I recently grabbed myself a new PC to play games on (nothing special spec wise, it’s just an iMac isn’t exactly a monster games machine) and so I’ve been spending a lot of time installing games. This has been annoying me no end because I’ve decided that most installers are really nasty.
For a start if I need to use a CD then I just know that I’m going to have to replace most of the installed files with changed downloaded versions anyway; some of these MMOs require gigabytes of patches from their base CDs nowadays so I’m looking at downloads very favourably. Eve was an easy one, Gigabyte and a bit for the whole installer and a clean install (It was just after the latest patch so it was easier). A look at my DVD shelf later and I’ve rejected Conan on size of the patch alone, I only get 50Gb of downloads per month and that’ll take a sizable chunk that’s worth more to me than trying the game again. Lord of the rings online was a clean install from my Mines of Moria disks so wasn’t that bad, but if I’d done it a few months earlier that would have hurt. Warhammer is installed but not patched, they want (for maybe obvious reasons) cash before they’ll give me the patches but I’m not quite ready to go back there yet. I’d prefer to have a fully patched client for that moment I decide I want to take a look, but as it is I’ll miss the first few of those moments because the patching would take too long for that nights play so I’ll just not do it.
The game that outright wins for patching though is Guild Wars. I download the initial bootstrapper and it downloads the basics of the game. From then on whenever I want to enter a new area it downloads a bit more and generally goes out of it’s way to prevent me seeing an installer progress bar for more than I need to.
Installing games is a pain, which is why I’m in Guild Wars if anybody needs me.
posted @ Saturday, March 21, 2009 11:10 PM