Steam

[Polemists]

If I don't have to hear that annoying beep sound it's a good day.

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.

I am still leery of it's matchmaking system.

but of course

I am less leery of it

Once we have

a

DEMO

[Sir Beane]

If I don't have to hear that annoying beep sound it's a good day.

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.

I am still leery of it's matchmaking system.

but of course

I am less leery of it

Once we have

a

DEMO

Steam'm matchmaking cannot possibly be worse than Gamespy. How I hate them so...

All in all Steam is a good platform for multiplayer, with very reliable servers used to dealing with traffic that big games like Counter-Strike manage to grab.

[Polemists]

but see that makes me wonder.

Steam has never handled a graphically intense game.

Half Life, Blue Shift, Counterstrike are all very low end system spec games.

Even half life 2 during release was hardly the top of the tier.

I'm not sure if graphics matter but since I'm told they suck up bandwidth I assume they do.

So I hope Steam is putting proper resources to CA's game and not just thinking we are some no name game like Sim City 5000

They will of course see the incredible passion for this game.

Once we have

A demo

[Sir Beane]

but see that makes me wonder.

Steam has never handled a graphically intense game.

Half Life, Blue Shift, Counterstrike are all very low end system spec games.

Even half life 2 during release was hardly the top of the tier.

I'm not sure if graphics matter but since I'm told they suck up bandwidth I assume they do.

So I hope Steam is putting proper resources to CA's game and not just thinking we are some no name game like Sim City 5000

They will of course see the incredible passion for this game.

Once we have

A demo

There are quite a few graphically high powered games that are distributed through Steam, so it shouldn't be a problem.

Games like GTAIV probably use much higher system resources when playing 32 player multiplayer. The highest number of players a TW game can have is 8, which is significantly less than many other game son Steam.

[Polemists]

Hmm I guess I havn't played steam in a while, last time I was on steam all they had was valve games....


That said, I assure you that 8 players, each with 2-3 thousand man armies is going to require some SERIOUS system specs.

Beyond my little labtop most likely.

No one knows what steam can handle yet tho

so we need

a

Demo

[Zenicetus]

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]

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]

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]

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

1. No more searching around the net for updates - games can update automatically
2. Smaller updates - games on Steam tend to get patched little and often so (hopefully) no more 250MB downloads!
3. An end to game disks and CD Keys - you only need them for the initial install!
4. You can download the game from Steam servers ANYWHERE in the world
5. 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]

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]

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. :)

[Husar]

Well, I think it was quite bad when they released it, but they patch(ed) it regularly and nowadays it's pretty fine.