FNV has been on my list every since it was released and I've been somewhat following the news about issues with it crashing and other glitches. In anticipation of purchasing it, I decided to try to preemptively download the patch (hotel ISP is rather slow...). But, after searching, the patch was nowhere to be found. Either I just missed it, or someone's infinite wisdom decided to make it available through steam only.

Well...finally got FNV and have been salivating over it all day. Finally got back to the hotel to install it....and then I get a new popup about updating Fallout: New Vegas. Which should be complete in roughly 3 hours and 56 minutes. So, let me get this straight...I have to first install the software, and then download the latest patches before I can actually play. Wow, it feels just like installing Windows! Is Microsoft behind F:NV?!?

So, I figured that since I had so much time to spare while waiting for these updates to finish, I had time to register and post some frustrations...I guess I can't fault Bethesda for this hotel's crappy bandwidth, but how about a game that is playable on install? Hey, look! I'm down to 3 hours and 40 minutes!

at least windows is functional when you are getting updates for it, just need to restart when applying the updates.

I don't know I think it's comparatively even worse than that. I think I've installed 2 windows updates that I actually had to restart because of... ever. I think I've had to restart my computer more often because of iTunes updates than Windows updates.

I do wish Steam treated games more like Impulse did. You always have the option of updating later and as long as the game is validated you can play it even if it is the release version. Correct me if I'm wrong though - isn't the release patch the only one you HAVE to download?

I've never tried an "impulse" based game personally but it does sound better since Steam I believe forces the user to use the current version as of the time of activation by that user so let's say beth released a 5gb patch tomorrow, anyone activating their game after that would have to wait for all the patches to dl, that's the way I understand it anyways. & for Multi-player games that does make sense to try to keep everyone up to date.

Ah but I don't think Impulse has an achievements system. I mean why play the game then right?

Also- I don't know how well impulse would have handled the launch. While they have some advantages in terms of DRM being friendlier (never had to have impulse running even in some offline mode to run a game) I do not think they offer encrypted preloading of the game. They have also never been the sole digital download source for such a large major release title. I think that while I would have preferred impulse TODAY I would have been very angry if I ended up having to spend a day and a half downloading it because of server issues.

Whether you like Steam or not, they were probably the only option out there with the type of DRM (basically anything besides what Ubisoft has tried up until switching to SteamWorks themselves just recently), a relatively robust community feature to handle and justify the existence of achievements, localized archiving and backup capabilities, and the capacity (along with pre-load) to handle a large launch. For as much as I like Impulse for my experience witht he GalCiv games, I can't say that I would not have made the same decision if I were in Bethesda or Obsidian's shoes. I'd like to own it as an Impulse version myself but I would have been too concerned about capacity of the Impulse servers and the stability of the Impulse client to have gone with them if I had to make that call as part of my job.

Maybe when there's a game of the year version though it'll be on other services. If it is I'd buy it (yes, a second time too) on Impulse in a heartbeat.