I’ve owned Dark Messiah of Might and Magic for awhile, buying it from a GoGamer.com 72 hour sale for dirt cheap. It’s definitely reinforced my recent decision to always prefer the Xbox 360 version over the PC version.
Why? Well, I started installing Dark Messiah about a half-hour ago, and while I’m typing this it’s still installing:
- Put in the DVD. If I had the Xbox 360 version of this game, I’d actually be done by now. But since this is a PC, there’s an installer involved.
- It asks me which various pieces of shit software I want to install along with it; I know the actual answer is “probably none,” but since I don’t know what exactly “PlayLinc” is, and whether it’s required by the game or not, I make the stupid decision to install it anyway.
- Now there’s about 15 solid minutes of just copying files from the DVD to my HD. It’s funny, because I happen to know the Xbox 360 port of this game is identical to the PC version. My PC, hardware-wise, is actually superior to the Xbox 360 in every possible way– it’s faster, both CPU and GPU, it has more disk space, it even has a faster DVD drive. Yet the Xbox 360 version spends approximately 15 seconds installing, maybe 30 if Live has to patch it.
- The main installer, even though it’s not all the way finished, starts up the PlayLinc installer. Neither of these installers actually tell me what he hell PlayLinc is, or why I would want it. But, oh well, I made my bed and I might as well lie in it. I hit go. Because I’m dumb.
- PlayLinc’s installer triggers a really, really nasty “this program is doing something very bad and you should not let it” dialog from Vista. Basically, it’s trying to install a low-level driver for some reason, with no security certificate. (That means that, for all Vista knows, this driver was developed specifically as a rootkit or a virus.) I deny permission. But wait, why did I see this dialog at all? (Well, to be fair, Dark Messiah’s software requirements say “XP only,” probably specifically because they knew they wouldn’t be able to sneak their crapware driver past Vista.) What does the driver do? I dunno; at no point did PlayLinc even tell me what it did, much less the driver it attemps to sneak past me.
- Now Steam becomes aware of the game, and asks me to enter a long and complicated serial key. It’s 25 characters long, and printed in a font that makes it impossible to tell whether characters are I or 1. (They’re I. I found this through trial and error, of course, meaning I had to type this code in twice.) Xbox games don’t have serial keys; you put the disk in, you play. You want multiplayer? It just works, no serial key at all. You want Xbox Live to give you patches? No serial key needed.
- We’re about a half-hour into the process now, and just before the point where I started typing this rant. Steam gave me this lovely dialog:
It’s looked like that for the 5 minutes it took me to decide to type this post, the time it took me to type all the previous bulletpoints, the time it took me to take a screenshot of the dialog and uploaded it into WordPress. It still looks like that. The progress bar hasn’t moved one single percent! Of course, it is doing something– it’s totally pegged one of my CPU cores to 100% and it’s thrashing my drive like crazy. Since the first installer knew I had Steam already, why isn’t the game already installed “into” Steam? Whatever that even means.
So it’s now been 45 minutes and change, and I’m still not playing Dark Messiah. I’m not even looking at the first cinematic. If I had the Xbox 360 version instead of the PC version, I’d be on level 5 by now. If this were Portal instead of Dark Messiah, I’d be done playing by now!
PC games need to be installed, even though the Xbox 360’s inferior hardware can play the exact same games with no installation.
PC games need serial keys entered to play online and patch themselves, even though Xbox 360 games with online play require no serial keys.
PC games that rely on Steam suck ass, because Steam sucks ass. Xbox Live has no such ass-sucking problem.
PC games frequently install hacks and nasty crap onto my PC. Things like seedy and unnecessary device drivers, or low-level hacks like PunkBuster. Ask yourself why any video game requires Administrative permissions to run. Xbox 360 does not have these problems, I don’t worry at all that playing a particular Xbox game will make my 360 software unstable or slow it down.
When are PC gamers going to get sick of this bullshit and demand higher quality products? There’s no technical reason the PC can’t do every single thing the Xbox 360 is doing, PC game developers just don’t care. At all.
I’ve now had plenty of time to finish this post, add links, edit it, format it, preview it several times. And that Steam progress bar hasn’t advanced a single pixel.
Update: Since Steam is still installing (15 minutes after publishing this post originally) I actually looked up PlayLinc on Wikipedia:
Playlinc was a game browsing and messaging platform that enabled multi-player game play, voice chat and game management. Playlinc is no longer in existence.
Ah, so the random crap I just installed on my computer apparently is “no longer in existence.” Oh how I wish that were true.
Update 2: It’s now 4 hours later. Steam never finished after two hours, so I gave up on it and uninstalled the whole shebang with the intention of starting the entire install over again. In the process, though, I learned that once I plugged the serial key into Steam it is actually capable of downloading the game from its own servers, apparently. So I got the download started, and now it’s at 70%. Whee.
xhrit | 08-Aug-08 at 1:53 pm | Permalink
Why do PC games suck? “Because I’m dumb.” pretty much sums it up.
the xbox 360 version is
a) not the exact same game, as it shipped with smaller levels to fit into the 360’s pathetic ram
b) a bad port with poor framerate and control issues
c) dumbed down with fewer customization and play options
But maybe that is why the xbox 360 version gets about 1/2 the ratinge as the pc version.
go xbox.
blakeyrat | 08-Aug-08 at 2:09 pm | Permalink
Of course, putting in the install DVD and following every single instruction to the letter means, “I’m dumb.”
To counter your three points, though, I’d like to present the following:
a) I doubt it, I wager it just separates levels into smaller chunks and loads more often
b) possibly, but at least it actually works
c) who cares? It actually works
Even if I concede all your points (I haven’t actually played the Xbox version), I’d much rather have a game with smaller levels, poor framerate, control issues, and “dumbed down” than a game that doesn’t even fucking work.
Adam | 11-Aug-08 at 9:32 am | Permalink
PC Games are generally more complicated to install and get up and running, but usually not too bad. This is an exception, but it is definately not alone in the world of PC install headaches.
I’ve always seen the PC vs Console thing as a series of tradeoffs.
Consoles are:
-Easier to use
-Cheaper
-Same-screen multiplay
-More consistent experience
PCs are:
-Capable of better graphics, better performance, higher resolutions
-Often have better/more internet multiplayer support
-Lots of free 3rd party content/mods
-More flexibility in general, controls, game features, etc.
There are exceptions on both sides there, some console games can have major issues just like PC games can have major issues (usually more on the PC side, hence one of the reasons why consoles are easier to use.)
Basically my point is that I don’t think it’s fair to say PC Games suck because you had a crappy experience with one game. Heck, I just ordered Mass Effect for PC (from a GoGamer Madness sale, no less) knowing full-well all the DRM headaches I am about to endure. But I know the gaming experience will be better on my PC than it would be on my 360. (That’s right, I am not a mindless PC Zealot, I own a PC, 360, Wii, and DS)
Steve | 15-Aug-08 at 5:44 pm | Permalink
> So it’s now been 45 minutes and change, and I’m still not playing Dark Messiah.
Welcome to Vista.
Brandon | 21-Aug-08 at 7:23 pm | Permalink
A lot of PC games have the problems that you described. And I agree that it sucks. Not to nitpick, but those problems with those games, and not PC as a gaming platform. The difference is that those companies have the opportunity to clean up their act and fix their mess, and make great PC games. In fact, many companies make great PC games.
Consoles, on the other hand, have their own problems, some of which are not fixable. For example, the limited hardware, the inability to directly access your saved games without extra equipment, and the locked down hardware that makes it difficult to upgrade, or to use the equipment for other purposes when it becomes obsolete. At their heart, consoles are just overpriced, obsolete, locked down hardware.
The thing that has kept me away from consoles, besides what I mentioned above, is their most popular screen. “Loading…”. I quit playing Fable when I noticed that the “Loading…” screen was shown almost as much as all others combined.
Shipoopie | 20-Oct-08 at 2:37 pm | Permalink
>Re: Steve
>> So it’s now been 45 minutes and change, and I’m still not playing Dark Messiah.
>Welcome to Vista.
I installed this pile of sh-tuff on an XP machine and had almost equal problems. DMoMM has a very poorly made installer.
The game itself runs fine once it is going… but I think we can all thank Valve for the Source engine for that.
>Re Brandon:
>I quit playing Fable when I noticed that the “Loading…” screen was shown almost as much as all others combined.
Fable for PC inherited that issue since it was a console-first title and suffers from portitis. Granted, the load times are faster on the PC, but there still should be far fewer than there are.
I’d like to echo the OP here. The most recent patch for BF2142 saw me uninstalling the game forever due to installation issues. It believed I had a modified game (I did not have a modified game) and so required a full re-install of the game. To which I said, no, it isn’t worth the effort (especially since the patch still failed to fix several quite visible gameplay bugs). EA lost some money there, if they had fixed the damn game and let me do it w/o reinstalling the game I probably would have purchased the expansion pack.
Now, the point of this blog post was not that all PC games suck (though the author did generalize to all PC games), but rather that the installers for most PC games suck. The Games for Windows initiative is trying to help this with 1-click installs, but it makes no comment on how much of a game should be installed or how long a game should take to install (it should only require the minimum to get the game going and then install the rest as the game is running, but that is not a deal breaker for GFW branding on the box).