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

[Ne1butme]

i know that we give Microsoft a lot of flack every time they 'recommit' to PC gaming. But DirectX is/was probably the greatest gift that M$ could probably give the PC gaming community. I remember prior to directX the dance everyone played just trying to make sure that the new game we bought was compatible with our hardware. Competing graphic and audio standards made everything confusing. Your sound card (remember those??) wasn't a soundblaster? Good luck trying to get this new game to run. Hmm, this release only has GLIDE support. Well, that means only a voodoo card would be compatible.

Demos for games weren't just about seeing if the game was fun to play, but about testing if the game could run on your system. Even if it wasn't a power issue, having the wrong drivers could derail the entire experience. Making sure you had the right ini and dll files installed.. God, it was awful.

Ever since DirectX became the standard for video and audio, that worry has gone away. Now, i only need to check to see if my rig is powerful enough to run on my desired settings. I don't have to worry about compatibility.


Thank you Microsoft (i'm not joking)

 

[clippen05]

Only game that I've ever had a problem like this was Medal of Honor: Warfighter. (In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have bought that rubbish game in the first place.) The singleplayer worked fine for me, but the multiplayer would work for a game or two and then freeze the computer, requiring me to restart. I mean, half of it worked, so not sure if it applies. Never found out why it did that. I recently tried playing the multiplayer again on the PC I brought to Uni, and the multiplayer worked fine. Not sure if it was a bug that they patched or that some hardware in my other PC was causing problems. (Don't think that was the case, the PC had top-notch specs)

I guess I'm one of the lucky ones where aside from one problem with a bad game, I've never had any completely game-breaking problems.

 

[Quintley]

Haven't had too many cases where I buy something and it doesn't work outright, but that's mainly because I don't buy many new releases any more as my laptop wouldn't be able to cope unless graphics are at a minimum. All my Steam games run ok, although Thief Gold requires some negotiation to get running.

Then again, I can't go online with any GFWL games, and Assassin's Creed 2, 2.5 and 2.75 haven't worked for a while since a Uplay update (although admittedly that might be because of the ancient computer they're installed on).

 

[lunavixen]

I initially had issues with Portal 2 not working, but that was because of a conflict with the fact that I have an AMD processor, a BIOS update fixed that. Otherwise I've only had issues trying to get really old games to run on my current rig, I tend to be really careful when buying PC games because I know that I can't get refunds if they don't work.

 

[DarkhoIlow]

As an exclusive PC gamer I have never encountered a game that I have played that couldn't be fixed via google and searching different forums to fix the problem/error that I have encountered.

 

[ActionDan]

Max Payne 2. I cannot get that to work on my PC no matter what I do. Apparently it works fine on older hardware, but I don't have older hardware.

 

[Something Amyss]

I've only had a couple of games I haven't been able to find a solution for. I've had several that won't work out of the box, though.

 

[lacktheknack]

Twice, both with happy endings.

When I got Batman: Arkham Asylum, I had been smart and tried the demo first. It worked.

The full game, however, had a perfect-storm incompatibility and only displayed orange blocks. Not in shapes of anything, just random 3D orange blocks. Steam support was baffled, and Google had never heard of that problem before. So I gave up.

A year later, I put in a new motherboard, and thought "Well, let's give it another go", and lo and behold, it worked. No idea what my previous hardware had done.

Also, when I got Dark Souls, it constantly froze and crashed on the GFWL registry screen whenever I tried to boot it up. I ragequit after trying every Google fix multiple times.

A couple months later, I decided to try again. No dice. Ragequit again.

Another month later, I tried again, after a couple tries, Mom called me to fold laundry, so I did. And when I came back, it had loaded.

SCREW YOU GFWL.

 

[Kathinka]

in the 22 years that i play pc games there was never a game that i didn't get to run some way, somehow. granted, i played pc games since over 20 years, so you learn how to make shit work one way or the other, and i get kind of obsessive about it until i figure it out. (i refuse to be defeated by a machine that can count only to one!)

 

[AnthrSolidSnake]

As you get more into PC gaming, it happens a lot less, but even the most well taught and insightful PC gamers have issues, and most times it's not even their fault.

Before I even knew graphic drivers existed, I tried playing the first Fable on PC. The water was piss yellow, the framerate was so bad is effected facial animations into hilarious and sometimes horrifying ways, and the game would crash if you so much as exhaled towards it.

It wouldn't be playable until a few years later when I bought my own very PC for gaming that I would be able to play the game smoothly, and finally figured out how to download drivers from the internet for the graphics card that came with it.

Today though I have a respectable gaming pc that I do my best to keep up to date, clean, and optimized, but I still run into issues because the game itself doesn't like something in my computer, rather than the other way around.

The most recent example was Wednesday, where I was trying to enjoy the last day of the Titanfall beta. The game stuttered like crazy, no matter what my graphic or vsync settings were.

I was going to say the first Crysis, but I actually remember being able to play that...at medium graphic settings...at a 1024x768 resolution, at about 26-40FPS.

 

[WarpedLord]

Not for a very long time, but when I started PC gaming 25+ years ago, it was pretty common. Probably 1 of every 3 games I bought back then didn't work, and most retailers would only let you exchange them for the same game... which still wouldn't work. That's what originally pushed me to console gaming in my early teens, and kicked off my lifelong cycle of going back and forth from dedicated PC gamer to dedicated console gamer and back every few years.

Ahhh... the days of having about 12 different versions of autoexec.bat and config.sys on my PC so I could run all my different games...

 

[Drakmorg]

I couldn't get the first two Hitman games to run on my PC, so now they just sit in my Steam Library uninstalled.

I was able to play, but not ever finish the first Knights of the Old Republic game. Dunno why, but the longer I have a save file going for, the less stable the whole thing gets. And after two attempts at playing through the game, both getting 30 hours in before the damn thing won't even let me smoothly load the save anymore, I just don't have the care left to try again.

Oh! I also remember a long time ago, not quite a decade, but less than that, honestly not entirely sure of the timing... Anyway, that time ago I had this old and shit desktop, even for the time, that I tried to run the first Sims game on and it was just too crap for it. I even remember going back to the game store and trying to get my hands on the 'most basic goddamn version' (can't remember the proper name) of the game to see if that would work, and then found out they don't sell it and just had the game sitting around until I got a better computer.

 

[Binkan]

Resident Evil: Operation Racoon something didn't work at first and when I managed to fix it i realized after playing it for 1min what a mistake that was, I cried for a whole day...not really but yea that game was shit and I don't intend to play it ever.

Skyrim is still being a ***** tho, whenever i switch from windowed to fullscreen the game crashes and it's been like that since the release and im not the only one with the problem but they still haven't fixed it, and no it's not on my end since the game works perfectly in if i have it in miniturized windowmode or whatever it's called and a friend of mine has the exact same PC as me(same parts and bought from the same manufacturer) he can play it in fullscreen.

 

[ScrabbitRabbit]

Yes, but only really ancient games before I discovered GOG. Bought Gothic from Steam and it wouldn't run at all (GOG version works fine) and bought Fallout 1 on disc and it wouldn't work. Apparently it was a common issue with that printing, but the Fallout collection version worked fine.

 

[Kyogissun]

Sleeping Dogs on Steam doesn't work for some odd reason and frankly, I'm too lazy to bother to get it to work.

If they fixed it, it must have been recent. Still would like to play the game someday...

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

Oh wait actually I do have a game at the moment that doesn't work at all, that offender is Star Wars Battlefront II, I game that's nearly a decade old and somehow runs fine on a friends older desktop compared to mine and no such issue seems to be able to fix it so I leave it uninstalled on Steam.

 

[Insideout Ink Demon]

Not wofked at all? First Hitman. Bought it to play on my mums PC. Having no idea what "specs" are.

Soul Reaver and Dead Space. The didn't like my G13 keypad, the camera kept spinning and spinning until I unplugged it.
Remember for some reason Bioshock I had to disable something on the sound settings for some reason.

 

[kasperbbs]

Usually i can fix these issues, but once my CD-ROM simply refused to read my newly bought copy of GTA 3, it worked just fine for my friends so i played through the campaign with one of them by taking turns between missions. Gifted that game to him afterwards, luckily i spent only around 3 $ on it since Vice City was already out for a while. I could have asked one of my friends to make an ISO image from that CD, but transferring 700mb of data was too much of a pain in the ass at the time and i wasn't all that interested in replaying all of teose missions with time limits again.

 

[Alcamonic]

Can I mention everything that has Uplay?

Other than that, nothing that I can remember. Even older games from the 90's era can be made to work on W7 if you have enough technical know-how to follow a forum thread.

Only "problems" I have ever had has been due to problems caused by the developers, but was quickly solved in following patch.