Fallout 4 PC Discs requires some downloading

FallOut 4 

Bethesda executive Pete Hines took to his Twitter account today to answer some questions regarding the upcoming Fallout 4, with the answers surprising some fans. While Hines initially only announced that the game could be downloaded directly from Steam if a gamer’s PC lacked a DVD drive, he went on to clarify that the physical disc itself doesn’t contain the entire game.

The second part, about capacity, though, doesn’t really hold water for me. There are only a few reasons people still buy discs. Some are just plain suspicious of digital ownership. Others like to have the box on their shelf just for the sake of having it. The third, and most important group here, is the gamer that lives outside a major city. If you live in one of the pop-up communities outside a metropolitan area, on a smaller island, or something like that, your options for fast internet might be significantly limited. Buying a disc is supposed to ensure that you don’t have to download a hojillion gigabytes of game data. Increasingly though, that’s not the case. Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain was simply a box with a code in it so that they could have shelf space for the game

Some of you might already know that Fallout 4, like many other games from the Bethesda collection, is using Steamworks to protect the games from pirating. From the looks of it, they are also employing an older type of protection for the physical mediums.

People can buy Fallout 4 on Steam, but they will also be able to purchase it the old-fashioned way, on disks. In fact, some publishers are now selling empty cases with just a game key inside. In any case, if you buy Fallout 4 for the PC, from retail, you'll still need to run Steam and download a few extra pieces.

Pete Hines, the VP of PR and Marketing at Bethesda, explained that this is standard practice for their games. For example, both Skyrim and Wolfenstein employed the same protection and nobody seemed to notice.

This is not exactly a problem and users most likely won't feel the difference, but it's interesting to see that Bethesda still cares about the fact that someone might create a duplicate after the CD. This kind of methods is no longer in use, and it's unlikely that this is still a vulnerability.