After listening to a few months of the GFW podcast, I decided to try out some new video games (the fancy new computer did not hurt either). Wanting to try digital distribution, I decided to try Steam, Value’s system. I bought The Orange Box. It is great and Steam worked great. After finishing, HL2, HL2 E1, HL2 E2 and Portal, I decided to try something else so I bought Company of Heroes (mostly because of the great coverage it received on GFW).
Again every seemed to work great. Until last night.
I had about a hour to kill before going to bed so I decided to see if I had time to squeeze a level in. I fired up CoH and was greeted, in game, with a message saying I needed to download a patch. I did not really have a choice, so I said yes and the download began. When it was done, I was told to exit the game and the patch would automatically start. So I exited and the patch did not automatically start. I re-ran the game and was told I needed to download a patch. Luckily it saw that I had already downloaded the patch, so it jumped right to the screen saying I need to exit to apply the patch. I exited and again the patch did not automatically start.
Fine, I’m a pretty computer literate guy, I can find and manually run the patch. Which I did, only to be told that the patch could not find a valid install of CoH. I was now frustrated enough that I decided to search the internet for a solution. On Planet CoH forums I found someone else complaining of the same thing. Apparently if you bought CoH through Steam, you need to update it through Steam. Unfortunately the patch was not yet available on Steam.
So, today, I am sitting at my computer downloading the patch through Steam. It is 29% done.
The big problem here is that CoH won’t let me play without the patch, but Relic (makers or CoH) had not made the patch available to me. The time between them releasing the patch to non-Steam users and the patch becoming available on Steam is how long CoH is effectively broken. Furthermore, this issue is not mentioned anywhere in the CoH automatic updater.
I think the problem is that CoH was not really designed to be a Steam game, instead it was shoe-horned into Steam. Here are a few questions:
Why does Steam CoH need to use Steam to update? Why not simply use Steam as a distribution method? CoH clearly has a built in updating system, why not use that?
If you are going to break the game until the patch is applied, then why not simply wait until the patch is available on Steam before pushing it out? Clearly Relic won’t have control over when Valve puts the patch on Steam, but they can control when they push the patch out, and thus break CoH. A little synchronization would go a long way to make this easier on the users.
I’m still pretty happy with my experiences with Steam. No tax, no boxes, cds or manuals.
Anyway, my download is almost done and I’ve got Nazis to kill.