Disconnected: Being a Gamer Without the Internet

It’s tough being a gamer without an internet connection in an age where everything wants/needs to connect to the internet for every facet of everything ever. I recently moved (August) and have yet to set up a solid internet connection. Living in rural North Dakota you don’t have many good options; dial-up or satellite. In other words, I’ve had to deal with not being infused in the community, and not always getting the latest updates.

Knowing that there may be a time when you too may not have Internet, this short series will cover different aspects of dealing with gaming offline and lives annoying inconveniences.

Like being stuck between James Franco and a hard place.

The Situation: Patches/Updates

Most of the time, when a developer releases a patch, it’s a good thing. Fixing bugs… new quests… other things probably… but every once in a while we run into a patch that renders the game unplayable. This generally happens in the graphics department. There’s been times I’ve updated a game to version 1.0.a.1.2 to fix the bug where Kareem the Dark Elf from a small backwoods village talks with a Boston accent instead of the Philly accent the back of the box TOLD ME he was going to use. How am I supposed to level up like that!

{Ding}

After patiently waiting for the 500mb download to extract itself, I boot up my game to go kill some Nazi’s with PHILLY Kareem only to find that, for some unknown reason, the game boots to a black screen. The next however-long is spent scouring the Google to find a fix for the fix they forced my to download. Although annoying, it can be overcome by searching the…

The Solution:

Internet… Oh wait… So, common sense is that if you don’t have internet but need an update you’d go to a buddy’s house or use your work computer to download the file onto a flash drive, move it to your computer and install it. But what do you do in this situation if you’ve had bad experiences in the past?

A good tip if you’re doing the whole transfer ordeal is to research the patch before you install it. Keep a rough run of your specs in your head to see if any known issues seem to occur to multiple people. If the game is running fine already, and you don’t really think you need the patch, maybe hold off on it for a bit, until your connection is back in its prime. Besides, by then I’m sure they’ll have released a patch to fix the patch that messed everything up in the first place.

 -Trey Stevens
@TheTreyStevens