It seems Bethesda has gone away from Windows Live and moved to use Steam for Fallout: New Vegas.

That means we have to install STEAM to activate the darn thing.

Sorry you aren't happy about that. Hope you still enjoy the game.

Ana

And do watch Steam for leaving bits of itself running in the background. I've found it using up a bunch of memory in the Task Manager Processes even when I'm not playing a game or doing anything with Steam.

I don't like having to go to Steam just to start a game, but everything seems to work OK after that.

I won't, since I'm not going to buy the game.
I refuse to have anything to do with Steam.

First of all I don't like their policy with dividing their price into regions in an unfair way and then of course the DRM issue of having to install the client just to play a game.

Thankfully I'm already a Steam user. The only thing that will ruffle my feathers is if the cheats don't work as easily as they did on Fallout 3. I had a devil of a time with Steam and Metro 2033. I never could get the cheats to work and a consequence never got to finish the game since basically I'm pretty average when it comes to combat. And by pretty average I mean I suck really bad at it.

Personally, I'm happy about this. Steam is light-years better than GFWL. Fewer bugs, a better interface that's fully accessible outside of games, files that are easily accessible and moddable, compatibility with controllers not made by Microsoft, the ability to patch games without starting them up, easier account creation, Steam Cloud for online storage of save files...the list of advantages is actually pretty lengthy.

I'm a Steam user and while I appreciate all of the above, I do not like having to access the internet to play a game and I really don't like having to stop the Steam process in my Task Manager after quitting every game. I built this computer and it's pretty fast and I have a decent internet connection, but that particular process slows my internet connection down for some reason.

When I want to play a game, I just want to play a game.

You can always tell Steam to run in offline mode if you don't want it connecting every time you play a game.

As for Steam's process slowing your internet, it shouldn't affect it most of the time, unless you're actively downloading. Have you checked your Steam settings to make sure the "Approximate speed of your Internet connection" is set appropriately? If it's not, I could see it maybe saturating your download bandwidth.

More to the point, most of the problems you mention are also present in GFWL. While there are definitely advantages to owning a hard copy of a game versus downloading a digital copy with DRM, the extra DRM, restrictions, and the terrible interface on GFWL drive me nuts. So to me this isn't a story about how Fallout is going to be on Steam. It's a story about how it's going to no longer require GFWL.

Probably what I need is a primer in Steam! I will definitely check into playing in offline mode as that annoys the heck out of me. When I was downloading Guardian of Light and Legend, my download speed would start out around 500 KB/S and then drop to 60 KB/S. It was driving me nuts, so I contacted my ISP (a local company with towers for us country mice) and they explained why they have to do that for now.

But I definitely do not like the fact that Steam continues to run in the background after I close a game.

I have the same complaints as you do about GFWL. The only game I have there is Bioshock 2, so I'm not real familiar with it, but I didn't much care for it. Maybe if I can get the Steam settings to work more the way I want it, it will grow on me!

You can logout of Steam once finished playing.

I find Steam ok. Not too intrusive. It's understandable publishers need to protect copyrights.

Check your processes in Task Manager after you log out, honeycomb. I find Steam still running using up 65,000 - 100,000 kb of memory. I have to manually shut it down.

I like Steam OK, but do find it annoying that they must insert themselves into my gameplaying even after I change my settings to play off-line.