Note: I will temper my diatribe below by saying that buried in the emailed receipt is the DLC code.
I wrote some good things about the Impulse game download service some time ago when I compared Impulse to Steam. At the time, I said that I would prefer to get a game over Impulse rather than Steam if they were the same price. Well Impulse is giving me fits and here’s why:
When you get a boxed game, you get all sorts of little pieces of paper that have various codes you need to enter to activate the game and activate downloadable content (DLC). Occasionally you get a manual, too.
Now when you buy a game from Steam or Impulse, you may or may not get a PDF of the manual (buried somewhere in the game folder), but you don’t get all the activation codes on pieces of paper. Instead, they will show the game activation code in the launcher app (actually Steam shows it to you when you launch the game, which is nice). Impulse makes you ask for it via a right click, but it is not hard to get.
So what’s wrong with this?
I bought Dragon Age: Ultimate Edition from Impulse because it was on sale. I already had a disk version, so I uninstalled that before doing anything. The new game downloaded and installed OK and was properly activated with the serial code. Then, when the game was launched, none of the added content (Ultimate Edition, remember) was there. Apparently what was supposed to have happened was Impulse should have popped up a window to show me the code to activate the DLC. That didn’t happen. And since I don’t have a simple slip of paper, I don’t have the DLC code. I’m not the only one with the problem – the forums are full of people in the same boat. It turns out (perhaps) that because I already had Dragon Age installed before, perhaps some update service was left when I uninstalled, so that broke the little DLC code window, or something.
So now I’ve uninstalled and have to install again. Yes, that means another 12GB download. If I had the DVD version, I’d be done already. Perhaps these download services aren’t so useful after all…