So, as you probably know, Arkham City for the PC got pushed back to November 15th. Why, you might ask? This Look at the tessellation in that screenshot! The video actually looks pretty nice. Normally when there's a PhysX comparison video it doesn't look too much nicer, maybe a flag or something, but this seems to really be using it.

Can someone explain to me with small words and big pictures just why it is that GFWL is still in use by... anyone?

I would guess it is deals made by Microsoft, maybe to lower licensing costs or DLC publishing costs if you make the PC version use Live as well. Just a guess.

I dunno. My dad has Arkham Asylum on PC, but he apparently never needed to sign in to install it, and never needed to use it to play the game at all. He needed it for DLC, but he never got any, so it basically just sat there, not doing anything.

Which as far as DRM goes, is actually pretty nice.

Could even be tied to a deal with the 360 version, as publishers pay a hefty premium to MS for every title they manage to sell.

Yes, I really wouldn't put it past Microsoft to risk losing money on the 360 version just to promote that deadbeat DRM client thing. There's a reason that their games division is prone to losing money and good business sense is not among those reasons. That's my Fallout 3 experience. AA on the other hand forced me to sign in before I could even do anything else. It also deliberately corrupted my save games. So yeah - won't be touching City.

I... kind of like GFWL. I also like using my PC as I would an Xbox, with a controller and all that.

The effects look good, but they're also kind of silly. The fog and shards and stuff are a little much. I also don't really like how much like Arkham Asylum the colors and environments look, just their color palette and all that.

Is it illegal to use UE3 if you don't use a certain color palette and big fat meaty characters?

Huh. That's odd.

It's not a criminal matter. But Epic will say mean things about your parents on Twitter. Which bit? The save game corruption is apparently standard. Try backing up your saves and then reinstalling the game. Saves won't work. They're encrypted by GFWL so you can only use them with that install.

Naturally I don't recommend you try this with any valuable saves. You will lose them all if you do this.

That it decided you had to sign and and then it screwed your saves. Maybe GFWL is Bipolar?

Either that or the implementation is different. It didn't have anything to do with the saves in Fallout 3 and seemed to be optional. In fact even the disc check was optional in a way. You just used the other executable.

With AA it was much more forceful and acted like Steam's incompetent step-brother. Only worse, what with the save game problem and the regional restrictions that it imposes.

Use offline profiles, I don't think they mess with those saves. That's what I do, never had a problem.

They work, I have moved my GFWL offline save from computers and Windows install to Windows install several time and never had any issue, the only thing you have to do is to make sure you copy your saves AND the Live something folder which contains the encryption key of your offline profile.


Offline profiles are encrypted too, if you don't backup/restore the profile along with the encryption key you won't be able to load the saves on another Windows install.

Unless of course they changed that recently, the last GFWL game I played being Dead Rising 2.

I wish I knew that sooner. AA didn't strike me as a game that was playable offline. I seem to have a copy that's worse than most people's.
I know that now. But that's the problem. It's not something you find out until it's too late.

No idea, tbh. Devs should just wait until Windows 8 to integrate their games with Windows Live.

Thats the reason Windows8's integration with GFWL means it will work straight away in 8