Because Bethesda doesn’t provide the legacy versions on steam, unlike other mod focused games, afaik. Once you’ve updated your game, you are stuck with whatever version you have.
Sure, you can always download the right version from somewhere else, but I wouldn’t count piracy + the risks coming with it as a viable excuse for their fuckup.
Hosting costs probably. Rolling back a patch is a rare scenario and Steam would have to host every version of every game in their store on their servers indefinitely.
Afaik that’s actually something steam does though, tools like Depot Downloader combined with SteamDB to get the metadata for a target version totally work, I’ve used that in the past to downgrade Skyrim before disabling auto updates. You can do it through the steam console as well.
Gotta love GOG’s patch rollback.
Honestly, that’s the real problem here. No one would complain about a patch, if they could freely decide to play with it or not…
Why can’t they (genuine question) ?
Steam has support for this (and many games use it). As far as I know it’s just a matter of the developers using it.
Because Bethesda doesn’t provide the legacy versions on steam, unlike other mod focused games, afaik. Once you’ve updated your game, you are stuck with whatever version you have.
Sure, you can always download the right version from somewhere else, but I wouldn’t count piracy + the risks coming with it as a viable excuse for their fuckup.
You can still access the legacy versions if you learn how to download the old steam depo manifest that is always archived.
Steam desperately needs to allow you to NOT update a game.
Isn’t there a “disable automatic updates” button in Steam?
So far as I know, you still need to update to launch the game, so you need to disable automatic updates and play offline.
Hosting costs probably. Rolling back a patch is a rare scenario and Steam would have to host every version of every game in their store on their servers indefinitely.
Afaik that’s actually something steam does though, tools like Depot Downloader combined with SteamDB to get the metadata for a target version totally work, I’ve used that in the past to downgrade Skyrim before disabling auto updates. You can do it through the steam console as well.
I always did this manually, interesting to note there is a program to help with this.