Well, I'd been pretty happy with this; OK, so I had to run it in XPSP3 Comp mode to get it to run at all, and it did crash a few times (but in seven hours of gameplay it had crashed three times, which, sadly, I thought was pretty good)...
...and then
Bethesda patched it.
...
And misery started.
Now, I hadn't even tried running the game outside of Steam, as I thought 'Steamworks game will require Steam'... now it turns out, if I'd backed the damned game up, I'd be laughing because I could go back to an .exe file that
didn't crash every few minutes. Did any WSGFers think to back the release-day version up?
Yup, the patch didn't appear to fix any issues - what it did do was enforce - HARD - Steam DRM, and break just about every mod that had been released.
Well done, Bethesda; you've taken a game that was very playable, patched it, and introduced enough crashes that I'm not going to bother playing it for a while now.
And well done Steam, for forcing updates, even when I've set the game to 'Do Not Update'. Bah.
I used to hate Steam with a burning passion.
And I grew to like it, because it made stuff easier to do - no hunting for patches, ability to in-game chat... stuff like that.
I am growing to dislike it again.