![]() I recently bought a pack of indie games on Steam. This deal with creating new accounts to play games (multiplayer or otherwise) is getting out of hand. Really, Bioware? You want me to blog about my DA experiences on your social network? Why do I have to download and run ANOTHER stupid client just to play the fucking game? That makes even less sense to me - I bought the game on Steam. I don’t care about their stupid “social network”, but at least it doesn’t require me to run the Games for Windows Live client to play the game, which some games on Steam do require. Does it seem a little annoying to anyone else to have to sign up for *another* account, solely for Dragon Age, just for the DLC? Couldn’t they have just used my damn Steam settings?!Īll things considered, Dragon Age is pretty tame. This account is used for multiplayer in a number of Steam-based games (not just games published by Valve). I signed up for this account the first time I bought games with Steam. Now, with Steam, I am already signed up for an account. How many people bought Dragon Age over Steam? Given how it was in the best-sellers list for a while, I’m willing to bet the answer to that question is “a lot”. But there is just one thing…and it’s the same thing that bugged me so much about UT3. But the thing with Dragon Age: Origins, that doesn’t have to be so bad. Dragon Age: Origins with its “social network” is a well-known example (required for the DLC), and anything made by Ubisoft now gets a special mention for the doubly asinine requirement of remaining online while you are playing even though it’s a single player game! Now, Ubisoft is absolutely terrible, and there is absolutely no redeeming feature in that model. Turns out that requiring accounts for single-player games is also gaining traction. UT3 is a multiplayer game, so making an account is okay, right? What about single player? Funny you should mention that… WTF, man? Could you imagine if you had to do that for every game you own? But wait, you say, that’s just for multiplayer. It’s even worse now that the game is on Steam, where first you download it to your Steam account and then once you launch the game you have to make another separate account. ![]() (The realistic answer is probably “it’s not necessary, but they want to see and control who is playing their game” or in industry-speak “preventing piracy.”) Part of me is glad that that game did so terribly for that reason I absolutely cannot stand having to sign up for an account to play a game I already paid for. I don’t see why this is necessary - it wasn’t necessary in Unreal Tournament, or Unreal Tournament 2004. My first brush with this terrible idea came, rather ironically, with Unreal Tournament 3, where after booting the game up I was expected to do these foreign actions like “create an account” and “log in” in order to play with other people online. UT3, on the other hand, demands you make an account. Now I’m expected to launch an individual game, then fill in a username and password in order to get online and shoot people. But wait! Now the concept has expanded…to individual games? Now I need to log in somewhere to play multiplayer on a PC game, where I don’t have to pay for the privilege? This isn’t like Steam, where you log in when your computer boots up to access your games - all your games. On both places it makes sense: the former because you had to pay for it so of course you had to log in to play, and the latter because all the games you bought ended up tied to the account so of course you had to log in to play. I don’t really know where this idea started, though I have a few ideas: Xbox Live for the original Xbox, and Steam. If one of them did, I have this little fantasy in my head wherein said person walked into CliffyB’s office and brought it up to him: “So, CliffyB, do you think we should make everybody sign up for an account and log in to play multiplayer?” To this, CliffyB would dutifully reply: “That’s the most fucking retarded thing I’ve ever heard.”įast forward a bit under a decade, and the most fucking retarded thing that my fantasy CliffyB has ever heard has gained some traction. I don’t even think the developers had conceived of the notion of requiring dial-up users to log in to their weak, easily-DDoSed servers in West Nowhereville before playing the greatest multiplayer game ever made. Unreal Tournament did not require me to sign up for account. ![]() Medievia was even a little unusual about that when compared to other MUDs, because you didn’t lose your equipment when you logged off. It was natural, really: it’s a persistent world where you’re expected to log in and continue where you last left off. Medievia was the first and last time I ever felt it necessary to make an account for a game. Unreal Tournament, in all its account-free glory
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