Steam DLC implementation can ruin your game.

[marfig]

Most of you know I'm only a newcomer to Steam. Despite knowing it since its infancy, I only very recently stopped resisting. And not really because of anything Steam could offer me, but because the market shifted towards digital distribution and made it virtually impossible for me to keep buying on retail stores. Heck, you can't find most games on retail stores these days.

But alas, here I am on Steam. Not converted, resigned.

The thing that always worries me about the service is all the limitations it imposes and with no benefit whatsoever. The convenience of buying online is something I can live without. Never bothered me, never will. I want something, I can get my ass off the chair and go out. A game is no different. With that, the only benefit Steam offers me becomes void. The rest is service limitations.

Of all, the one that annoys me the most is the way Steam handles DLCs. For it, a DLC is something you buy and wish to install, never uninstall or never enable/disable. For Steam all DLCs are game additions that follow the simple commodity pattern of content patches. Why would I ever want to remove Borderlands DLCs, for instance?

But many (many!) games don't follow this pattern with their DLCs. The most striking example is strategy games, for which DLCs are often alternative gameplay background and game content which users may want to enable or disable, depending on the king of game they wish to play that day. But Steam doesn't care. What's the result? If I want to play Hearts of Iron III with the For the Motherland DLC, I will no longer be able to play the game with the Semper Fi DLC. Not anymore, forever. Steam installs all DLCs, and doesn't allow me to disable For The Motherland if one of these days I feel like playing just the Semper Fi DLC (a scenario pack for American troops that is also the only DLC compatible with one of the best mods developed for the game).

Were I to buy rental, I'd just reinstall the game with the needed DLCs. But not on Steam. In here, I bought the DLC it gets immediately installed and I will never have the option to uninstall it or disable it. All I'm left with is bugging the developers to change the way they develop their games because there's a digital distribution service who doesn't care one yota about it.

 

[Tharic-Nar]

I wouldn't call this a Steam issue, but a developer issue. I mean, yes, Steam forces you to install all registered DLC, since it's technically a bundle - but only with certain games. Dawn Of War 2 for example, the major DLC (game expansions) are separate installs and are listed separately in Steam, requiring the base game, but they all launch the same EXE.

Bethesda allows you to disable DLC via it's 'DATA' menu when you launch the game. (Fallout 3, Oblivion, Skyrim - Obsidian's Fallout New Vegas)

It's not entirely Steam's fault. Could it be handled differently? Sure. But I think it's more to do with the developer than anything.

 

[marfig]

I won't deny that Paradox has it wrong. When they release non cumulative DLCs (they are expansions really), they should provide users with a manager much like Bethesda manager. But the thought remains that while I can "easily" deal with it with retail versions of the game, I certainly can't on Steam. And the idea that a DD manager limits the installation options of a game is something I see as a weakness. If anything this software should be as transparent as possible.

It's good to know though it treats expansions as separate products.

 

[RainMotorsports]

Marfig it also depends on the game. Battlefield for example all the DLC was downloaded and installed BEFORE you bought it. They put it in all the patches. Of course when you can pick up an entire game with all its DLC a year later for 10 bucks it doesn't look so bad.

Battlefield 3 will likely be 30 GB by the time its done and that's not a joke. I am very sure my estimate is conservative at best.

 

[Rob Williams]

Of all, the one that annoys me the most is the way Steam handles DLCs. For it, a DLC is something you buy and wish to install, never uninstall or never enable/disable.

I couldn't agree more on this being a poor implementation. Ideally, users should be able to open up the respective DLC list for a game and click the checkbox beside each listed piece of DLC that they want Steam to automatically download. As far as I'm concerned, there's no reason Valve couldn't offer this sort of functionality with Steam. It's not as though once the DLC is purchased, it's suddenly required by the game.

As Thar mentioned though, developers -do- have some control over this. If a game has multiple DLC, they could add another menu entry that would allow you to load up just that DLC. As an example, with Serious Sam: BFE, there's both a "Play Game" and "Play Moddable Version" when you right-click the title in the list. The unfortunate thing is that few devs take advantage of this sort of thing.

It's good to know though it treats expansions as separate products.

As far as I'm aware, this is up to the developer, not Valve. Total War: SHOGUN 2 just released a proper expansion, for example, and because I own the original game, it's just considered a piece of DLC (even though the expansion is stand-alone). So that means whenever I install SHOGUN 2, it installs all of the DLC -and- that expansion (for the record, total install size: 28.9GB).

But then there's Deus Ex: Humarn Revolution. Its "Missing Link" DLC is treated as a separate install.

Another thing that kind of bothers me is that Steam treats each piece of DLC as if it's a full title. Because of this, my Steam profile makes it look like I own 27% more games that I actually do. Isn't that a little... odd?

 

[marfig]

Ah, thanks for that. I was a bit doubtful that Steam would indeed consider expansions for all games the same way. I was pretty sure of hearing of game expansions on Steam that installed as DLC. But since I don't own any, I had to keep it to myself. It may be indeed have to do with how a developer decides to register an expansion on Steam. But on the other hand, Steam does have some control over how it wishes to distribute expansions, DLCs, and what packs it wants to make. I won't exempt Steam of responsibilities here too.

And absolutely on the "DLC is a full title, but we are only joking" aspect to Steam. On one hand we have you have impossible to edit DLC installations that effectively make them an integral part of the game. On the other hand we are trolled with a much higher game count list than what we really have. I mean, I wish I had 70 games on Steam. But the reality is that I have 22. The rest is DLC content and beta or demo titles that I can't edit out.

 

[Kougar]

I have quite a few opinions on this, so I'll just go down the list.

I rather prefer Steam to buying in physical stores. I always pay way less, are guaranteed to be in stock, and I can still price shop around. Steam is better than other sources for showing what games have what DLC available... something you won't find anything about in a B&M location. And that's for new titles. Older titles, any B&M store today will typically cost 2-4x the price of the same game in the steam store, because they never mark them down more than once or twice over the lifetime of the box sitting on the shelf. Also, steam games get upgrades... I can't even list how many games got GOTY editions with extra DLC packs / content bundled in at the same price as the original game. And at least for me, Steam is just way more convenient for managing my games. I haven't touched a physical game CD nor had to hunt for serial codes (serials for DLC count too) on missing inserts/jewel cases in several years.

But anyway, more towards the topic.... I firmly believe the onus is on the game dev as to how DLC is integrated. For games like Civ V and Borderlands (which each have a ton of DLC), the DLC is already pre-built into the core game, if it doesn't outright require the core game to function. It wouldn't make any sense to launch it individually.

The game devs set it up so that if you don't want to use the DLC then you don't have to. If I don't want to play with any DLC packs in a multiplayer session of Civ, then I can unselect / select which ones during the setup screen for hosting a new lobby. In Borderlands the DLC isn't even used until you teleport yourself to one of the added maps, which begins the related DLC content. Otherwise the player wouldn't even know the DLC was installed.

I will agree that Steam should allow more control over which DLC is downloaded. It's DLC and as such the core game doesn't need it to function, so not downloading it shouldn't be an issue. I'm going to assume they took the approach they did simply because it makes their game management workload much simpler on themselves...