As a scientific study, it was decided to field test the Steam gaming platform against two "Generation Now" candidates. (Aged thirteen)
The process was simple. Send them a gift of a game on Steam. They browsed through a few candidates from the online catalog and they both agreed on Torchlight, the highly acclaimed dungeon crawler. It's a PC exclusive and as luck would have it the game was on sale for the super low price of US$4.99. Requiring very little computer horsepower, Torchlight should run on the vast majority of computers, making for a perfect test subject.
Promptly purchased it as gift on the Steam Store which automatically emailed the youngsters, alerting them to their latest digital Christmas present.
http://store.steampowered.com/
First hiccup. One tried hitting the link for the game in his email without first installing the steam client which produced an error in his browser. With no clue on how to proceed, he returned for guidance. I explained you must download and install the Steam application before accessing the game link.
Problem solved.
An hour later, they were both up and running and playing Torchlight. As suspected, they both chose to play it on laptops which had integrated graphics cards. Thankfully the game ran just perfect even on those.
The reports were encouraging. Comments like "Best Christmas gift ever!", "I rate this game 9/10!" and "Does steam have this? Does steam have that??"
They were literally children in a gaming candy store.
So far so good.
Fast forward 24 hours later and things aren't quite as peachy. Torchlight uses SteamCloud which is an ingenious idea to store your save games on the internet. This allows you to continue playing the game on any computer you want and eliminates the risk of losing your save files should your computer crash or spontaneously explode. Its a great concept, if it worked 100% of the time. As these two kids soon found out, it didn't.
Torchlight is an RPGesque game, so you basically hack and slash your way through a dungeon with your pet. Leveling up and collecting random items. Losing your progress after say a five hour play through is going to be very frustrating. You cannot just play it over and collect the same items (as if playing it over wasn't tedious enough). Sure enough, they both encountered a situation where the steamcloud service did not save their progress and left them with the daunting task of replaying levels they just completed. Not the best way to spend your precious holiday time. One of the candidates shut the game down and promptly returned to Maple Story (a free MMO rpg).
Had it happened to just one, I'd figure this was some rare glitch in the matrix. However, it happened to both and that was very worrying.
Not wanting to throw in the towel just yet. Fired up google and took a look at the torchlight forums. Sure enough, the issue was well discussed since February 2010. The fix, is to disable SteamCloud. This is done by browsing to your %appdata%/runic/torchlight folder and opening "local_settings.txt". Once there, find "IGNORE STEAM CLOUD" and change it from a value of 0 to a value of 1.
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1138872Luckily, the game also keeps a local back up of your progress. So once the steam cloud has been disabled, you can over right the current save file with a backed up version to retrieve your progress. Problem solved.
Fun Fun. Easy enough for me to do, being a PC game veteran from the DOS era, I am well versed in getting under the hood. These particular Generation Now-ers weren't up to the task, even with google at their disposal.
I have mixed emotions on the result of the experiment thus far. Steam is an excellent platform but miffed at such a glaring issue existing a full year later after the release of an acclaimed PC title like Torchlight.
Will continue to monitor their progress.
If anyone else gave the gift of gaming via steam for the yuletide season, I'd be happy to hear your experience (and theirs).
