Dang, I see Gloomhaven is one of the upcoming free games. I bought that on sale for $20-something and have yet to play it. I need to no longer buy any games. If I wait they may just show up on Epic and it’s not like I don’t have hundreds of games I already own.
To be fair, it runs almost exactly as well as the XBox GamePass for PC launcher and slightly better than the Ubisoft Connect launcher.
I dislike how slow it is to load my list of games, in comparison with Steam.
The main ‘performance’ annoyance for me is the start-up times. Epic always takes significantly longer to start up and get to my library page than any other launcher I have (Steam, Galaxy, Ubi, EA, XBGP).
I think that’s because it updates the client at start.
lmao I just tested this.
Both EGS and Steam are installed on the same SSD.
EGS takes 25 seconds to fully load, and then extra 30 seconds to display my game library.
Steam takes 8 seconds to fully load AND display my game library.
Not to mention Steam has orders of magnitude more features.
Conclusion: Fuck EGS
All the launchers do a ‘check for updates’, but Epic can’t be updating something every time I start it.
I.e. I close it and open it again and it’s still a lot longer than doing the same in anything else.
For me, ordered by time taken from clicking the icon to getting to where I can select a game from my library:
- Steam, Galaxy, and XBGP tend to take around 5-10 seconds
- Ubi and EA take 10-15 seconds
- Epic takes 15-20 seconds to get to the point when I can change to the library tab (since you can’t set it to start there), then an additional 5-10 seconds to show the library.
This makes me never want to actually buy games of EGS. I am constantly reminded how the user experience/journey of just launching it to grab the freebies is so fucking awful. Slow ass forever start that takes a million years followed by a blinding white checkout screen. Midnight mode for life yo.
Man, you guys should be Mac users, it’s even worse on Mac.
Gloomhaven is the first free game they have offered that I don’t already own and want to try. So I guess I will be loading up EGS soon. Thanks for mentioning it @Mark_Asher.
I think the updates are extremely frequent. They are handled differently from Steam, which prompts you to restart the client to install updates. EGS updates the client automatically every load.
Steam is still quicker, or course, but in my experience it’s a different of like 2 seconds compared to about 6.
I’m a bit dubious about that - if I open/close the launcher a bunch of times in a row (which is what I did earlier), you say it is downloading a client update every single time…?
It’s not. Brad probably meant that it checks for updates on every load. If it finds the update, there is that blue tick to let you know to update it.
The EGS client is undoubtedly very slow and unresponsive. I always create a desktop icon for any game I’m playing regularly, which makes it unnecessary to launch EGS at all. I only have to deal with it to get my free games.
For those with a slow-loading EGS library, I recommend using the list view instead of tiles; it loads MUCH faster. EGS is definitely a pig compared to Steam, and I’ve also noticed it uses the GPU much more significantly according to task manager. I have no idea why, but then I’m an idiot when it comes to coding.
Pro-tip - you can get their free games straight from their website!
True. Sometimes I see a notice about a game on here and “buy” it from my iPad.
Not everyone can, unfortunately… The website never lets me sign in, so I can only do it through the PC client. :P
It wants me to do multiple captchas (even though I have 2 factor enabled) where I’m selecting up to 9 images each time, and then tells me my ‘credentials are invalid’.
This still happens even though I’ve reinstalled Windows since it first occurred.
Have you tried linking the Epic account to some other account (e.g… one of the consoles, or Google, or Facebook?), and then logging in using that service instead? My impression is that they only use the captcha for “native” epic logins.
I hadn’t, as I needed to get into my account to actually link anything to it.
But I tried again and got there by opening my account via the PC client.
And yeah thanks - ironically it works perfectly (and with no Captcha) logging in to the Epic site with my Steam account… :)
Wow! You just massively reduced my annoyance with the Epic website. Thank you!