Have you ever bought a game on PC and not been able to play it?

[krazykidd]

Simple question.

Have you ever bought a game on PC, and have been unable to play it due to an error or something you were able to figure out how to fix?

It's no secret that sometimes a game on PC that a person buys doesn't work right away. Sometimes a simple search on google will help you fix the problem in a couple of minutes, other time it could be longer. I'm wondering if there was a time where you were unable to find a way to fix it and gave up.

I'm a console gamer, i'm not tech savvy at all. I'm also very impatient. I have in the past bought PC games which didn't work from go, and dud to my lack of knowledge and motivation, just cut my losses and said to hell with it. Three instances come to mind YEARS appart. I remember when the First Call of Duty was releases ( man i'm old).This game was released on PC only, and i heard many good things about it back in the day. However after i bought it and installed it, my computer couldn't run it. Next was world of warcraft. I also remember when this was released, it sounded awsome and i have never experienced an MMO, well this one i wouldn't get to experience until after the lich king expansion ( to be fair my computer at the time was shit, so it was probably my fault). The last was Final fantasy 14 ( the original not AAR). Being the FF fan that i am, i decided i was going to buy this game, as i was curious and it looked good on paper. I have no idea why this game wouldn't run, it was the last straw, i at that point decided to never buy another PC game ever again.

Note that this isn't a " i hate PC thread", i have a lot of respect for people who actually understand how PCs work, and i know i am missing a couple of amazing games due to not being smart enough to work my pc. The blame lies entirely on me for my laziness,impatieness, and stupidity.

 

[OneCatch]

Simple question.

Have you ever bought a game on PC, and have been unable to play it due to an error or something you were able to figure out how to fix?
It's no secret that sometimes a game on PC that a person buys doesn't work right away. Sometimes a simple search on google will help you fix the problem in a couple of minutes, other time it could be longer. I'm wondering if there was a time where you were unable to find a way to fix it and gave up.

Generally I'm able fix fix stuff reasonably promptly by checking forums and so on, for example;

Fallout 3 had serious instability problems (would crash after 3 mins) but I fixed that for my PC after trying a few things.
Bioshock had some audio driver issue that was fixable somehow in about 10 mins

There are a few that are more persistent though;

I gave up on Metro 2033 for a few months after migrating to Win 7, but got it working more recently after tinkering around with it for a few hours.
I could never get the original Rainbow Six to work on a post 2000 machine.
The older Max Payne games took a bit of work as well.

At the moment I'm having some problems with Company of Heroes 2 - it mistakenly thinks Steam or itself is running in safe mode for some reason. That game has always been a bit unstable and inexplicably resource heavy though. Haven't looked into it properly yet - I got distracted by Sanctum 2!

Edit: Fixed Company of Heroes - was about a 15 minute fix.

 

[ToastiestZombie]

I bought Gone Home from the Humble Store and it doesn't launch at all. None of the fixes I've seen worked and most of the threads I've found have useless "Oh I have the same problem, woe is me!" replies. Shame, I was looking forward to being able to have an opinion on it without hundreds of people shouting "BUT YOU HAVEN'T PLAYED IT".

 

[Caliostro]

Happens every once in a while.

Not very commonly, especially if you're careful with your software/hardware. But once in a while it can't really be helped. Especially with the very old or very new games.

Most of the times if I can fix it, I find the solution fairly fast. Like... Within an hour at most. Sometimes it's just a developer issue that needs to be fixed on their side - happens with some newer games, especially at the start of betas. It's usually fixed quickly.

For example, recently came across issues with the titanfall beta, a graphical glitch that rendered the game unplayable. Fix was found very shortly - simply disabling the AA.

 

[OneCatch]

Ghost Recon: Future Solider doesn't seem to run because it's a shit game.

Well not really, but it doesn't run and I can't be bothered figuring it out.

Is it still unplayable? I didn't get it previously because of warnings about tech issues.
I was thinking about picking it up on this weekend's Steam deal, but if it's still broken I definitely won't bother.

 

[Shpongled]

Ghost Recon: Future Solider doesn't seem to run because it's a shit game.

Well not really, but it doesn't run and I can't be bothered figuring it out.

Is it still unplayable? I didn't get it previously because of warnings about tech issues.
I was thinking about picking it up on this weekend's Steam deal, but if it's still broken I definitely won't bother.

It's broke as fuck but to be honest, I had it coming. Most Ubisoft games are completely unplayable on PC due to the horrid UPlay service.

Both Splinter Cell: Conviction and Chaos Theory didn't work for me for about 2 years because of Uplay. Conviction started working at some point for whatever reason (didn't fix it myself, assuming there was a patch), not sure about Chaos Theory.

OP: So yeh, i've had games not work on PC. To be honest it's a fairly common issue and has been throughout all my 10-15 years of PC gaming. Most things can be fixed within a few hours of googling and fannying around. Sometimes, there is no fix. It's one of the often unspoken major disadvantages of PC gaming.

 

[Foolery]

Doesn't happen very often, but yeah. More likely that some kind of DRM or software that goes along with the game is the actual issue in my experience. It's why I won't buy games on PC unless they use Steamworks or are DRM free.

 

[teqrevisited]

Only once. I remember ages and ages ago I bought Command & Conquer: Tiberian Dawn and it flatly refused to install no matter what I tried. Luckily I was able to take it back.

 

[OneCatch]

It's broke as fuck but to be honest, I had it coming. Most Ubisoft games are completely unplayable on PC due to the horrid UPlay service.

The only game that's worked flawlessly for me with Uplay is Far Cry 3.
Bloody Dragon was a bit unstable because I bought it through Steam, Conviction was dodgy and unstable, and Blacklist won't actually start at all unless I first force quit it and then restart (though weirdly enough it works perfectly after that).

Disappointing about Ghost Recon, but thanks for the heads up anyway.

 

[MysticSlayer]

The only one that it happened with due to technological issues with the game was Medal of Honor: Airborne. If you had certain settings on your computer, the game wouldn't run. Problem is, computers at the time had those settings on by default, especially higher end ones. EA was completely clueless to the problem, so it required some Google searching to figure out how to deal with.

In a less extreme case, there was the original Call of Duty. The computer I had the time of buying it had an incompatible graphics card, which finally got me to upgrade my computer (it was long overdo). The new computer then had a processor the game wasn't fully compatible with, and it crashed constantly. All it required was a quick update, though, and it ran fine afterwards, but I still found it really humorous that the game seemed determined not to run for me.

There were also a couple games that wouldn't run due to the service they used:

Batman: Arkham Asylum. Games for Windows LIVE's authentication was screwing up the night I bought it, so I had to wait until the next day.

Fallout 3 DLC. Got all the DLC with the Game of the Year edition. The problem is GFWL would never let me download them even though it clearly recognized that I owned them. If I installed it from the disc, then GFWL claimed I didn't own it anymore and wouldn't let it run!

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

Some games have in the past but have either been eventually fixed for me via a patch or unofficial patch or sometimes even a new launcher.

With that said I like some PC gaming but at the same time totally despise having a broken game and not knowing how to fix it and then having to drag myself from forum to forum to look for a suitable fix, I dislike having to need help for something that shouldn't be broken and something I shouldn't need to fix in the first place.

Sometimes I do wish I were just back on consoles, some days I don't.

 

[Legion]

Only with old games on a newer machine. System Shock 2 as well as the first two Fallout games required some work. The Fallout's needed some computer settings tweaked and System Shock 2 also needed modding to get it running smoothly.

I've never really had any major issues with more recent games. Not ones that made it unplayable anyway. With Fallout New Vegas and Skyrim I had to use the console to fix bugs at times, but nothing that stopped me playing most of the game.

 

[Jamash]

Of course, it's part of what PC gaming's all about.

The most recent example I can think of is True Crime: NYC, which works, but it works a little bit too well and the game speed is scaled to my more modern processor speed, resulting in a game which plays about twice as fast as it should do. I should feel good that it runs at probably 4 times the framerate of the PS2 version at a much higher resolution, but you can have too much of good thing.

I also recently has some old school style problems in getting Fable TLC and Sid Meier's Pirates! to run. They worked OK but at an abysmal frame rate despite my superior hardware and new graphics card. After much troubleshooting and installing "obsolete" components of DirectX 9 and Direct Draw, it turned out that the problem was with a piece of ASUS OSD software that came with my GPU which didn't play well with older DirectX 9 games and obliterated the framerate.

Still, the woes of getting contemporary PC games are nothing compared to the dark arts of invoking the Machine Spirit of MS-DOS to get some games to run in the 90's.

I remember trying to get Dune II to run on out Windows 3.1 or 95 PC, that was an ordeal. First I'd have to exit to DOS, but then because Bill Gates never envisaged that anyone could ever use more than 640KB of memory for anything, I would have to hack DOS with my 1337 skillz and piece by piece disable more and more components of the computer to free up enough memory to run the game (despite the PC having much more than 640KB of RAM).

It was a monumental process of trial and error, especially since I didn't really know what everything did. Did I want to play Dune II with sounds... then perhaps I'd need to sacrifice keyboard support. Want to use the mouse? Then perhaps shut-down this process with the obscure name... oh wait, apparently that was critical, then perhaps I'll shut down these two instead to fee up some more precious Kilobytes.

Then once I'd finally worked out a stable configuration of a stripped down, skeleton crew version of DOS with enough memory to run the game, if I was lucky I'd remember to save it as a batch file on a floppy disk so that I wouldn't have to go through that process again (although there was no guarantee the boot disk would work the next day).

Back in the day, it was expected that a game I bought on PC wouldn't work, or at least it wouldn't work immediately without significant teething troubles, so nowadays I'm grateful that the biggest problem I face are my PC being too good and too fast to run older games or a temporary glitch in the DRM permission to run the game.

 

[KarmaTheAlligator]

Had it happen quite a lot with older games, and is one of the reasons I don't mind buying those again from Steam or GoG as they usually make sure those will run on newer computers.

As for more recent games, yeah, I've had to spend some time on forums and other sites to figure out what to do for a few games to work (or if it was even possible to make them work) on my laptop. Cannot remember any names at the top of my head.

 

[omega 616]

I've got dishonored just sat there, looking at me from steam library ... I got it from the sale knowing full well I couldn't play it.

My PC is a little funky, in school I was taught 2gb of ram + 2gb of ram = 4gb of ram but my computer think it's something like 2.1gb. Tried messing around with various things to show the correct amount but it never works, I have a suspicion that it's my motherboard but I, like the OP, am pc illiterate.

 

[suitepee7]

dark souls when it was first released, was unplayable for me, 10 fps and looking like shit, with mental controls... nah thanks

on a technical standpoint, F.E.A.R. doesn't work on my PC, which has pissed me off quite a bit. no idea why, it crashes before it fully starts up =\

I've got dishonored just sat there, looking at me from steam library ... I got it from the sale knowing full well I couldn't play it.

My PC is a little funky, in school I was taught 2gb of ram + 2gb of ram = 4gb of ram but my computer think it's something like 2.1gb. Tried messing around with various things to show the correct amount but it never works, I have a suspicion that it's my motherboard but I, like the OP, am pc illiterate.

don't want to sound patronizing, but are you certain it is in the right slot? if it has 4 slots for RAM, the pair should be in 1 & 3, and if you get another pair that should be in 2 & 4 (although i think i read somehwere it should be in 2&4 first, then 1&3 for the second pair, IDK where though)... no idea why, but it's the way things are