will I be able to buy and play without Steam? I love Sins and planned to buy Rebellion the second I heard of it but I refuse to install that POS on my computer so I'm wondering if there's another option.
Nope, sorry. No other options will be made available.
Although I heard if they release it on disc as CE I think you may or may not need Steam. I have to emphasize that is a guess.
u sure? i know they said the beta is only on steam but i dont remember them saying that the final release was just for steam
The collector's edition will be in a boxed set, or so Stardock says. They have not released much of any details on it except that they are making one.
I don't know if it will require Steam or not. I hope not, because I also boycott Steam.
IIRC Rebellion uses Steam for Multiplayer Matchmaking... So the Collectors Edition will probably still require Steam. I can be wrong about that though...
Man, so much steam hate around here.
Sins was published by a company that was pushing an alternative to Steam (Impulse) at the time, so it's somewhat natural that we have a lot of Steam haters around.
We also had a lot of people complaining that they wouldn't buy the game back then "because it wasn't on Steam". One of my friends actually didn't want to buy the game because it wasn't on Steam, even, once Trinity was added to Steam, he bought it.
So que sera sera, you cannot please everyone, those who only buy from Steam will buy the game, and will more than cover the "financial loss" of the Steam haters who refuse to buy Rebellion over what is just as silly as company wars.
To answer OP, Rebellion is using steamworks, so Steam will be required to run the game, though you can run Steam in offline mode and still play.
Like Mr. Haze said, when a game uses Steamworks, it requires Steam to play.
It does sadden me though when people get so emotionally involved in what software they use to launch a game though. It's silly to me that software I may write someday will not be liked because of the brand name in front rather than it's own merits.
What is so bad about Steam? I have heard tons of people hating on Steam, but I have not encountered anything wrong with it. I played SupCom 2 on Steam, and now Rebellion. Those are the only games I have on Steam, because those are the only games that I want that happen to be on Steam. I don't see what all the fuss is about. Steam seems pretty organized to me.
I may be missing something, but if this is just hating for no reason other than "I don't trust it, even though it hasn't done anything" or "My traditional is Impulse, so I hate everything else", than take another look. Put your predisposition aside.
Like I said, I may be missing something bad about Steam, but I suspect otherwise. If anyone has a real reason to hate Steam, tell me. But right now, Steam is as good as anything else to me.
The issue with some people is how Steam has treated ones in the past. Some have had credit card issues and then suddenly had their games frozen when they reported only a minor issues. Others enjoy breaking down a game and then using in their own way but Steam takes offense to it.
I was a previous hater of Steam but now it has wormed its way into my heart.
The deals it provides for PC software cant be beat. If I am not sure about a game and eventually (within 3 months) steam will knock 66% off the price for a day and I usually buy it. Also provides Meta-Scores for every game.
All my friends are easy to reach and link to. You never ever have to worry about their version being incompatible with mine and waiting for someone to update so we can play. I also don't have to worry about hunting patches down.
It keeps all my games in an easy to reach interface and has linked foums to keep up with gossip with only a click.
CONS: If your internet connection goes on the fritz it can lock you out of all your games if you did not set yourself to off-line mode BEFORE the internet connection was lost. Might be a work around for that. Haven't had that problem in several years.
The other Con is I buy a lot more games than I used to. Plus having Gamestop, Steam, and now Origin is aggravating. Because compared to Steam the other two are a waste of space and don't add any benefit to me or my friends. Although this hasn't happened yet, one might buy it on each platform which would cause chat issues.
Edit: Ryat, I have never had Steam cause an issue modding a game and I Mod a lot of games. Skyrim and Fallout don't even look like the same game any more and Steam has never caused a problem with either. As for my Credit Card I have lots of problems with Master Card cancelling all my cards all the time but Steam has never had an issue.
Hmmm... Well it has never happened to me. When was the last time this has happened?
What he said... Try it again guys.
once the beta is done hopefully they will open rebellion up to like impulse and whatever else lol
They'll sell it on Impulse, but you still need to have steam installed to run the game. That's the evil of steamworks, it makes where you buy it irrelevant, and locks you into their system. Its a bit like I don't like Apple products, but even Apple has more competition and alternatives than steam has.
Its quite unfortunate their only competitor died with the impulse sale, since gamestop clearly doesn't give a crap about creating a presence in the PC market to make an alternative to steam. Brad says Stardock couldn't have kept being a good game company if they would have held on to it, but honestly I think the PC game market needs a competitor to steam more than it needs another good game developer.
The other issue that I haven't heard anyone talk about is the fact that once you buy a game that requires Steamworks, you are required to have Steamworks installed on a computer forever more if you still want to play that game. Plenty of people here installed and (used to) use Impulse before GameStop (rarely such an apt name for a company than GameStop) and were thus already required, at least some of the time, to have Impulse installed. Now lets take that a little further to others who might (or might in the future) have another such program installed to buy and run their games and it starts to get bloody ridiculous.How many programs (even one or two is bad) do we need to have installed and running to play our own dam games? I am already sick of bloatware and programs adding sneaky toolbars/software onto free downloads and this is compounding an already growing problem. Of course, the other side of the coin is that if you go ALL Steam then it is wonderful in many respects. Cheap deals, only one platform, solid infrastructure etc. but if you don't want to go all Steam or simply want the freedom to choose then you are out of luck if a game you want is forever tied to Steam (unless you are happy with even more bloatware).I don't really want to go all Steam and tie so much of my money with a single company like that. So for me, it is quite sad Stardock has gone this road.
Agh, internet connection (another reason Steam is not such a great option for me)Ignore, double post.
Its wasn't modding. Deeper then that.
My issue with having it on Steam is that it always has to launch Steam before the game when you want to play it. I'd have no issues buying through Steam, if once I downloaded it I never had to run Steam again until I wanted to buy something else or install a patch.
With Impulse I installed Sins through it, and then never touched it again. If Steam were like that I'd have no problem with it, but when I try to launch the game directly w/o steam it just gives an error saying Steam isn't running. (On my old PC my Steam folder was named "Steaming pile of crap" for this reason alone) I shouldn't have to run the damned thing in the background when I play.
Well not sure how much you are fundamentally changing the game since modding tends to modify every file. Generally disabling the auto update feature works if you decide to get a bit frisky with the executable.
But I must admit you do give me a chill.
We must go deeeeeeeper....
Well, with "Dragon Age Origins", there was some problem with the expension "Awakening"... modded files was needed to be placed differently if the game was buy on EA or Steam... well, a simple mod installer who check if yourr game is Steam or not solved the problem...
Well, in some case, it make "where you buy" relevant... specialy if you buy a boxed game who need Steam... let say that you are on holiday in Thailand and buy in store some boxed game who need Steam there... install it, and play it during your Holiday without problem... back to US, you try again and ... bang ... the game don't work anymore...
Some game are protected in a way that you can only play with them in the zone where you have buy it !!!
Well, one of the thing that i hate the most with Steam is their price, specially for European like me... their 1$ = 1 euro make my game cost at least 30% more on Steam... by example, if Rebellion is released on Steam, for US people, it will cost 39.95$... for me, it will cost 39.95 euro ( 50.89$ )... lucky, i was able to order directly with stardock and enjoy a discount... have pay 23.51 euro ( 29.95$ ) with the Stardock pre-order...
In fact, i advice any european who read this post to pre-order the game now, same if they don't have the discount, they will spare at least 10$ by buying directly on the Stardock store...
There is a work around in some case... by example with the Total War game, in place to start the game in the usual way who start a launcher.exe, you directly start the game exe... will not work with game who have steamwork embedded in them...
Well, steam is not perfect... by example, it is the only software that i use who lead to the BSOD at boot time ( not always )... something about a protected area of my main memory used by my bios for initilize my hardware raid that Steam overwrite... Reply from Steam was simple : "dissable your raid system" !!!
On the other hand, Steam work perfectly with Linux ( no problem with my raid drive, so maybe the BSOD on windows is due to a communication problem between the OS and Steam )... Impulse have never work on Linux !!!
I like very much the "add a non-steam game to my library" option... all my game in one single place is very easy... and the Steam "GUI" is very easy to use...
Steam is not better or more bad that a other client... and having Steam being the main digital distributor have one advantage... Steam will not die ( soon ) like it have happen with direct2drive where some people have loose between a few games and 2/3 of them when direct2drive was buy by Gamefly... Maybe the same thing will happen someday with Impulse, seeing how Gamestop handle it...
Thoumsin, you raise a few good points I was not aware of.
I travel to Europe constantly, but I never buy games there because generally the exchange between the US leaves me brutalized. Although a few times I would have come out ahead. In either case I never have had to worry about the region outside of my DVD collection and NTSC and PAL.
I do run Steam on 3 computers flawlessly and steam doesn't care. I can easily run all three at the same time if 2 are in off-line mode. And just cause Steam is off-line doesn't effect the games at all (Even Ubisoft ones).
From a philosophical standpoint, I agree with Valve more than Gamestop or EA.
D2D died for me when it wouldn't let me mod a game due to changes in the EXE.
Gamestop doesn't really even offer PC games in their stores so this seemed like a bad idea to me. If not fore Stardock, I would have never gotten impulse anyway and GS acquisition of it pretty much means I will get the next GalCiv game on steam when it has a major sale and uninstall impulse.
EA is in it for EA and everyone else can go to the devil. They are rather resistant to their customers complaints and suggestions. If Origins ever became a burden I could easily see them end it and screw their whole customer base. They do it with their games regularly.
Valve is a PC first and have always taken suggestions seriously and made large improvements. Steam now vs Steam 5 years ago is huge. The added functionality they offer is nice. I no longer have to set up my Ventrilo, Xfire, Yahoo, Aol, and alt tab out all the time (which created more BSOD or crashes).
Steam is not perfect as I pointed out. But I can never lose a disk and there are work arounds if it ever went under.
I have so many disks but lost their serials it is a nightmare. Add in the games that used to require special maps to answer questions before it would let you play leaves me out of many of my games I used to own in the 90's. Steam seems elegant to all that.
Wow quite the response, thanks.
Yeah back in the early days of Steam I had problems with it and most importantly had it creating problems with the computer. I got crap for support, etc etc, uninstalled Steam and swore to never install it again. Bad enough of an experience I was really hoping it would fail and something better (less controlling/offensive) would come along.
Also on the moral side of things I believe that after paying a whack of money for a game I should be able to play that game. Being forced to run/deal with another program first in order to get access to my copy that I bought and paid for that's installed on my computer offends me. Do I need to call GM to get their permission every time I want to start the car I bought from them?
On the more practical side since I only have a laptop extra drains on system resources are not welcome. Also I only have access to high speed internet when I'm at home - a grand total of 5 or 6 days each month since I'm a long haul truck driver in North America. Luckily I don't enjoy multiplayer and there has been a nice bit of backlash against games requiring an internet connection to play even single player (for damn good reason - that's ridiculous) so that doesn't seem to be getting any traction.
However...
Impulse was great for me with my situation/limitations but now it's been whored out to Gamestop and isn't an alternative to Steam anymore. Also EA's Origin has changed from something like the old Impulse to more Steam-like without warning or notice which pisses me off everytime I am forced to deal with it but unfortunately that seems to be the way PC gaming is going.
As annoyed with Origin as I am, I've been able to set it so it doesn't load up on system startup so I only have to deal with it when playing Origin based games and can shut it down completely when I'm done playing. Keeps the "necessary evil" to a minimum basically - how invasive/meddlesome is Steam these days in comparison?
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When I was a child I caught a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eye. I turned to look but it was gone I cannot put my finger on it now. The child is grown the dream is gone I have become comfortably numb - Pink Floyd
I agree with LHDAllaxul . When I "buy" a game on Steam it's always felt to me like I'm just renting it. A good way to think of if you own something is if you can sell it. Since there is no way to sell a Steam game without selling your Steam account well there you are. Lose your Steam account for whatever reason and you lose your games.
Basically Steam is a way to control you the gamer with a sugar coating of cheap games for easy access. Good example with the car LHDAllaxul .
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