Gigantic on PC Guide: Installing, Updating, & Playing with Friends

I'm writing this post because I'm a huge fan of PC games, but a lot of the process of using Windows Store Games is very new so to avoid some trial and error I'm attempting to pass down what I've learned quickly. This guide is designed to get the game installed, show you how to keep it updated, and get you playing with friends as quickly and streamlines as possible.

Gigantic is available on PC and Xbox One. The PC version (at this time during open beta) is available through the Windows Store. Thanks to the Xbox Live Network you can play with and against your Xbox friends and share the same matchmaking pool (cross-platform) so you don't have to worry about poor matchmaking numbers like you may have heard about from other multiplayer Windows Store titles.

Because it's on the Windows Store it does require Windows 10 and the anniversary update. This update fixes a lot of the annoyances of Windows 10 so it's a good update to grab. If you don't already have the update you will be prompted during the installation steps below so don't worry about it. Just come back and continue where you left off after getting the update.

I. Getting Gigantic on PC

Optional: this is not a requirement, but will make everything else smoother. If you already have an Xbox Live account that you want to use be sure you log in with that account to Windows, the Windows Store App, and the Xbox Live App. I changed my Windows login to match my Xbox Live login after I started playing Windows Store Games and it helped a lot! This way your store purchases will go to the correct account, all your friends and games from Xbox will be available on PC, etc. This is a good tip for all Windows Store Games, not just Gigantic.

- Open the Windows Store:

If you haven't changed your Windows taskbar there will be a Windows Store Icon by your start button. If you have simply press your Windows Key or click the Start Button and type in "store" and it will come up in your search list.

- Sign in to the Store Using your Xbox Live Account:

Use the drop-down menu in the top right to sign in/verify you're signed in with your Xbox Live account so purchases (even of free games) go on your Xbox Live account.

- Find Gigantic and Install it:

Use the search bar on the right to type in "Gigantic" and it will come up in the list. Click on Get the Game and then Install Note: I've already gone through the purchase process (even though it's free), so the button may say something like purchase.

The actual game page will load and just click Install and wait for the download, shouldn't take to long.

- Before Running the Game Open and Sign into the Xbox App:

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You can do this while Gigantic is installing or after, but you need to do this before running the game for the first time if you've never signed in on this PC. Search for the Xbox app: Use the Windows Key or Start Button and type in "Xbox" when the app launches this is where you MUST be signed in with your Xbox Live account.

- Play Gigantic and Have Fun:

Search for Gigantic: Again use the Windows Key or Start Button and type in "Gigantic" That should be all you need, but if you run into any other issues continue to read the section below.

II. Keeping Gigantic Up-To-Date:

Windows is suppose to keep all your Windows Store Games and Apps up-to-date and normally does, but not always. To verify you're up to day: open up the Windows Store, click on your portrait on the right next to search and click on My Library and look for Gigantic in the list of Available updates at the top.

Click on the down arrow button on the right to start downloading the update.

III. Log In Failures:

This section covers bugs on the open beta build 253638 and anything below will of course become more functional with updates to Microsoft's APIs and Gigantic patches, but for now it's an attempt to help players use the Windows Store version of Gigantic and a few things to check should you have issues logging in.

If you click the start button and then the game hangs trying to log in: Close Gigantic and open the Xbox App and be sure you're signed in. I've actually had the best results by opening the Xbox App every time before I launch Gigantic and just leaving it up in the background while playing, this has fixed that log in issue for me.

If you click the start button, get the generic Login Failed and return to the same screen with the Start Button:

I've seen this caused because Windows hasn't kept Gigantic updated like it should, follow the steps outlined in section II above.

Other log-in errors will probably require you to contact support or retry later do to some kind of network issues :(

IV. Lose control in the Tutorial:

This one works on Xbox One or PC. If you get stuck at any point in the tutorial or practice bring up the menu by pressing Esc or Start (three lined button) and select quit from the menu, this will bring you back to the home screen.

V. Stuck in Queue Without Finding a Match:

If you spend an excessive amount of time in queue (greater than 5-10 minutes, though most queue pops seem to happen around 3 minutes max.) I've seen this caused by your client being out of date. You only match-make with players on the same version as you, and if everyone else has updated, you won't find a match, follow the steps outlined in section II above.

VI. Playing with Friends:

I mistakenly thought this was broken completely on Windows, instead some options either get defaulted off or it's easy enough to turn notifications off for the Xbox App and assume you'd still be able to party with the app open, but with notifications turned off they don't come though at all. Here is what I've found.

If you're not seeing the Windows toasts to join a party after being Invited to a Crew:

If you don't see the Game invite toasts (shown above) when someone invites you to a party, you can turn them on by:

- Press the Windows Key or click the Start Button and type in "notifications":

- Scroll to the bottom (alphabetical order) and be sure your Xbox App is set to on:

- Optional: Open the Xbox App and under Settings (gear icon on the left), General tap you can increase the Notification time so you have time to free your mouse (Windows Key) and click the toast before it disappears.

- Optional: Since you MUST have notifications turned on to get invites in the Xbox App under the Notifications section turn off anything you don't want to toast in the bottom right of Windows.

The Reliable way to Party Without Notifications:

- Have the person who is going to lead the party launch the Xbox App and Gigantic and log in to both.

- Have everyone who wants to be in the party with the leader launch their Xbox Apps (with Gigantic running) and find the leader in their friends list. (everyone should already be friends, if not add each-other as friends)

- The leader will have an button: "Joinable: Join Gigantic", click that button and everyone should show up in a party.

- When the leader is ready to play they use the Play Gigantic button and everyone will be brought into Hero Select and after they pick heroes will join the matchmaking queue together.


I'm only covering the large game breaking PC specific issues in this post. As long as you can log in and play with friends you'll find a very enjoyable multiplayer game with some time investment. Like anything else if you see other bugs try the basics of updating drivers, use the steps above to be sure Gigantic is up to date.

If you haven't already read though it, check out my guide on How to Win Matches: The Power Struggle: http://billychatterton.blogspot.com/2017/01/gigantic-guide-how-to-win-matches-power.html Hopefully this will be useful as you start playing the game to understand what is going on. Download Gigantic and enjoy! I'll see you on the airship!

The Basics of Importing Games

I have recently enjoyed importing games and am going to write a post about the basic considerations when importing hoping to help others interested in importing. There are a lot of details you'll need to look into, but this is a quick overview to get you started.

Does Your System Support Importing (Region Locking)?

The first thing you need to know is if you will be able to boot the game on your system. Some systems are region locked and will only read disks with a matching region encoded to them.  3DS is region locked while the DS was not. Playstation 3 and 4 are not locked, but I haven't looked into others so I won't list them. A Google search will answer this question quickly. If your system is region locked you'll need to buy a system for the region the game is made in. This may or may not be easy for example the 3DS is self contained, anything that is not you will need to know if it supports NTSC/PAL and if your TV also does. Also some kind of power/pug adapter may be required, plugs are easy but 110/220 voltage is not always.

PCs are technically always open, but I've read up on a few rare cases that require you to change the language and/or location in the operating system.Other issues may still apply though, keep reading.

Is the Online Play Restricted in your Area (IP Blocking by Region)?
IP addresses are the internet's way of telling who's who where the data needs to go. IP addresses are grouped by country like mailing address and some game servers restrict access to IP addresses for anything not in their intended area. I'll give two quick examples of this.

- Monster Hunter Portable 3rd: The middleware software that allows multiplayer on the Playstation 3 HD version does not connect in the US. So I can play all the single player content fine, but won't be able to use the multiplayer.

- Monster Hunter Frontier: This game is an always online game so basically you can't play any of it without connecting to a server as far as I can understand.

So how do you get around IP blocking? The only way I am aware of is using a VPN connection to an IP address inside the restricted access area. I've setup a free VPN and had a lot of latancy just web browsing, so haven't tried to play games over it at all. There are also paid VPNs that will probably perform better. Lastly I've also read about Frontier players being found out and the VPN being blacklisted so one one else could use it to play. I've avoided trying to get past this kind of restriction so far.

Is the Game Localized in Your Language?
This can be a bit one... Here are some considerations.

- If you are importing the game anyway, check all regions to see if any are better. Gundam Breaker 3 for example was never released in North America, but the Asia release had English subtitles and menu translations, so importing this version was far superior to the Japanese version.

- Look for versions that have language more similar to yours. I don't have a ton of experience with Spanish or German, but both are easier to try to decipher for me than something without the Latin alphabet.

- If other games in the series are in your language play a lot of them first. In my case most of the titles I've imported are Monster Hunter titles and I started by playing their English versions and mostly imported to play on the big screen instead of handheld. The game is still very recognizable to the original so most of the mechanics and iconography are similar enough to understand knowing them in English first.

- This one will require some gray areas, but a lot of games have fan-translated version. If you are playing on PC you might be able to patch it in, or if it's not a current generation console you might be able to find an emulated version of the game that has been patched you can use as reference to learn some of the mechanics. As long as you actually own a copy of the game and the system it seems gray, but I'm not a lawyer, so don't take my word for it.

- Look for community sites, YouTube videos, etc that other people have posted to help out.

- Google Translate

In my opinion this is the big one and what really makes importing a language you don't understand doable. Sorry for the boor quality shot, but Google Translate allows you to use your camera's phone and will in real time translate the text in the camera to your language. You can also take a picture and highlight just the text you want translated. The translations aren't perfect by any means, but normally will give you a good enough translation to figure it out.

- If you find yourself wanting to import from the same country consider learning the language.

Research the Specific Game and Region Requirements

In conclusion the internet is a big, wonderful, scary, disgusting, amazing place. Someone else has probably already imported the game you are looking out to your region if it hasn't just released. Do your research. Internet searches on every game I've imported and numerous ones that I didn't have told me exactly what to expect. They'll tell you what features will or will not work, the back of boxes will tell you what languages will have auto and subtitles and multiplayer options. Also any third party online middleware should be listed there and you can search for other games using it.

After importing a few games I was surprised how easy and enjoyable it is. And currently I'm spending a large percentage of my gaming time playing Monster Hunter Online a Chinese MMO version only in Mandarin. If there is a game you really want to try go for it and enjoy!

The Current State of PC "Ports"

There seems to be a disturbing trend with PC ports. Over the past few years we've been treated to mostly decent ports of the majority of games coming out on the current generation of consoles, but that's starting to digress back into the way things were before.

I recently purchased Street Fighter V on Steam and ended up returning it within 48 hours after not being able to solve a crash bug. I'm sure Capcom will fix this bug in the near future, so I'm planning on purchasing the game again when Juri is released and I can get the game at a discounted price. I did attempt to purchase it at release, but was disappointed that I can't run one of my favorite franchises at it's pinnacle visual peak.

I never had any issues with Arkham Knight, but it was notoriously pulled from the Steam store and no-questions-asked refunds were offered even after it returned to the store nearly 6 months after release.

But by far, the worst example in this article is Mortal Kombat X! After putting out a decent PC port of a decent fighter they made the choice to stop supporting the PC version with new content. Most of the work is already done. There is a PC port and the content is already being added to that current port. Games are developed and tested on PC long before they are ever loaded on dev kits for console testing!

So the big question why aren't we getting good PC ports?

I'm sure every one of these games and the numerous other examples I could have used have their own stories. Here are a few things I have seen that may be contributing factors:

• Studios often buy large supplies of hardware at the same time. Unless an effort is made to diversify hardware, testing is done on less than a half dozen hardware configurations.
• Testing for so many possibilities is hardware and software is time consuming! Often problems are impossible to reproduce without exactly duplicating the source of the problem. This is especially true of in-house or heavily modified game engines.
• This is my observation and probably NetherRealm's reasoning: PC players don't seem to buy as much DLC as console players. People I talk to, myself included, wait for a "complete edition" to be released instead of being nickle and dimed by incremental DLC.
• Possibly little money is spent on a PC port because the studio is afraid there will be too much piracy? (Though strides in DRM have made recent games uncrackable.)

I'm not sure exactly why we are seeing a steep decline in quality, but we are in danger of taking a huge step backwards. Please buy your PC games, let the publishers and developers of any games you want to see on PC know you want their games, and respectfully be specific about port quality and features you appreciate in your games.