I've had enough of this internet dependency.

My internet was out for a few days and I was literally paralyzed, I could play maybe 20% of my games.

• Wanted to play Max Payne 3 (I have the box, not the Steam game), it always forces you to download big multiplayer patches on game startup, even though I only wanna play single player, and you can't play single player without downloading the patch, so I couldn't play the game.
• Steam locked me out because you can't set it to offline mode without being online to do that. So if your net is suddenly down and you didn't set Steam to offline mode because you're not psychic, Steam turns into a brick.
• Tried to play The Witcher 2 (I have the box, not the Steam game), the patching manager for that game is ridiculous, couldn't play.

Even now that I'm back online, I'm spending too long a time waiting for Steam updates, game patches, and all this crap.

I've been a PC player since infancy but I'm beginning to feel like I'm on my PS3, I spend half the time dealing with unnecessary internet crap forced down my throat.

This stuff should be mandatory only for playing online games, online. If I'm attempting to play an online multiplayer game, rape me with your patches all you want. I shouldn't have to put up with any of this to play a single player experience.

I miss the days when I could play the single player experience after installing it. Nowadays the word install means nothing. You are forever tied to the publisher's servers.

sounds more like you have a problem with steam. pretty sure you can bypass patching and play both of those other games fine normally.

Steams Offline Mode is also pretty fucking terrible.
The majority of their games (at least out of the 625 games Steam says I own) don't even work in Offline mode.
But of course people wouldn't know terrible DRM if it hit them straight in the face anyway so nobody really complains about it

After a certain period people get bored of doing the same things.its human natures.

I never have issues with offline mode on Steam. I was under the impression that as long as your machine is verified with Steam Guard, you can use offline mode whenever (Heck, I just turned off wifi on my laptop and tested it and got into offline mode just fine). It sounds like you haven't set up Steam Guard.

I think the problem here is that your trying to play Max Payne 3

I have never had a problem with any game the few times Steam was down.

I'm fairly certain that as long as the game has already been downloaded and launched at least once, it can be played. At least, that's how it worked for me the roughly dozen times that it has happened.

I've lost internet before and had no problem whatsoever getting onto steam.. It flat out asks you "Hey man, you're not connected to the internet right now. Wanna switch to offline mode? Yes/No."

I don't know what to tell you.

The problems you are having have absolutely nothing to do with the platform and more to do with the way a few publishers/devs have decided to do dumb things. As long as you don't restart Steam, if you lose connection you should maintain the ability to play your games.

Get better internet, or just always have Steam in Offline mode. If you hate it so much, that's the easy solution.

@jouseldelka: If you have a box for Witcher 2 then just go to GOG and get a DRM free copy for free. It's what I did.

I'm the opposite, I am getting sick of consoles in general and PCs are becoming more streamlined.

you're in trouble, friend. requiring online is a fact of life these days, and it's only going to get more pervasive.

Hmm.

Well i just shut steam off, and then pulled my cord, started steam back up, and it told me i had no internets ( duh ) and wondered if i wanted to quit steam or enter offline mode, so i said "yeah go offline"
It sat there for 10 seconds or so, and then steam booted up, and i started dirt, and the game started too.

so, offline mode works as intended for me at least.

I'd almost never get in this situation unless i wanted though, i have two different connections running into my house, fiber and cable, so if my fiber dies, which it can do in the middle of the night for an hour maybe 4 times a year.
I switch to my cable.

It's not even that. I have a strong dislike of "always online" but can't remember exactly the last time I lost internet so I figured I'd test it now. I exited Steam, physically unplugged ethernet, and started Steam back up. It prompted me to start in offline mode then let me get into Bioshock Infinite and The Witcher 2 without any problems.

I do however agree that patching has gotten out of hand.

It may be hard to play PC games without an internet connection, but it's also hard to do anything on a PC without an internet connection. Computers should really have an internet connection.

@devildoll: Thanks for the test, but that's not my experience. For me, Steam tells me it failed to connect, and it shuts down. I also have Steam Guard set up.

I wish I could back up all the massive Witcher 2 patches so I don't have to download them every time I install it, but backing them up didn't work the last time around - the patcher didn't recognize the files I backed up!

I have steam guard as well, my computer is authenticated of course, and i have it set to autologin.

Offline mode in steam certainly used to be fucking pointless (you had to set it in offline mode before it went offline) but that issue was resovled about 2 years ago or so as far as I know. It certainly works ok for me.

I agree with Steam's Offline Mode. It's terrible. I recall not being able to access a lot of my games when I was waiting for my new ISP to set up the internet stuff. It always seems like Offline Mode breaks at the most inconvenient times.

Next gen the XBO and PS4 will join in...so have fun with your Wii U I guess?

Steam's offline mode is wildly inconsistent from one user to another; I almost never had any problems with it. One problem I had was when they changed the format or something, so I can't play some games before Steam goes online to do something to the local data.

Max Payne 3, though... I just don't want to download it because of Australian data usage quota =[ It would be nice if internet is easily available and consistent worldwide.

edit: By the way, I think there's a way to bypass The Witcher 2's patcher. I forgot how to do it, though.

Don't forget that all day patch download that it requires out of the box. Fun times!

Rockstar Games are not well known for their amazing PC support. It has gotten better, but that company is very smug about its PC games as if its somehow above them. Max Payne is huge because its full of cut scenes (my favorite part of all games is the part where I can to sit around and watch a movie) the game itself isn't that big. I wouldn't feel bad if Rockstar fell off the planet for the way they treat their more technically fortunate fans. Go back to making games on the PS2 if you hate progress so much. You haven't made a relevant game since then anyway.

Snarkiness aside it does bother how much always DRM stuff has popped up and how the people they promote them basically say "deal with it" to their customers even if they have legitimate complaints like not being about to play Diablo III single player on an airplane. I like the convenience of always one stuff like steam cloud and auto patching, but some games just have online stuff because why not and its screw over players in really big ways sometimes.

I tried to play From Dust a month ago. I pre-bought it before the hooplah when it came out (Big mistake). I loaded it up from steam and the DRM for it has changed so many times I'm pretty sure I can't even play it now, even though I payed full price for it. It spits out a serial code and loads up a uplay interface with no place to put the code in.

Yeah, I never understand how people have trouble with Steam. I've set it in offline mode with no problem, even after a cold restart with no internet.

To be clear, I don't think you're lying or anything OP. I just don't get what the difference is between my Steam and yours.

Sounds like you're getting sick of internet. Also sounds like you have pretty shitty internet. The two are probably linked.

I've never been stuck in an offline steam situation that I can remember, but the only caveat should be that you need to have started the game you want to play while online at least once before you can use it online. I wonder if the people that are having problems didn't know that / still don't know that? I don't know other than ever time I've tried to run a game in offline mode, it has worked.

Consoles aren't exactly a godsend.

I had to download the Army of Two demo, launch it and accept the license agreement before EA would let me play Mercenaries 2.

Damn publishers...

Rockstar PC games *exaggerated poop noise*

User error being blamed on anything but the user! NO! Say it ain't so!

My internet never goes down and my download and upload speeds are amazing, sucks to be you I guess. PC gaming is the best and always will be.

How about you turn off automatic updates in steam? That actually works.

I felt the same way in 2004 when Half-Life 2 came out. Same shit different...

Sure, but... shouldn't you be saying you hate gaming in general? You're not exactly free from the eternity of patching and software updates on consoles.

I have a feeling XONE/PS4 won't make you feel any better.

Here is a simple solution crack the games you already own, I do that with my singplayer games I buy with no multiplayer component.

Weird, I remember bringing our laptops to school and we played half life 2 on them in offline mode.

Also, you can play most non-source games without opening steam by just going int othe steamapps folder.

Steam locked you out? what? I've played tonnes of my steam games in offline mode countless time and I didn't have to set it, if your connection is no go it asks you "yo you wanna go to offline mode?" and you click ok and your done. If you didn't patch a game prior to this and it needs a patch to run, well, that's your fault not steams.

I wonder why so many people pirate video games?

I bought Assassin's Creed Revelations awhile back and of course it brings up Uplay, which sometimes asks me for a key. However, I bought the game on Steam and only have the key for that, not Uplay (unless I rebuy it of course). So sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Moral of the story, fuck companies like Ubisoft and Steam that do that and fuck games with excessive DRM. I don't pirate my games, but if people do it because they don't want to deal with the bullshit that comes with legally buying the game, then pirate away.

That's the only problem I've had with DRM on PC, though. I can't play Max Payne 3 at all after paying full price, since it just boots up to a black screen and Rockstar can't fix it.

This for sure. Steam Guard on my PC made offline mode a lot better for me.

It's Ubisoft's fault that you have to launch Uplay through Steam, not Valve's. And if it doesn't work, it's on Ubisoft's end since you only launch Uplay from Steam. The game launches from Uplay.

Same goes for Max Payne 3. Rockstar insist on having their own profile database (Social Club) that's mandatory if you want to play any Rockstar game. If the game doesn't work, it's because of Social Club.

I think Steam has some of the best deals when it comes to DRM. You can install and uninstall a game how many times you like, you can mod game files, you can play installed games offline and you can download and save backup files of every game. Pirating games is a hassle compared to Steam imo.

I'm starting to hate that my 480 is the bottleneck in my system.

This is exactly how I feel every time I start up my PS3. Everytime I start my PS3 or start a game I need to patch something. Want to check a price on PSN? Wait about a minute to load into the shop and then wait for it to tell me to patch. Fuck.

And I never expected the PC to get to such a severe console-like state, which is why I'm aiming this criticism at the PC alone.

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate the consoles, but one of the reasons the PC has always been my platform is the freedom and choice. Unless I need to play the game online, nothing more than a hard disk install should be required for me to fire up the offline singleplayer. It's been like this forever, but not anymore.

This isn't a locked game system that needs to stay part of a closed and tightly watched ecosystem, it's a free and customizable computer, this new reality of being forever tied to the publishers' and developers' servers with the patching and the updating is just unbearable.

This is a very bad step for a very great platform, and I can see it getting worse and worse.

I hate PC gaming right now because I bricked my motherboard with a bad BIOS update. Once my PC is back in action I'll probably think it's pretty cool again.

Get a copy of GOG Witcher 2 with your activation code. You can at least have that game offline.

http://www.gog.com/witcher/backup

I'll agree with you about Steam's patching. That shit can get annoying.

1. All games work like this. Making two executables and splitting the assets so that you only had to have either SP or MP on your system would mean a lot of extra work for the developers. The only reason this is done is on games today is to accommodate for the limited size on 360 discs.
2. If they did not require this you could log into offline mode on multiple systems, if you have a smartphone you can share your 3G connection so you can get online and set it to offline mode. Try running game executables directly from your steamapps/common folder, some developers will let you run their game without steam authentication.
3. That sucks. CD Projekt RED is not huge but considering that they own GOG.com you would think that they could make a proper patch manager.

ive disliked PC gaming for a long time. but the pros have outweighed the cons compared to the current and next gen consoles imo.

Oh, yeah, I know that it's not Steam or Valve to blame for those problems. I was kindof ranting and should have been more accurate with what I was saying. My bad. I mean, I love Steam, but then again I always have had internet so no real problems with them.

But yes, you're right that the Social Club and Uplay are to blame and Steam isn't involved in those problems.

Next Gen Consoles, Day 1 Downloads, Play will that shit downloads. BEST FUCKING IDEA EVER. Xbox ONE has it confirmed.

@bigjeffrey: iirc you can play blizzard game once the download is past a certain point, while the rest keeps downloading

That's handy. I wish Steam had something like that. Hell, I wish could play any game on Steam while downloading something else.