Slashdot Mirror
Metal Gear Solid V PC Disc Contains Steam Installer, Nothing Else
dotarray writes: The boxed copy of Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain reportedly contains nothing but a Steam installer. That's right, even if you fork out real-world money for a physical copy of the game, you'll still have to download the whole thing from the internet.
The game officially launches tomorrow. Early critical reviews are quite positive, though you should take that with a grain of salt until the game is more widely distributed. Game Informer says, "Unlike the linear design of previous entries, The Phantom Pain rarely assumes you have particular weapons and equipment, so the missions are brilliantly designed with multiple paths to success." The Washington Post notes, "The Phantom Pain’s openness feels like Kojima finally found a technical platform broad enough to make use of all of those tools and trusts players to build their own narrative drama from the way they choose to put these tools together for each mission." IGN has this criticism: "... where Phantom Pain’s gameplay systems are far richer and meatier than any the series has ever seen, its story feels insubstantial and woefully underdeveloped by comparison." Metal Gear Solid 5 is launching for PCs, current consoles, and previous-gen consoles; Digital Foundry thinks is likely to be the last true cross-generation AAA title.
Digital entitlements are here to stay. Goodbye, used video game market. Goodbye, replayability. Goodbye, minimum viable product.
Judging from the trailers, it seems that the title is nonetheless appropriate, as multiple characters have prosthetic limbs. Knowing Kojima's body of work, the title is deliberate and thematic.
This is different. Your time is 100% wasted going to a brick and mortar store to buy an online installer.
Unless you have a POTS modem, your time is already wasted when you go to buy a Steam-"powered" game. Since you don't own it and are just licensing it for reals in the case of a game which must be blessed by an online server before it can be played, you really are just wasting everything when you buy it on a physical disc. The disc itself is meaningless as it alone cannot be used to install the game. Even a Steam "backup" is not a backup of a game, but of the game's resources. It's not really a game until you can play it (unless hacking Steam out of it is fun to you, then it's two games in one!) and you can't play it until it's blessed.
Someday Steam will go away, and then all those discs which are now coasters which install Steam and maybe some game resources will just be coasters.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
People with a 10 GB/mo plan on cellular, satellite, or Iowa DSL could start a download now and not finish the 50 GB of a full 2-layer BD-ROM before the end of the year.
Well, there are plans which would provide more bandwidth. The reality though is that more and more games have not just massive installs but also massive patchsets, so if you don't have high-speed internet with reasonable caps then modern gaming is not for you. That sucks, it sucks a lot, but it's how it is, and the person without decent internet access should take up retrogaming yesterday. I only have 6 Mbps myself, though with no cap, and that puts a serious crimp in my gaming activities. I cannot download a game and game online at the same time, for example. I can only game while my lady watches Netflix in the mornings; in the evenings, my ratty-ass WISP goes all to hell due to oversubscription and/or crap hardware they claimed they were going to replace a long time ago, shock amazement.
TL;DR: AAA games are not for people with crap internet
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's amazing how proud people are of their immorality. Good for you, jack!
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Well, usually when you buy a physical game using Steam, there's a Steam installer as well, but you get a lot of the basic assets and such so you don't have download 12-15GB of data over your internet connection.
Given most of the fixes usually affect code, and maybe maps, not having to download that stuff certainly helps.
It amazes me the people that defend game and software maker immorality. Good for you!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
And if you return it and get a "second" license so that you retain your right of first sale, then you're not stealing. Software "licensing" should not be able to take away your right to sell something after you've bought it (so long as you don't keep a copy for yourself). It works with DVD and Blu-Ray. That's why companies are trying to say "physical media is dead" and convince the next generation of people that it's true.