Like many people, I’ve been thinking about physical media lately, and how our entertainment items – movies, albums, books – used to be things that sat on a shelf that someone else could see and say, “Hey I like this thing on your shelf.”
PC games were one of those things, once. I have a few. And I’ve scrounged them up from their various moving boxes and parents’ houses to see if they still work.
Does anyone here still play a game from an optical drive? A game where your regularly-played copy isn’t the Steam version?
For me, Morrowind was the last game that I was still playing on a disc. I have newer games on discs, but just played those once or twice and then put them back on the shelf. But I was still playing Morrowind from a CD up until 2023, when it went on sale on Steam for $1, so I bought it. I almost didn’t get it, since I liked the fact that I was still playing a game on a CD.
I plan on taking inventory of which games still work and what it takes to install them today.
What were (are?) some of your favorites?
Bruh I haven’t had a computer with a disc drive in like…15 years.
Last game I played with a disc was disc golf.
I almost went that route, but kept moving my disc drive from one PC to the next just for Morrowind. I didn’t have room for it in my latest build, though (I put in a tower cooler for the first time), so I bought an external DVD drive.
So, how far can you throw those DVDs?
I haven’t had a disk drive in my PC for over 10 years now. It’s a PITA even finding an inexpensive case that has front bays these days.
Why not USB-based disk reader?
Yeah, they definitely aren’t seen as a necessity anymore.
However, the Silverstone FLP01 was mentioned in another community around here and I was so tempted to get one. At $150, it’s not exactly inexpensive, and I already have a perfectly good case (Fractal Design Core 500), but man I want one. The “floppy disk drives” are doors that flip down: the top one reveals an optical drive, and the bottom one reveals the USB ports.
Guild Wars 2 was on disc for me.
I have that disk too. But I don’t need it if I want to install and play the game today. Same with my Elder Scrolls Online disk or my Assassin’s Creed Unity disk. Neither GW2 nor ESO will even play with just the data on the original disks, forcing updates before becoming playable. Not sure about ACU though.
Eragon
Last one must have been GTA 4 (I’ve meanwhile bought this on Steam so I can play it without) or Crazy Taxi (came with a cereal box in my childhood).
I bought GTA4 for like $8 during a Steam Sale shortly after it came out, back when Steam Sales were crazy good. An absolute steal for such a great game.
Starcraft 2 for me. I haven’t had an optical drive in my pc for probably 10 years or so. The last “physical” game I bought was Mass Effect Andromeda, and it was just a box with a download code inside.
PC gamers were incentivized to move away from optical media asap, since optical drives read slowly compared to HDDs, and SSDs are even faster.
Yeah, I had forgotten how slow an optical drive was, and how that was usually the limiting factor. I installed Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear from the original CD a couple days ago, and it took about 20 minutes to install on my current PC. I’m pretty sure that’s about how long it took in 1999, too.
Downloading it from Steam takes about 10 seconds.
I’ve got a portable DVD player, and I’m going to use it to install the original Psychonauts onto my son’s computer, so he can see what the meat circus was like before they softened it.
I recently checked my box with old game CDs and DVDs, just out of curiosity, not because I wanted to play something. Most of the stuff is just sentimental value/nostalgia, but there’s one promo disc/game, I tried to archive because I found nothing about it on the net, but I couldn’t even read it. Others also have read errors, but I don’t know if a better drive could still work (just have a cheap external one).
I think the last PC game I bought on disc was SC2: HotS, but I don’t even know if I ever used them, since you can just download the game, after you’ve added it to your Battlenet account. Definitely haven’t used game discs since 2014, because I remember building a PC then, putting in my old drive, but then I gave it away, because I just never needed it.
Probably Crysis.
Long enough ago that my DVD drive had sealed shut since then and I had to use a paperclip to open it.
Nice. I had borrowed a friend’s physical copy of Crysis, and that’s how I played it back in the day.
Half Life orange box, the last physical media I ever bought. 2009-10 ish. Still have the cosmetics for tf2
Morrowind was also my last. I actually ripped the files from the disk and that’s what I’m using with OpenMW now…
Nice. I haven’t tried OpenMW yet, but I definitely want to. Are you running a bunch of mods with it?
I haven’t looked into modding yet, but from what I understand, most Morrowind mods should work seamlessly. It’s only those that need the Morrowind Script Extender, which don’t work in OpenMW.
Also, I’ve seen this website recommended before: https://modding-openmw.com/
I literally cannot remember the last time. This PC doesn’t have any optical drives and I’ve had it for like 7 years now. I did use a USB optical drive once to install a driver for something. I can’t even remember the last game I purchased that had a physical disc, honestly. I haven’t bought a game requiring a disc since living in Japan so that’s definitely a decade. Probably around 15 years, if I had to guess, and maybe even longer than that.
I remember finally building a new PC that was halfway decent and wanting to play some quake 3 mods. So this would have been around 2005??
Broadband was here so I wanted to take advantage of that sweet low ping but needed a physical copy of the game for the mods to work.
Even then it was hard to source a game disc but I got it and had a few years of fun playing urban terror… I can’t really be bothered with online shooters now but back then it was simple, quick and fun. There’s too much going on in things like Apex and Overwatch for me.
Also my PC basically has a console setup in the living room and I play with a switch controller, so I’d get destroyed anyway!
Diablo 2 battle chest
I should still have that somewhere as well. That was one I didn’t find, but it should be around.
Do you need a battle.net account to play Diablo 2, or can you just install and play offline if you only want to play singleplayer? I haven’t been able to find a clear answer about this, since everyone talking about it these days is talking about the download-only version.
If you have the key within your disc carrier, you should be solid.
I think you can download it and still play single player even on the remaster, which was solid btw.
There are also pirated versions that you could utilize given that you already own the software.
There are also 3rd party moded communities like path of Diablo.
Path of Exile 1 & 2 are crazy good and true successors to Diablo 2 if you haven’t checked those out. They blow Diablo 3/4 out of the water in gameplay.
I still have some floppies in working order, even.
But no, I don’t play them regularly. It’s just easier to make a backup that doesn’t need a disk in the drive. Even most of my retro PCs these days run out of a large-ish hard drive replacement, so keeping games outside their unreliable original media and the original media elsewhere is a better alternative.
It’s a bit different on consoles where carts are harder to duplicate and ingest, as well as being more reliable and loading faster. Floppies and optical media, particularly when you can access the files, less so.
