Assassin’s Creed II DRM Requires Full-Time Internet Connection

Terry Olaes

I Used to be the [H] News Guy
Joined
Nov 27, 2006
Messages
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This blogger vents about the harsh DRM that Ubisoft is requiring for the upcoming PC release of Assassin’s Creed II. The game will require a constant connection to an Ubisoft server and if it loses the connection for any reason, it will pause the game until it can reconnect. If it cannot reconnect after a certain amount of time, the game is terminated without saving. Whoa.

Also, you don't hold onto your saved games anymore. They do. This part is really significant. That's why the game needs the net connection all the time. It's not just for their amusement. The constant contact is necessary because your game is saved on their machine. Not yours. They are claiming that this is for your convenience, because then you can get at your saved games from any computer anywhere, but nobody is fooled.
 
This is pretty harsh...........I'm concerned that gone are the days where your game is stored on your HDD.

The most recent example of this is the Aliens v Predator.
Unless this was an "honest" error on rebellion's part, you cannot save your game in single player offline, you must be connected to Steam online.

I learned this the hard way............played for about 90 minutes offline and lost all progress.

rebellion says they have a fix coming tomorrow, "that corrects saves when going from steam to offline" -----whatever that means. They didn't come right out and say that you could play offline and save the game on your own HDD.

The part about lost connections is really stupid..........Ubisoft goes offline and the paying customer is screwed...........they can't even use their own game..........I mean come on.......even the XBox 360 has less stringent protection, and the bad guys are going to find a work-around anyway.

Fortunately I don't want this game anyway.:mad:
 
And I thought Steam was bad. What is wrong with these gaming companies anymore? Guess what game I won't be buying.
 
This is unacceptable.

Vote with your wallet and don't buy this crap.

Most people have probably already played and beat it on a console (I did before returning it to Gamefly). It's 4-5 months old, the developer has already stated they didn't do any enhancements on it for the PC release (in all that extra time they had). Now it's got the most strict DRM of a singleplayer game to date? When it's DOA at least the DRM will prevent them from blaming piracy, although I wouldn't put it past them still trying.
 
I liked the first Assassin's Creed, I think I got it on sale a few months after release. However, I had already decided I wasn't going to buy AC2 for awhile because they thought it would be cool to charge $60 for a direct console port, with no added graphics enhancements or content. This is just another reason not to go anywhere near the game. The only thing this changed is instead of waiting for the game to be ~$20, now I'll wait until it's <$10. There's so many other great games out there right now (STALKER: CoP is awesome), good luck with that, Ubisoft.
 
Yeah I never got GTA4 for the PC for the same reason, all the different programs I had to install in order to get it to work was just unacceptable in my book. I should never have to connect to a server to play a single player game.... EVER
 
Glad I bought it on PS3 instead of waiting on PC. I get to play it offline without issue, good thing too because it is a really great game. It really saddens me to see the state of PC gaming these days. I have always been a PC gamer first, but with the lack of quality PC exclusives and intolerable DRM practices. I find myself using my consoles more and more. :mad:

Shame to see ubisoft taking this approach. DRM never has and never will work. The only thing DRM does it punish legit customers and make legit customers turn to pirates to play a game they would of otherwise gladly paid for.
 
I was interested in this one after hearing that it makes some pretty big improvements over the first (which I found decent but a bit boring and confusing to play, probably helps a lot to have a gamepad, which I do now). I'm definitely not buying it at the $60 (!!) asking price, though. If anything, I'm actually more interested in getting the first now. I can probably find it at a Best Buy for $20 these days.
 
According to reviews, ACII lets you choose on-line or off-line saves? Doesn't affect the overall necessity for being connected, but afaik you don't *have* to put your saves online.
 
Hmm Spewn, if that's true then this entire thread is wrong?
 
No, ol1bit. The protection requires you to be on-line the whole time, but not because of your save-games.
 
As with all DRM systems the only victim is the paying customer.
I know a lot of people with limited bandwith internet connections.
Hopefully Ubisoft fails with this approach.
 
I don't plan to buy or pirate this game, some friends have it for ps3, i will simply borrow it for them if I can even feel bothered enough to play the game.
 
I dont see a problem, if you buy the game if it looks decent or is. Why cry? What dont have a internet connection? then ok valid reason then. Otherwise really?

My wallet will be deciding only based on the fact if its a decent game or good game to waste 30-50, or hopefully some deals come out which im sure will pop up to overcome this Drm which most find kinda disturbing. Which I do too but eh.
 
I think Rise of Flight was amongf the first to require a full time connection, been out awhile. It is a WW I Flight Sim, Russian coders and very nice airplane graphics. However I would have never bought this POS if I knew you had to be connected just to fly around single player What a bunch of dumb ass Ruskies, Every time I walk through Fry's looking at games I see Rise of Flight has the same big pile of unsold copies. People find out about this crap and do vote with their wallets. Offline Alien vs Preds saves really pissed me off.
 
GTA4 is nothing like this at all. You only have to log in once to RGSC and GFWL after you've installed GTA4 unless you've changed GFWL/RGSC accounts or reinstalled the game, it remembers your credentials.

Of course, that's if you actually own the game.

Hell, after the initial verification of the cd-key takes you online you can go offline forever, you don't even have to log onto RGSC, just play offline, and you can create offline GFWL accounts too.


This new generation of Ubisoft DRM is an unnecessary treatment of legit customers as criminals, the gaming DRM equivalent of house-arrest with a foot-cuff, cameras in your house and calls from your probation officer that have to be answered at any and all times you may want to save, and if he's on his lunch or not working his eight hours a day you're breaking your forced "report once every hour" agreement with him.

Don't buy Ubi games with this DRM, don't even pirate them. Just shun them, send them letters. I've got a stable ISP that goes down five hours a year that I notice, I'd like to not lose my progress made in case it goes down.
 
This form of DRM could be a nice precursor to advertising in single player games as well. If your game client already has to be online at all times to play, why not throw some advertising billboards in there to make some extra money?
 
and especially this headache inducing nightmare:
http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1496868


I'm amazed this wasn't in the news area here long before now. ;)

I think the worst part of that is the Ubisoft quote of:
"What happens if Ubisoft take the DRM servers offline for maintenance, or suffer a technical breakdown?
In the case of a server failure their games will be taken offline, and you'll be unable to play them. "The idea is to avoid that point as much as possible, but we have been clear from the beginning that the game does need an internet connection for you to play. So if it goes down for real for a little while, then yeah, you can't play.&#8232;&#8232;""

No contingency plan, just - 'Yeah, you guys will be screwed if our servers mess up, but we'll try not to let that happen.'
 
I have this reserved right now. I'm canceling it because of crap like this. I will go out and pay for games, but not when they do silly stuff like this. Piracy isn't what's hurting the PC Gaming market, it's silly DRM solutions that make PC Games practically unplayable vs their console counterparts. Bioshock 2 is bad and quite frankly silly enough right now that I have to "log in" to Windows Live in order to play and save my game. I'm sorry Ubi, but this ISN'T the way. Utter garbage...
 
I'm not surprised by this. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me that development companies are looking at ways to drive their markets exclusively to consoles now. They see a larger profit margin there. They'll keep dorking up the pc versions of any console port they put out, blame low sales on piracy, and convince the stock holders that PC game porting/development is not worth it.
 
Who wants to buy a game where you got all this drm working against you. I wouldn't pay a dime for it. They are screwing their original customers as hackers will remove all this protection on release day or before it. Only one that gets hurt here is the customer.
 
Exactly. I won't even be considering buying this.

I had it pre-ordered.. cancelled it the day i saw the first article a couple weeks back on PC gamers website...course the reply from ubisoft was just the nail in the coffin for me buying any of their products ever again...The game companies who have games coming out over the next few weeks.. are going to have slightly inflated figures because of this...while i hope ubisoft goes bankrupt... We dont need any more Hitler Youth run companies... i think we have plenty as it is...
 
Is there an entirely different readership on the weekends here? This has been discussed ad nauseum in the forums for a couple weeks. And to clarify some of the points:

1) The constant connection apparently is because at each load point, or mission, or whatever, the game checks in to the server - not just for saving the game.
2) The $60 price tag is NOT just a high priced port only; the game is including additional DLC content (2, I believe) with the game. Source: http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/62077
 
I can see how they thought this was a good idea. No disc checks, no rootkits, no activations, and users are going to have an active Internet connection 99% of the time anyway. I mean let's face it, unless your Internet is always going out for more than a couple minutes at a time this DRM isn't going to affect you at all.

But there's still very little point to implementing something like this. New DRM schemes never increase sales, and release groups always crack the thing pretty much instantly. All this is going to do is frustrate people. Even people who would not be affected by the DRM are going to refuse to buy the game on principle, so, yeah, bad idea.
 
This form of DRM could be a nice precursor to advertising in single player games as well. If your game client already has to be online at all times to play, why not throw some advertising billboards in there to make some extra money?


That is exactly the reason I didn't buy BF2142.
 
This is awesome, if it helps stomp out piracy as well as storing game progress remotely. I've never understood why Steam or GFWL couldn't do this as part of their service. They store achievements, why not go one step further and store my game progress?

As far as the end-user is concerned, this is a minor price to pay and I'm sure if people went and checked their routers they would probably find they have been connected for weeks on end. I can't even remember the last time I lost internet connectivity.
 
I'm curious to see how well this works. I'll buy but didn't like the first one too much so it will be a sale purchase.
 
this is one of the reason i moved form pc gaming to console gaming. consumers who pay for ther stuff get screwed.
 
As a member of the Canadian military I do a bit of travelling, and relaxing on games on my laptop in the evening or while on the road (train, plane, etc) is my main playing times for most games.

Looks like they lost a sale on this, matter of fact it pisses me off so much I hope if comes out to pirate so I'll play it that way.

Fuck you Ubicock
 
This is awesome, if it helps stomp out piracy as well as storing game progress remotely. I've never understood why Steam or GFWL couldn't do this as part of their service. They store achievements, why not go one step further and store my game progress?

As far as the end-user is concerned, this is a minor price to pay and I'm sure if people went and checked their routers they would probably find they have been connected for weeks on end. I can't even remember the last time I lost internet connectivity.

I hate this type of bullshit. It's like the encrypted PSP game saves. Total BS. It's not cool with me or my pocket book.
 
I dont see a problem, if you buy the game if it looks decent or is. Why cry? What dont have a internet connection? then ok valid reason then. Otherwise really?

My wallet will be deciding only based on the fact if its a decent game or good game to waste 30-50, or hopefully some deals come out which im sure will pop up to overcome this Drm which most find kinda disturbing. Which I do too but eh.

My internet connection isn't very reliable, so even if I was cool with this form of DRM, I wouldn't be cool with getting booted out of a single-player game every half-hour to an hour because my internet connection went south. :(
 
lame. I thought x box users were the real pirates anyway. Didnt M$ shut down a million x boxes for that not to long ago?

I defiinately wont be buying this kind of crap. I was looking forward to checking out this game too but not now.

Hell I think if they just cut the price a bit they could sell more copys and there would be less pirateing. I dont buy any game over $39 as a rule and prefer $29. If I have to wait year for the price to drop so be it.
 
So where's the "don't buy AC 2" editorial?

And Splinter Cell Conviction. And possibly other UbiSoft titles on the PC after that.

I bet it'll be a doozy from Kyle or someone when it happens. I can't wait to see it. :)
 
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