Fallout Review

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            Fallout

Review by ScoutAugust 2004

The Bomb was part of my cultural and mental landscape as a child of the 50s. My mother, good citizen that she was, taught civil defense preparedness classes in the evenings at the local grade school.  For reasons I still don’t understand, she insisted that I accompany her. For three years in a row I watched film after film depicting, in vivid detail, the effects of nuclear strikes. One of the most memorable was shot in the Nevada desert in a government-built town that was inhabited by crash-test dummies. I loved watching the slow-motion footage of houses exploding like balsa-wood models as the waves of white light, shock, fire and dust tore through them, the life-sized dolls being ripped to shreds. Less amusing and infinitely more disturbing were the films the US military shot in Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the days and weeks following the bombings. Here I was treated to close-up views of the stages of radiation poisoning, the ghoulish skin eruptions as the flesh literally melted off the underlying muscle and bone of the bewildered victims. I became so alarmed that at age nine I built an improvised fallout shelter in the family basement, made from bales of straw and stocked with gallon jugs of water, cans of ravioli, and a flashlight.

It’s difficult, I suppose, for later generations to grasp just how insidious this was, this idea of instantaneous destruction raining down from the skies. Every day was tumescent with the promise of sudden death. The jolt of fear as the low-flying combat jets from the nearby base roared overhead on their monthly flyover … always that first bright instant of terror that the approaching sound might not be from a fighter jet piloted by America’s best but instead a warhead from Russia with love.

The last part of my mother’s class was always given over to what the world would be like after the Big One. After the nuclear winter had melted, if it ever would, after the radioactivity had diminished to survivable levels, if it ever would, after the few survivors (the percentage points were displayed on a graph depicting severity of attack, number of missiles that would make it through, etc.) had emerged from their shelters—what next?

No one knew.

At that point, the discussion usually flagged. Imagine the beauticians and insurance salesmen and kindergarten teachers and farmers and clerks and traffic cops circa 1960 trying to wrap their minds around the end of the world, of time, of life as they knew it. A few tried to describe how they might go forward, but they weren’t convincing anyone, least of all themselves.

Flash forward to 1997. Fear of the Bomb is ancient history—now no one gives a crap. The possibility of nuclear war is a nonissue, a far and distant memory. Except there’s this CRPG created by Black Isle and released by its parent company, Interplay. It’s an unofficial sequel to the beloved Wasteland and it’s called Fallout and it’s about what might have happened if the unimaginable had occurred, if the world as we knew it really had ended.

From the very beginning it’s obvious this is more than just another video game. With the Ink Spots’ classic song “Maybe” lilting in the background, one of the very first images we see is of a prisoner kneeling before two men in massive armor. One of the captors pulls out a pistol and shoots the prisoner in the back of the head. Twice.  Then he turns and stiffly waves at the camera as if to say, “hi mom.” The dying man’s leg jerks once, then grows still. As the camera pulls back, we see the edge of a TV screen. On the tube is a heroically posed shot of a futuristic soldier superimposed over a very odd-looking US flag. Next comes a series of ads in gloriously retro black and white. As the camera continues to pull back, a bombed-out living room appears at the edges of the screen, and then, where a wall should be, there is nothing but crumbling ruins and the shattered skyline of a dead city. On the wall behind the TV patches of rose-patterned wallpaper cling to exposed lath and plaster. A broken coffee cup lies on a stained and ripped carpet. In less than 90 seconds, the creators of Fallout have captured the mindset of a decade and revealed the untapped fears of a generation. Behind the fragile facade of civilization lurk death and destruction, those twins demons of chaos, bogeymen haunting the collective dream.

This is Fallout.

After a quick history lesson and plot lead-in (war is hell, war has happened, you and a few others have survived nuclear devastation inside secure vaults), the game’s first cutscene plays. The unctuous Vault Overseer gives you your mission. Find a water chip in 150 days or don’t bother coming back. Then it’s out of the protective walls of Vault 13 and into the wasteland with you.

The next thing you see is a character generation screen. You have the choice of picking a premade character or making your own. Almost everyone chooses the latter, as it’s just more fun that way. SPECIAL.  As in Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility and Luck. You’ll need to choose your character statistics wisely.  The wasteland is as lethal as it is unforgiving, and only the toughest will survive.

You are given a finite amount of points spread evenly through these statistics. It’s up to you to redistribute them as you see fit.  Want to be a tank? Give yourself lots of strength and endurance.  Not so enamored of brute force but consider yourself a wise guy who lives by your wits? Then load up on Intelligence and Charisma.  Like to play stealth characters? Perception and Agility might be for you.

Next you get to pick two optional traits and three tag skills, which allow you to further customize your character and even grant you a few more statistic points to distribute. The excellent and very funny manual gives you a good overview of what all this means.  It would take a separate review to describe the Vault Dweller’s Survival Guide in detail, and I doubt I could begin to do justice to the sly, tongue-in-cheek wit you will find on every single page.  Read it carefully before making your choices. Or just read it for the cool retro fun of it. It’s really that good. More developers should release manuals like Fallout’s.

The interface, though gorgeously designed with burnt-out radio tubes and a scuffed, scratched and dented skin, is complicated and takes some getting used to. Once you get the hang of it, things smooth out quite a bit. A few tips: Pay special attention to the action icons and how they work in combat. This will save you a lot of reloading later in the game. Also keep an eye on the dialogue screen in the lower left corner of the interface. Valuable information can easily scroll past unnoticed.

You level up by gaining experience points via combat and solving quests, which then reward you with bonus skill points. You can distribute these points as you see fit, paying particular attention to tagged skills, which accumulate at an accelerated rate. Every third level you get to pick a perk, a bonus ability. Some perks are eminently practical, like Awareness, which allows you to see your enemy’s hit points, or Action Boy, which gives you precious action points for every combat turn. Other perks are, shall we say, of less obvious value, like Mysterious Stranger, which introduces a mystery NPC who appears from time to time in combat to lend a gun hand, or Snakeater, making you immune to poison. What these perks really do is allow further customization of your character after you are deep into the game and know your strengths and weaknesses. It’s sort of like getting do-overs without having to begin again. For instance, a stealth character with low strength who is having problems carrying enough inventory might want to choose Strong Back, a perk that allows you to carry 50 more pounds of inventory. Or a tank character might want to pick Speaker, which ups Speech and Barter by 20 points.

The game begins with a timed quest, the above-mentioned directive by the Overseer to hunt down and return with a new water chip for the water purification system. Without it Vault 13 is doomed. You have exactly 150 days to find the chip and return it to your home vault. While that sounds like an eternity, believe me, it’s not.  First of all, traveling in Fallout occurs in real time. So does healing and learning and just plain old walking around without a clue, of which there is a lot, especially at the beginning. The first time I played, I swallowed hard as I watched the hours and then days spin by while I cruised the wasteland. In a matter of minutes I had burned a week of game time just messing around in the desert killing rats so I could level up. I spent the greater part of another week shuttling back and forth between two towns gathering up supplies. Before I knew it, the Overseer was coming to me in visions and admonishing me to hurry.

The evil game clock only stops when you enter combat, which is a good thing because there is a lot of fighting in Fallout. It’s a strictly turn-based system structured to allow for serious strategizing.  Most ranged weapons, i.e., guns, allow you to aim at specific body parts instead of just blasting away. This is especially important when battling strong enemies early in the game. Why? Because it lets you target legs and eyes and arms. Instead of trying to annihilate that drooling, slithering monstrosity with an astronomical number of hit points, you have the option of crippling it instead. A shot or two or three will damage it enough to send it limping off, still alive but no longer a threat. Or you can blind it. Or take out a tentacle. Or shoot it in the groin if you are feeling especially evil. This makes combat much more interesting than methodically blasting away until hit points are used up and the enemy keels over as much from boredom as critical hits.

Also, in combat mode you spend action points like you would currency in a retail outlet. Want to access your inventory? That will cost you action points. Want to shoot using burst or targeted mode? That will cost you more points than if you just shoot straight. Think you need to cross the room and position yourself to better advantage?  Points, baby. Every action in combat has its cost, and you have to think ahead and budget accordingly. I found that one effective strategy with the monsters was to shoot once with a targeted shot and then use the remaining action points to move away. Since the beasties couldn’t strike unless they were immediately next to me, they were forced to spend precious action points chasing me down.  This way I could pick them off one at a time and for the most part remain out of reach. Of course, this doesn’t work with humanoid foes equipped with their own ranged weapons, as they can stand their ground and fire away.

While the battles were fun and engaging, what brought me back session after session were the stories, the atmospheric settings, the feel.  There was a kind of immediacy to Fallout. The game world was bombed-out southern California. No medieval castles or wizards or dragons of yore. No holo decks or interstellar time travel. Fallout is firmly rooted in the radioactive soil of a dystopian US.  Characters curse and spit, babble and make love. Toilets are backed up, mattresses are crawling with vermin. Even that most benign of villages, Shady Sands, has an air of desperation to it. Nice guys usually don’t even finish in Fallout, much less last, so be prepared to put your church manners on ice for the duration.

But not your curiosity.

For there are mysteries to be solved in Fallout. The settlements and ruined cities are rife with political intrigue and personal rivalries. Think carefully, choose your replies wisely, and you can find yourself privy to startling confessions and valuable information.  (Don’t worry if you lose track of where you are; there’s a big yellow-and-black review button at the lower left of the screen that allows you to roll back the chatter.) Information is everywhere. The history of the apocalypse lies hidden in lockers and vaults, in the burnt-out brains of ghouls, the seemingly casual comments you overhear on the street. No dry-as-dust extrapolative downloads here, folks.  The developers of Fallout weave their end-of-the-world narrative into the setting and characters and action with the skill of master storytellers.

While this game rewards the thorough and the clever, it understands the efficacy of the brute gesture too. Sometimes you want to be smart and strategic, and other times you just want to blast the crap out of mutant radioactive scorpions. The choice is yours. You can actually finish the game playing as a borderline idiot, with an intelligence of 1 or 2 and strength of 10. Or not. Or maybe.  In fact, most situations can be solved in one of three possible manners: by brute force, force of personality or stealth. The amount of detail this requires is simply staggering, all the more so considering how easy it is to play through to the end in about 12 to 15 hours.  The less than thorough player can miss much of the fun and walk away wondering what all the fuss was about. But the player who questions every character, peeks into every corner, opens every door, follows every side quest will be richly rewarded. While it’s almost reflexive to start shooting at the first sight of an enemy, many of the more menacing NPCs can be reasoned with if your intelligence and speech are high enough.

Of course, all the speech points in the world won’t help you with monsters like the radscorpions, the deathclaws, the mutant rats or the oversized praying mantises. It’s kill or be killed in these situations, and with that in mind the makers of Fallout have made available a wide assortment of armor and weapons with which to dispatch the varmints.

First, there is the armor. As you progress in the game, leveling up and solving quests, the armor available to you gets better and better. You start out with nothing more than a blue Vault 13 jumpsuit, then soon find yourself a leather jacket. Later, you get some very butch-looking metal armor, then some nifty camo green combat armor, and so on up to the creme de le creme, the Brotherhood of Steel’s hardened power armor. Much of your early success depends on locating and acquiring decent armor. Hunt down a set, and you won’t be sorry.

Small guns include pistols, machine guns and rifles, and the ever-elusive LE BB gun (in a tip o’ the hat to Fallout’s spiritual predecessor, Wasteland). Big guns include large machine guns, flamethrowers and rocket launchers, though only the strongest characters will be able to carry enough ammo to make them useful. Then there are my favorites, the energy weapons. These include pistols and rifles that use power cells, small energy batteries, to fire lethal pulses of energy so hot they can bubble the flesh from a foe in an eye blink. If you leave the gore setting on high, you will be treated to some nauseatingly cool special effects.

Want to fight with bare fists and not bother carrying a small arsenal around with you? Unarmed can be just as valid a way to go if you’ve piled up your skill points there. Or melee weapons make a nice compromise.  These are hand-to-hand, close-up and personal weapons like knives, spears and sledgehammers. Later in the game you’ll run upon some powered, clawed gloves and sawing machetes that will easily make chopped bad boy salad out of your attacker. Or bad girl. It’s equal opportunity nefariousness in Fallout, so leave your preconceptions at the door.

There is one more weapon, in a way the most problematic, and that is the party member. You find these NPCs scattered about the map, and, while a few are valuable fighters, several are, shall we say, less than impressive. They are AI-controlled in combat, which means you can’t directly manipulate them. You can give them weapons and armor, but they seem to use them at their own discretion. When you do choose to outfit them, you have to use the steal or trade functions, as there is no dedicated interface for party member item exchanges.  Even worse, if you want to retrieve something, you have to steal it. Trade won’t work as the character wants to be compensated for whatever it is you wish to take back. This makes for awkward inventory management, and since half the reason to keep most part members around is to use them as pack mules, the system gets old fast. Party members also have an irritating habit of blocking doorways at the most inopportune moments and will think nothing of shooting you in the back if you get between them and their target. Many are so challenged in the common sense department they will rush a vastly superior force with little more than a penknife, making multiple reloads a necessity if you are feeling particularly sociable.

No review of Fallout would be complete without mentioning that most memorable of NPCs, Dogmeat. Dogmeat is a very mean dog who, if you play your cards right, will take a liking to you and faithfully follow you for the rest of the game. While I rarely spent much emotional currency on my human NPCs, I was alarmingly attached to Dogmeat. Unfortunately, it’s almost impossible to finish game so that he survives the final two battles, though apparently it is doable if you are determined and persistent. I wasn’t, and in the end I finally gave up and let him trot off to the big fire hydrant in the sky. Dogmeat’s passing was a little thing in the scope of the game and not the only NPC I eventually lost, but it was wrenching to walk away from his bloodied little corpse. In fact, the game’s forward motion ground to a halt until I had successfully taken revenge on his killers, eliminating the entire outfit in a murderous spree.  I only mention this because it reflects what is so great about this game. It gets under your skin, it affects you, engages and involves you, in dozens of tiny little ways.

Once you return the water chip, the Overseer gives you a second quest, a two-part quest actually, which, when completed, triggers the game-ending cutscenes. Here the developers did something really effective: they customized the ending so that what you see depends on your decisions made during the game. Without going into too much detail, suffice it to say that actions in Fallout have very real consequences. There are several different possible endings, though in my two playthroughs I basically got variations on the same one. All of these different ways to progress made for tremendous replayability.

A few nitpicks. Though most of the menu can be accessed via quick keys, navigation is point-and-click only and can grow tedious, especially in the towns where you have to squeeze down narrow alleys and around corners. Also, the rigid isometric view hides a lot of items along foreground walls, and you have to shimmy along countless numbers of them if you want to find everything there is to be found. The developers seemed to take particular delight in hiding items, especially lootable lockers, against walls, thus forcing upon you a gigantic RPG version of the dreaded pixel hunt. Fallout did more to advance my carpal tunnel than the preceding six games combined.

The occasional close-ups of talking-head NPCs, while always wonderful, are too far and few between. Most of the characters are small and doll-like, and there isn’t nearly enough variety in their avatars.  During mass battles, I could not tell friend from foe. The game attempts to differentiate characters in combat by outlining them in red, though a later perk lets you choose to have friends limned in green. Until I was able to pick this perk, the similarity made for much needless confusion. This should have been better handled from the get-go, and, in fact, in Fallout 2 friends are automatically outlined in green.

Also, combat with multiple characters often seemed to drag on forever.  I sometimes had to wait for what felt like whole minutes before my turn came up, and in the larger battles much of the action occurred at the edges of the screen, which did nothing for the immersion factor. The random cities were the epitome of cookie-cutter settings.  Every block of buildings looked like every other block of buildings looked like every other block of buildings.

Still, in comparison, these flaws are small potatoes. In the end, Fallout is a nearly great game. I gave it a hearty thumb up and not a gold star only because I found its sequel to be even better.

At the beginning of Fallout, Interplay hawks itself as “By Gamers for Gamers.” Let me add to that: Fallout is by adults for adults. Those on the hunt for the G-rated, cute or fantasy-laden might want to look elsewhere. For beneath Fallout’s morbid, black-as-midnight humor runs a deadly serious intent. To play this game is to gaze, however briefly, into the void. And as the old saw goes, sometimes the void will gaze right back at you. Here, at least in this case, the cliché is proven true. That’s not to say that Fallout doesn’t entertain. It is vastly enjoyable.  It consistently seduces with its vitality, its muscular flex, its postapocalyptic élan, its vivid, hyperreal environment. As I wandered the cities, vaults, villages and deserts, I could almost smell the unwashed bodies, feel the nervy, jerky desperation, see the sands spotted with the blood, sweat and tears of a wounded people pushed to the very borders of what they could bear and beyond. You get all that and aliens with a velvet Elvis fetish too. It just doesn’t get much better than that. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Interplay Publisher: Interplay Release Date: 1997

Available for: DOS Windows

Four Fat Chicks Links

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Screenshots

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System Requirements

Pentium 90 MHz Windows 95 and DirectX 3.0a or higher or DOS 5.0 or higher and 1 MB VESA-compliant SVGA card 16 MB RAM when running under Win95 (32 MB RAM when running under DOS) 2X CD-ROM drive Mouse Soundblaster or compatible

      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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