Yeah, agreed on the two hours thing, I have to say .

My point was rather for the poor sods languishing on rubbish broadband with severe caps who have posted elsewhere. There might have been the odd article on the net but unless you were buying a physical copy from a retailer and actively googled "what's the size of the install" (and who does unless you're getting a key), you wouldn't have been told. Online retailers didn't put up a warning and there was nothing on the official Bethesda portal or the box. Given that GTA5 retail actually did ship with a bunch of DVDs, it's bad that Bethesda did this.

The pattern used to be: the complete install would be in the box, and it would be playable. If you wanted the inevitable Day One patches etc then you'd at least have an option in your client. Nowadays a retail copy can have everything from the complete install (GTA5) to an empty disc apart from a Steam link. There's this erroneous assumption that all PC gamers around the world have excellent, unmetered broadband.

A mere 12 hours sounds like heaven to me. It will take me days.

Not just PC gamers. There's a massive disconnect between certain developers and reality.

Some of Microsoft gizmos like the Kinect come to mind which, while interesting, were designed with a specific type of customer in mind that has a large living room with plenty of space and specific illumination. Anything else and it fails to work reliably, as plenty of people have complained over the years.

Same deal with things like always-on consoles or Windows 10 downloading the whole installation without you being told about it, since to those developers everyone lives with unlimited, high-speed internet connection at a flat rate like they do. :v

But as you and others have pointed out, most AAA titles still have physical copies that contain the vast majority (if not the entirety) of a game's basic installation, unlike what happened here and in a few other cases.

It still doesn't make it right for Bethedsa not to tell the people how much they have to download extra to play a physical copy of the game. It shouldn't be a 20gb download and Bethesda needs to do a better job of correct information.

OP did you buy the physical copy so it could destroy your disc reader if you bump it? Because that's the only advantage, it just allows you to download it and makes sure you have the disc in your system each time so you can't just give your friend a copy for free.

My download last night went fast, less than 2 hours, and I could play it just fine. However, I do think that the physical copies should contain most of the game files. That is why people buy physical copies to avoid the download. In my case, it probably would not have save all that much time over the download, in fact, it might have taken longer as I tend to wander off when multi disk installs are happening so the disk swap is slow.

On PS4 it pre-downloaded the day before so it took 2 seconds to start up at 12:01 am when I played it.

I pre-ordered physical DVD for Skyrim and the Steam download part went fairly quick. Has something changed with FO4? My connection speed is 28Mbps. I have not received it from Amazon yet so could just RMA and buy from Steam if either method takes the same time.

Yes, FO4 comes with one DVD which has about 5GB of data. The rest you have to download, but with your Internet speed you won't have the impractical waiting time as many, like myself, are complaining about.

Skyrim was much smaller and almost all files could be installed from disk. Fallout 4 downloads 19 GB of data from Steam even if you have the disk version. It's a significant difference.

double post

I'm sorry you have to wait for days, but you will agree with me that when you buy the physical version of a videogame is not correct to find in only 20% of the game!

I used 3, preordered yesterday evening, was still done two hours before unlock.

And I have the cheapest internet connection, so rarely I need more than 20 Mb/s.

@Lorca and Rosveen. Thanks for info.

Yes, it had been no issue putting the game data files on the discs and just downloading the program files.

Only issue is that people can open the files and extract content for spoilers but this should be posible to do form the console versions blue-ray too.

Part of the point is that steam is not cheap, its usually cheaper to buy the physical version.
This is also true even for MMO like ESO or WOW who is far more expensive at the official digital store where they take all the profit themselves than physical.

ESO just had an code as I understand.

However download is simpler for most, game downloads and you can play. Most would probably not bother sitting and swapping discs either.

I agree it's not good for me or others in the same situation as me. I do realize that for most it's fine. And that digital is the way the world is moving in and that the world never waits for everyone to catch up with it. Yes, it's very irritating.

Not to mention that if we did live in a post apocalyptic world, we could never play our games again.

What I would rather happen is that the entire world would have good internet options available to them.

That really svcks OP. The FedEx/UPS arrangement setup svcks even more. Not to rub it in, but I pre-loaded to avoid this very issue. And have been playing non stop rave session since 9:01pm PST yesterday.

Got burned this way when Skyrim came out. Nearly ended up NOT getting a hard copy of the CD because 2 Blockbuster employee asshats decided they wanted to buy up Skyrim in bulk volume and charge their customers premium price Thankfully, the lynch mob mentality of customers like myself in the line behind them convinced the sales clerk to limit them to one a piece. Never even thought something like that was possible. Even with tactics like that, Blockbuster still went bankrupt. SMH.

So this time around, I planned my strategy into the weeds. Took the day off today so I could play a 51 hour marathon session through the holiday. No more avoiding FedEx/UPS delays by waiting for over an hour in a long line, just to pickup your reserved copy of the game at midnight. Because some 99% of the ppl ahead of you in line decided against pre-order and tried to buy it at the last minute. SMH. So the only other breaks I'm taking today besides bathroom ones is a supply run to Target and Walmart to pickup some Nuka Cola and a copy of the game guide.

Well at least you bought the Collector's Edition, which will make up for the wait. So don't stress yourself out. When you finally crack the box open and slide in your CD, all of your agony will be worth the wait.

For that to happen we have to somehow get Internet Service Provider (ISP's) companies to change their attitudes and stop not allowing competition of smaller Internet Service Provider (ISP's) companies to come to certain areas.

As well to stop with refusing to want to bring their internet to certain parts of the world where people want it.

And last thing, they need to stop charging so much. I pay $120 dollars (USD) for Comcast every month, when I was living in Europe for a few months I got internet there about as good as Comcast for $10 dollars (USD) a month.

I feel all of your pain. Makes me glad I went PS4.

Got my copy just after midnight at a GameStop, drove home and popped it in, watched the seven S.P.E.C.I.A.L movies while it downloaded and installed the day one update, and I was in.

The download/install took almost exactly as long as the seven videos, as though they planned this.

Bummer about the download issue. At my home I have 20 gigs a month through a Verizon hotspot because like many I live out in the sticks far away from any cable, DSL or fiber. However at my business in the city I have xfinity and could download the 20 gigs in a couple hours I'd guess...which does me no good what so ever because my gaming rig is at home.

Guess I will be lugging it to work to download the game when I buy it. Be nice to be able download it to a flash drive then take it home and install.

Well, count me your one.

In all honesty, I don't give a damn. I didn't buy the physical edition so that I didn't need to download everything from STEAM. Would it have been a bonus? Absolutely! But I've given up on trying to buy physical copies since the industry relegated the PC section to one side of a freestanding kiosk. It's a bonus to get one, but I fully expect that most games I get for PC from now on will be online in one form or another. That has nothing to do with publishers, they're just following the money.

If retailers can't sell PC games on aisles the size of console games, that has less to do with the publisher and more to do with the format. I've accepted this. I'll still buy physical copies, just so I can have something tangable. That's always been the reason I prefer physical copies over digital. Not because it doesn't svck up bandwith like a sponge, but because it's real on some level. Everything else is a bonus.

Least you can I'm stuck looking at a CD with no key guess I can tape the pip boy and act the game out.

That will be awesome, even better than the actual game

To people with bad internet, welcome to the svck. Know your pain is shared, I won't be playing Fallout 4 either, and that despite apologist propaganda, it is unnecessary suffering imposed on us out of greed. If you haven't bought Fallout 4 yet, my advise is don't, go play something else, wait a year, get the GotY edition with final patches (fewer bugs) and all DLC for half the price (or less), probably a much smaller download (if any), and tons of mods available. Yes, it svcks, its gamesas's fault, for a single-player offline game it cannot be the customer's fault, better companies don't do this to their customer's, drown your sorrow in some other games, and discourage others from getting this, or even any other games from gamesas.

My sob story: I was a long time gamesas customer, and fan, from Morrowind through Fallout 3, but they ended that with this broadband-only DRM abuse. I pre-ordered New Vegas via Amazon, my first indication it used Steam was the Steam installer, no mention of that anywhere, not on Amazon nor the previews and had trusted gamesas not to use that, but by then I couldn't return it (open box), and now years later I still can't play it. I watched Skyrim come and go, instead doing another huge mod build for Oblivion. For Fallout 4, with gamesas pissing on its customers yet again, I'll probably do another huge Fallout 3 mod build (next year).

I'm on 26.4kbps dialup, over 40+ year old noisy phone lines, because Frontier communications refuses to efficiently spend the money, hundreds of millions, the government gave them for infrastructure improvements. Instead they waste huge amounts of money on shareholder dividends, reducing prices, buying more land-lines from Verizon, advertising to increase market share in urban areas while they practically ignore the majority of their service area where they hold monopoly status, fending off class action lawsuits over failure to provide even basic DSL performance on higher end service plans, buying state legislators to prevent state action against them, and so on. Its obscene, should be criminal, and some of it might actually be, but there isn't a damn thing I can do about it.

Despite that, I downloaded over 5 gig last month, most of that was Oblivion mods, including Better Cities (~1.5GB, ~150 hours). The problem is Steam network overhead, for ads and social media features I don't use, causes downloads to fail, with FONV I let it run for ~6 weeks, it managed to get maybe 200MB. If gamesas used the physical media efficiently, instead of abusively wasting people's time and bandwidth, my 26.4kbps dialup would be fine.

Through it all, if gamesas re-released FONV (GotY), Skyrim (GotY), and Fallout 4 on DVD, ready-to-play, ideally only with disc-check DRM like FO3 (I'd even tolerate non-Steam online activation), I'd buy it in a second, despite the abuse and already having a useless FONV disc.

Taking days to download this would be a luxury for me let alone hours... Just got home and the postman didn't deliver it so I have to collect it tomorrow from the post office just to add more salt to the wound lol.