rightly expected that I'd be getting a game on my DVD, not Steam.

Gets better from here.  So Steam downloads and installs my "retail" game, forever tying me to using what's a pretty shit poor client (yes some folks hate Steam - they just get deleted off their forums for speaking out). I figure I'm good at this point, but nope, there's apparently an update. Can I play DoW II while this update downloads like I could've on Impulse?  Nope.  Even worse, the Steam client - in true fail fashion - just keeps switching from "Download starting..." to "Updating...0%" to "Download starting..." and it won't let me play the game at all.

What the hell did I pay for?

Although I haven't bought it, I hear the Empire: Total War release (which also forces Steam upon everyone) has been an even greater debacle of fail akin to the Half-Life 2 release years ago. Wow, way to go publishers!  Your incredible stupidity seems to grow by leaps and bounds with each passing year. Why don't you do your customers a favor and stop tying us exclusively to one service?  PC gamers already get boned as a matter of course, we don't need more. K, thanks.

67,843 views 31 replies
Reply #26 from Elemental Forums Top

The disk may come with the "latest" Steam and GFWL clients but it still needs to check versions seems. So you'll have to install the newest clients whenever you decide to install the game again in the future. Appart from that, you only need to download patches. I have Steam to autopatch the game but I read that I can configure it to not autopatch the game on start.

Unlike Impulse, Steam requieres you to start the service whenver you want to play the game. It doesn't seem to hog system resources or anything, and it autostarts with the game (no need for me to make extra clicks) so not a problem per se. But I would prefer an approach like Impulse's. Also, Steam offline mode requires you to activate it first while online... Not a problem because to install the game, first you need an internet connection anyways even if you would install, patch once and then force Steam to run offline forever.:annoyed:

Thanks to (most probably) THQ's preload, the game was pirated before a week or so of release. So some kind of antiSteam scheme was already discovered. If I were only interested in the single player part (which I'm) and without a decent/any internet connection (which I'm not), i would find extremely interesting something like that. I'm SO glad about Stardock's way of handling my SP experience...:thumbsup:

That ottatouch surely is doing some bad PR on purpose or really has no idea of what he is talking about (not very possible) if he mistakes a serial with a credit card number.>_>

 

Reply #27 from Elemental Forums Top

Some people are hopeless, me to I guess for believing what I read on the internet :blush:

 

It is correct though that if you install the game, connect it to the net, play it, stop playing it and turn off the computer, turn on the computer, find out the net in unavailable (for whatever reason) and thus you can't play the game installed on your computer?

 

If this is true I'm surprised a Griefer has not Denial of Service attacked Steam yet...... I don't know anything beyond what DOS does, so I assume its possible.

 

I just don't like that one idea, that you must always be able to connect to the net to be able to play.

Multiplicity - Control multiple PCs using one keyboard and mouse
Reply #28 from Elemental Forums Top

If you are without internet connection, you better have another game that you want to play installed... You could prevent such situation getting Steam in offline mode once the game is installed and fully patched, only getting Steam online whenever you read in the official forums that there is a new patch. Only interesting if you don't care about multiplayer part. Still, it's not good.

Reply #29 from Sins Forums Top

Just one thing; I don't really understand why this thread is about Empire: Total War instead, because it beats DoW II in so many ways;

DRM shittyness (steam bugs, about a billion of them), Game bugs (more than a billion), and an in the end unrewarding game.

DoW II is a well-made game with very few in-game bugs (I've played it for around ~75 hours, and have found virtually no game compromising bugs), and it's steam problems are far less than other current releases (Empire: TW, *cough*) and GfWL gets better and better for every update. (The latest update made the matchmaking damn much better for example)
The game itself also gets patched quite frequently so far, 1.1.2 is the current version so. (From 1.0.0)
Also, you don't need an online GfWL account, you can create an offline profile instead. (This will, however, not get you any achievements.)
The only thing that annoyed me was that, when added to Steam, DoW II automatically started downloading from their servers, instead of installing from the DVD. There was no dialogue to let me choose where to install from, it just started downloading. That was quite annoying tbh. Other than that, the Steam+GfWL frameworks along with DoWII works remarkably well, surprising to see considering that there have been some problems with both of them before.

GTA IV is also a good example of crappiness btw; DRM to the max, extreme amount of (many yet unfixed) bugs, extreme optimization issues, and really stupid developers (bragging about 200$K copy protection, yeah that's gonna get soo many people to not copy your game... pff.) and a non-impressive game.

Reply #30 from Elemental Forums Top

My problem with, and the reason I didn't buy, DoW II is because it seems like they just updated the graphics to choke $50 more dollars out of us. I loved the original and expansions, but don't realese a new game and take out everything that the expansions added for crying out loud (I WANT MY DAMN NECRONS BACK!). Whats even more annoying is that the expansions were stand alone, so they could charge $40 for those...AND require that you have your cd key for the others just to use those races to begin with. THQ went the rout of EA in screwing over their customers, and it really annoys me.

--As far as Steam goes, I think it's lame that you have to connect to it before you start up your game. Plus I have a grudge against steam since my account has been hijacked 3 times...

Reply #31 from Sins Forums Top

What are you talking about?  First you accuse them of just slapping new graphics on the old game, which if you had played the game or read complaints about it you'd know was a farce, but then your second complaint is that they 'removed' all the old stuff.  Which is it?

Just so you know, it's a little much to expect that everything in 3 (or 4 if you count the half-assed Soulstorm) separate releases show up all in one tidy package for the sequel.  Give 'em a few more million and no definite release date and maybe they could accomodate you.  Would you then pay $110 for the game because of how much content was in it?