Originally Posted by Hephador

Alright, y'all have piqued my interest enough to buy RO. However I've never used Steam before. I have questions and am looking for help cuz their info page is crap. When you dl a game via Steam, do you have to run Steam in order to play it? If so, is Steam a resource hog and is it better for me to wait for the cd package to hit the shelves? If it makes a difference to the answer, I'm running an Athlon XP 2800+ with 1.5 gigs of ram. Or if there is a handy Steam primer out there, I'd appreciate it if someone could kindly point me in its direction.

While Steam's launch was certainly very rocky, I think it's safe to say that by now it is a solid gaming delivery client. I've ordered both DoD:S and RO through it, and both transaction and delivery have been more than acceptable (YMMV if it's the game's launch day, of course). As mentioned, it runs between 8-15 MB of RAM, and will keep your purchased games up-to-date as well as inform you of new stuff that Valve is offering.

Note that it's not just Valve's games - Valve is just the distributor in this case. So one day we may be buying Unreal Tourney through it, who knows

Through Steam you can also download and backup the games you bought, although I don't know anyone who's reported verifiable success with this. If you move to a new machine though, the only thing you have to re-download is the Steam client (tiny) and put in your ID info. It will then download everything you bought to your new machine, which is nice. It will not keep your savegames, however, which is a bit annoying.

If you're worried about Steam needing a connection all the time, there is a toggle to put it in "Offline" mode, so you can play some games (like HL2, I think) without being connected. You can also turn it off if you're playing something else, of course. I tend to run it all the time myself.

Valve has also just released a "Friends" beta, which will be (I guess) some sort of gaming Instant Messenger (like XFire), and I guess they're still working on it.