Note to gamesas:

For many of us that live at a rural address with "not so fast" internet...which encompasses roughly 90% of physical area of the US (anyone that lives more than about 1.5 miles from a nearest town or city of less than about 3500 population, except Vermont)

1 DVD + 25GB download on a 1.5M is effectively the same as digital distribution. I'm "lucky" with DSL that isn't subject to a monthly data cap. It's just not terribly fast. I know people that live a mere 14 miles downtown Colorado Springs (a reasonably large city of 1/2 million) within sight of a major US highway on the FLATLAND side of town, whose ONLY option is Hughesnet, capped at 20GB/month after which large downloads over about 250kb are BLOCKED until the monthly billing cycle resets. You may not be aware, Hughes residential customers cannot simply buy more data if they use up their allotment for the month like a typical cellular plan can. No. They WAIT until the billing cycle resets.

Can most of us find a Starbucks within an hour drive with free fast unlimited access? Probably. But we can't drag a desktop computer in there.

When BDROM drives dropped below $100 a couple years back I put one in my desktop thinking as game installs are getting so big (5 DVDs or more) eventually the choice would be between digital distribution or a single Bluray disk. So I got one.

So you say "Bluray drives aren't common on PCs". Well, no. But that's because companies like Bethesda haven't done it. Back in the early '90s when CDroms were new, software companies jumped on, and within a couple years you'd have been hard pressed to find a PC that didn't come equipped with one. The transition to DVDs went almost as quickly. With super fast internet downloads (but only in town!) optical media may not be necessary for everybody. But a lot of us still rely on physical media for very large software packages. We are aware and the relatively minor expense of upgrading a dumb physical drive is "nothing" compared to the overall cost of a PC than can run modern graphically intense games.

Ok. Its snowing this weekend. First big winter storm for the Chicago/Indiana/SE Michigan region. I started installing from DVD (and downloading) 3 days ago. I'm not the only one in the house I CANNOT sap the internet connection for 36 hours straight. So maybe in another two days I'll have the game downloaded/playable. It's nasty outside, roads are slippery, and awful. Plan to stay at home. Seems like the perfect weekend to begin the Fallout 4 experience. But not. Sorry but all other recent huge AAA games I've bought were packaged with multiple DVDs + smaller download that set one back at most few hours- not several DAYS. This isn't my fault. No Bethesda, YOU dropped the ball here. A single BDrom disk would be nice. If a million DVDs in a box is too costly and it's on a single Blu ray disk, trust me, those of us that need it will get one. I ALREADY DID.

But they are a business and it costs them nothing for you to download the game.

/thread

Yeah great excuse. So pass the cost and inconvenience to paying customers thus making piracy a more convenient option. This is one of the reasons I'm going to wait this out unlike my other gamesas purchases which were day one purchases. Pay for the game then pay the internet provider for breaching bandwith limit then wait hours to play. That's putting the burden on the consumer. Its punishment with a price tag and fees.

you just have to accept that you are in the minority, and they probably aren't going to change things to accommodate you. I kind of had the same problem with music. when everything started switching to CD's, i was kind of irritated that I had thousands of hours of music on cassette tapes that were becoming harder and harder to use. cry as I might, they weren't going to stop making cd's for me. a decade or two later, the same thing happened with digital formats. . am I pissed that a lot of my music I've purchased on 2 or 3 formats, sure. but what are you going to do.

They could ya know, put the game on a flash drive in the box something cool and vault tech like... those are cheap

Sorry man but..

I live in a rural area too and even live almost at the top of a mountain and have access to 25Mbit DSL.

I recommend checking around and seeing whether or not you can get a different ISP. ATT Uverse is what I got and while it's far from the best it's way better than Hughesnet.

Failing that you could try and see whether a friend would be kind enough to burn you their steam folder for the game. All you should have to do after copying it over is verifying the integrity of the installation which should fix registry problems, etc.