History in the Making — An Elder Scrolls Retrospective

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            History in the Making—An Elder Scrolls Retrospective Part 1

By SteerpikeMay 2002

The Start of a Beautiful Friendship

It’s always strange to watch history in the making. Most ironic is that we rarely recognize it for what it is—”history in the making” is usually just some new tidbit until it actually becomes … well, history. Then it may grow and change over time, improving, remaining in our collective consciousness. Whatever it is, it’s something that we know will not be forgotten for a long time to come.

Naturally enough “history in the making” is not necessarily an appropriate term to apply to computer games; we were, after all, just told that computer games cannot communicate ideas and are therefore not protected by free speech (thanks for clearing that up for us, judiciary!), so to call a game series “history” may be offensive to some Hayes Code-worshiping censorniks still lurking out there. “Gaming history” will encapsulate things more nicely and keep us safe from the pundits.

When Ultima hit stores, probably few aside from Richard Garriot himself envisioned the future of the series. Same goes for Wing Commander, Wizardry, and any number of other successful first launches that have spawned franchises in their own right.  I was working in software retail when The Elder Scrolls: Arena came out in 1993; I remember that buzz about the game was very positive (it was one of the earliest first-person RPGs and had arrived amidst the Doom craze, when everything was going to first person), but I have no recollection of thinking that it, too, would be the start of something or that The Elder Scrolls would become such a favorite among gamers.

Nine years later, we know the series to be one of the most progressive and forward-thinking franchises in the history of gaming—a quality that has blackened the eye and the pride of Bethesda Softworks more than once, for the studio/publisher behind The Elder Scrolls has committed just as many egregious errors as it has achieved victories. Bethesda has developed a reputation for releasing games too late, too riddled with bugs, and too insufficiently playtested to be worth the accolades they might otherwise deserve. It’s possible to describe The Elder Scrolls as a study in the disgrace and humiliation of a company that absolutely refuses to let go of its vision for the future of CRPGs—but it’s equally possible to describe the series as the first step on the thousand-mile journey that will finally bridge the gap between computer and tabletop roleplaying, and certainly as a work so immense, so complex, and so stimulating that we may be able to brandish it before the pundits who still refuse to accept our pastime for what it is—an entertainment art form in its thrilling infancy. Like them or not, The Elder Scrolls are part of something the medium needs, something that may one day lift our perceptions of interactive media and our imaginations alike to heights we’ve not yet imagined.

With the big release of Morrowind, it’s time to do a retrospective on the series to remind gamers where it has been and to speculate on where it might be going. For many, many gamers, especially our friends in XBox Country, Morrowind will be the first Elder Scrolls game they play. Some may not realize that though Morrowind is officially referred to as “The Elder Scrolls III,” it is in fact the fifth title to bear that Elder Scrolls prefix.

The Youngest Scroll

According to the documentation, The Elder Scrolls: Arena got the subtitle it did because the vast, sprawling empire of Tamriel in which the game takes place is, by all accounts, a pretty rotten place to live. Stuff is expensive, monsters prowl the landscape, the provinces constantly wage war against one another, and aside from a few relatively civilized areas, the entire nation bitterly resents occupation by the Imperial Province of Cyrodiil, a land of humans who decided, several hundred years before, that they should just take everything for themselves. Each of the provinces is home to a race of your usual fantasy peoples—Dark, High, and Tree Elves inhabit the provinces of Morrowind, Sumerset Isle, and Valenwood respectively; exotic races, such as the tigerlike Khajiit and lizard-man Argonian tribes, live in more distant Elsweyr and Black Marsh. Those directly related to human beings are relegated to the northern provinces of Skyrim, High Rock, Hammerfell, and of course Cyrodiil itself.

Something is rotten in the state of Tamriel, however. When Arena opens we discover that Jagar Tharn, the Imperial Battle Mage and advisor to Emperor Uriel Septim VII, has trapped his former boss in a (presumably unpleasant) alternate dimension. In an unusually well thought-out power grab for a fantasy CRPG villain, Tharn has also assumed the Emperor’s shape and form. No one except you and a handful of others realize that anything is wrong. Your character is stuffed in a dank prison cell for the somewhat dubious crime of “knowing too much,” and it’s your lonely and largely thankless task not only to expose Tharn for the imposter he is, but to drag Emperor Uriel back from wherever he’s been banished.

Sadly, Arena came out before the fantasy RPG renaissance, when developers realized that locating and assembling the disparate parts of some magical object shouldn’t necessarily represent the end all and be all of the player’s goals in such a game. So you have to—wait for it—locate and assemble the Eight Pieces of the Generic Magical Item (in this case, the Staff of Chaos) in order to defeat Jagar Tharn and save the Emperor. Not a particularly creative objective, but a very creative story.

Perhaps sensing this flaw in the execution of their game, the designers did their best to sideline it. A major two-part undertaking is required to locate each of the eight pieces of the staff (there’s one piece in each occupied province), and each instance of this is so difficult that characters really have little choice but to spend lots of time enhancing their own skills by doing odd jobs and adventuring on their own initiative. Magical artifacts also pepper the game, and if you’re lucky someone might make mention of one rumored to be nearby. Generally speaking, however, the side quests in Arena were little more than the “Medieval FedEx Man” tasks that reviewers like me joke about. However, at the time, it was fresh enough that taking objects from one person to another over and over again wasn’t so bad.

Arena is often compared to Ultima Underworld, a game only one year senior, and the comparison is generally a fair one.  Both were first-person, action-oriented, fantasy role-playing games.  Both involved puzzle-solving and communication with others but focused on exploration of vast areas and use of magic and equipment to excel.  But Arena boasted more than 400 unique visitable locations, nearly 12 million square kilometers of in-game landscape to explore, 150,000 words of in-game story, and probably 100 hours worth of play assuming you did nothing but follow the main quest.  And remember that this was all done in 1993, when that level of scope was frankly unheard of. It was, at the time, as close as anyone had come to recreating the pencil-and-paper RPG experience on a computer.

There was a certain sense of “sprawl” associated with Arena; it was easy to get lost in a place as big as Tamriel.  Quick travel was available for crossing long distances, though theoretically a player could walk from one end of the empire to the other—it would just take a long, long time. It’s interesting to note that though the developers of Arena worked hard to create a realistic world map with pleasant rolling landscapes, players rarely used it. The truth is that the majority of the game was spent in town, in dungeons, or looking for the same—though this did nothing to detract from the fun and frolic that was Arena.

Technologically speaking, it was excellent for its time, with a realistic weather system (I used to really dig the snowstorms), day and night cycle, fairly strong sprite-based graphics, and plenty of attractive interiors and exteriors to gawk at. MIDI-based sound that would make gamers chuckle nowadays sounded just fine in 1993, especially considering it was being pumped through a Soundblaster 16. Gameplay in general was just the sort of time-suck people like from quality RPGs; I spent hours playing Arena, sometimes simply to explore and have adventures, other times intent on progressing the story arc. Bethesda did one better than most design studios by allowing great flexibility to the player, including no fewer than eighteen potential character classes to choose from—players could also choose to hail from any of the eight occupied provinces of Tamriel, and each race enjoyed unique benefits and drawbacks.  This was just a hint of things to come; the degree of flexibility found in Arena was nothing compared to its successors.

I know Elder Scrolls fans who to this day swear that Arena is their favorite Elder Scrolls installment—though I think that with Morrowind finally out, we’ll see that opinion changing. And it really did have just about everything you could want from a CRPG: action, tons of adventure, reasonably good story, side quests galore. Nothing was missing, because things that we’d note as being absent today weren’t considerations in 1993’s technology.  Remember that most people played Arena on 486 computers with 8 megabytes of RAM, and you’ll understand why persistent game effects and NPCs that remembered who you were weren’t exactly necessities in the games of the time.

Ironically, the Elder Scrolls as we know them today almost never were. Despite the story above, the truth is that Arena is called “Arena” because the game was not conceived as an RPG but as a first-person gladiatorial fighting game featuring a wide selection of fantasy races and classes coming together to do battle in a huge (you guessed it) arena. Apparently someone at Bethesda thought that a CRPG concept had more promise, and the universe of Tamriel was born.

Arena was big during that glorious gaming summer of 1994, when X-Com, Doom 2, Ultima Underworld 2, Myst, and Wing Commander 3 all vied for attention. That summer was perhaps the best season for game releases in the short history of the industry.  Arena sold well and received very high critical acclaim thanks to its potent degree of nonlinearity, action-packed style, and quality of replayability. Arena was, and still is, a crucial achievement in the world of nonlinear CRPGs. By all accounts it was among the first of the true nonlinear fantasy roleplaying games. And for that alone it would be a classic, but the truth is Arena was much, much more—not only for itself, but for the foundation it provided.

Bugs by the Bucketload

And now for the story of how the sequel to Arena cost me nearly five hundred dollars.

I was a senior in college and very ill the day The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall finally came out in 1996. I remember it well.  A remarkably unfriendly flu had kept me horizontal for nearly ten days, and I’d spent it weakly mousing my way through what passed for the Internet at the time, looking for information on Daggerfall.  We didn’t have sites that tracked the ship status of games back then, so much of my intelligence gathering depended on calling EB and croaking the same questions over and over again: Is it in? No?  When do you expect it? Can you hold a copy for me? A miraculous feeling of health and well-being overcame me when the kindly EB man told me that Daggerfall had finally arrived. Even that foul swine flu couldn’t compete with my pent-up excitement.

In the intervening years since Arena I’d unwisely upgraded my computer to a Cyrix 6×86 processor. Not knowing at the time what a floating-point unit was, I thought it was the bee’s knees (it booted Windows 3.1 in nine seconds)—that is, until I first installed Daggerfall.

The instructions had me in such a state that I could barely make it through character generation. I was so excited to play a game that promised to completely blur the line between fantasy and reality, between computers and tabletop, that I simply didn’t want to deal with the mechanics of getting started. I wanted to be halfway through.  So I raced through chargen, tore through the opening dungeon, and immediately began exploring Gothway Garden—the nearest of more than 5,000 unique visitable locations in Daggerfall—only to experience …

DOS Causeway Error #9. Dagger.exe Has Shut Down

Woe. Torment. Agony. For days I started over again and again. I reinstalled. I formatted. I CHKDSKed. Then the [not particularly] friendly tech support gnomes at Bethesda sent me a sad email. It said, essentially, that Daggerfall was not compatible with my processor. Period. The game would never stop crashing. And while a patch was in the works, I shouldn’t get my hopes up.

Though Bethesda and Cyrix eventually solved the problem, I’d long since gone storming off to Geraldo’s Casa de PCs and gotten myself a genuine Intel processor. So by the time that the patch fixing that particular error came along, I … I was dealing with all the other errors in Daggerfall.

It is impossible to start a discourse on The Elder Scrolls II without focusing first and foremost on the fact that the game was released unacceptably early and so riddled with bugs as to be nigh unplayable. I and other players encountered dozens of crash bugs, kindergarten-level spelling and grammatical errors peppering the million-word text narrative, ghastly tearing and collision, clipping problems, missing quest objectives, bizarre reputation and crime errors, items and capabilities clearly described in the documentation but missing from the game, map corruption, save-game corruption, objects stuck in the walls, and so forth, literally ad nauseam. I can’t track down an official number of patches finally released by Bethesda to make up for the humiliation that was Daggerfall—it appears to be between eight and a dozen—but the truth is, even the final version of Daggerfall was horrendously buggy.

Far be it from me to forgive the company for this massive faux pas; the crime cannot be excused, but it is only marginally offset by the fact that Daggerfall was so unspeakably ambitious.  The amount of play available in Daggerfall cannot be measured in hours. Sure, if you started at the beginning and went straight through the game, focusing only on “story” objectives and ignoring every single divergent path, you could expect to finish in about 200 hours. But you’d be ignoring ninety percent of the experience of Daggerfall, because the point of the game was that you didn’t have to follow the story at all. Here for the first time was a game in which you could buy a house, settle down, meet people, and, if you chose, keep your days full from dawn until dusk fulfilling tasks without ever once repeating a job or embarking on something that actually progressed the story. Daggerfall was immense to the point of incomprehensibility.

One of the good things about Daggerfall was in fact a feature I’d rushed to get through the first time around—the character generation process. New players could choose from a list of predefined classes; create their own by assembling, puzzle-like, the different skill sets, advantages, and disadvantages, or instead answer a dozen questions with varying moral choices and have the system suggest a class based on the answers they gave. Additionally, Daggerfall was the first CRPG to eliminate “experience points” as a tool for advancement. No longer did a thief become a better thief by killing a dragon but not by picking a lock; no, leveling up in Daggerfall depended on your ability to improve key skills related to your class. If you were a thief and you wanted to go up a level, you needed to improve your thiefly skills. All the dragons in the world wouldn’t help you. While this made tremendous sense and has been adopted by many other systems since, there was and still is a small drawback: classes whose key skills were routine requirements (running, say; or jumping or talking to people) were more likely to advance than classes whose key skills were called upon less frequently. Still, it’s much better than a silly and arbitrary numbering system that provides rewards based on actions taken rather than skills gained.

If you did choose to follow the story, you’d find a spectacularly conceived and wickedly intricate murder-and-revenge plot dealing largely with the presence of a very angry ghost—the ghost of the recently killed King Lysandus of Daggerfall—who is inexplicably haunting his former hometown with a spectral army.  Unlike Arena, which took place in the entire vastness of Tamriel, Daggerfall (and indeed all future Elder Scrolls games) focused on what was in fact a very small area of the huge empire. Daggerfall is a city-state in the province of High Rock, at war with a few neighboring city-states in the same province. The entire game takes place in an area around a bay on the western seaboard of Tamriel. Your character is an imperial agent sent to discover the reason for the spirit’s bad-kitty behavior, and, in an oh-if-it’s-not-too-much-trouble sort of way, to track down a missing letter sent by the Emperor to Lysandus’s wife. The letter was “of a sentimental and personal nature,” and the Emperor doesn’t want it falling into the wrong hands, because stuff like that would command a fortune on eBay. Now, if you’re thinking the Emperor Uriel is just getting it on with Mrs. Lysandus … well, if you think that, then you have no idea how devious the writers at Bethesda really are. The reality of Daggerfall’s plot is infinitely more complex.

A new paradigm for RPG design is what allowed the game to be so colossal in scope: terrain, dungeons, and many interiors were generated randomly and didn’t exist at all until you actually approached them.  This made it possible for Daggerfall to ship on only a single CD, but it led to serious problems, especially in the honeycomb of underground ruins beneath the surface of the landscape. The word “large” does not adequately describe the extent of hugeness that every single one of the literally thousands of dungeons offered.  It was so easy to get lost in this underworld that a spell had to be specifically created to get you out once you were in. Weeks of game time could be spent down there, first looking for whatever objective you were supposed to deal with in the dungeon, and then wandering until you find your way back out. The worthless automap did little to help matters.

If you find your life dissatisfyingly lacking in frustration, try this on for size: grope your way through the haunted darkness of a nineteen-floor dungeon just to kill a goblin that’s been eating someone’s cattle. Arrive in the goblin’s room and find it half clipped into the wall so you can’t touch it. Return to the guild that hired you for the job and accept a demotion and decrease in reputation because you “failed” a quest. Because quest objectives were placed randomly inside the randomly generated maps, the object or target you were looking for might just as easily have been ten feet from the entrance as in the deepest, darkest corner of the underground vastness. More often than not, it was impossible to find your objective at all. If you did, there was a good chance it was stuck in the wall and inaccessible. If it wasn’t, there was a good chance you’d get stuck in the wall.

Unlike Arena, the world of Daggerfall was a persistent one. People remembered you if you’d done something to warrant remembering; if you committed any crimes, the city guard would certainly remember you and passers-by would be less likely to help with directions.  This had to be patched, of course; in the original release of Daggerfall, your reputation went up every time you committed murder. I came out of prison one time and found the city idolizing me as a god.  Just another bug in a box full of bugs. Another personal favorite was that though the designers had incorporated the ability to catch vampirism and lycanthropy—on the plausible ground that if you hang out with vampires and werewolves, you might become one yourself—getting bitten by a were-creature always turned you into a wereboar, no matter what, and getting vampirism was simply impossible. When I emailed Bethesda about this, curious as to why a werewolf had turned me into a wereboar, I got the electronic equivalent of a shrug in return. The bug was so insignificant compared to all the others that it wasn’t even on their radar.

Daggerfall was the first game Bethesda produced that used their proprietary new game engine, the XNGine. XNGine was a sprite-based tool, supporting 3D only in software and depending heavily on software fogging to look good. For the time, XNGine looked great, and Bethesda continued using it long after it had ceased to be competitive with other game engines. It was designed to be highly scalable, though that turned out to be slightly less than true in future iterations of the engine.

One of the issues that shortened Daggerfall’s life was that it shipped in the absolute earliest days of the 3D revolution. Sadly, the game never supported hardware 3D—not even in a patch—which took years off its shelf life. Though the blocky, sprite-based graphics looked outstanding at the moment Daggerfall hit shelves, the world was about to be treated to GL Quake and accelerated Tomb Raider. Once gamers saw what the future held, they had little patience for single-surface sprites, inadequate fogging effects, and water that looked like the televised snow that appears when you unhook your cable. Also, though the workhorse DirectX 3 was being widely used, Bethesda chose to ignore it, deciding DOS support was more important. Thus Daggerfall also represented one of the last games that required users to manually configure their hardware to play. Gamers are spoiled now, and we want our titles to work straight out of the box. Lack of DirectX support and refusal to patch the XNGine to support Direct3D may have doomed Daggerfall’s replayability potential.

This is important, because as I prepared to write this article, I gave a lot of serious thought about what really killed Daggerfall for me. Obviously I hated the bugs, I hated the insanely huge dungeons with their absurd jumping and lever-pulling puzzles, their clipping problems, their missing quest objectives. I hated that so many things were promised in the documentation that never turned up in the game. But the truth is, I could live with all that because despite the bugs, the game came really close to blurring the line I wanted it to blur—the line between true nonlinearity and the “faked” nonlinearity of a game like Myst. Too many people think that the ability to accomplish objectives in any order somehow equates with nonlinear play. That’s not true: actual nonlinearity means the ability to do anything, period. Daggerfall nearly offered that, though the bugs ruined the execution. And because better-looking RPGs came out, and they didn’t have the problems that Daggerfall did, I looked elsewhere for the promise of nonlinearity. If Bethesda had ever added Direct3D support, I might be playing the game today, bugs or no.

Bethesda created Daggerfall to prove that a computer game could mimic the tabletop roleplaying experience. They failed miserably, due in part to the inadequate technology of the time and in part to their own unwillingness to sufficiently playtest their own creation.  Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, and the best anyone could say about Daggerfall was that it came close to achieving Bethesda’s goals.

Though it was supposed to turn the CRPG world on its ear, in truth Daggerfall wound up being a massive stopgap between Arena, which everyone loved, and Morrowind, which everyone is currently loving. Many of the things they did in Daggerfall were brilliant. Guild affiliation, enchant-your-own-stuff services, reputation, persistent worlds, political intrigue and the value of story, not to mention, of course, the freedom of a nearly true nonlinear gaming experience; all these things were present in Daggerfall. But in the end the mixture wasn’t right. Daggerfall drowned in itself. Gorged on ambition, it choked and withered away, buried under the weight of its own too-muchness.

—Continued in Part 2—

The Lowdown

All Games

Developer: Bethesda Publisher: Bethesda

Arena

Release Date: 1993

Available for: DOS 

Daggerfall

Release Date: 1996

Available for: DOS 

Battlespire

Release Date: 1997

Available for: DOS Windows

Redguard

Release Date: 1998

Available for: Windows

Screenshots

Arena

Click to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlarge

Daggerfall

Click to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge

Battlespire

Click to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlarge

Redguard

Click to enlarge Click to enlargeClick to enlarge Click to enlarge

System Requirements

Arena

386/25 IBM or 100% compatible 4 MB RAM

Daggerfall

486/66 MHz IBM PC or compatible 8 MB RAM 2x CD-ROM drive 50 MB hard disk space Local bus (or equivalent) video card Mouse

Battlespire

IBM and 100% compatibles DOS 5.0 or higher P133 MHz or better SVGA with VESA 2.0 4x CD-ROM drive, MPC Level 2 or better 16 MB RAM 150 MB hard drive space Soundblaster or compatible

Redguard

Pentium 166 MHz 32 MB RAM 350 MB free hard drive space Windows 95 16-bit sound card Supported: 3Dfx video card, 4-button gamepad

Arena Where to Find It

Daggerfall Where to Find It

Battlespire Where to Find It

RedguardWhere to Find It

Links provided for informational purposes only.  FFC makes no warranty with regard to any transaction entered into by any party(ies).

      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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