TLDR Sniper Elite 5 runs smoother, update downloads are smaller using Microsoft Store and not Steam version.
Recently I decided to remove Steam and with it a few of my favorite games. Sniper Elite 5 was one if not the best one, on Steam it had huge downloads plus a few in game bugs that do not exist now. I bought the game again (it’s worth it) with two season passes to get all the content, now I have to go through the game to unlock all the goodies but this doesn’t bother me since I play campaign COOP all the time.
Some cool things happened when using this new Microsoft Store PC version using the Xbox game center login which I had already. This game has cross platform so you can play against players on gaming consoles, this can be disabled too.
- The downloads are done properly, when a new skin, mission, other things are added you just download a smaller file. On Steam you had a massive 40+ gig download each time which rebuilt the entire game, even for just a weapon skin aka the valentines pistol one. The final straw for Steam was the downloader which would reset most of the time like when you pause the download, I had to download the entire update about 3 times due to resets one day which still failed. SE5 is around 103 gigs itself.
- Some in game bugs I experienced are gone, I had a bug when using focus mode and moving that would sort of disable my movement making me press the windows desktop shortcut and then clicking back into the game to move again. This happened during many Axis Invasions which left me vulnerable.
- Overall smoother game play, now I am assuming this because Steam features and overlays are not in the game aka bloat.
A negative is most of the older versions like Sniper Elite 4 are not available on the Microsoft Store, SE4 has a harder difficulty setting authentic plus which I would love to see get added into SE5.