Late last night (or early this morning), I was all set to play a skirmish game of Rise of Nations with my good friend and fellow Canuck Jenn Cutter. This is for an upcoming podcast episode, so we need to fit in the experience before we record that show. (Yes, she’s a guest, but not the only one. I’ll explain more later.)
We set up Game Ranger to get around the annoying Gamespy stuff that never seems to work right, and were all set to kill some dudes. But we could not connect because we had different versions of the game.
Usually you would just patch and move on, but this isn’t an option for us – we were both up to date. The issue, it turns out, is that Rise of Nations Gold is incompatible with Thrones and Patriots played from its own disk. The Gold version apparently uses a slightly different version because of some No-CD thing or whatever. Good going guys.
There is an elaborate work around that may work, but it involves all kind of crap that I should not have to put up with. Time is of the essence here, of course, so I ordered a copy of RoN Gold to see if, at the very least, those two versions could speak to each other.
Yet another sad story in legacy PC gaming.
Did you make sure you ordered your copy of RoN Gold from the same store she did? Cause with Microsoft, you never know…
It’ll never work, unless you ordered your copy within the same phase of the moon that she did.
Even if that’s finally the case, Jenn is hard-core Canadian (whereas you’re just C-Lite), and that’ll end up being the final issue of compatibility.
I just had a deja vu of the ordeal of trying to get Rise of Legends multiplayer to work. All these crazy workarounds and problems with RTS multiplayer has me somewhat interested in Supreme Commander 2 just to see how well Steam will work for it.
I’m dealing with my own personal multiplayer fail with Dawn of War 2 trying to understand why a game needs two different platforms (GFWL and Steam at the same time) to play a simple multiplayer game.
I have had issues trying to play Men of War on steam with multiplayer. I can’t join most games, but people are able to join games I create on occasion. I think the steam version is different, so all the games I cannot join are newer.
I think it is just silly that DoW requires Games for Windows since it doesn’t do anything Steam couldn’t do. If anything, it works as an extra resource hog at times.
If you bought Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC on Steam, you would have to run Steam AND Games for Windows LIVE AND Rockstar Games Social Club in order to play multiplayer. At least it wasn’t worth the effort.
You know what I do when shit like this happens?
I just torrent the game I wish to play. Paying twice for the game you already own is absurd at best, even if the game is dirt cheap.
Ah, fun with SKUs and versioning… I sometimes buy gold edition bundle packs, and inevitably they require different patches from the original + expansion versions. Other times they come pre-patched or partially patched.
Then there’s that whole issue with digital distribution, and requiring multiple layers of DRM to get into the game, to say nothing of patch and mod compatibility.
I guess it was inevitable that patching shenanigans would cause problems with multiplayer compatibility.