4 ms·

People always forget what a pain in ass it was to download patches before Steam existed.

• account42 5y ago
  OTOH with Steam you can generally not choose to avoid patches you don't like, even with single-player games.
• jcranmer 5y ago
  With "just don't do it" being perhaps the most common solution.
  • SketchySeaBeast 5y ago
    But then people forget that the bugs back then were just as bad as today, you would get crashes literally every 15 minutes, and some were hilariously malicious - Pool of Radiance (late 90's version) would straight up nuke your C:\ drive if you uninstalled it from the non-default location.
    • gpderetta 5y ago
      to be fair, steam is not above wiping your disk in similar scenarios: https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671 https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671
  • munk-a 5y ago
    Especially when it came to mods - since auto-updating wasn't a thing mod devs were a lot more happy to tie their mod to a specific patch of the game and just refuse to support other versions. There's something to be said about this making modding more accessible since you weren't committing to long term support patches as the game evolved... but it also made things a royal pain.