Deus Ex: Human Revolution Initial Impressions

Thrasher said:
Well it listed the DLC by name "PreOrderpack1 - Explosive Mission Pack"" as soon as I input the code, but it didn't install it (at least I couldn't find it on my drive). Later it did something behind my back, and said it made an update, which I assumed was the DLC but it looks like the patch, since the executable updated, a day late I might add. :( You'd think they'd at least provide a human understandable log file of all the updates it does for you automatically. I don't want to start playing until the DLC is installed. Is there anyway to be sure?

I now understand why some people may hate Steam.
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If you look under the news blog for the game it usually posts what the updates are, however it's up to the developer to do that and some unfortunately will provide a patch and not post an update regarding the contents or may post the update info on their own site or forum.

Regarding the patch, they did post about it yesterday

http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=28050 (scroll down a bit)

An issue was found that caused some users to be unable to start the game on specific machines. Specifically, the presence of older ATI/AMD drivers, also on machines with NVidia hardware, would cause the game to crash on startup. This patch is a hot-fix for that particular issue. On top of this, it also increases the number of save-slots from 20, like on the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions, to 99.

Square-Enix, Eidos Montreal and Nixxes are committed to supporting this title and will continue to monitor for any further issues and provide additional patches in the future if required.

We hope this will help you enjoy Deus Ex: Human Revolution!
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Thrasher said:
Well if it wasn't sealed I would never buy it at a "new" price.
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Yeah - this is why I ripped my card out of the cashier's hand when I saw that it was opened. Found out later that my local store is one of the Gamestops that was removing promotional content from the packages without informing the customer.
 
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@Thrasher - If it says "PreOrderpack1 - Explosive Mission Pack" under your DLC tab, then it's installed. I wouldn't worry about looking for the actual files.

You got the better bonus btw. I only got the Tactical Enhancement Pack, despite my insert saying Explosive Mission Pack. :-/


@jhwisner - Opening their PC games is nothing new to Gamestop. Most of the stores around here have been doing it for a long time. They claim it's for "security reasons", and that's why I almost never purchase retail PC titles from them.
 
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Hmm, there are people selling the explosive mission DLC on eBay for $20+. I can't help but wonder if some of those Gamestop employees yanked those codes out and put them up on eBay.

I want the damned thing but I don't $20 want it.

I really, really hate all this pre-order DLC nonsense sometimes.
 
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Motoki said:
If you look under the news blog for the game it usually posts what the updates are, however it's up to the developer to do that and some unfortunately will provide a patch and not post an update regarding the contents or may post the update info on their own site or forum.

Regarding the patch, they did post about it yesterday

http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=28050 (scroll down a bit)
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Yes I saw that last night. But this doesn't tell me if the update is actually installed on my machine.
 
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jhwisner said:
Yeah - this is why I ripped my card out of the cashier's hand when I saw that it was opened. Found out later that my local store is one of the Gamestops that was removing promotional content from the packages without informing the customer.
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For shame. Desperate times, or just scum bags?
 
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^Yeah I don't know. That store (that particular one) used to be pretty good until the managers changed. I can't hate the cashier who I was unfortunately a little rude to though since I wouldn't assume someone could walk away from a job on principle in this economy. I guess this is what you get when a distributor or retailer grows to a point where they decide its more advantageous to leverage their market position to bully customers and publishers than it is to provide good efficient service and actually compete for market share as opposed to strategically conquer it.

JDR13 said:
@jhwisner - Opening their PC games is nothing new to Gamestop. Most of the stores around here have been doing it for a long time. They claim it's for "security reasons", and that's why I almost never purchase retail PC titles from them.
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Yeah but the manager of the store near me refused to do that with the PC titles - except for the one or two used for display boxes when she wasn't given already empty display boxes. She was why I didn't mind getting games there; also people have talked about how some Gamestop stores will keep PC titles sealed at least. She got a better job recently though so I guess that policy went with her; or maybe her disagreement on certain policies is why she left.
 
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Thrasher said:
Yes I saw that last night. But this doesn't tell me if the update is actually installed on my machine.
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If you got the 28-ish MB update then that was it. Steam automatically pushes updates through before it even loads up the game so if you are connected to the net you will always get any updates published (unless you opt out and turn it off).
 
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JDR13 said:
@Thrasher - If it says "PreOrderpack1 - Explosive Mission Pack" under your DLC tab, then it's installed. I wouldn't worry about looking for the actual files.
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Are you sure? I never saw it saying installing or some such. It could have been fast since I am on a 1 GBit net at work. Did you see a delay between entering the code and seeing your DLC on the list? Or was it there nearly instantaneously like me?
 
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Motoki said:
If you got the 28-ish MB update then that was it. Steam automatically pushes updates through before it even loads up the game so if you are connected to the net you will always get any updates published (unless you opt out and turn it off).
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How would I know if I got the 28MB update? That's my point.
 
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Thrasher said:
Are you sure? I never saw it saying installing or some such. It could have been fast since I am on a 1 GBit net at work. Did you see a delay between entering the code and seeing your DLC on the list? Or was it there nearly instantaneously like me?
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If it's a relatively small DLC and you have a fast connection I can say from past experience with other games the addition of the DLC will be pretty near instantaneous. These days some games will even pretty much build the DLC content in the game and then it's just the code the unlocks it.

Steam has a lot of convenience features and personally I like it never really having to think or worry about updates and such but they could be a little more descriptive about what is going on sometimes and I can see where that would be a control freak's worst nightmare. ;)

Thrasher said:
How would I know if I got the 28MB update? That's my point.
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If you're running the game and you're connected to the net and you didn't manually go in and uncheck auto-updating then you have it.

Steam will pop up a little notice when in the lower right corner of the screen when an update downloads and it will be listed under your library>downloads for that session when you go look there. Once you close out Steam and then re-open another session that old history goes away though. I haven't figured out if there's a way to view your download history from past sessions.

But basically if there's a patch that was published and you didn't opt out then you have it.
 
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Motoki said:
Steam has a lot of convenience features and personally I like it never really having to think or worry about updates and such but they could be a little more descriptive about what is going on sometimes and I can see where that would be a control freak's worst nightmare. ;)
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Yeah - should be an easier way than checking the "steam.log" file; it can get pretty stupidly large.
 
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jhwisner said:
Yeah - should be an easier way than checking the "steam.log" file; it can get pretty stupidly large.
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So that file has all your update history in it? Noted for future reference.

Is there any way to view that full log within the Steam gui or no?
 
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Thrasher said:
Are you sure? I never saw it saying installing or some such. It could have been fast since I am on a 1 GBit net at work. Did you see a delay between entering the code and seeing your DLC on the list? Or was it there nearly instantaneously like me?
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It was really fast, but I'm pretty sure my DLC is just a few weapons/items.

It wouldn't show up on that tab if it wasn't installed though.
 
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Motoki said:
So that file has all your update history in it? Noted for future reference.

Is there any way to view that full log within the Steam gui or no?
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Last time I had to open it was to find my steam ID way way back in the day; I had to use notepad to do so. If your log is excessively large you might have to use wordpad to open it. I do not however remember all that it contains, but its worth checking to see if it does include a complete update history. I don't have Steam on this computer though so I can't quickly check to find out.
 
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The log file is there, but it's not human readable. Every download has an ID number, and I think the IDs are uniquely assigned for each different DLC or update. But if you don't know what each number means, it's not "human readable".

EDIT: Bah. This is not even true. It just gives you an APPID for the DL. The same APP may have multiple downloads. No unique numbers for each download. Not very useful.
 
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Thrasher said:
The log file is there, but it's not human readable. Every download has an ID number, and I think the IDs are uniquely assigned for each different DLC or update. But if you don't know what each number means, it's not "human readable".
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Well of course, it wouldn't be fun if they appended a name for downloads that included bulky things like words now would it. Sorry that wasn't helpful though; I remembered it existed but I didn't remember if it was informative enough or not.
 
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Thrasher said:
The log file is there, but it's not human readable. Every download has an ID number, and I think the IDs are uniquely assigned for each different DLC or update. But if you don't know what each number means, it's not "human readable".
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It's pretty much the same if you leave Steam running all the time and then check your downloads for that session. It will tell you what games made a download and what file size but you won't know the specifics beyond that from the downloads list or log.

The thing with Steam is, you always know you have the latest patch of any game and any DLC you have will be listed in the DLC tab. If they are there, you have them. Beyond that and maybe a news article from the publisher giving info on what's in their patches, you aren't going to get much more detail. If that bothers you then you will probably not like using Steam very much.

Personally, after having to deal with fussing with patches and such for years it's nice to not have to worry about it and just know that I have the latest version of the game no matter what.
 
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Except you do have to worry about it when instructions for obtaining DLC are poor, and their servers come to a grinding halt, and they have bugs in their system.
 
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Thrasher said:
Except you do have to worry about it when instructions for obtaining DLC are poor, and their servers come to a grinding halt, and they have bugs in their system.
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Who, Impulse? I've not experience these issues with Steam.

Also, with any Steamworks game you don't have to download them from the store you bought it from (ie Impulse, Gamersgate, Direct2Drive, Amazon etc) you can always just put your key into Steam and download it directly from them instead if the other sites download servers are acting up.
 
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