Well, it was not totally zero-day, since it took slightly more than 24 hours, apparently. Still, indeed it is now the case that the only ones suffering from the whole “you have to be online all the time or we’ll kick you out of your offline game” thing are the legit customers, while pirates gladly ignore such silly limitations.

The source (on InfoAddict, via PlayNoEvil) states:

Now that the news has spread like wildfire, Ubisoft is finally issuing a response and it is predictably vague. So vague that I am inclined to believe their statement doesn’t hold much water or truth.  Is it possible some aspect of the game is missing? Sure. Is it likely? No, not given how Ubisoft designed Silent Hunter V, meaning it’s not an MMO and it’s world doesn’t exist on a 3rd-party server. If Ubisoft really wants to defeat piracy, may I suggest that your next game be called Silent Hunter Online? Problem solved.

Indeed. Yes, for online games, it makes sense that you need an online connection. For offline games, absolutely not so much. Worst case is that some encrypted content needs to be streamed from the online servers in order for the offline game to work, but even that can be emulated by a dedicated cracker as well (and it requires faster internet connections than mere keep-alive pings that are a more probable implementation of such a feature).

Anyway. Ubisoft of course claims the games won’t work at all anyway. We’ll see what the next days hold, I might update this post or even write a new one if fundamentally new things show up.

Most recent example: Ubisoft. There is a good article on Rock Paper Shotgun about this. What they have announced to do is the following: With every future Ubisoft game, whether it’s single player or multiplayer, online or offline, boxed with a CD or delivered via download, you will constantly need an online connection in order to keep playing the game.

Ubisoft's DRM in action

In other words: Even if it’s a pure single player offline experience, you will constantly need to be online. If for some reason (shaky WiFi, ISP hickups, flatmate downloads too much stuff, Ubisoft’s servers have problems) you lose your connection for a moment, you are also dropped out of your game and (at least in some games) lose all the unsaved data. (Image source)

Ubisoft also does talk around the issue that in five or ten years, their licensing servers for a game might be offline. As a sidenote, in the case of EA, servers shutdowns happen nearly every year. Ubisoft do not fully commit to promising a patch that will remove the online shackles (Source):

PCG: So you can commit to saying that those systems will be patched out?
Ubisoft: That’s the plan.
PCG: It’s the plan, or it’s definitely going to happen?
Ubisoft: That’s written into the goal of the overall plan of the thing. But we don’t plan on shutting down the servers, we really don’t.

I trust the developers that they don’t want to shut these things down. But I don’t trust the management that they won’t. After all, they get nothing out of second-hand sales, and they can stiffle those if only more recent titles actually work at all.

Cogs, great indy game on Steam

Now, a common argument appears to be “but Steam does the same”. And I love Steam. But it has a few fundamental differences to this incoming Ubisoft system:

• You’re only kicked out of actual online games if you lose the connection to the game server (and not the Steam server – the latter doesn’t have any serious impact whatsoever) – so Steam does not affect your capability to play games.
• There is an offline mode, which always worked a treat for me in the rare occasions where I’m offline.
• Steam uses the fact that it’s online for great benefit: automatic background updates, digital content delivery, online save data (well, Ubisoft plans that as well), community features across games (with text and voice chat), all with a very easy-to-use interface.
• Steam is open for games from other developers, and notably, indie developers who gain a way bigger exposure to an interested audience through the system. Without Steam, I would have missed out on Cogs, Bob Came in Pieces, Defense Grid, or Braid.

Vote with your Wallet

Ubisoft’s feature only does one thing: It makes it harder for legitimate customers to play the game. As i wrote elsewhere: Since no server connection is required at all, it’s just another small hoop crackers have to go through, and no change at all for pirates. On the other hand, it is a big change for legitimate customers. Yet again, legitimate customers are punished for piracy.

Piracy is merely a strawman argument. It shouldn’t convince anyone.

If it would actually make game piracy harder, I might understand it a slight bit. But it doesn’t: Cracks and patches will be out within a week tops, patching out the online requirement for pirates. Essentially making the game a better product for non-legitimate customers. They even have an internal schedule for about when the game will be cracked (Source):

Do Ubi believe this DRM is unhackable?
They accept that it’s all DRM’s fate to be eventually hacked, explaining that internally, they’ve already talked of a timescale for how long their games will be protected by it. But, they believe that it’s secure enough for them. “We wouldn’t do it if we didn’t believe in it. The guys who designed it believe in it. Do we think that it’s the one system that God has sent onto earth that will never be cracked by anybody ever? We can’t guarantee that, but we believe in it.

”

Well, I really looked forward to the new, back-to-the-roots, Prince of Persia games. Looks like I won’t buy them, completely unlike all but two (1999, 2008) of the previous ones.

I have one thing to say really: Vote with your wallet. If you run into this post after having bought a broken product like that, return the game. Ubisoft will only stop hurting you if you don’t encourage them to.

Disclaimer: Even though some of the contents of this post make it reasonable to believe that I advocate piracy: I don’t. I also do not play pirated games, or use pirated software – it’s a matter of ethics for me, being both a developer and an aspiring philosopher myself.

Dead Space

I had heard a lot of positive buzz about Dead Space, the new EA SciFi horror shooter, so my expectations were naturally high. When Steam finally had it (funny enough, I’m one of those odd folks who are up in arms against any form of too rigid DRM except when it’s Steam), and in English too (something that’s nigh impossible to get here in Switzerland in retail, but that’s another issue), I bought it.

So yesterday I tried to play it, with those high expectations, and with disastrous results. Those were my first impressions:

• Odd strafing … When a game moves you forward with speed X when you press “W”, and moves you sideways with a speed close to X when you press “A”, you’d expect pressing both “W” and “A” would move you roughly in a 45° angle? Not in this game, here the angle is closer to 4.5°. That’s a common shooter standard that you chose not to implement there, and it is annoying.
• Aim mode … You can only shoot if you enter aim mode first, which displays those nice targeting dots, but which also slows down your mouse a lot. You know, EA, I do have this custom-built gaming rig with an insane-res laser mouse and a huge mouse pad, and I do play with low sensitivity. I can aim perfectly well without you slowing down my mouse – in fact, I can aim way better if you don’t keep changing my input. This is not a console. At least give me an option to change it.
• Mouse smoothing … Turning off VSync helped a bit, but the smoothing isn’t gone (with 50+ FPS). And there’s no option to switch it off. My mouse movements are rather smooth, thank you very much, and having them artificially smoothened further disconnects me from what’s happening on the screen. And I’m not alone (although I wouldn’t use such strong language).
• Save function … There is none. I have no clue if the game is supposed to autosave or if there’s checkpoints and forced save spots or whatnot. And honestly, I don’t care. A PC game without a save function has to explain to me why it doesn’t have one, preferrably within the first minutes of play. And then the reason better be good, too (like the one in PoP: Sands of Time was).
• Program crash … Right after shooting the first monster, my game crashed. Not just the game, the whole system halted. It managed to do something I didn’t know was possible: It put the video card into an error state where a soft reset didn’t help anymore (the BIOS then beeped “video card error”), a hard reset did luckily. I’m sorry, EA … is my run-of-the-mill 8800GT (market share according to Valve: 12%, drivers updated) too exotic for you?

All in all, I can confidently conclude that something is wrong in the EA PC testing department. And I can even point to what it is: The ones testing PC games there are not actually PC gamers, but console gamers who have to test the PC version as well. No way those huge bloopers would have made it into the final obvious console port otherwise.

It’s just another game that alienates PC gamers by screwing with their conventions in favour of a game experience similar to the one on the console. In case you haven’t noticed: The demographics of PC players and console players might overlap, but have distinct histories and premises.

Now if you’ll excuse me, work first, and I’ll need some Quake Live (or possibly Left 4 Dead) this evening to calm down. Maybe I’ll give Dead Space another try afterward, the story seems to be great so far after all.

World of Goo

The game we’re looking at is World of Goo, created by the independent developer 2D Boy. It’s out since October 13th, was available on Steam but isn’t anymore in Europe due to some contract confusion – but you can still buy it directly from 2D Boy. I preordered mine from there, and it went entirely smooth.

Oh, something of note: The game comes without DRM! From the mail I got that told me my preorder copy was ready:

World of Goo has absolutely no copy protection or DRM at all, since we want to give you (and everyone) the best experience we can. Thanks for not distributing this, and helping us make this possible!

This means that I’d have bought the game even if it’d have been less great Too rigid DRM has the effect of not letting me buy it, last time that happened was with the Spore I was looking forward to so much

Graphics:

The graphics are utterly cute and charming, perfect for a casual game like this.

Miss World of Goo

Every level has a unique style, the goo balls have a quirky personality and hop around, the backgrounds and level overviews are marvellous. Each chapter has a distinct style, too, four of the five are seasonal and the fifth … is a secret.

Sunset with Goo Balls

The reason why you don’t see five stars here is because the (fixed) resolution they chose is merely 800×600 – while actually playing the pixels don’t bother that much really, but it’s not perfect, and only perfect gets 5 stars.

A nice touch is that the low resolution kinda reminds of those retro classics we all love so much…

Sound:

The only nitpick I have here is that the tracks are rather short (about a minute each) – there’s plenty of them (although they do repeat towards the end), and they greatly support the gameplay and feel of the levels as well. The goo balls make cute little “plop” or chattering noises whenever you pick them up, or drop them, or fling them, or whatever else you can do with them.

Gameplay:

The goal couldn’t be simpler in principle: Guide the goo balls to the exit, collect as many of them as you can by building close to the exit pipe and letting them jump out. The first level has a great sign showing how to do things:

First Level

That’s all the instructions you’ll ever need. Well, and the time trackback feature, another such shield.

The complexity doesn’t come from an overly complicated user interface, but from the different types of goo, and the levels themselves. Whenever you start thinking you might get bored by what you’re currently doing soon, there’s a new level with an entirely new challenge, new types of goo, new ways in which they stick to each other, new ways of interacting with them, and new obstacles to overcome.

But the changes are introduced so carefully that you barely notice you’re playing an entirely different game, it feels totally the same although you’re not using the same mechanics nor components anymore…

Different Way of Doing Things

Some of the levels really are positively hard. For one, I even had to cheat and look it up in their forums.

If you’re bored in the end after all, you can always ramp up the difficulty by trying to get OCD flags for the levels (Obsessive Completion Distinction Criteria) – those require you to finish the level faster, or bring more goo balls to the pipe, or only use a select number of turns.

Fun:

Oh, as if I hadn’t mentioned “fun” enough by now. This game is the most fun game I’ve played in years, period. With some social criticism and dark humour thrown in, of course. The learning and motivation curve are just perfect – you really see that these developers have something so many titles lack these days: Love for their game.

The game isn’t really meant to be one that wastes your time for years and years, like MMOs or online shooters are, so longevity is less of a criterion. Nevertheless, the OCD help there as well, and going back to earlier levels after more experience in more complicated ones is a rewarding experience. Additionally, the game is entirely a puzzler but nevertheless has a story worth of note.

And there’s always the World of Goo Corporation’s tower building minigame to keep you interested after you finished the levels, I had the 25th-highest tower worldwide for a few seconds. Too bad I had built the top bits a wee bit unstable and it crashed horribly.

Overall:

I was very, very tempted to give 5 stars, but the game does have some shortcomings. Since everything else is totally awesome, and it’s easy to find reviews that list what’s good, I’ll list those shortcomings here:

• There are some remaining bugs – I had a two or three crashes. One of them actually deleted my entire profile as well, so I had to start from scratch – luckily, that happened shortly after I reached Chapter 2 for the first time only.
• The music does get a bit repetitive – not because the tracks themselves wouldn’t be great, but because they’re so short.
• The game overall is somewhat short, although Ron Carmel (one of the devs) was probably right when he said that “Beyond the moon chapter in the European version, there will be no extra content. I think we’ve reached the point with this game where more is not better.”

But keep in mind that the game only costs $20, and is from a studio that consists of two people. And has no DRM. Before that background, I should maybe give the fifth star after all (but I won’t, can somebody bind my hand on my back please?)…

Anyway: Go buy it, now! This game finishes the discussion whether games can be art, simply by being art.

Update 2008-10-15 15:24: Gee, if you’re not convinced, there’s a demo now (the entire first chapter), via Rock Paper Shotgun. And you seem to be able to change the resolution with a little hack, although it didn’t quite work for my 1280×1024 (1024×768 went fine though).

GOG Header

Yay! I was watching Good Old Games for some time now, was always looking forward to it since I first saw it. Today, I got the beta access key, a reason to rejoyce and share

First off, it’s awesome because you find games you always wanted to play but never found time to, then it’s awesome because you find games that you never knew were good. Finally, there’s no DRM, and it’s cheap … I’ll let their advertisement speak for itself:

1. We’ve got games your 10-year-old won’t be better at.
2. So you’re cheap. It’s okay – we are, too. ($10 max, currently)
3. You buy it, you keep it. (No DRM!)
4. All games are Vista and XP compatible. (with compatibility hints)
5. Extend the experience with tons of cool and exclusive add-ons.
6. We’re bringing together classic games and a classy community.
7. It’s so easy, your gramma’s probably already playing.

Store Layout

The Welcome Mail

Admittedly, this is a bit of a teaser in another way too, because the beta is only open for those who signed up for it before September 8th, so I’m sorry, you’ll probably not get in. Yet.

The catalogue they have is already impressive by the way. Not only do you find Fallout (both, of course), Descent (all three) and Earthworm Jim, but also underestimated gems like Sacrifice that I’ll love to play again

Now let’s just hope the silly publisher paranoia dies down and they realize that “Help, they sell our games that we don’t sell at all otherwise, and that are pirated all over the web without DRM right now, it’s evil”  doesn’t really make sense.

Or what do you think?

Update 08-09-27 22:34: I played through the tutorial of Sacrifice meanwhile again – gee, that game is really good, even after all this time Sure, the controls are a tad dated, the configuration options could be slightly better, and the graphics show their age, but the game has charme! Something many current-day games sorely lack. And, the payment and download and installation process went entirely smooth, no problems whatsoever – a really good impression the site makes here, continuing in the “no DRM, no hassle” vein Something I gladly pay for.

I hate piracy, but even more so I can’t stand rigid DRM. Particularly when it has compatibility problems with legit programs, restricts other legitimate activities on a computer, or acts akin to a rootkit. Even if EA removed the need to be online to play an offline game.

Anyway, that alone wouldn’t warrant a blog post – but this is utterly hilarious: Tons of customers that are as disgruntled as I am (or even more so, apparently) went to Amazon and did this to Spore’s review score:

Spore Reviews

Well-deserved, EA. This comic here sums it up nicely.

Other reactions: Now also on Basic Thinking (in German), with fitting video, and on Rock, Paper, Shotgun, where the poster takes a stance different from mine and the discussion in the comments is tremendously interesting. Next step: BBC – the mass media are picking up!

Update 08-09-09 20:57: Amazon US meanwhile has nearly 1500 1-star reviews, while Amazon UK deletes anti-DRM comments, and EA continues using SecuROM, all via Basic Thinking. Let’s hope the momentum carries this a bit further into mass media and provokes some more attention before it all dies down under the censoring monetary weight of major corporations.

Update 08-09-12 00:23: More coverage, on ars technica (that I saw, but haven’t linked before), and in German at Spiegel Online, via Crossmediale Kommunikation (German as well).