Well, I am hacked off.

I had to register simply to express my annoyance with this stupid situation!

I have been a fan of the fallout series and Bethesda for a while, and played both fallout 3 and DLC on my PS3 and New Vegas all the way through. Well, roll on a couple of years, my PS3 is long gone and I fancied re-visiting them on the PC.

I was in GAME today and purchase New Vegas Ultimate edition (with Steam download) and FOT3 GOTY edition. Well fallout 3 doesn't come with steam code but does have it's own keycode. Now I bought these two games to play on my M11X, so the steam version of Vegas no probs, but after getting all excited and installing FOT3 to enjoy it I get some [censored]** error that I don't have the original disk in my machine. Well, of course I don't because my Alienware laptop doesn't have a OPTICAL ROM drive!!! (To install I created an ISO from my desktop with the disk and installed it on my laptop via USB).

So I am stuck with an ORIGINAL purchased game, with a valid key code that I can't even play on my laptop I bought it for!!!

What a stupid situation, I'm now hunting the net for a crack to play a legitimate game that I purchased. It seems totally idiotic that I have to search for an illegal crack probably riddled with malware to play my original game I paid good money for today!

I just wanted to say how stupid this is, and that Bethesda, you are a bunch of muppets!

You just need the disk to install. You can play the game without the disk. Do not use the fallout launcher. You only need to run the Fallout launcher once to setup the video card.

Use Fallout3.exe to play the game.

Thanks for the reply. Especially as my post isn't really adding any value to the forum, but I was so annoyed I had to let it out.

I read that online, but I tried creating a shortcut to fallout3.exe and it still said the same thing?

So I then unplugged the USB stick and tried running and then it said another error and told me to insert the original disk

I've found a few cracks online, after about 60 popups trying to install malware on my machine I actually downloaded one but everything is in Polish lol, it's so frustrating. I wanted to do FOT3 before starting Vegas again really.

It just seems really stupid, I haven't even been asked for my key when I did the install, they should have just made people register, I mean people will still crack games regardless, it just seems like a silly way to punish people that actually buy the game! And lets be honest, lots of laptops and MACs haven't had optical drives for years, my wifes macbook, my M11 and my daughters ACER, none of them have optical drives we just do everything via mounting ISO's. Even my MSDN subscription just uses ISO's, just seems like a silly idea, ok I could buy a USB DVD drive or something, but I have never had any need and I'm not going to do that for one game.

I should have bought it on Steam I guess.

P.S it could be my disk version is a redist? It's published by mtgames according to the packaging?