Hi Folks Just in case any of you are considering "buying" Daggerdale, I thought I would let you know my (limited) experience with the game so far. Yesterday I purchased the DVD at the Local Best Buy for $14.95, figuring "What the heck. If it truly sucks, I not out a lot of money". Put the disk in the drive and start the install process. My first sign that this wasn't going to be good was when it set up some sort of connection with something called "Steam", but didn't actually install the game. So I go to Steams site and find Daggerdale. At first glance it seemed that they wanted to charge me ANOTHER $14.95 to install a game I had already payed for. So I thought to heck with this, and threw the package in the trash (Best Buy doesn't do returns on opened software). This morning I decided to cancel my account with Steam. So I go to Steam, and needless to say there isn't an obvious "Click here to cancel your account" button. While digging through the FAQ section, I find out how to "Activate" my product, so I go through the steps specified (even then it took me a few tries to get it to work). Now I am waiting for the silly bugger to download. Even on a 4G wireless broadband connection, it's going to take at least 3 hours to download something that should have been on the DVD to start with. To top it off, the Windows Taskbar is showing "Steam (Not Responding)". Right now I would say that Daggerdale makes unpatched, un-modded ToEE look like the most crash-free, bug-free software on the planet. TRC "Everything is worth what it's purchaser will pay for it" - Publius Syrus
The new football manager also needs a steam account to play, but i found it fairly easy going. But then i have 100mb/s so if there is any kind of download needed it is always quite fast. Haven't tried daggerdale though so i can't say if there is more downloading than other games connected to Steam. A good thing is that steam makes it harder to crack which force people to buy the game and thus giving money to the developers to create more games and hopefully good ones.
I actually have purchased quite a few games on steam and I like it. For one thing, I don't have to put the disk in when playing the game and it also updates any patches automatically for me. I can re-download a game to another of my pc's if one is down, (except for save games). I also like that I can chat with some of my gaming buddies while I'm playing. Even if they're playing a different game at the time. On a side note, steam has a pretty good indie games section that we can get some of the harder to find indie games, or just find out about new ones. Oh, and you can get a demo for free of many of the games they offer. I know I sound like a "fanboy" but I bought Two Worlds II on steam and it has a real problem running on higher end nvidia cards, so steam gave me my money back without any hassle. So, yeah ... Me likey steam.
I have no intention of ever touching anything that is connected to 4th edition D&D. It sucks that you had a negative experience with Steam though, I haven't had too bad of an experience. I got Red Orchestra 2 through Steam, it's a fun game, I haven't had too many problems outside of getting used to playing a shooter with a keyboard and mouse (all of my FPS/TPS experience up to RO2 has been on consoles). I am also finding that I like the cross-game chat with friends I have that are also on Steam.
