RE4, RE5 and RE6 updated on Steam, RE5's removes GWL requirement and adds local co-op
Soon after in 2015, the news was out to the whole world revealing that the game couldn't be played on Steam, and it was the fault of a secret viral experiment conducted by the international technological enterprise, Microsoft, and its GWL virus."
Almost 15 years have passed since its original release in 2009, and now; almost 10 years since its inclusion on Steam, Resident Evil 5 finally had its "Games for Windows Live" requirement removed with an update released on February 27th, 2023. RE5 still required to have the GWL service installed on PC, and without it the game wouldn't launch. Players who bought the game on Steam, or even those that had the original PC port from 2009 (as I do), should have stumbled into this issue when the service went defunct in 2014, a years before RE5's official re-release on Steam in 2015. Players still had options to bypass the GWL requirement, in the form of a mod to allow it to run, but it was still something the user had to go out of their way to fix. Now, with the Feb 27th update, Steam users can simply download the game and it boots without the previous GWL prompts and struggles.
RE5 not only got its GWL requirement removed, but it also re-introduced split-screen co-op into the game, a feature which wasn't available for PC. The changelog for RE5's update goes as follows:
RE5 Feb 27th Update Changelog said:- Removed Games for Windows Live support.
- Will support local split screen co-op.
- Some other minor bug fixes.
Some users report that new extra settings were added into the game's options, like the FOV settings from console re-releases, and being able to extend the in-game view when playing split-screen (instead of the letterboxed view).
The updates don't end there, though, as the original Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil 6 also got updates available alongside RE5, seems like they all got released in the same update bundle (which I found out the hardway, when being kicked out of playing RE4 just for the update to download, and then to had my progress blocked due to not being able to launch it for using the HD version, having to redownload it). However, for RE4 not much documentation has been shared regarding what the update did specifically, as it seems RE4 only had its .exe modified, and users with the HD project might require to reapply the whole project again.
As for the black sheep of the bunch, RE6 seems to have gotten the largest update of the bundle, with around 300-400MB in size, and this one added around 15 tracks from the Digital Soundtrack, as well as new wallpapers, a digital artbook for the game in PDF (alongside other PDFs for the soundtrack as well), and an update to some of the game's language ARC files.
With all these updates, it might be worth jumping back into the Over-the-Shoulders trilogy of RE in preparation for the RE4 Remake.