Feb
22

DRM gone mad!

4 Comments

First, let’s start it off with a comic…that is always fun:

Gamers are getting a little pissed at this, and Ubisoft is is the latest example of this misguided effort to “curb piracy” because somehow they think it’s hitting the bottom line. Assassin’s Creed and now Silent Hunter 5, are gong to be getting a DRM protection scheme that requires you to be online while playing the game at all times….loose connection, and apparently, tough luck. Want to play off-line? Tough balls, cause your games are saved on Ubisoft’s servers…that’s right…on their servers:

Nothing, however, beats this latest. Beginning with Settlers 7 and Assassin’s Creed 2, gamers in single-player mode will be required to maintain a constant Internet connection. If you lose that connection for any length of time or any reason, your game session is terminated. Ubisoft is spinning this as a feature, claiming that by adopting this system, they can offer gamers unlimited installs, cloud-accessible saved games, and the ability to play from any computer. The one point the company didn’t mention when it first announced the structure of this system, is that the game doesn’t save before it throws you out.

Now, as MMO gamers this is not new as this DRM scheme is pretty similar to the client->server relationship that we are use to, but for single player games this is a big deal…. especially for those buying Silent Hunter 5 as this is totally unacceptable.

Of course, this will do nothing to curb piracy. Piracy of games will continue and legitimate users will feel greater need to either pirate as well or just stop buying games. But hey…I guess if we don’t put in DRM, the terrorists win…right?

D out.

Posted in Editorial
4 Comments Posted by Darren

4 Responses to "DRM gone mad!"

  • SmakenDahed says:
    February 22, 2010 at 8:53 am

    As much as I hate piracy, I hate most DRM attempts too. It’s more of a hassle to legitimate users than others.

    I don’t really have as much a problem with the scheme mentioned above, if I lose internet connectivity, chances are the power has gone out so I’m not going to be playing for too long anyway. Granted, I’m a MMO player mainly so, like you said, it’s not an alien concept to me.

  • Xelous says:
    February 22, 2010 at 9:51 am

    Ubisoft have used notoriously bad DRM solutions in the past, I remember trying to get IL2: Forgotten Battles to work on Vista when it came out, it was a nightmare as the DRM they used showed up as a root kit and was rejected. But Ubisoft washed their hands of the matter, and I was directed to the vendor of their DRM (Safedisk) for support.

    And I think if they’re going this way, I’ll not be buying another Ubisoft game ever again.

    Infact, EA/Bioware are on short notice with me for the amount of crashing in Dragon Age. So I’ll not be buying another game from them.

    Activision/Blizzard have peeved me off with their lack of innovation in WoW, and I don’t think Diablo3 will live up to the hype…

    And Cryptic are not winning any awards with me in STO, it’s Star Trek, but that’s it, so many crashes and bugs it’s untrue (I know the engine is a fight for them, but jeez there is a limit to what I’ll pay money for).

    So, god knows who I’ll buy a game off of next… might have to write my own again.

    Please Note – I have the email correspondance of this, and this is the advice on their web portal for this game title, there is no slander involved in this post -

  • Matt says:
    February 22, 2010 at 12:24 pm

    “Infact, EA/Bioware are on short notice with me for the amount of crashing in Dragon Age. So I’ll not be buying another game from them.

    Activision/Blizzard have peeved me off with their lack of innovation in WoW, and I don’t think Diablo3 will live up to the hype…”
    Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa who.a. Dragon Age never crashed once for me in over fifty some hours so far. I definitly agree about WoW though. That game got so carebear I quit not long after WotLK. But you are already dissing D3? W.T.H.?

  • Xelous says:
    February 24, 2010 at 6:56 am

    Well you’re a lucky puppy :) , 64bit builds suffered alsorts of problems, they’re well documented on the forums under PC Support.

    On my PC, I first of all suffered from the problems in their release 1.0, with it not integrating PhysX, so I would fall over to desktop when approaching certain objects in the world. Notably the dog handler NPC before entereing the first tower…

    So, I shelved it until patch 1.0a, then we could run the game, but without PhysX turned on. But it still leaked memory like a sieve.

    Next came patch 1.0b, this did stop some of the memory leak, it went down from about 800megs an hour to about 40megs an hour. But it still tipped over unexpectedly when things were “triggered” in the environment, often with a horrible C++ Runtime Exception, so they went about fixing that.

    Only to release patch 1.0c which had the wrong, or different, C++ runtime DLL’s, and so they had to release 1.0c v2.0… at this point the patching process got so annoying, because we have thread upon thread of people confused what to do.

    So, within a few days we had patch 1.1. That did let the game run for a little longer, but there were still no PhsyX without it falling over.

    Eventually with patch 1.1a they said we could try PhsyX again, but not on an 8800 card (which is what I have), only on 9800 or higher NVidia, and not on ATi at all….

    At this point I figured I’d put the cheese back on the shelf to become a fine aged variety, rather than the stick MaccyD’s Burger variety I was stuggling with.

    Indeed when the solutions to problems began to be posted by the public, rather than Bioware themselves, I knew I had to leave the game be: e.g. http://social.bioware.com/forum/Dragon-Age-Origins/Dragon-Age-Origins-PC-Technical-Support/Crashing-Problems-in-Windows-7-SOLVED-1269766-1.html

    E.g. http://social.bioware.com/forum/Dragon-Age-Origins/Dragon-Age-Origins-PC-Technical-Support/Error–36-failed-to-complete-patch-102a-983989-1.html

    E.g. http://social.bioware.com/forum/Dragon-Age-Origins/Dragon-Age-Origins-PC-Technical-Support/weird-graphic-anomalies-1349899-1.html <- this one gauls, there are alsort of bugs in there, and the general rule has been to "run the repair tool", but never do any of these companies say what's wrong, Blizzard are particlarly bad for this particular trick….

    So, I've shelved it to let it mature some, if it does. But they're on short notice, I eagerly awaited the game, and it was kind of ruined by only getting twenty to forty minutes of play before crashy crashy.

    As for diablo3… I'd love to love it, but I can't stoke myself to commit… it'll be all hyped up and when it comes along, I'll find fault. It's my own fault, but I think that if there's a single flaw in the game it'll be dumbing down… Nothing is hard anymore, nothing comes with a manual to scare the bejesus out of anyone… Those were the days my friend….. I thought they’d never end…. we’d sing and dance forever and a day…. lalalalallalalallalalalalalla …. and then along came the massmarket and we all had to play safe… la la la la

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