HL2: how big a download?

[Holman]

Despite all the woes I hear about with Steam, I'm very tempted to get Half-Life 2.

My question is, how big a download is the game? I'm on a DSL connection, and I'm wondering if even that will take all night. Are the servers for DL'ing reasonably fast?

Thanks.

[$iljanus]

I took the plunge last night and downloaded the Steam Bronze package (HL2 and CS: Source) in supposedly 120 minutes and perhaps it took a little less time. HOWEVER...even though the game was supposedly ready to play it took a hell of a long time to load and I couldn't play offline. I then noticed in the properties menu of HL2 that only 67% had been downloaded and it still seemed to be downloading stuff even as I was playing. So I just let Steam finish what it needed to do which took an additional hour since my bandwidth was split between finishing the HL2 download and the CS:source download which was also incomplete. I didn't know how to cancel the CS download in order to have HL2 be able to use all my bandwidth. The game loaded much quicker after I had 100% of the game.

There's a monitor in the Steam software that tells you the download speed it's operating at as well as the percentage of game downloaded. Also, on the Steam site they tell you the status of their download servers and how much traffic is on them.

http://steampowered.com/status/status.html

http://steampowered.com/status/content_servers.html


I didn't mind spending the time downloading it but I certainly didn't expect to be able to play with just a partial download and the first time it was loading it scared the shit outta me since it just seem to hang with no progress meter and no way to alt-tab out. Luckily I noticed HD activity and my modem light was lit so I assumed that there was some Steam related thing going on. Never thought it was still grabbing files though.

So to summarize, take a look at the Steam site and if the network activity seems reasonable go for it. When Steam tells you it's ready to play, don't believe it. Check for yourself and if it still needs to download files just let it do its thing.

PS I thought the download speeds, at least last night, were pretty fast averaging between 600-1200k/sec (or whatever the unit of d/l speed usually is) split between HL2 and CS. I don't think speed was the issue in my case but rather the sheer size of data that needed to be transferred.

[LawBeefaroni]

I think for HL2 alone it was around 3.2Gb.

Make sure you only select HL2 initially or you'll get a ton of simultaneous downloads. If you get multiples anyway, just go to the game's properties and turn off autoupdate and close Steam and it will stop downloading when you start Steam back up.

And yeah, the "Ready to play in..." dialog box is wrong. Use the Monitor to determine how much of the game you have left to download. Mine said ready to play right around 67% too. Even with DSL, you want to download this one overnight or while you're at work.

[Lee]

I had about the same results as $iljanus using cable. Although I had to try 3 times, during primetime hours. The first time was going fine, and about 30 minutes into something happened to my connection and it slowed way down. Took me 2 restarts until I got a solid connection. It took me about 2 hours until I could play and even then it was still only at 82% downloaded. Last night while watching TV I had it finish it up.

Total size according to properties is 838 megs.

[$iljanus]

Last night while watching TV I had it finish it up.

So it was YOU who was hogging my bandwidth last night! Grrrrr....

I have to say though Lee it was worth the wait. Pretty game.