hey people. i just spent 3 hours with a mate trying to get HL2 to work. my friend doesn't have an internet connection at his home, so i gladly offered my net service at my house. we installed HL2 without dramas, set up the steam account, and played it for a bit with the net running the background. once we got rid of the net connection, all hell broke lose. HL2, CS, Steam, noting worked without the net. We set it up accordingly to it's recommendations to be able to play offline but still bacus. WHAT A PAIN. Anyone else experience negeative experience with HL2/Steam?? On a side note, HL2 is one fine game, im not a fan of the FPS genre, but this game kicks arse.
Welcome to the wonderful world of steam. You have to have internet access to play the game. Sucks doesn't it?
Yeah, it's annoying as all hell. I have Dial up so that whole decoding the files and downloading new ones took about an hour and 45 minutes. I was beyond pissed. When I finally got to play it and it told me I had to be online my head almost exploded I was so mad. I cooled down a bit after I figured out you can play it offline after you've played it the first time online. Not so bad I guess. My only haggles with the game were the sound skipping issue. I did an update for steam that repaired a few corrupted cache files and everything was sweet as pie. I also had a problem with my dvd-rom reading the 1st disc that's needed to start the game. I went another means of starting the game that we're not allowed to talk about here I don't think. Needless to say I'm very happy with the game overall. I absolutely loved the ending... Can't wait for HL 3.
it's good to hear you got it working divinus. i just heared my friend finally got it workiing offline and bypassing steam.
Yeah, Steam is quite possibly the most obnoxious program ever conceived by a game developer. Forcing you to install a software to play their game and then forcing you to have an internet connection even to play the single player game. I can see why Valve chose to go this route, but honestly I'm not sure if it did what it intended to do. They sure did great on stopping pre-release pirating, but people that are going to obtain the game illegally are going to do it no matter what. Even if Valve stopped them from playing a month eventually a crack will come out. There was a playable cracked warez version available the same day HL2 was released. Valve is walking a fine line in which they're going all out to stop hackers/crackers/whatever. The only problem is most of these extreme anti-piracy features cause problems for the people who actually pay for the game. People are going to get the game illegally, no matter what. All Valve did was slow the process down and in doing so caused their paying customers pay for it. Some people salute Valve for Steam. I think it was too extreme. I'm sure it stopped multiple people from playing the game illegally, but I'm also sure it pissed off mulitple paying customers who will remember this when HL3 comes around.
No problems here. I just bought it for my son for Christmas. I set it up on his computer and downloaded it from Steam. Once it was working properly I quit HL2 and Steam. I blocked Steam.exe and HL2.exe on the firewall, deleted the clientregistry.blob file after making a backup, and started Steam again. It tried to connect and after a minute or so it popped up a box saying that it couldn't connect and gave me the option to play HL2 offline. Worked fine offline after that. The procedure is one of the FAQs at http://steampowered.custhelp.com/ Just search for "offline" and it's the first hit. I agree that Steam is a PITA. I do not even like First Person Shooter games, it was for my son.
