GFWL fails again.
You may remember from the ether that Greg Wild has previously reviewed the last two addons for Fallout 3. He’s managed to get himself clogged up with something in the real world, exams or whatever, so I volunteered to do the Broken Steel review. Ordinarily we wouldn’t announce that we are going to review something, because it’s rather pointless, but this is a special occasion.
That occasion is Microsoft’s complete inability to make a bloody content delivery system that works.
Greg has opined on this before, but now it’s my turn and it is extremely simple. I’ve just paid 800 of your magical mystery money, Microsoft, and I expect to be able to install the content that I have purchased. The fact that the interface has a hard enough time detecting mouse input is bad enough, but when you take my money and then deny me the product I have ordered, citing some ridiculous inability to install, it becomes totally unacceptable.
I had held off buying the last two addons, namely because they were a little lacklustre, but had I experienced this terrible content delivery system beforehand I may have skipped all of them altogether. It’s shoddy, amateurish, intrusive and broken.
I’d be inclined to take it out on Bethesda, but Microsoft’s ludicrous testing phase implies they should have noticed this before it happened. And before people start telling me that it’s isolated, have a link, go on. Even the developers are getting it.
What was wrong with releasing DLC the old fashioned way, via a normal installer or, better yet, just rolling it all into a bona fide expansion pack?
Just because something is new, doesn’t mean it’s better.
4 thoughts on “GFWL fails again.”
GFWL is a weird, superfluous service. What the hell was wrong with steam? Steam works, people love it, etc. Valve did a hell of a lot for PC Gaming, and all microsoft really did for it was allow Age of Empires games to come out.
Well, you know, they made the OS’s, etc, but you know. I just don’t get it. Why GWFL? GAMING WAS ALREADY HERE!
“New from Microsoft:
WATER FROM TAPS LIVE
LIVE water is coming to your taps.”
FAIL
I’m not even that peeved about this. I was planning on waiting until they collected them into some sort of physical media to buy them anyway. What really irks me is the 1.5 patch required to play the Broken Steel expansion completely breaks the game. Many, many, MANY people have written in to talk about how it can screw your ability to load cells, continue the game, save the game, and more. On top of that is the fact that it completely breaks any and all third party mods you might have, many of which are practically essential to running the game well and not having it remain cripple on the PC.
Overall, I’m just not happy about the whole fiasco, and will stay well away from it until they can work out how to fix things without breaking 10 more.