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?
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.