I have finally decieded to try Steam and log my experiences here. I have been a part in many principal discussions about Steam, but now its time to tame the beast.
Just to state my personal feelings before I start. I like to buy games online and have used Impulse and Gamersgate quite a lot. I dont like games made exclusively for a single platform, and I dont like being forced to be online to play. Some times I travel to places with no connectivity, like my parents cottage and my wifes homeland.
Here we go.
Chapter 1: Getting the Steam client
I bought Fotball Manager at Gamersgate for 8 Euros, and I saw that I would need a 3rd party account to play (I knew this would be steam). After buying the game I clicked download at Gamersgate as usual and the game downloaded and installed. At the end of the installation the Steam client came to life. I filled in a new account and my first problem arrived. The client got stuck on creating account. I killed it manually after about 10 minutes. I got an activation email and got my account activated anyway
Chapter 2: Starting my first game (and installing it twice).
After restarting the Steam client, it seems that my account was created, and I then wanted to start my already installed Football Manager game. I copied the activation code from Gamersgate into Steam and it was accepted. Steam DID NOT seem to realize that I had downloaded 2 GB and installed the game, so it started downloading the game again. Not good.
I am now writing this while I wait for steam to download the game. To be continued.
Thats how it worked about 4 years ago...
As long as your login is saved, Offline mode is available.
Did you set Steam to save your login? Without that Offline mode doesnt work.
If you had it saved, disconnect from network and restart Windows (restart isnt needed mopst of the time)
I'm never buying a game on Steam for more than 5 bucks if it's for single player. I'd feel cheated if I was unable to go into offline mode. A couple months ago I was moving and had limited internet access, and when Steam updated I was unable to use Offline mode. I tried all the usual suggestions with no success. I didn't find out until I was able get a good connection that the reason was because the update changed something that started rejecting uppercases in my Steam username.
I cannot find a save login function. Where is it?
When you login to Steam you have field for "username" "password" and under password there is option to save your login info.
Also FYI many games sold via Steam can be started directly via its exe - I have little over 300 games in my Steam account and 20-30% of them can be started without having Steam running (mostly old games, indies, almost all Paradox games etc.).
few months ago (IIRC in September) one Steam update broke Offline mode, but beta update which fixed that issue was available within 2 days
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