Prince of Persia: Warrior Within Review

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            Prince of Persia: Warrior Within

Review by SteerpikeJanuary 2005

Joking Aside, We Actually Are Quite Close

Like me, my older brother is a writer, and a gamer. Together we’re getting our father into the hobby, but I’m concerned, because so far Dad has been taking after my brother Marcus in matters of taste, and when it comes to gaming, Marcus is much more curmudgeonly than I. He didn’t like Knights of the Old Republic (“too much moving around”).  Or Thief (“too dark”). Or System Shock 2 (“too many monkeys”). Or Morrowind (“too much foliage collection”). Or Far Cry (“eh”).  He is a joyless shell of a human, bereft of brightness and glee, churning with subsurface wrath. He has my pity.

However, his gloweringly lemonish surl, in addition to being endearing, does have one side benefit: when he recommends a game, it’s a safe bet that you won’t be disappointed. And so when he emailed me and said in no uncertain terms that I should pick up Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, I did so, and I was suitably impressed. Sands of Time is an amazing game. It is beautiful, hugely entertaining, and stuffed to the proverbial gills with thrilling play, snappy writing, and excellent voice work. Indeed, even on the PC with a mouse/keyboard combo—a control scheme for which it is not ideally suited—it managed to be one of the best PC games of 2003, selling nearly two million copies across all major platforms and very nearly toppling Knights of the Old Republic for the IGDA’s Game of the Year award. As one can imagine, a sequel was in the cards.

However, in a maneuver of astounding dimwittedness, Ubisoft pretty much disbanded the PoPTeam studio responsible for Sands of Time and shifted the entire writing staff from the original over to work on the upcoming Prince of Persia movie. The new team totally rewrote the protagonist, recast the talented voice lead with a monotonous hack, cut a beloved supporting character entirely, and announced that, unlike the soft-edged dreaminess of its predecessor, Prince of Persia: Warrior Within would narrate like an action movie directed by Ingmar Bergman—that is, bloody and depressing.  And rather than focus on the fiendish jumping puzzles that have been a Prince of Persia standby since Jordan Mechner originated the series for Broderbund in 1990, Warrior Within, while including the acrobatic conundra, would tilt the scales much more aggressively toward complex, combo-driven swordfighting.

Amazingly, these enormous foundational changes have resulted in a game that plays as well as, if not better than, The Sands of Time. It’s nowhere near as original, clever, or well-written, nor is it remotely faithful to the Prince of Persia franchise; but the surprisingly elegant new combat system, rich graphics, action-packed pacing, and control improvements on the PC platform are without peer. Though Ubi made a heroic attempt to ruin it, Warrior Within manages to transcend more than a year of incompetence on the part of nearly everyone involved with its production. So despite the fact that I had serious doubts about this one, I’m no longer at all hesitant to award it our highest honor. Warrior Within is vastly different from Sands of Time, but it’s still a great, great game.

The Dahaka. The What? The Dahaka. The What? The—

The Prince, as fans will recall, allowed himself to be tricked into unleashing the Sands of Time in the previous game by a Jafar-like vizier with dreams of controlling a world populated by sand-filled time zombies. Fortunately for us, though, a contrite Prince and his new girlfriend Farah managed to stuff the Sands back into the big magic hourglass where they belonged. The Prince also used his Sand-filled dagger to rewind the whole grubby affair and undo lots of damage that his actions had caused. Then he kissed Farah and went home to continue his princely activities.

Unfortunately, screwing around with time gets the attention of a huge black tentacle-horn-thing called the Dahaka, a sort of chronological library cop. It’s dispatched to give the Prince some what-for, and our hero has to skip town before this new nemesis can eat him up.  Thus begins the Prince’s life on the lam, and by all accounts it’s been a pretty unpleasant experience: every now and then the Dahaka will turn up and hurtle after him, getting a little closer every time. It would seem that only the Prince’s death will bring normalcy back to the timeline.

Finally, weary of the chase, the Prince seeks advice from a smelly old man who lives in a tent, knowing that unhygienic desert hermits are full of oracular knowledge. Old Man tells him that his fate is preordained: the Dahaka will kill him, and nothing can change that. Thus the Prince conceives of a new plan. He’ll travel to the source of all time, return to the past, and stop the creation of the Sands. If the Sands of Time never existed, he reasons, he won’t have been able to use them to mess up the timeline, so the Dahaka will have no beef with him and will go home.

Problem is, the Dahaka’s home is the Castle of Time on the Island of Time with the Empress of Time (yeah, I was serious when I said the game was written by talentless amateurs), so the Prince isn’t there for much … time before he hears familiar pounding footsteps behind him.

Being chased by a Dahaka makes you grumpy. At some point during his flight, the Prince managed to get some henna tattoos and a gothy new wardrobe. He also has blue eyes and an American accent now, like all Middle Easterners. He spouts moronic bad-dialogueisms like, “You will soon feel the edge of my blade!” Compare this to the wit of the admittedly somewhat foppish—but in a good way—Prince from Sands of Time and you’ll see how brutally the new writers raped this character. Indeed, to call the writers of this game one-lobed idiots gives a bad name to one-lobed idiots; considering that Ubisoft basically terminated the extremely gifted original writing team, it says something about how much value the company places on fiction.

This says more. One of Ubi’s head writers—uninvolved with Warrior Within—was recently asked if quality script writing was a fundamental part of elevating the art form of game development. His answer: “No.”

You don’t say.

In another move of staggering brilliance, the writers cut Farah from the story. The hilarious verbal repartee that these two bickering quasi-heroes shared (“I’ve never told that to anyone before,” “I’m not surprised; it’s the most childish thing I’ve ever heard”) was one of the especially bright points in Sands of Time. It was pretty clear that the original writers intended both to be present in any sequels. Plus, Farah was one of the better-written female characters in gaming.

Instead, they introduced two of the most offensively drawn and poorly written new female characters ever conceived by male game developers who can’t get laid. Doubt me? Check it. That costuming is pretty much accurate. Your new female nemesis Shahdee is even more shockingly uninspired than the rest of the story. In fact, I have little doubt that the small … minded jackass responsible for Warrior Within’s characters described Shahdee in one line in the design doc: “Shahdee is angry and wears a steel bikini cuz steel bikinis are sexy. And she’s, like, hot, because hot chix totally dig my mad phat skillz.” Kaileena, your mysterious seminude maybe-ally, another Middle Easterner with milky skin and green eyes, harbors her own share of poorly written malcontent. And of course the Empress of Time is a hot, barely clothed woman, perhaps intended as a personification of the proverbial hourglass figure (get it?). Warrior Within seriously exhibits some of the most offensively sexist portrayals of women in gaming that I’ve ever seen. I, a guy who is pro–hot woman, was offended.  Ubi set the games biz back again by hiring Cro-Magnon retards to write the sequel to a hugely selling franchise resurrection. The player will not care at all about any of these “important” new characters.

Moreover, the Prince, a returning hero who was much-loved, is simply not a likable character in Warrior Within. He was a bit of a ponce in Sands of Time, sure, but let’s remember that the man was also so genial he somehow managed to inspire Farah—who originally wanted to watch him die screaming—to fall in love with him. He also inspired players to like and identify with his character, a special challenge considering the setting of Sands of Time. Recall that it was the Prince’s hubris that unleashed the Sands in the first place; that and his obsession with pleasing a father who was already quite obviously pleased with him. That would have destroyed the world had the Prince not been given the opportunity to temporally undo his own blunder. Arrogance is very difficult for an audience to forgive, and yet we did, because the Prince was likable. In Warrior Within, he is a sullen, spoiled, obnoxious, bullying caricature, and you won’t give a damn if he lives or dies.

The acting, too, is godawful. The Prince sounds like he’s from Wisconsin and delivers his lines with Award-of-Suck–winning blandness. Shahdee, Kaileena, even the grunt-intensive Dahaka are equally uninspired. Warrior Within pretty much screams “we were too cheap to hire good writers and actors, so we had Raoul from Accounting (the team is French-Canadian) write the script, and the guys who fill our Coke machines said the lines.”

So the story is badly conceived and the characters are hideously written. Still, when it comes to a game, the gameplay is the really important factor, and Warrior Within has plenty of excellent gameplay.

It’s a Reverse Swirl

I played the PC version of Warrior Within, so I can’t really speak to any camera or control improvements among the assorted console versions. But my persistent gripes with Sands of Time for the PC were the clumsy perspectives and control issues that would so often cause me to fling myself into the void. While not eliminated altogether in Warrior Within, the keyboard and mouse controls are drastically improved.

The trick is that in most third-person games, the camera is locked to the character’s back. That wouldn’t work in PoP, where the camera needs freedom to wander, since you depend on its subjective field of view to see solutions to the diabolical jumping puzzles.  However, an unlocked camera by nature introduces control issues, since the position of the camera—your perspective on the game world—is not a constant as relates to the position of your character. In a nutshell, “W” does not always mean forward.

The problem is all but fixed in Warrior Within. “W” means forward from the perspective of the camera, not the perspective of the Prince. Same with “A” and “S” and “D.”  Furthermore, the irritating “swoosh return” blocked-camera effect is gone from Warrior Within—the camera, controlled by the mouse, will simply not go to places where it would be blocked.  While occasionally frustrating in tight spaces, it’s much less vexing than the vertigo of a constantly realigning camera position.

I cannot say enough about the new and incredibly more complex combat system, for which I originally had very low hopes. I suck at Killer Instinct, and my brain is too small and stunted to remember or execute in a timely manner combos of the Up-Up-Left-Up-Left-Kick-Left-Left-Kick-Right-Up-Punch-Kick-Left-Duck-Kick-Left-Right-Left-Up-Kick-Left-Jump variety, and I feared Warrior Within would play like that: the demo certainly led me to believe it would. Yet Warrior Within allows you to carry out insanely complex fighting combos with a minimum of effort.

You could quite easily clamber over an enemy, breaking his neck as you go, snatch his dropped sword, run up the wall, flip backward, land in a blades-out helicopter twirl to lop off some heads, then somersault away from any retaliation and hurl your secondary weapon into an oncoming menace. Most importantly, you could do all that in a preplanned manner; the fighting system is so fluid and so easy to execute that you can carry out extraordinarily complex assaults against multiple targets with only a handful of well-timed clicks.  It’s because just a couple of buttons do a lot of stuff, depending on the context—where you are, where you’re facing, what you’ve got, what’s around, and so forth. Never will you feel so cool fighting hand to hand as when you’re doing it in Warrior Within. You will need a responsive mouse with at least four comfortably placed buttons, but most gamers have that already.

Secondary weapons are a new addition, and one that I’d originally thought would add too much complexity to the fighting controls.  But the elegance of the system overcomes that. Possession of a #2 weapon is quite unnecessary. Many gamers may avoid them, opting instead for the Prince’s devastating strangulation and fatality maneuvers that can only be accomplished when he has a hand free.  Others may snatch them up for use as long-range ordnance but not employ them much in close combat. Fighting in Warrior Within is so flat-out awesome that I wish they’d included an arena style of gameplay, with customizable environments and enemies.

Speaking as a person who hates jumping puzzles, it’s odd that I love them so much in the Prince of Persia games. My grumbly brother, once a 3D animator, was originally drawn to Sands of Time because of the beautiful animations of the lead character when he executes solutions to these puzzles; the Prince has even more unique animations in this game. And though Warrior Within is much more combat-oriented and doesn’t offer dilemmas even remotely as baffling as Sands of Time, they’re still fun and engaging and make great use of the game engine’s skeletal animation.  Each animation is drawn by hand; there is no motion capture in Warrior Within. You’ll run along walls, swing on ropes, slide pirate-style down curtains, and basically use everything in the environment as your own personal jungle gym. They’ve also integrated combat into the environment to a slightly greater degree, though puzzles and fighting are still kept largely separate.

Making a triumphant return are the Prince’s powers of time control.  Originally available through the auspices of his stolen dagger, apparently the Prince can now rewind and rework time just because he’s so damn dark and grim and cool. He’s like a chroniscient ancient Middle Eastern Trent Reznor. As usual, you need to have some Sand in your possession to make even the most basic Rewind powers work, though in Warrior Within, it’s easier to get Sand—you’re in the Castle of Time, after all. It seeps out of dying enemies and can be found in many pieces of crockery that inexplicably clutter the halls of the palace. Generally the time powers are modified and polished, but in truth they haven’t changed much. It’s amazing, though, how necessary to the franchise they have become after just two games: should the next PoP title leave out the time control, I think gamers would abandon it in droves.

They’ve also tweaked the save system. Warrior Within is still very much a console port, so you cannot save whenever you like. Save points are much more common, however, and you’ll generally find a new one after ever major puzzle or combat sequence. You’ll certainly find one before and after every Dahaka event, during which the Dahaka turns up and chases after you for a while. These instances allow approximately zero margin for error, usually involving jumping puzzles that would be quite simple if time weren’t a factor. It’s nice that you can start over at the beginning of the chase sequence rather than enduring a long build-up every time. All in all, save points—which are represented by healing fountains rather than sand whorls in Warrior Within—are about three times as frequent. While I generally prefer the freedom to save whenever I like, in games like PoP it just wouldn’t work, and save points are common enough that it’s no big deal. One thing I do miss is that saving no longer affords you a glimpse into the future.  This was necessary in SoT because the puzzles were so incredibly difficult, but it was also a neat effect and I’m sorry it’s gone.

Finally, it’s considerably longer than its predecessor. Sands of Time was a 12-hour experience, give or take; they claim that Warrior Within is 24-plus hours, though my own experience was closer to 20. Still, it’s nice that they extended the play length from the original, which was too short, though I suspect that extension was easy to accomplish since Warrior Within makes no effort to be even remotely as complex as Sands of Time.

Attach Camera Lens. Add Vaseline.

Warrior Within’s visuals bring back the beautiful muzzy blur. This effect reminds me most of the film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, an experience that was to me like watching a dream. But Warrior Within, though it has its share of somnescence and general fuzziness, looks more like the video game version of Roman Polanski’s Repulsion. This is mostly because of the setting.

Whereas the Maharaja’s palace in Sands of Time was a colorful, luxurious artifice, in Warrior Within you’re visiting a place that has long since gone to seed. The vast majority of the game is spent in the Castle of Time, which looked great back in the day but looks like Fallujah in the present. Fortunately, you spend a lot of the game in the past, and it’s fun to see how the moss-covered ruins transform into a lavish golden pleasure garden when you are transported to the days of yore.

Most of your jaw-dropping on the Warrior Within graphics front will be related to the animations of the Prince, who looks even more amazing in this sequel. Though reskinned with his stupid tattoos and “I’m an angry goth rich kid” clothing, he is breathtakingly fluid and lifelike. His acrobatics and combat moves are astounding. One day they’ll find a way to combine the elegant fighting system and gorgeous protag animations of Warrior Within with the quality writing and terrifyingly good gameplay of Half Life 2, and we’ll have the perfect action game.

Ultimately, the graphics in Warrior Within are stellar and smooth at high resolution; I played through at 1600×1200 with everything and it was buttah, and my machine is definitely getting long in the proverbial tooth. There’s nothing to complain about here, and the developers did great work with a year-old graphic engine. Colors are far more muted and drab, but of course you spend most of your time in a ruined castle, so that’s to be expected.

Audio, however, is kind of a mixed bag. The clanks and clinks of swordplay, the soft ripple of a curtain as wind passes through it, the whoosh of drifting sand or the spatter of running water, and the mechanical clockwork of the game’s devious traps all sound excellent.  Alas, then, that the voice acting is so dreadfully bad and the musical score is a totally out of place hard rock thumpfest, complete with roaring guitars and drum solos. It’s as though Ministry were hired to design the soundtrack of the next Super Mario Brothers; the music and the game exist in totally different worlds.

One of the great strengths of Sands of Time is the way it is narrated, as a flashback a la Sacrifice.  Though you had to finish the game to see the clever intricacy and structure of the story, the writers and artists made clear that you are playing the game inside the corridors of the Prince’s memory.  Time, he says, is not a river flowing swift and true in one direction; Time is a torrent in a storm. SoT made it clear that the same is true for memory, which isn’t organized in a crisp linear fashion. That game was designed to look and sound and feel like … well, not to beat a dead horse, but like you’re playing a dream.  They cut a lot of that from Warrior Within. Not exactly a capital offense, but jarring all the same.

Warrior Without

Warrior Within is not a perfect game. But many—most—of its flaws are based in the inaccuracies associated with its absolute failure to remain faithful to its immediate predecessor. If it weren’t a Prince of Persia game, I’d probably be raving even more, and though the tone of this review may not seem ravey (maybe I take after my brother), despite its failings, Warrior Within deserves raves.

I just came off a review of Half Life 2, which received a superb score despite a story I considered so riddled with holes as to be utterly nonsensical. At the end of the day, though, Half Life 2’s gameplay, that evanescent “fun factor,” was off the charts. And in a game, gameplay is the most important part of the equation. We see this again and again: games are games. They mean something, but they have to be fun. I’ll take a badly written but fun game over a brilliantly written but flawed game any day.

Warrior Within’s script feels like it was written by a fourteen-year-old whose most advanced sexual experience was sneaking looks at his dad’s Playboys. A fourteen-year-old whose most complex imaginings involve being killed just after rescuing the prettiest girl in school from some terrible danger—dying at the moment he and the girl whisper blood-bubbled protestations of love for one another. A fourteen-year-old who never matured, who resents women, who devalues powerful narrative in favor of masturbatory adolescent fantasy, and who has never, ever, had an emotion beyond puddle depth. The writing is vomitous, the acting nauseating, the characters vile.

Warrior Within’s gameplay feels like it was tuned by industry luminaries of whom no more than a handful exist. Industry luminaries who recognized the need to sell games and tweaked the jumping puzzles to attract more potential purchasers while still respecting that portion of the franchise history. Industry luminaries who also saw the flaws in SoT—the redundancy in combat, the inordinate cruelty of some puzzles, the shortage of save points—and fixed them. The gameplay is without peer, the combat aorta-thrumming, the environments breathtaking.

Warrior Within is not a perfect game. In many ways, it stands as a badly written testament to exactly what is wrong with video games: sexism, teenage hormones, amateurish writing, clumsy franchise handling. But it’s entertaining. It’s incredibly entertaining. Oftentimes we game scholars, myself included (or especially), get lost in what the games need to mean. What they need to do. How they need to affect us. And we get lost in that for a good reason: games are still looked down on, held in contempt. They’re not viewed as the world’s first interactive art form; they’re viewed as a child’s playthings—something of which grownups who play should be ashamed. And so we are defensive of the medium we love.  But in so doing, we often lose sight of the fact that, as important as all that is, they are still games.

And Warrior Within is a great game. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Ubisoft’s Montreal Studio Publisher: Ubisoft Release Date: December 2, 2004

Available for: Game Cube PlayStation Windows XboxPlayStation 2 

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System Requirements

Windows 98SE/2000/XP (only) PIII 1 GHz or AMD Athlon 1 GHz 256 MB RAM DirectX® 9-compliant graphics card (supported cards are NVIDIA GeForce 3/4/FX series (including 4MX) or ATI Radeon 7500/8500/9000 families or newer) DirectX 8-compliant sound card DirectX 9.0c (included on disc) 16X CD-ROM or 4X DVD-ROM drive 2 GB free hard disk space

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

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29 Responses to The Long, Sordid Tail of DRM

  • Meho

    Good one.

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

  • Spike

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

  • Jason O

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

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

  • Bennet

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

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

  • Meho

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

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

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

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

  • Lewis B

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

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

  • Meho

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

  • Lewis B

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

    Not exactly the same situation, but not hugely dissimilar.

  • Gregg B

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

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

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

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

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

  • Mat

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

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

  • xtal

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

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

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

  • Cesar

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

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

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

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

  • Andrew

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Meho

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

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

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

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

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

  • Lewis B

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

  • lakerz1

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

  • Igor Hardy

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

  • Meho

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

  • Cesar

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

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

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

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

  • Andrew

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Ho ho ho. Ho.

  • Gregg B

    I like this bit:

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

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

  • Spike

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

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

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

  • Littermate

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

  • Spike

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

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

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

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

  • xtal

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

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

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

  • Bluebogle

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

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

    Ahh, the good old days..

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