Awesome game but even after the first patch this game is still in beta mode... way too many glitches and the DRM... wooo
But the problems.... if this game were not so well designed from a "game" point of view (great gameplay, great atmosphere, great story), I'd have given this a score of 3 or 4.
DRM
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What happened to GFWL games using GFWL as their means of DRM? Oh that's right, GFWL is a piece of dog s*** that cheap skates can easily bypass and play the game offline even with saves enabled. I'll come back to GFWL though.
You're hit with an activation system after install (very limited amount of activations too). Keep in mind also that your version of the game is activation specific too... so if you bought the game via directdownload like I did and you lose your install files for some reason (which I did), be prepared to download from that exact vendor again. You won't be able to use your activation code on a DVD version, or a different vendor's install BINs.
Considering I paid for the game, this adds to the first touch of feeling robbed.
But once you're in and activated... GFWL. I had serious issues updating this game. As usual you have to wait till the game loads, and regardless of how much power your rig has this game takes way too long to do its initial load. It stinks of SecurROM crap. Don't have the bleeding edge latest GFWL? You won't be able to play logged in (and thus, saving your game will be disabled) unless you accept the update... which still has to download while the game is running.
Get that, quit, reload the game... now the game has a patch that needs downloading and installing.. fair enough, though I'd have liked to have known this before having to sit through yet another load time and wait for this thing to download before it safely frees up my rig (and beware, Alt-TABing can crash this game simply because it's not in the mood to multitask).
Here's the problem.... this game patch... never actually worked. I got stuck in one of those infamous GFWL patch loops where each load forced me to redownload and reinstall the patch, auto loading the game after each reinstall too.
Very frustrating.
Now here's the greatest irony of all. I finally got the game running by resorting to the community patch floating around the hack/download world. That's right... with all that money put into protecting the game from hacking and piracy, it's the hackers and pirates that made their bug fixing patch actually install.
And by community patch I mean they took the official patch and basically fixed it... something the developer is responsible for doing.
That is where I feel truly cheated. A broken game (DX11 is still unplayable on my system... invisible/flickering shaders and horrific frame rates). All that useless DRM and even a patch they didn't bother beta testing properly... and the very people they're trying to "protect" us from are the ones that provided a fix for the game.
Disgusting.
As yet I haven't gotten far enough into the game to encounter any of the game breaking glitches others have experienced... like the game reliably crashing once you reach certain missions.... with no way of fixing the glitch for the people stuck in that mess.
I'm not impressed Rocksteady. My advice to you... wait until this game becomes a GOTY edition. Hopefully by then this title will truly be out of beta and stand as a genuinely stable piece of code for the PC... until then, find something else to play. This does seem like a great game, but no game is good enough to endure this amount of bugginess and frustration.