Doesn’t seem like it would benefit the customers in any way then. Especially an issue for those on meetered internet connections.
And the ‘technology’ to patch and download only the content the user/game requires has existed for a long time. Even game rips of the past managed to solve this easily.
I don’t believe most DLC content is really that big. In many cases though, such as in Warhammer, the much of the new stuff trickles into the game anyway, whether you have the DLC or not. It’s just not available to the player.
The alternative is, as you said, maintaining multiple branches of the exact same game, and making them incompatible with other versions of the multiplayer game.
That seems unnecessarily expansive in addition to being frustrating. Imagine trying to set up a MP game of AoW 3, and realizing you that because your friends are missing one or more DLCs, you have to download a completely new sparse version of the game just to be compatible.
In any case, it seems like the only people impacted are people on a metered connection. I doubt that packet for downloading the base game vs the base game +DLCs are all that much different.
I don’t understand why developers would waste resources on developing separate download branches for multiplayer games. If you’re that bandwidth limited, should you really be playing mp games that are so-called “live services” (like Ghost Recon Breakpoint) ? I’d argue no.
Believe ARMA2 solved it with everyone downloading a lower resolution model of the DLC content so they could see it in game and be a passenger, but the dlc owners had the “high quality” model and were able to use the equipment by themselves.
Having to download video cutscenes, strings and audio for several languages you will never use is a waste. Having to download the whole content of a 1GiB data file, because they updated 1MiB in it, is also wastefull (and harmful to the environment. :) )
It doesn’t create compatibility issues or require multiple branches as long as it is done sensibly, without forcing a user to download the whole Expansion/DLC even if they do not buy it. I think Division 2 for example downloaded a lot of WONY even without the purchase of it.
But I guess developers shouldn’t optimize or spend any time to NOT wasting the customers resources, after all, their own resources are much more important than the 100ks of users, right?
Heck, why even run VTune or similar when you can just tell the users to get a better computer, upgrade to gigabit fiber and stop being luddites.
Yeah, I’m sorry, but your line of argument isn’t really getting a lot of traction with me. If this is the hill you want to die on, that’s on you but it just is a non issue for me. Maybe I’m privileged in that way.
I could see how your suggestion might actually be harmful to the greater community though, by making game development even more expensive than it already is. And more of logistically nightmare.
The foreign language audio files thing is definitely laziness on the part of the devs and is ironically another area where pirates give a better experience than legitimate sellers. They can take up huge amounts of limited hard drive space, but repacks (unlike legit downloads) often give the option to download just the ones you want.
Yikes. Mods are good. Fracturing mod support across stores is not. For games that exist on both Epic and Steam, they better make it dead-simple for mod authors to easily update both in one-click fashion.
Course it isn’t. Like the ocean is big, so what does it matter that we throw another bottle into it, right.
Storage, CPU, RAM is limitless, why optimize anything just to save a buck in development costs. It is better that 10 developers gets paid less and a suit earns more than 100.000 users having a “optimized experience”.
And as Kolbex rightly states, yet another area where the unlicensed distribution of a product is the better, as it is more ‘tailored’ to the user. (And probably has a better installer that leaves no system footprint, yet still miraculously works).
Assuming most mods either still will go into the “< game>/< subfolder>” or “%userprofile%/< one of about a billion different “My Games” folders Microsoft has fucked around with over the years>/< game>” so should be fairly easy for them to pick the right folder.
Finally! With this (well, once it’s out of beta and more games support it) my needs of what a game launcher should have are almost covered.
Yeah, the main things preventing me from using the store were lack of cloud saves and modding support. Steam Workshop is just too integral to many of the games I play. Hopefully cloud saves are in a better state than they were when it first rolled out and once modding support is in and supported by games, the store will have most of the features I need.
To my knowledge, mods from Steam workshop download to the Steam directory - steamapps/workshop, not to the various data directories that exist in microsoft land.
Based on what I know above, I have to wonder…
I was less worried about the installing of mods, vs. the acquiring of them in the first place. I don’t want to see a mod only available on the Epic Store when I own the Steam version of the game or vice versa. Since we already see this issue with DLC…
Unless it is very easy for mod authors to support both workshops easily, I can see them saying ‘sorry, I only support <Epic/Steam>’.
I think it may well be an issue. For instance, as far as I know you can’t publish a mod on Steam if you don’t own the game, which makes sense (I see this with X4 mods, where some mods aren’t on Steam because the mod author doesn’t have a Steam copy). So if a modder has the game on Epic, I could see that mod not being available on Steam unless they coordinate with a Steam user to publish it there and vice versa.
Well, that’s more on each modder, they have to upload their work twice, once in each platform. edit: oh yeah, obviously to do that he would have to buy the game twice, I can see that being a problem.
I can imagine people uploading to the platform they own, and then to nexusmods.com or something agnostic like that.
Seems like the best thing that could happen for Nexus Mods (or moddb, if that’s still around) would be for Epic to start competing with Steam Workshop.
When it comes to Nexusmods, seeing them on Steam/EGS instead would be a blessing, since then you’d finally probably be able to have a “install” button that lets you include all the fucking Skyrim mods you need to get things working, instead of having to chase down 25 different releases because the mod authors are so uptight and wont let anyone link to or package them for easier use.
Other than that, would prefer to grab them from the source not controlled by Epic/Valve. i.e. github, etc…
Mmmm Total War. Even bad Total War is worthwhile to me.
I hope there are well designed scenario battles. Some of my favorite moments in Total War are the historical crafted battles.
