I don’t play video games very often, but when I do I expect them to work.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, I guess.
I should have known that but sometimes I don’t listen to myself. First a little backstory:
It started out innocently enough, I had purchased hitman 3 using the Epic games store when it first came out because I really wanted to play it. Or maybe I was just an idiot. It’s hard to say.
A friend even recommended that I purchase it on Epic despite my distrust for them as a company.
I could even play Fortnight with him, even though I hate that game with a passion. I don’t know how I let myself get talked into these situations but I obliged. To be fair he still is my friend… I’m not that pissed off I guess.
What was the worst that could happen though? Download some software and install a game… I’ve been doing it for years using Steam… Surly everything would work fine, right? I mean they can’t actually be that bad right?
I would have had to wait another year for Hitman 3 to come to Steam which I was willing to do even though that was complete bullshit, but like I said, I really wanted to play that game.
The previous installment, Hitman 2 had consumed 100+ hours of my life so I figured that this game would be the same. No game in history has had that kind of control over me… well except maybe Morrowind or Oblivion back in the day. Grand Theft Auto 5 also ranks up there but Rockstars privacy policy also makes me sick. Another story for another time, although I think that game is avalable on Epic Game Store so maybe that is relevent.
Regardless, lets move on.
I don’t have a ton of time to play video games but the hours add up over the years, especially during the winter months.
Anyway, I ended up paying way too much for Hitman 3 when it first came out and honestly, I didn’t really have many problems with the Epic game store at that time.
It wasn’t until I went to re-install it recently and all hell broke loose.
You see, after it was released on Steam, I just played it there for a few years until I had unlocked almost all the achievements. Unfortunately, once you unlock the achievements you really can’t go back and start a new game and do them again unless you jump though some hoops. I really don’t understand why IOI (the developers of hitman) decided to do that but that’s for another story.
A work around for that is to create another account on steam and then family share the game to the new account. Or you could just delete everything from IOI’s servers and start fresh, but it looked like they had been cracking down on this recently and I wasn’t sure if it would work as other people have noted.
This all seemed like a bit overkill for me. I just wanted to play the damn game. So long story short, I just reinstalled the game from Epic and tried to play it.
I had a bunch of achievements I had never unlocked on EGS plus they added the hitman 1 & 2 levels to the game so I could go back and do those again. You would think that would be a good time… come home after a shitty day at work and just play some Hitman. You would think…
The thing is that when I finally got around to playing the game, cloud saves would sometimes work which meant that your saved game might be there when you went to reload it… or it might not be. Most of the time I just got an error saying that the game could not be loaded. Awesome.
It was always an adventure with saved games. I have never had that problem on Steam, so I figure it’s just a platform issue.
Also, it was taking forever to upload said saved game data to their servers. I know my internet connection isn’t the best but damn.
I just want to play the game, not wait around while the servers sync up… I don’t have THAT much free time on my hands. This was taking forever.
Its bad enough I had to wait a couple of days to download the game on my shitty internet connection. I wish they would just bring back physical media, but I digress.
Then I started watching my network while I was running the EGS on my PC. I wasn’t sure what they were sending but while the store was running, it was sending quite a bit of date to their servers. Apparently, it was not the saved game data because that would be there when I went to load the game.
Maybe it was trying to upload the whole game back to their servers or something… or all my personal data from my computer. I am not sure, but I probably should have been watching the packets that were being transferred so I would know for sure.
This is what I get for just wanting to game… first world problems I know. All that to say how is this a problem?
Well, IMO games should be enjoyed on the user’s computer at their leisure. Installed there, saved there and then loaded from there so there is no chance of the cloud not syncing and you losing your saved game data for no apparent reason.
And there is basically no risk of shit on your computer being uploaded to a sever somewhere, but minor details.
Game data could also get corrupt on your local hard drive, but it seems that the chances are rare in my experience. And you can make a backup of the data if you are worried about it. It’s not that hard to back up a computer so when things go south, you can just restore from backups and move on.
I uninstalled EGS from my Winblows gaming rig and as much as I really want to re-play the Hitman trilogy, it’s not worth the aggravation to get shit to just work right.
I will never give that company any more of my money so they can create a subpar product that doesn’t work half the time. Maybe I just don’t understand computers.
That’s got to be it.
The good news is that there are a lot of older games that you can still get off GOG.com, All of which are DRM free and you can install on your own computer and play without an internet connection most of the time. They even have all the old Hitman games that I used to love. All running on your local machine without any 3rd party connection.
To me, that is the way gaming should be.
I should not have to connect to some random server in “God only knows where” to play a game that I spent money on. It makes no sense to do that in my humble opinion.
You also don’t know how and when any of the data they may or may not be collecting can and/or will be used against you. Feels like I have my tin-foil hat on but I am not wrong about this.
Have you every tried to read their privacy policy? I guess if you are a lawyer it makes sense, but for the average guy/gal that just wants to game, they aren’t going to try to understand how these companies are using them.
It’s not just Epic though, but almost all game studios practically force you to sell your soul to play their shitty game.
I should know better.
In reality I should just stop playing video games altogether but there are certain times when you just want to.
My point is that when those times come around and you just want to sit down and play a game, it shouldn’t be this difficult, or as invasive to your privacy.