Evil Genius Review

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            Evil Genius

Review by SteerpikeOctober 2004

Mediocrity: A History

I want so badly to give this game a good review, but it commits the one crime I cannot forgive: for lack of testing, for clumsiness and laziness on the part of its designers, it is but a glimmer of what it could be. Evil Genius is the well-intentioned but desperately flawed sophomore offering from Elixir Studios, the British developer responsible for 2003’s well-intentioned but desperately flawed Republic: The Revolution. In this its second game, Elixir channels the spirit of Dungeon Keeper 2, inviting us to play as a wicked mastermind in the campy world of sixties-ish spy movies. You will build an underground lair, conduct criminal activities across the globe, construct a doomsday device, and ultimately bring all the world under your megalomaniacal control. But where Dungeon Keeper 2 was graceful, elegant, superbly tuned—possibly the perfect RTS—Evil Genius is clumsy, boorish, frustrating, and frankly not worth the price of admission.

Any game that has the audacity to compare itself to both X-Com and Dungeon Keeper 2 on its box cover has some serious shoes to fill. Holding it to that quote, I find it sorely lacking, especially in the areas of interface design, play balance, and AI.  It is worth noting, however, that the major flaws in this game are patchable (though it would take one hell of a patch to cover everything), so it’s possible that Elixir is just guilty of unleashing a flawed release candidate on the public. The game itself, the concept, is just fine.

You play as one of three criminal masterminds just starting their careers in world domination. The proud owner of a Volcanic Island of Undisclosed Location, you must use your seed capital to get an underground lair going, staff it with assorted functionaries, and then get to the serious business of trying to take over the world.  This is the Dungeon Keeper 2 portion of the game: dig out and build rooms, manage money, hire people, supervise evil activities, and so forth.

The X-Com portion—and that comparison is on the same level as comparing onions and oranges—takes place on the World Domination Map, where you place minions for the purpose of stealing cash, perform acts of infamy to increase your evil standing, steal unique treasures, and generally do your best to upset the delicate balance of world order. So far as I can tell, the only thing that Evil Genius has in common with X-Com is that both games have a world map.

I’ve been told that I compare games to other games too much, so if this is a quirk that bugs you, it might be best if you stop here.  Evil Genius is all the Dungeon Keeper 2 crowd has had to look forward to since that franchise came to an undeserved end, and it’s on that great game that this mediocre one is based.  Pretty much everything that Dungeon Keeper 2 did right, Evil Genius does wrong. But there are also some things it did do right, so we’ll talk about them too.

Evil 101

You can’t just be evil willy-nilly, of course; if you go too far, the forces of good will come to teach you a lesson. The world is divided into five regions, each with its own anti-evil organization: S.M.A.S.H., P.A.T.R.I.O.T., S.A.B.R.E., and so forth. It’s a prerequisite of crime-fighting that your outfit be an acronym.

As you conduct your evil operations, you gain heat and notoriety.  The former is the amount of attention that your criminal activities are garnering by region; get too much heat and some people will be dispatched to your evil island to deal with you. Heat goes down if you stay out of trouble. Notoriety, meanwhile, increases as you commit nefarious deeds. You need notoriety to get the respect of other evil people and to succeed at certain mission objectives.

The forces of good have two methods of dealing with your evil self.  They’ll send out standard agents pretty regularly, to stalk the sunny shores of your island, snooping for evil activity. Should they locate the evil door to your base, they’ll jimmy the lock and poke around inside—if they find nothing, they’ll eventually go away and you’ll lose some heat. But if they see something untoward, they’ll race back to HQ and soon the island will be swarming with do-gooders, so it’s often best to just drop them in your evil prison.  Problem is, though the game insists that heat is the mechanism by which opponents attack you, in truth it seems more random to me.  There was always a pretty significant presence on my evil island, and after a certain point they attacked relentlessly and with such overwhelming force that I couldn’t use the World Domination Map anymore, because I literally needed all of my human assets to protect my little volcanic island.

The other method that the good guys use is the Super Agents. Super Agents are the James Bond/Cate Archer/Maxwell Smart kinds of people who can seriously disrupt your evil plans, both on the World Domination Map and if (God forbid) they ever come to your island. This would be a better mechanism for game challenge if they hadn’t made the Super Agents hypersentient and nearly impossible to kill. Even imprisoning one is ridiculously dangerous. One time, Super Agent Mariana Mamba (bikini and butcher knife; think Ursula Andress from Dr. No) burst into my evil lair and proceeded to slaughter literally every minion I had at my command—about 75 people—before packing up one of the priceless treasures I’d stolen and leaving me alone on my island (I had hidden my Genius in the safety of the inner sanctum).

You have your own form of Super Agents, called henchmen. These are supercriminals like yourself, but (presumably) they lack the brainpower to be evil geniuses. So they hire themselves out to you.  More become available as your notoriety rises. Only Super Agents can permanently kill a henchman, but Super Agents are so vastly more powerful than henchmen that combat between the two is kind of a joke.

Generally speaking, henchmen are among the most useless units in the game. They wander randomly, usually to the most remote and irrelevant evil locations on your island. You can control their movement, but they pick up their meanderings again unless you maneuver them all the time—while Mariana Mamba was butchering my people, my two henchmen were having a smoke in the freezer, totally ignoring the howling alarms and the shrieks of the dying. Their pathing is abominable, they get stuck on things, their “special abilities” generally wind up killing more of your people than enemies, and their verbal responses are flat-out racist. Their flaws bring into sharp relief that this game is a great idea with very poor execution.

Witness the Power of this Fully Operational Battle Station

One of the most fun and challenging aspects of Dungeon Keeper 2 was the amount of precision required to dig out and build a functional lair. The game’s true masters turned their dungeons into objets d’art, beautifully ticking crystalline lattices of efficiency and design. It was deeply satisfying to watch a perfectly conceived dungeon humming away as creatures went about their daily lives. Lair-building in Evil Genius is also fun, but it includes some bizarre flaws that really hurt the overall effect—due in part to the fact that lair efficiency appears to be of no importance whatsoever, and there’s no need to display the level of care and exactitude so necessary in the game’s spiritual predecessor.

If you decide you don’t like a room and delete it, for example, the area fills up with evil dirt again. You can completely rearrange your base whenever you like. It’s an underground lair. The whole point of it should be that you have to be careful, because once the dirt is out you can’t put it back in. Furthermore, there are clumsy bugs in the system: connecting rooms with corridors should be a snap, but the game simply refuses to build corridors sometimes, saying they’re too narrow when they’re not.

Evil Genius offers a nice variety of rooms (though who ever heard of an underground lair with no guard post?) and is more forgiving than Dungeon Keeper 2 when it comes to the efficiency of nonsquare areas. This is because the efficiency of a room in this game is dependent not on position on the map or proximity to other rooms, but on the furniture you place inside, so you can build to whatever specification you like and stock the place with the furniture you’ll need. However, furniture is stupidly restrictive when it comes to placement and access. Items block each other, people get trapped behind stuff, and the limitations are absurd. For example, you can’t put an evil fire extinguisher on the same section of wall as an evil security camera. Why? A genius might know; I do not.

You control access using evil security doors, which are also flawed.  Doors have four completely useless lock levels that ten minutes of playtesting could have improved. Why can’t you set doors so that only certain minion types are allowed through? Why can’t you order doors to be guarded but still open for your people? Why can’t doors be set to only open when approached from one side? And why on Earth can’t you designate certain areas of your base off-limits, so your personnel aren’t constantly wandering there to sneak cigarettes instead of doing work?

Another great thing about the doors is that they’re useless as security devices. Agents will try to pick the locks to gain access to your base, an activity they could easily dispense with since your minions are constantly walking through the doors, which open for them automatically. Door opens, agent runs through. Security bypassed. If only Bond had it so easy.

You have access to a wide variety of nefarious traps with which to protect your island, but in the end they, too, have too many problems to be valuable. A new and unnecessarily boorish linking system allows you to set up extremely complicated trap scenarios using pressure pads, but in my experience traps killed my people far more often than they killed—or even fooled—the enemy.  The Dungeon Keeper 2 strategy of putting traps at breach points or entrances to offset minor invasions just doesn’t work in Evil Genius, because the traffic of your own minions through those points means that they’ll be the likely victims every time a trap fires.

One section that should have been dispensed with entirely is the hotel-building. Despite the fact that you lair is housed inside an evil volcano on a remote and desolate island, gaggles of tourists inexplicably show up and roam the beaches. If they wander into your base and see something nasty in the proverbial woodshed, they’ll return home and tell the agents of justice, and your heat will increase.  Thus, you must build and maintain a hotel to corral the tourists and keep them away from your lair. This would be okay if the hotels worked—which they don’t—or if you didn’t need to staff the place with crucial Valet minions, meaning they’re not available to do other work. I wound up using automated sentry guns, not hotels, to deal with tourists. They tried to throw everything including the kitchen sink into Evil Genius, and the result is an overly complicated morass of frustration and poor interface design.

The World Domination screen is equally clunky. There are two preset zoom levels—one is too far out, the other is too far in. Movement of your minions, represented by little game piece–looking icons, is unintuitive. You receive no warning when an enemy agent or Super Agent appears in an area where your operatives are committing evil acts, so oftentimes you visit the screen only to find that someone has wiped out a gang of your followers. Finally, the World Domination Map is the only place where you can review your heat levels, and there’s no simple way to view your heat for each of the five do-gooder alliances at once.

Frankly, I could have done without the World Domination section.  It seems tacked on and runs poorly. Its chief purpose is to display the hundreds of acts of infamy you’ll want to commit, both as mission objectives and to increase your notoriety. And, of course, it’s where you get your money—but money is a fickle thing in Evil Genius. You don’t pay your minions or henchmen (!) and pay no cash upkeep for your island or its facilities. You just pay for rooms and furniture, so once your base is “done,” there’s little reason to spend more money.

There Is Still Good in You, I Can Sense It

It’s fairly obvious why Evil Genius is so clumsy a game.  Pretty much all of the creative calories that Elixir has seem to have gone into some really top-notch graphics (for a strategy game)—it sports vivid colors, superb animations, and a level of detail that’s frankly beyond belief. Every evil action your minions perform has a unique and often hilarious set of animations associated with it; it’s fun to just zoom in and watch your people going about their evil daily business.

Reflections, shadows, and similar 3D candy are used to great effect in shiny tile floors, beeping and whirring machinery, and various outdoor effects. This game has really excellent graphics, and the attention to detail is stunning, right down to the logos on the security cameras. Elixir worked its evil tail off making this game as pretty, and as funny, as possible.

And it is funny. It’s so funny that even Dungeon Keeper 2 seems a little dull, humorwise. Evil criminal masterminds are gut-busters when you think about it. Giant lasers, doomsday devices, cunningly disguised traps, goofball henchmen—it’s all there, ripe for mockery. And they didn’t stop at the obvious stuff: If you don’t feel like torturing imprisoned agents in your standard issue interrogation chair, no problem! Pop them in the giant electric mixer in the kitchen or squash them between the moving shelves in your archive room and see how fast they talk. There are, however, no traps or rooms that sport dangerous marine life like sharks or electric eels. You can’t really be an evil madman if you don’t have a shark tank.

The opening score is beautifully evocative of every Bond film ever made, and the in-game music exhibits the same flavor. Voice acting, especially from the Evil Geniuses, is tuned for humor and delivered with great accents and superb comic timing. Generally speaking, if sound and humor were all that made a game good, we’d be bandying phrases like “game of the year” around. But it’s not.

Evil Genius is reasonably stable; I experienced a few crashes but suspect they’re more the result of my system than the game.

You Have Failed Me for the Last Time

You have two types of evil followers: the aforementioned henchmen, who you can control directly but who ignore those orders and are almost entirely useless due to rotten AI and bad pathing; and minions, who you cannot control directly. Minions do the basic menial stuff in the base: tidy up, handle construction, move body bags, guard the place, and so forth. Theoretically, they’re supposed to go about their activities without any but the most macro-scale input from you.

But as usual, the system is flawed. To secure your base, you set up evil security networks composed of cameras and loudspeakers.  When you hit the panic button, intruders (again, in theory) are to be gunned down by all of your menials as they race to the enemy’s location.

But most of them don’t race to the enemy’s location. Most just stand there. You must keep your base on constant amber alert in order to get your people to carry guns; otherwise, they’ll fight with their fists (and they generally fight with their fists anyway).  Worse, opponents are dealt with through a system called tagging, which is both clumsy and incomplete. You can tag anyone: ignore, kill, imprison, or weaken. If someone has a kill tag and a minion wanders by, that minion will try to kill him.

Tagging is a big problem. You have to manually tag every enemy who enters your base, or your people will ignore them utterly. Why the vaunted security networks can’t be set to automatically tag anyone who, say, goes beyond a certain point inside the base is anyone’s guess. But since your people and automated defenses won’t attack someone that’s not tagged, and only you can tag opponents, the system requires constant supervision.

The inability to tell minions where to go and not go is where combat in the game breaks down. I can’t count the number of times I sat there watching as agents blew up parts of my base while minions ignored evil alarms and went about their daily business. Your minions are stupid, and they’re stupid in ways they shouldn’t be. The Valet minion, for example, essentially fills the shoes of Dungeon Keeper 2’s Imp during combat: he picks up body bags and moves them to the freezer, puts out fires, stuff like that. Like Imps, Valets are all but defenseless. Unlike Imps, who run away from dangerous areas, returning only when they get an all-clear, Valets cheerfully walk right into the middle of a firefight and get gunned down. Bad-AI frustrations like this abound.

Each minion has stats that decrease over time and must be replenished using assorted rooms and evil items in your base. But stats decrease far too quickly, and minions aren’t too good at recognizing when they need to, say, head to the archives to brush up on their Smarts stat or visit the pharmacy to boost their Life stat. The result is minions who spend a lot of time staring blankly at the wall because their Smarts have reached zero or, worse, just dropping dead.

Minions turn into other minions: the basic Worker is your primary drone, recruited on a time schedule. Workers can do everything, but not as well as their upgraded counterparts. If you want to train Valets, you need to go out into the world, kidnap a hotel maid, and torture her into giving up her wisdom. The torturer then turns into a Valet and can train others in the Training Room. Valets, in turn, can be upgraded to Spin Doctors and other, more skilled social minions, whose primary duty is to keep the base tidy and reduce heat. Same goes for guards, technicians, and so forth. It’s a good system, but limitations on the number of people you can have working for you mean that you never have quite enough minions to do what you want. Also, if all of an advanced minion type get killed, you have to go out into the world, kidnap another representative of that type, and go through the whole process again. When taken in conjunction with the suicidal Valet example above, it can get damned annoying.

There’s also no comprehensive system of tracking or cataloguing your minions, finding out who they are, where they are, and what they’re up to. Sure, you can double-click one and get the evil gist, along with an unhelpful rundown of activity like “Working for you,” or “Standing there.” But this info should be available as a mouse-over, not a double click, and there should be some way to track all of your minions at once.

Evil Always Prevails, Because Good Is Dumb

It all comes down to control and pacing. Control in the sense that you don’t have enough; minion AI is insufficiently tuned to trust that they’ll do the right, or even the wise, thing. Control is also bad in the areas of pathing, because minions and henchmen alike try to make it to their destination in a straight line. If there is no straight line, they get stuck.

Pacing is the final critical flaw in Evil Genius. You spend a lot of time waiting, either for more minions to train up or for your heat to go down, or for something else beyond your control to happen or stop happening. A lot of time is spent staring at the screen, waiting. And that gets boring.

Sculptors often say that the piece inside the marble block is already there; they’re just freeing it from the excess. Dungeon Keeper 2 was similar in many ways—the game is designed in such a way that there are clear right and wrong ways to do things. And yet you never felt that the game was heavy-handed or dull, and you never sat around and waited. There was always something to do or supervise. Evil Genius aims for the Dungeon Keeper 2 paradigm but misses the evil mark due to sheer awkwardness of interface, design, and AI. That’s a pity, because as great as Dungeon Keeper 2 is, there are only so many times you can make the perfect dungeon. I was hoping that Evil Genius would be a followup we could enjoy for years. Ultimately, Evil Genius wasn’t tested enough, and it shows.

That said, you’ll note that it escapes the evil Rotten Egg award, and it makes that escape for just one reason: despite my myriad and valid complaints about the game, I spent hours and hours playing Evil Genius and had fun for most of that time. Rome: Total War, a title that’s certainly a contender for game of the year and a triumph in every respect, sat idle while I cajoled Evil Genius into being a good game. That I failed is not my fault (it’s never the mastermind’s fault) … personally, I blame the ineptitude of my subordinates. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Elixir Studios Publisher: Vivendi Universal Release Date: September 28, 2004

Available for: Windows

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System Requirements

Windows 98SE/Me/2000/XP PIII 800 MHz or higher (P4 1.5 GHz recommended) DirectX 9.0b 128 MB RAM (98SE/Me), 256 MB RAM (2000/XP) GeForce2 MX 16 MB or equivalent DirectX® 9 compatible video card (64 MB Geforce 3 recommended) 300 MB free hard drive space 16x CD-ROM drive (24x recommended) DirectX® 9.0b compatible sound card MS compatible mouse Keyboard

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      Copyright © Electric Eye Productions.  All rights reserved.  No reproduction in whole or in part without express written permission.

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29 Responses to The Long, Sordid Tail of DRM

  • Meho

    Good one.

    Of course, it will be very interesting to see the battle between crackers and UBI’s cryptographers. PC version of Assassin’s Creed II is already circulating the warez scene, although as yet uncracked. Everybody seems to think it will be cracked in a couple of weeks time at worst, which, admittedly is better for UBI than what usually happens (games cracked before release). Of course, I won’t be buying it because I find this practice unnacceptable (and I do have the console version anyway) but the success of this game and its DRM might mean quite a lot in the future. Of course, we ARE moving towards the age where you will be required to be connected to do any playing at all, whatwith the Gaikai and OnLive systems rearing their heads on the horizon. Doesn’t mean I have to like it, eh?

  • Spike

    I went to the Ubisoft website and looked at their list of published games.  It seems that the last of their games I played was the last Myst game in 2005.  In fact the only Ubisoft games I’ve played have been Myst games.  So I don’t see that their new DRM crime-against-my-privacy will have much of an effect on me.  But I hate the idea.  It’s an “Off with their heads!” kind of development.  Reminds me of the idea that people will put up with lost privacy in exchange for security.  In this case the security is only to benefit Ubisoft.  Yes, I allow my privacy to be violated every day – each time I visit Amazon, or read Google News -the list goes on and on.  BUT THOSE ARE MY CHOICES.  I also have a choice about where and how I spend my money, and I’d refrain from buying a game that allows so much intrusion into my computer/life.  A game that tells me how I must live my life even in the smallest of ways such as always being connected to the internet is a game I can forgo.

  • Jason O

    Consoles CAN be connected to the internet 100% of the time, but there are still many consoles that never go online. Modern Warfare 2 sold over 11 million copies, yet XBox Live only shows 840,000 users that have been on-line with it. That’s not played online, that means they played the game in any mode while connected to XBox Live.

    Games that have required an internet connection and were multiplayer only have a history of vanishing quickly from the console marketplace. Phantasy Star ONLINE did much better on the Gamecube then it did on the XBox. What was the difference? Oh yeah, you could play PSO without an internet connection on the Gamecube, the XBox version require a live account and an internet connection. That’s hardly the only example but one that is near and dear to my heart.

  • Bennet

    No, no, you don’t get it! Ubisoft’s “always connected” requirement isn’t DRM, it’s value-add for you, the beloved customer. Just like the Albertsons supermarket chain requires employees to plaster obnoxiously bright orange “Thank you for shopping with us!” stickers on your Coke and milk not because they think you’re stealing them but to express their sincere gratitude for your patronage.

    Maybe my memories of a time when consumers paid for a product and got the product, unadorned by FBI warnings and impossible to open wrappings and authentication servers that can vanish at any time without warning were planted by aliens. In the current cultural climate it’s certainly difficult to believe that time ever existed.

  • Meho

    But Steerpike makes a good point: business model, retail model is lagging behind the times. And developers, instead of researching ways to use the existing systems to sell more games rather research new ways to piss off their paying customers.

    Seriously, in my opinion, pirates pirate games because they are better value than retail games. Not just in the sense that they get to spend less money on them, but they get them faster, do not have to go through any hassle with DRM and have full control over the game. I think that Gabe Newell put it best saying that Valve sees pirates as customers who haven’t been served yet.

    I think UBI and their ilk should look for ways to make retail games more valuable to their customers than (free) warez copies. Yes, stuff like achievements/ trophies helps a little, sure. There are other ways too and one of them is resale value. But, oh, what a surprise, used games market pisses publishers off MORE than pirates do. In fact most of the current DRM schemes are only effective against resales. EA’s ten dollar project and all other free DLC on day one initiatives. So, honestly, I’m afraid that UBI’s online-all-the-time-or-no-service DRM is basically only going to affect sales of used games. The crackers are going to bring their games to pirates eventually. I believe that draconic DRM schemes such as this will only inspire people like GeoHot, Dark Alex and Yoshihiro to spend more of their time on circumvention. Their street cred is going to be huge after all…

    What Valve seem to understand is that playing games through Steam should make playing MORE valuable/ comfortable than not playing games through Steam (which is, at the end of the day a DRM system). Being able to instal a game on as many machines as you want and not having to have a disc in the drive is exactly what pirated games give us too, but with Steam you also retain all your stats, friends lists, achievements and everything. So it’s BETTER than playing pirated games. I only hope that UBI wake up and realise they have to ADD value, not just subtract freedoms.

  • Lewis B

    I’m not really sure I see their DRM as a huge problem.  If my PC is turned on, so is my internet.  I’m fully aware that my name is probably on a million data bases already, and although it might be annoying knowing that Ubisoft have implemented such a security feature, if you don’t physically notice it, I don’t particularly care.

    I’m currently playing Myst at the moment, having never before.  What an odd game…

  • Meho

    Well, you know, just from a philosophical standpoint: if the game is unplayable as soon as you don’t have Internet connection (which, I’m afraid, happens to me more regularly than I am comfortable with) for no other reason than making sure you have paid for it then to me this is pretty much unnacceptable. Requiring a connection for something that is a function of the game itself is OK, but enforcing it just for the sake of protection of the publisher, sorry, no sale.

  • Lewis B

    True Meho.  I had 40 minutes the other day before I went out and thought I would have a quick skirmish on Dawn of War II.  Steam (despite my love for it) wouldn’t launch the game because for some reason it kept freezing and refusing to connect or launch in offline mode.  I couldn’t actually locate the source directory either to boot the game up manually. So, I didn’t get to play and instead spent 40 minutes in a fit of rage cursing Valve and all who work under them. 

    Not exactly the same situation, but not hugely dissimilar.

  • Gregg B

    I’m really not concerned about the privacy issue simply because that illusion is just that, and doesn’t really comfort or unsettle me. My problem with this whole thing is that internet connections can be temperamental at the best of times and the idea that if the connection falters I will lose my progress (and thus my invested time which I’d argue is more valuable than my money) then quite frankly Ubi can fuck off. I’ve been pretty placid up to press with DRM simply because it’s not seemed that intrusive but this will affect the paying customers more than the pirates. It devalues the product and I fear it will push otherwise paying customers to download cracked versions that don’t suffer from this shit. Which, of course, will play into Ubi’s hands.

    Am I right in believing all this stems from the hideous retail model that just refuses to die? Physical retail creates pressuring deadlines, costs considerably more due to increased physical production (and overheads in staffing and floor space), it’s inflexible with stock limitations and shelf space dictating the range of titles available in any given store and by the sounds of things is the sole reason for this ‘tail’. If you look at Steam, it isn’t always the newest games that sell the most due in no small part to their sales and weekend deals.

    “I wonder if we’ll ever get to a point where a person would be just as likely to invest in a beloved classic as a hot new release.”

    From my experience there are a lot of people who simply can’t stomach old looking games, even some of my friends who’ve been playing games since they were young have turned into total graphics whores. Seriously you want to see the totally underwhelmed look on their faces when I show them XCOM for any period of time. We’re at a stage now where graphics are so advanced that for a lot of people going back so far to sample an allegedly classic title is simply too much. Thankfully GOG is doing a fantastic job of making these titles as accessible, and valuable, as possible.

    EDIT: Spot on Meho. My point exactly.
    See what I mean though Lew? Time. Valuable stuff. A quick skirmish on DoW turned into a 40 minute skirmish with Steam.

  • Mat

    This seems like an awful idea.. or at least one which sounds like a good idea to somebody somewhere, but in reality is unworkable.

    Since I’ve been a paying internet customer I have lived at 3 different addresses and used around 5 different ISP’s. I have ALWAYS had problems with my internet connection. With my current set up it tends to go down if a menacing looking cloud passes overhead..

  • xtal

    Some people may like to play a game offline now and then; this is especially easy with older ones before the dawn of activation codes and online authentication. While those aren’t that annoying, having to maintain a constant internet connection just to play a game that you paid for, which is not specifically a MMO, really bites.

    Gregg B said:
    “Am I right in believing all this stems from the hideous retail model that just refuses to die? Physical retail creates pressuring deadlines, costs considerably more due to increased physical production (and overheads in staffing and floor space), it’s inflexible with stock limitations and shelf space dictating the range of titles available in any given store and by the sounds of things is the sole reason for this ‘tail’. If you look at Steam, it isn’t always the newest games that sell the most due in no small part to their sales and weekend deals.”

    I agree with this. Just a few years ago I couldn’t see myself paying for intangible, digital goods. Fast forward to now and it’s really my preferred method of computer gaming, whether it’s GOG, Steam, or elsewhere, I find it’s the model that works best for the customer. If I’m not mistaken, I believe once upon a time that was who the industry was trying to serve, no? The customer?

  • Cesar

    You know, I’m from Brazil and there piracy is HUGE. Maybe for that reason I feel for the industry and understand the efforts to stop it. However, I suspect this crack delay would have a very minor impact in markets like Brazil. People can’t afford the games, so they wouldn’t pay full price anyway.

    It is a shame that we don’t have privacy anymore. The other day a friend of mine on XBox Live sent me a message to congratulate me on a goal I scored in Fifa 10. I didn’t know but apparently not only you can see I’m playing Fifa, but you also see when I score and my avatar cheers! While that sounds very cool, it is also very disturbing. But like Matt points very well, privacy is already gone. And since I don’t have it anymore, why not help stop piracy?

    On the other hand, the plurality of solutions is a different matter, it becomes a hassle. I think the solution should be platform dependent, not publisher dependent. In Brew phones, the control is embedded in the system and you cannot use an app if it cannot be verified, which means if you are not connected to the network you can’t play.

    Unfortunately that cannot be applied to consoles, there’s a considerable number of devices outside the internet umbrella. But if the game constantly checks if you are online and tries to authenticate the copy, online piracy will suffer a big hit and the technological move towards full connectivity will make the practice more and more efficient over time.

  • Andrew

    Not going to buy the game, long tail or not, it sucks to have that kind of persistent connection needed for offline play. Not even just startup authorisation either. I must admit any Game For Windows Live games can be similar (Dawn of War 2 being one of them necessitating it) although most of them allow offline profiles, and most of them allow the saves to be moved easily between any online or offline accounts.

    Oh, and if you’re disconnected it won’t kick you out of the game too, even Microsoft didn’t get that wrong.

    I don’t even understand how privacy comes into it, my main issue is twofold:
    – The above note about simple, offline play (and disconnects for blips in service)
    – The fact it isn’t just your connection that is necessary, it is THEIR connection and servers

    The second point as a partial game historian leads me to wonder how many years (not decades) the servers will be there. Publishers have removed much more necessary servers quickly if they are a cost liability (or they want to push people onto a newer game…). Downtime is also, considering some of the services require payment (Xbox Live for instance) devastatingly poor considering the user base sizes, especially on high load days (and I wonder if we’ll see “Assassins Creed 2 unplayable at launch due to server overload” at all, heh). Lucky it’s “just games” though, no worries if we only have 99% uptime right?! 😉

    (Also, frankly their Assassins Creed 1 port was poor until they patched it, where at least then it was playable (in full on 16:9…for some reason), which makes me wary of any PC release of a console game they do. I wonder also if they still have unskippable cutscenes, I’ve not checked it out on the consoles).

    The fact they’ll never have enough sales of this PC version due to the earlier console release to either say this is a roaring success or roaring failure. It’s the longest end of the tail in the first place. Or they’ll lie about whatever happens anyway. It’s utterly bizarre…I just don’t understand it.

  • Meho

    Cesar: I’m in Serbia and here piracy reigns supreme (much worse than Brazil, I imagine) but still, this is pure and simple bullshit. I purcahsed BioShock 2 today, for my PS3 even though I’d prefer to play it on my PC just because of the stupid DRM that won’t let me control the use of a game I pay for. They can fuck off with that. So, my purchase was influenced by DRM, depsite the game being more natural to play on a PC. Protection measures should not create this kind of bitterness in a human being.

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    The issue of server overload on release days is significant. Think about it – a game like Modern Warfare 2? Or any other hotly anticipated release? Of course the servers would go down. It’s not cost-effective to install a server infrastructure capable of handling Day Zero traffic. That would royally piss people off.

    Ubi and others who use draconian DRM typically insist that if they ever go out of business or shut servers down, they’ll issue patches so the games can be played offline.

    Around the holidays here, big stores like Best Buy station a guy at the exit. His job is to go through your bag and consult your receipt to make sure you haven’t stolen anything. That’s a very similar ideology to this one: treat all consumers like thieves in hopes of catching the few who are.

  • Lewis B

    Considering most MMOG servers cannot cope on launch day, I see it as a gaurentee that when the next Modern Warfare is released, if they do follow through with this, would see many unhappy players.

  • lakerz1

    This new DRM policy will totally be screwing me over because I have a wireless internet setup, but my signal is a bit weak so here and there it drops out for a 10-15 second period before it reconnects.  Plus my wireless router is a bit wonky and will just stop working once in awhile until I cycle power to it.  So, until my setup changes, I will be forced to avoid all Ubi PC games that use this.

  • Igor Hardy

    I seriously doubt a person which would normally pirate a game, will pay money for it just because she has to wait a short while longer for the cracked version. This can work only for very cheap games – like 1$ cheap.

  • Meho

    Just for those keeping tabs: the Russian version of Assassin’s Creed II has apparently been successfully cracked, with a fix for the saves too. Of course, I don’t KNOW this for sure but that’s the word circulating through the grapewine.

  • Cesar

    Brazil is a strong competitor in the piracy rates. 95%-97% if I am not mistaken.

    Anyway, I don’t have a problem with the privacy issue. Not even with the assumption that we are all thieves. If you extrapolate that idea, you will conclude we shouldn’t have patrol cars on the streets. They assume people will commit crimes and have to keep watch. Homo homini lupus. Society isn’t perfect and even though losses are part of the model, no one is ready to lose out of good faith alone. I don’t mean to say DRM and police watch are the same thing, I’m just saying it’s not that simple to draw a line where it becomes offensive to monitor society.

    That being said, it is not acceptable to have a DRM impact gameplay at all. I don’t mind it authenticating my copy. But if I am offline it has to work. And if I loose connection during the game I shouldn’t be kicked out.

    And while the efficacy of the solution might be questionable under these circumstances, like I said in the previous comment, it only tends to increase.

  • Andrew

    “Ubi and others who use draconian DRM typically insist that if they ever go out of business or shut servers down, they’ll issue patches so the games can be played offline.”

    I have seen this happen to absolutely zero games ever. The fact that it is nearly impossible to sanction any work on IP if a company is in administration is the key. That and it is non-trivial to get around your own disk DRM by producing an installer that will work with your disk copy to install it.

    I’d love to be proved wrong…this is by far the most worrying thing of the deal, just installed Bioshock 2 and it has online activation (sigh)…worried I might need to download cracked versions to install it in the future!

    Oh, did you see the patch notes of the first patch? It makes the DRM very very very slightly “better” (I mean, better as in “still shit”):

    http://www.fileshack.com/file.x/17456/Assassin%27s+Creed+2+Patch+1.01+-+US

    “Game can now be continued from the exact same point when connection is restored”

    Ho ho ho. Ho.

  • Gregg B

    I like this bit:

    “Only those who purchased a copy of ACII or SHV legally appear to be affected. Pirates playing illegally downloaded cracked versions of the game are able to play without a problem.”

    Is it apparent pirates are having no problems yet? If they’ve properly cracked it then what I feared (above) is true. Last I heard was that the DRM apparently downloads levels or important files as you play. I don’t know whether this is true or not though.

  • Spike

    Meho beat me to it.  I just read a similar article on The Register.  I don’t suppose that the DDoS attack will make Ubi rethink its evil ways, but this might (I can dream, can’t I?):

    “Meanwhile Ubisoft’s much criticised controls have been broken by software hackers. A hacker group called Skid-Row managed to bypass DRM restrictions on Silent Hunter 5 less than 24 hours after the game was published. Skid Row has releasing a crack for the game based on this work, Zdnet reports. ®”

    Full article here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/03/08/ubisoft_anti_drm_hack_attack/

  • Littermate

    Spike.  RE: The Register article
    There is a comment to that article that claims the crack for SH5 is not a complete crack and would only allow an incomplete experience, because not only are save games stored online but some of the game data files are stored online too, implying that the boxed game you buy is incomplete.  This seems plausible and effective IMO, because if I was demanding an internet connection for my software this is how I would do it.  It demands not only that a games code be cracked but that missing data files be supplied too.

  • Spike

    Having just read this article – link below – I’m thinking that DRM will be fine and dandy AND hunky-dory with me as long as the packaging it comes in is “green”.  Yep.  That makes it more palatable.

    http://www.fastcompany.com/1620105/ubisoft-green-recycled-case-digital-manual-sustainable-packaging

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    I would kind of like to buy games in potato cases.

  • xtal

    I was thinking… and remembered one of the most creative instances of “DRM” if you can call it that: King’s Quest VI! I looked it up and sure enough it is mentioned on KQVI’s Wikipedia page:

    A booklet titled “Guidebook to the Land of the Green Isles” (written by Jane Jensen) is included in the KQVI package. Aside from providing additional background to the game’s setting, this booklet serves as part of the game’s copy-protection. The player will not be able to pass the puzzles on the Cliffs of Logic that guard the Isle of the Sacred Mountain without information from the booklet. The booklet also includes a poem encoding the solution to one of the puzzles in the labyrinth on the Isle of the Sacred Mountain.

    I guess that’s not very feasible today, what with widespread use of the internet around the world. I still think it’s more creative than the “thank you for your money, we intend to treat you like a criminal” method.

  • Bluebogle

    I played the KQVI game with the booklet. I was a kid at the time, and thought the booklet was so cool! It really added to the whole game’s experience.

    The quest for Glory games came with fun booklets as well, though I don’t remember if they had copy protection elements to ’em.

    Ahh, the good old days..

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