Steam

**Zenicetus** · 01-27-2009, 23:25

Originally Posted by Polemists

Alot of people seem to be behind steam, which leads me to believe it is not the seem pos that I was playing blueshift and half life 1 with, that lead to maps never matching quite right.

It's good to hear that it's improved, but there's also some consumer psychology at work there. For people who are already running other Steam games, a new one on the horizon has zero additional impact. They're already living with the trade-offs like background processes, authorization requirements, potential game obsolescence without a physical disk, etc. It looks a little different when you haven't bought into the concept yet, and you're being dragged into it kicking and screaming just because you'd like to buy that one single game. I appreciate the user feedback from current Steam users, but I take it with a grain of salt.

Right now I haven't seen any other game I'm interested in on the horizon that requires Steam, other than Empire. And I'm not interested in playing online (recovering WoW addict). So it's basically down to whether this one game ends up being good enough to warrant that. It definitely puts a damper on any enthusiasm for early purchase, because I'll need to see plenty of user feedback first.

P.S. @ Jack Lusted, thanks for the answers so far, even if it isn't what some of us want to hear.

**Belgolas** · 01-28-2009, 00:15

Oh everyone can calm down about steam going down in the future. Steam has it's own back-up program so once you have downloaded a game you can put it on either a disk or a back-up hard drive so even if they did go down you could still play it with a no-cd. Although the likely ness of them going down is pretty slim. Even games companies that get bought out you can still play on their servers for multi-player. Plus any company would be stupid if they bought steam and didn't support it because of how much money is involed. You are just paranoid.

I PREFER Steam over a physical disk so there is ZERO trade off.

Ituralde there is already a total war community on the steam forums. I don't think there is a group for this forum on steam but there is a Total War Center group and plenty of Total War clans and a few dozen ETW groups and most are even language based groups. There are Total War fan clubs.

**BeenPlayingSinceRTW** · 02-05-2009, 05:37

Originally Posted by Zenicetus

Right now I haven't seen any other game I'm interested in on the horizon that requires Steam, other than Empire. And I'm not interested in playing online (recovering WoW addict). So it's basically down to whether this one game ends up being good enough to warrant that. It definitely puts a damper on any enthusiasm for early purchase, because I'll need to see plenty of user feedback first.

P.S. @ Jack Lusted, thanks for the answers so far, even if it isn't what some of us want to hear.

I agree.

I went out and bought the last few TW editions in the first week, but I'm definitely going to wait on this one...

**satchef1** · 02-06-2009, 01:11

I've been using Steam since Half Life 2 was released, really glad to see Total War is going that way.

No more searching around the net for updates - games can update automatically
Smaller updates - games on Steam tend to get patched little and often so (hopefully) no more 250MB downloads!
An end to game disks and CD Keys - you only need them for the initial install!
You can download the game from Steam servers ANYWHERE in the world
Integrated friends lists, community features, server browsers and matchmaking

I'd also hope for good mod support, Valve have managed it with the Source engine so hopefully CA will follow suit (as Steam will make our normal ways of modding a little more difficult). A Total War SDK? Finally?

**Belgolas** · 02-12-2009, 05:04

Another thing I forgot to mention while in ANY game on steam when you hit shift + tab (only if you set it to be like this, you can have this off or set it to different keys) it brings up a menu where you can chat to your friends, change some steam settings, surf the web with Steam's built in web browser. I really like the web broswer part. It is really usefull if you are lets say looking at gamefaqs or want to check your email or want to be on facebook or check out some cheats or checking to see if the ETW demo is finally released. This means you don't have to alt tab out which take time and then have to load the game back up. Again this works in any and every game on steam.

**Merak** · 02-12-2009, 09:59

i was around when steam was first releaste and then it was quite bad program, (word of mouth) only that made me never use steam but now when empire is in steam i created a account and was marveld by the simplicity of the program and if it is a DRM it is by far the best DRM to date (if you need to format a pc game with a securom game in it you first need to uninstall the game) from what i can tell i just need to install steam again and then download the empire and play again..

make me wonder why i never used steam before. :)