Greetings everyone! I wanted to ask if the game in question is going to be on GOG? It's hard to find a copy of it anymore and what GOG offers is usually the best in digital distribution. Thank you for reading and have blast during the holidays!

Don't bother asking them - they have a form letter reply that states that they can't tell but be assured we are striving to bring you the best of the old games :). I tried it with Gothic3.

Anyway, there were some oddities with this game - creator going bankrupt, the refusal to release source code so it could be adequately modded, etc - that tells me that they won't agree to do so. T'wood be nice, though. As you said, it is hard to find a copy at a reasonable (ie, not scalped) price.

I wouldn't bet on it showing up anytime soon, although it's currently available on both D2D and Steam for $20 so it can still be gotten easily enough without paying the extortionate prices copies are going for on Amazon and similar sites.

If you can (havent tried it) get someone in the UK to buy it and gift it D2D it was £7.50 which is what $10-$11. its really shitty how they screw people over with regional pricing.

If you purchase something on steam does that mean you have to have a constant connection to the internet to play it? I had a bad run in with half-life 2 when it came out

It doesn't require a constant connection, but it does require fairly frequent connections. Under normal circumstances running a game purchased through Steam requires launch of the Steam client, which then must log in to your account before you can play the game. The client does have an offline mode, but from the reports I've heard this will sometimes not work for unknown reasons (and the number of days/weeks it will let you be offline before requiring you to log in again seems somewhat random). I'd personally recommend the D2D version over the Steam version, as it only requires you to connect to an authentication server upon installation of the game, after which you can play to your heart's content without ever needing to connect to the internet again.

Full disclosure: I've never actually used Steam myself, so all my information on it is second-hand.

How so? Half-Life 2 didn't require a constant connection at all and still doesn't.

DP's info is essentially correct, though the reconnect frequency for offline mode is roughly every 30 days. As long as all your Steam games are already up to date and have been launched at least once, you can set Steam to offline mode and only ever need a connection about once a month.

Half-Life 2 launched back when Steam was only just beginning, and from what I've heard Steam had quite a few problems back in those days, along with off-line mode being significantly more finicky (to the point of often being useless). Again, second-hand information, so feel free to correct me if you have first-hand information to the contrary.

Honestly, I've had Steam since the week HL2 released and I have never had any of the problems you hear about with connection issues and useless offline mode. Maybe I'm lucky that way.

I got so lucky with Bloodlines and found it in our local thrift store for about $3. I was soooo happy.

As far as HL2, I purchased the game sometime between 6 months to a year ago on steam. If I set steam on offline mode, the game says it can't run. I have always had to be online to play it. It's the 2nd and last game I ever bought on steam.

BTW, you may be interested to know, if you don't already, about the Resurgence project for Bloodlines. They are porting Bloodlines to the newer version of Source that has a SDK. Pretty much all the maps are ported now, they just desperately need an experienced coder to help with the game mechanics.

Sounds like a job for wesp5.

Wesp has been supportive of the project as a member of our site's staff but has chosen not to get involved on a larger scale to this point. You'd have to ask him about that, my assumption would be juggling rl and the unofficial patches is about all he can or chooses manage right now.

We have a lot of very capable coders in the community, but many are tied up in their own projects and many understand what a full-time project this would be if they didn't have a team of coders helping them out. From communicating with many of them, I can tell you they are also very involved with RL careers/relationships ect, not a group of teenagers with a great deal of time on their hands to juggle multiple projects of that scale. They finish a large project then get burned out for a few months, then begin working on the next version of their mods/ expansions. No pun intended but unless something changes, it will likely have to be some "new blood" doing the coding.

Too bad (I'm assuming) that we don't have any university programing professors amongst us - they could make it a class project and have grad students be the "coding" team; a win/win proposition.