A couple nights ago I finally fired up Fallout 3 (PC version) for the first time. It incorporates Games for Windows Live (henceforth GFWL) and this was the first game I’ve played that does. I do have an XBox Live Gold account (gamertag: Jaded) and so wanted to move that profile into GFWL.
But it wouldn’t work. When I tried to sign in, I got to the ‘importing profile’ step and got an error saying something about my not being in a location supported by GFWL. Which sounded pretty odd…like somehow a spoofed IP was being sent? Anyway I’m not going to ponder the geeky details; point is, it didn’t work.
I downloaded the GFWL stand-alone client (which is barely a client…talk about no-frills), and that did connect, no problems. Between that working, and my XBox 360 never having any problems, I pretty much ruled out issues with my router. Some googling led me to the advice to shut down XFire and try again. Which I did, then fired up Fallout 3 and GFWL worked like a charm. I imported my profile, saw friends online and all that.
But I *like* running XFire, so I kept looking for a solution. I wasn’t the only one having the problem, but it certainly wasn’t ubiquitous. I should add that I bought Fallout 3 off of Steam, so I had that running as well.
To make a long boring story slightly less long, I did solve the problem eventually, or perhaps it solved itself. Last night I disabled the “Video Capture” feature of XFire and booted Fallout 3, and it connected with no problems. Huh. Well I was in the mood to play, not tinker, so I accepted it and spent an hour talking to the denizens of Fallout 3.
A few possibilities need to be checked.
First, it might be that the (experimental) XFire video capture feature was stepping on some aspect of GFWL, and disabling it fixed the problem. Honestly that seems unlikely since it was the *first* feature of XFire I disabled, and everyone knows its always the *last* thing you try that fixes the problem. 🙂
Second, it might be that GFWL was just borked the first night I was trying to import my profile and I was just unlucky.
Third, it might be that XFire steps on GFWL’s ability to import the profile, but not to connect once it has been imported (which seems like a 1 time task that had to happen). This is, in my opinion, the mostly likely explanation.
I may (or may not) experiment some more in order to determine what was going on, but there were enough people frustrated by the XFire vs GFWL issue (mostly players of Fallout 3 or Dawn of War 2) that I figured there’d be some value in my sharing what little I know so far. If you can’t get GFWL to connect that first time, try turning off everything you can possibly turn off, particularly XFire and any kind of virtual network stuff (which seemed to be a problem for a lot of other people) just to see if you can get online long enough to import your profile. After that, you might have better luck running the game with your usual assortment of 3rd party apps running.
I don’t have GFWL game to test this with, but I seem to recall Xfire and… was it Steam? I forget which other app it was, but the two of them weren’t getting along at the time if I had the in-game chat, etc. overlays enabled in each. The solution was to choose one, and disable the overlays in the other. I don’t have any Xfire friends so I disabled all Xfire’s overlays and things worked fine. Not sure if my specific problem still exists since I still don’t have any Xfire friends and therefore no need to re-enable overlays to find out.
Well you could be on to something. Because by the time you have all this cooking you end up with overlays from Steam, XFire *and* GFWL. I never chat in XFire (honestly I just run it because I like that it tracks how many hours I’ve put into a game) so I should look into disabling the overlays in it. Thanks!
Glad you were able to get things worked out, and that you have started playing a most excellent game!
The first thing I do after installing Xfire is to tweak some settings like disabling the video capture option. I like running Xfire for the same reasons you do as well, plus I like to see what my firends are playing too. But there have been a few occasions where I had to disable Xfire in game because it caused some games to just perform badly. I had to do that for NWN2 when that first came out and LOTRO back in the day.
If a game is not running well and I have Xfire running, I will usually disable the Xfire in game option to see if there was some sort of conflict, it’s been know to happen!
I fecking hate Games for Windows with a passion.
I can’t actually play several games because that… ‘system’ causes my machine to scream large, bleeped out words, at me. It bogs down my computer something cronic and well, I have more crashes with games running Windows Live than those running without. It’s even worse now that almost every PC game going has jumped on the bandwagon of joining the shite parade of achievement hugging toss pots.
Whose idea was it to fill my screen with “HERE’S A FUCKING NEW BADGE FOR COMPLETING A MISSION! AND ONE FOR KILLING SOMETHING! AND ONE FOR STANDING THERE. AND CAPTURING THAT. AND THAT. OH AND THAT ONE. AND IN RECORD TIME. WITH NO ONE DYING. HAVE A GREAT BIG PAT ON THE BACK SUNSHINE BECAUSE YOU DON’T GET ANYTHING ELSE FOR IT!”
Yeah. Needed to get that out of -my- system.
I know for a fact that Fallout 3 can be played without having a GFWL account, and so can Dawn of War 2(although you will need an account for multiplayer). I for one love achievements, but not nearly as hardcore as some, but I can understand the annoyance.