City 16

Hey, neat. Ubisoft’s announced an Online Services Platform to be added to its future PC games. Let’s disingenuously pretend to read it for the first time to see what great services they’ll be adding… Online… As a platform…

What are the key elements of this platform for PC gamers?
Although a permanent online connection is required, this means that a CD/DVD is not required to play the game after installation. The protected game can be installed as many times and on as many computers as you like. Saved games are also synchronized online so the user can continue playing from any location with the game installed.

Waitta minute! A permanent online connection is required? This sounds suspiciously like [pause for effect] Digital Rights Management.

Yeah, ok, so Ubisoft announced this days ago and half the PC gaming portion of the Internet has already exploded about it. Everyone agrees it’s a bad idea. The only person who doesn’t agree, Gerald from this Gamespy article, makes a point so vacuous and out of touch with reality that everyone who reads it should disagree with him on principle. Still, given that I’m half-way through my unexpectedly lengthy Assassin’s Creed II posts and that, if my stats page is to be believed, the majority of people who read this blog are interested in PC gaming, it seemed somewhat remiss of me to ignore the issue.

To briefly get my bias on the whole issue of DRM out of the way, I totally understand that companies feel the need to protect their intellectual properties. As far as I see it, the whole ‘copyright is theft’ argument is both unrealistic and hugely insulting to the developers who’ve taken the time and effort to create their game. That said, Ubisoft’s proposal is completely batshit insane.

Why? The simple reason is that requiring a persistant online connection would make any Ubisoft PC titles I buy henceforth the only games that would be, on occasion, completely impossible to play… I think… wait, hold on.

- 1 Hour Later -

Ok, so when I wrote that last sentence I realised I had no idea if any games would stop me playing them without an Internet connection. Mine is online pretty much constantly, so it seems like the sort of thing I might have missed. So as not to come across as totally ignorant I’ve spent the last hour starting up games and periodically ripping out my wireless USB hoojamaflip to see what happened. First up was Steam, as I knew it had an offline mode and for some reason I was under the impression you needed an online connection to activate it. Ripping out the Internet during a game of Half Life 2: Episode 2 had absolutely no effect which was unsurprising when I realised my firewall had blocked the hl2.exe application while it waited for me to confirm it, meaning it had never been online in the first place. Still in online mode with no connection present I tried to start Portal. It started. It was all proving to be rather anti-climactic. After a stroke of pure genius I restarted Steam and got this error message:

“Fuck You Valve for leaving me unable to play my… Oh, an option to start Steam offline.” Choosing that option started Steam up as normal and gave me access to all the games I subsequently tried.

Ah, but what about Fallout 3? That is inexplicably tied to my Games for Windows Live account, meaning I can only access my savegames by signing into the service. I started it up and was informed that GfW had signed into offline mode still giving me access to all my save data. So yeah, fuck Ubisoft.

You may be wondering what the hell my problem is given that I had to go to all that effort to even see if a lack of connection affected any of my existing games. Well, our area’s Internet connection can be somewhat sporadic. Only the other day I lost connection for a half hour or so while I was playing Fallout 3. The game went into offline mode and continued on. I wonder how a future Ubisoft title would handle that…

What will happen if I lose my Internet connection when I play the game?
If you lose your Internet connection the game will pause while it tries to reconnect. If the Internet connection is unable to resume, the server will have stored your last saved game and you will be able to continue from where you left off once your Internet connection is restored.

Oh good, the game’s completely disabled until connection returns. The Q&A page doesn’t even make clear if you can save your game if the connection is interrupted. Even with a connection certain bandwidth heavy programs, µTorrent for example, knock out all other online processes. If I have to choose between playing the latest Ubisoft titles and completing my back catalog of That’s So Raven episodes*, I know who’s losing out.

The services provided by this move in no way justify the cost. Cloud saving is great, sure, but I doubt Ubisoft has many games that would run smoothly enough on notebooks to warrant it. It works for, say, Torchlight (to the point that I re-bought the game on Steam to have the feature) but that’s because Torchlight runs fine on most hardware. The same can’t be said for AC2, which I doubt many people will be installing on multiple PCs. Even for Ubi’s casual games that notebook would need an online wi-fi connection when on the move, something not widely available for free in the UK. Also, the old ‘CD/DVD not required’ argument – am I the only person who has no fucking problem with putting a DVD in the disk tray? The top picture is a Fallout 3 disk check error, because it was the only piece of DRM I could find to give an error on my computer, and I had to take the bloody thing out of the tray to make it happen.

Ah, here’s a telling question:

Can I resell my game?
Not at this time.

Strikes me as a two-birds-one-stone situation, given how much publishers hate resales. The stupid thing is that, to my mind, EA have already solved this issue with Bioware’s last two releases. Both Dragon Age and Mass Effect give free DLC to people who buy new copies, and offer the same DLC in paid form to those who purchase second hand. That’s a perfectly fine solution as it at least offers the consumer a choice. It’s an encouragement to buy new not a barrier from buying used. In that small distinction is a world of difference.

Bottom line, for me at least, is that, when I said publishers had a right to protect their IPs, well that goes both ways. Consumers have rights too and surely one of those should be that the people who actually purchase the game aren’t punished with a restrictive system that won’t affect those that pirate the game. Because this system will be cracked, as they all are, and future Ubisoft titles will be pirated. I’d argue that people who would have otherwise purchased a title will seriously consider pirating it.

And so, I leave with this question: If the piracy does increase on future titles, is a major publisher going to look at the figures and realise it needs to dial back its DRM or is it going to withdraw from the PC market altogether?

*Because tone and humour don’t always translate well in text I want to make it categorically clear that I have never downloaded an episode of That’s So Raven. Have you ever actually watched that show? Beyond shit.

UK gaming site TheSixthAxis has published a guest writer piece, Consoles Vs PC, arguing that some PC gamers are elitist. I’d like to argue that some sweeping generalisations are tired and inaccurate.

Lets deal with the main purpose of the article straight off: Yes, some PC gamers are elitist. So what? Specifying a trait exhibited by some members of a massive community of people is neither helpful, revelatory, nor the basis of a post. For instance: some Led Zeppelin fans make good lasagna; some console gamers are both immature and borderline illiterate. For example, as a beta tester for SCEE I often have cause to visit the European Playstation forums and, in a misguided attempt to engage the community, started a PC gaming thread. To quote one post to the thread:

EPIC GEEK FEST! sorry, i’m just not a fan of PC Gamers, they mostly seem really nerdy and those sort of poeple [sic] who take deep breathes [sic] after saying something. and talk really loads [sic] with enthusiasm and lie all the time about stuff. and think there no [sic] EVERYTHING.

I’d be offended if I could even decipher what he was trying to say. The point, though, is that I have no desire to go on about the attitude of console gamers because it would be a pointless generalisation that bore little in relation to the attitude of the majority.

Back to the original article and it appears that the writer’s main problem with the PC elitists is how they always keep banging on about how much better a mouse and keyboard is for FPSs than a control pad. That this is his only criticism of the attitude of PC gamers seems strange given that I can think of three or four ways that some PC gamers can be elitist that have nothing to do with control systems. The control system argument is a somewhat flawed criticism for the simple fact that it is largely true. Developers themselves seem pretty convinced of this as evidenced by the fact that they will generally implement aim-assist in the console versions of their shooters. They also tend to avoid online shooters that have cross platform play between the PC and a console, because of the assumed advantage it gives PC players.

None of this actually comes close to my main problem. My main problem is this: Don’t criticise PC gamers of being elitist by being elitist toward PC gamers through use of the same old repetitive clichés that don’t stand up to even the most basic scrutiny.

If they want to play a brand new game, they need to buy that, as well as have a half-decent graphics card and the likes.  We don’t need that, all we need is the relevant console, so they must be very bitter about having to upgrade all the time, and it’s not cheap either.

Actually the majority of PC gaming is done on pretty basic machines thanks to the indie and casual gaming scenes, as well as the two most popular games in all of gaming-land: World of Warcraft and The Sims 2. Even if you don’t take that into account his statement simply isn’t true. My current PC is 18 months old, and the graphics card in it was released 3 years ago. It is still more than capable of playing all modern releases on the highest settings and when that stops being the case I’ll still have the ‘high’ and ‘medium’ settings to look forward to. One of the advantages with an open platform is that it requires developers to tailor their games to suit a range of graphical settings. Can you live with slightly lower detail shadowing? Do you really need to have full anisotropic filtering? No? Congratulations, you’ve just bought yourself another couple of years of life out of your graphics card. This is unlike when a new generation of consoles are released and you’re forced to upgrade or miss out on the majority of new releases.

Also, [consoles] give you a standardised control input system, which is fantastic; developers can map functions and moves to pre-defined buttons and combinations, and it just feels better holding a hand-sized controller, instead of a flat keyboard and a cheap mouse from Tesco’s.

I don’t even understand the point he’s trying to make about mapping functions, as this is something I’ve done on both console and PC games. As for the cheap mouse jibe, my mouse came with my computer for free and was designed by someone who understood ergonomics so I fail to see the problem.

This is probably starting to sound like the rantings of PC gaming fanboy but, owning all but one of the current generation of platforms, I probably do the majority of my gaming on consoles. Had I seen an article bemoaning how bad consoles were compared to the PC I’d probably be writing this article from the opposite perspective because, at any level, fanboyism is a tiresome fanatical allegiance to something that is, essentially, nothing more than a personal preference.