Come September, my cousin wants me to buy a copy of "Borderlands 2" for him for his birthday. Says he likes it for the campaign coop gameplay that he can share with his 2 younger brothers, since they have like 3 pcs and a laptop at home. Silly as it may sound, My question is, if i bought one copy, is it enough for 3 or 4 computers using a LAN? To be honest it has been a long time since i played an FPS (Counter Strike Beta, circa 1998, and Counter Strike was free back in the day.) So i am not quite familiar with how FPS multiplayer games go about these days especially for a LAN setting.
I don't think it will allow you. You can try it though. Haven't tried any LAN gaming since living in a dorm in high-school.
Some games offer LAN play where you only need one disk. I'm assuming that is what he meant. I know Diablo II for sure did this, you could spawn multiplayer games from one disk as long as you were connected in a LAN.
A lot of the newer ones won't let you do it anymore. Starcraft 2 required you to all have a copy and access the Internet too.
Well from what I've read, Borderlands 2 is going to be a Steamworks game meaning you will have to register the game with your Steam account. That means you'll have to have a unique copy (CD Key) for each account. However, Gearbox has said in a recent release that Borderlands 2 will have an Offline LAN mode. I don't know if Valve fixed this, but my friends and I were able to circumvent the need for multiple games (that had an offline LAN function) by using Steam's offline mode. One person who had the game installed would switch to offline mode and the next person would log in to the same account and download/install the game. Then that person would switch to offline mode and so on. You could have multiple people logged into the same account as long as only one was in online mode at a time. With that being said, since Borderlands 2 is a Steamworks game it will have Steam Cloud sync for game saves. I'm not sure how that will work with multiple people on the same account in offline mode, but I'm guessing saves are just stored locally in offline mode. Source: http://www.borderlands2.com/loveletter?x
Thanks for the input guys. I'll take a look more closer and try if i can find some work around should the "1 cd" approach becomes hard. Man i really miss the old days, friends and i used to hit the LAN gaming shop right after classes and play Half Life, CS, Starcraft, Quake, C&C, etc. No need for a strong internet connection and a subscription.
Apparently the first game does allow one copy to play on lan if it was a disk copy. Digital download from steam or other places might not work though, and just because it works, doesn't mean it is legal, if that matters to you. Here is the info I found. Probably won't know about borderlands 2 until after it has released, and some one tests it out. Based on comments it seems like something that works unintentionally and not a feature that would be advertised.
Bump this thread cuz I just pre-ordered BL2. You can't use one copy for multiple computers and log on at the same time. For any copy(digital or physical) you need to log into your Steam acc and activate it. The activation code will expire after use... sooo my guess is that you can't. Steam: leoo2000
