The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Review

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            The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion

Review by SteerpikeApril 2006

The End of Steerpike’s Review

I was going to put this part at the end—it’s more dramatic as a conclusion—but the fact is I’m wordy under the best of circumstances, so out of courtesy to those who don’t have all day, this section gets right to the point.

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is history now. And whether or not you personally liked it, it’s widely accepted as one of those games that changed the world. Opinions on how “good” or “fun” it is differ. But it is unquestionably among the most important video games ever made. Each and every Elder Scrolls game has somehow raised the bar higher than its predecessor, and people naturally expected the same from Morrowind’s sequel.  So does Oblivion trump Morrowind?

Well … no. At least not in my opinion, which puts me in the extreme minority. Suffice it to say that while Oblivion is an impressive technical achievement and a very enjoyable game, if I had to choose between the two, I’d take Morrowind. For the first time in Elder Scrolls history, a new installment is a (small) step backward.

Oblivion is the worse game for a variety of reasons: structural, mechanical and thematic. Mistakes were made in its execution that were not made in its predecessor. It is still a triumph in many respects. But it is not equal to Morrowind, and, as far as I’m concerned, it is not the game we were hoping for.

The Beginning of Steerpike’s Review

Oblivion is awesome … and it sucks. There’s such a split personality associated with this game that it almost feels like two titles, not one. The first is an incredibly engaging and well-designed roleplaying experience with stunning visuals and fascinating technology.  The second is a frustrating and obnoxious pain that goes out of its way to constrain your actions, sacrifices gameplay to show off cool tech and includes “features” that make you feel like you’re part of a secret government experiment to see how infuriated people can become before they explode.

I have two major complaints. The first is the enormous collection of little things that ruin the game experience—not bugs, but quirks and idiosyncrasies; design decisions so half-assed that they have no right being in a game this good. More on those in a minute.

The second is that no matter how hard I tried, I never felt like I was part of the world of Oblivion. I could not immerse.  It felt not like a living place but like a disconnected series of questlets. And that’s a serious problem, but it’s also a very subjective one.

Save the World! (Whenever)

I haven’t finished Oblivion. There’s no “finishing” it; it never ends. I have completed the main quest, which takes about 25 hours of a 250+ hour game if you hurry. I’ve also finished a wide variety of side quests, but I’m not “done.” Oblivion is basically a big fantasy sandbox.

The Elder Scrolls games are true epics, offering up a vast and sprawling universe full of distinct culture and rich history.  The Empire of Tamriel sits on millennia of posterity. It is a vibrant place, truly real, which makes the awesome, world-shaking adventures found in the Elder Scrolls that much more engrossing.

For centuries, Tamriel—once a contentious battleground in which nine nations warred constantly—has enjoyed relative stability under the imperial rule. Led by Tiber Septim, the humans of Cyrodiil invaded their eight neighbors long ago, using trained dragons and the chainmailed barbarism of the imperial legions to conquer elves, lizardfolk, cat people and everything in between. Eventually the annexed nations learned to deal with their new role as provinces.

And the Septims have ruled Tamriel ever since. Uriel Septim VII, the latest in a long line of imperial mediocrities, has reigned for more than fifty years. He, like all emperors before him, knows the dark secret of Tamriel: should the Septim line end without an heir, the marble doors of Oblivion will open and devour the world.

The land of Oblivion is the Tamrielic Hell, a brimstony nightmare that is home to the fiendish Daedra, demons that figure prominently throughout Tamriel’s history. And while individual Daedra occasionally find their way to Tamriel, a barrier exists that absolutely prevents the establishment of a permanent passage between the two worlds.  Or so everyone thought.

Your character, who starts inauspiciously as a prisoner in the imperial dungeons, couldn’t really care less about any of that until the emperor (voiced by Patrick Stewart in the easiest few grand he ever made) and his bodyguards appear, rattling keys and babbling about murdered sons and approaching assassins. It would seem that your cell is the secret access point to an underground passage out of the Imperial City. Someone is coming to kill the emperor, someone who has already killed his sons, and his guards are making their last-ditch effort to get him out. Figuring that death in a dank and anonymous tunnel is preferable to rotting in prison, you trail along.

But luck is not on Uriel’s side. He’s murdered by cloaked assassins down in the tunnels and dies literally in your arms. With his last breath, he gurgles out some instructions that saddle you with an unfairly gargantuan responsibility: it turns out that there is another son, an illegitimate son named Martin, who must be found and enthroned posthaste.

But the marble doors of Oblivion didn’t get that memo, so they dutifully creak open, and soon demon gates are popping up all over Cyrodiil, with an extensive selection of infernal Daedra pouring through to terrorize the countryside. Getting invaded by demons is rarely good news, and for an empire already in decline, it’s likely the final nail in the coffin.

As with all of the Elder Scrolls, it’s really up to you whether or not you do anything about it. The main story of Martin Septim and Daedric incursion is just one of approximately ninety million paths you can choose to walk. But in Morrowind and its predecessors, the “main” quests were never particularly urgent; they were more like slow-moving mysteries. You felt free to ignore them because there wasn’t any pressure associated with your objectives—or at least none that was readily apparent.

In Oblivion, the world is literally going to hell. From a roleplaying perspective, there’s no practical reason not to deal with it immediately, which creates an unpleasant sense of tension and exigency that made me feel very rushed. It disconnected me from the world, made me unwelcome. Morrowind absorbed me. I was part of Vvardenfell. It became my home. I never felt that way in Oblivion. I felt hustled along by an impatient tour guide, because ignoring the main quest would be like playing DOOM and choosing to explore the Martian surface rather than fight the monsters.

What a Lovely Engine You Have

Technically speaking, Oblivion delivers on all of its promises and more. It is startlingly gorgeous, breathtakingly so, to the point where I couldn’t stop taking screenshots. The codebase, which is a combination of proprietary Bethesda work and Emergent’s middleware Gamebryo engine plus Havok physics, is simply astonishing. The outdoor vistas are too glorious for words, with only the tiny complaint that distant objects such as grass tend to “pop” in rather jarringly. Indoors, the game shows nigh-criminal attention to detail, with every locale perfectly modeled and populated by hundreds of lovingly designed unique objects. Oblivion is quite simply the most beautiful game on the market today.

I’m reviewing the PC version here, and I’ve got a reasonably powerful PC—3800+, 2 GB of memory, a Radeon X1900 XT and two Raptor hard drives in RAID 0, which dramatically reduce load times. Oblivion’s performance is perfectly adequate on my machine—25 to 80 fps with all features maxed out. Forums suggest that lesser PCs can handle the game provided users are willing to lower their screen resolution and disable GPU-crushing effects such as high dynamic range lighting. The 360 version, I’m told, stutters occasionally but is otherwise a solid performer.

I never had technical problems with Morrowind (seriously), though I guess others did. Oblivion, also, is surprisingly stable for such a massive and complex game. It’s not reasonable to expect a product this colossal to ship without a few bugs, and it definitely has some issues, but to describe Oblivion as broken or even particularly buggy would be unfair. Everything works more or less as advertised, which for Bethesda is still kind of an aberration. It’s good news, though, especially considering it could have been a technical train wreck given Bethesda’s history.  Programming gnomes are already working on the first of what’s doubtless to become many patches, so watch the website.

You should also watch it for new goodies. Like its predecessor, Oblivion is mod-friendly. The Elder Scrolls Construction Set is improved over its previous iteration, and fan-developed mods are already available for free online. Just be advised that Bethesda is charging money for its own official plugins. Horses that don’t look like a four-year-old drew them? Ching! Two dollars. New quest that wasn’t done in time for the release? Ching! Two dollars. I can’t fault Bethesda, but these things might add up for fans.

One of the game’s chief selling points is the Radiant AI system, which establishes individual identities, needs and solution paths for literally every living thing in the game. Radiant, though still experiencing growing pains, really does work; follow a single NPC all day and you’ll see that. It is far from flawless, as AIs occasionally forget what they’re doing, often get stuck in endless conversations with each other and tend to bug out of work after lunch, but it’s nowhere near as busted as I thought it would be.

And yet, to my enormous surprise, it doesn’t affect play much.  In all honesty, I didn’t see that much difference between a Radiant-controlled NPC and one of the scripted robots of Morrowind, except that the scripted robots didn’t wander too far from their first position.  This is partly due to artificial constraints designed to keep players (and AIs) from breaking the game. I suspect we’ll see a more ready-for-prime-time version of Radiant in the upcoming Fallout 3.

Composer Jeremy Soule, who also scored Morrowind, returned to provide his awesome talents to Oblivion. I tremble at the thought of Soule teaming up with Irrational’s mighty sound design god Eric Brosius; they could probably rule the world through audio.  Oblivion’s soundtrack is exquisite and minimalist: mostly haunting, lonely violins and flutes. It’s a big change from the sweeping orchestrations of Morrowind and testament to how diverse and talented Jeremy Soule is.

Scenic Cyrodiil on $20 a Day

Oblivion didn’t exactly have me at hello. The tunnels where the emperor meets his fate also serve as a bloated and rather dull tutorial, taking more than an hour to complete. Moreover, it does nothing to help you understand the impenetrable menu system. The interface is, frankly, obtuse. It requires countless clicks to get at controls and information that should all be accessible from one screen. Some critical information isn’t available at all. How it made it out of testing is beyond me. Default mouse controls are clumsy and require considerable remapping, and the instructions fail to describe important interface elements and world effects.

The big full-color map included in the box has nowhere near the level of detail that Morrowind’s did, depicting instead a world that seems rather barren. Which is weird, because it’s anything but barren. That world, in addition to being so beautiful it could stop hearts, shows signs of handcrafting that border on the creepily obsessive. The landscape is overwhelmingly peppered with places to visit and things to do: haunted ruins, plundered mines, huge cities, old castles, mysterious caves, tiny hamlets and, of course, those terrifying Oblivion gates that keep sprouting up like malevolent orange mushrooms. Every corner of Cyrodiil is an embarrassment of adventuring riches. In fact, I suspect that’s why they made the map so bland, because they want you to find everything on your own, lawnmowering back and forth across a game world that is actually larger than Morrowind’s until you’ve uncovered every farmhouse and crumbling fort. No thanks.

As always, Bethesda learned hard lessons from the previous game and enhanced play in many areas, such as a dramatically improved new stealth interface that allows you to slink around and attack from the shadows if you so desire. Combat in general has been significantly improved: it’s visceral and hectic, often involving multiple parties on both sides. The addition of Havok physics and more effective sound design shivers every blow and parry through your wrist like a gong, while combos and power attacks greatly increase the frantic bludgeapalooza of the game’s battles. Slamming an enemy against the wall with your sword, seeing his shield clang to the ground and spin away like a top while he sinks slowly to his knees …  very cool.

Alas, nonviolent encounters are another matter. The characters with whom you interact are very much on the wrong side of the Uncanny Valley (that means they’re ugly), and the limited dialogue tree makes conversation seem like a highly directed affair. The AIs don’t tend to respond dynamically to what you do, and the inclusion of voices for every single character in the game is a mixed blessing.

Actor Sean Bean, perennially excellent and often underappreciated, provides the voice of Martin Septim. Instead of the bored phone-in we usually get from Hollywood stars, Bean delivers a layered, subtle performance that he clearly considered carefully and put his heart into. Unfortunately, he and Patrick Stewart represent the beginning and the end of talented voices in the game. Everyone else is so painfully wooden that it hurts, it physically hurts, to listen to them. Inexplicably, they got like three women and three men to voice all of the (literally thousands) of speaking roles in the game, so get used to hearing the same voices over and over. Worse, characters often change voices in midconversation, so without warning the hiss of a reptilian Argonian becomes the whiny tenor of a wood elf.

In the interests of freeing you up to do whatever you want in the world, several hundred unique side quests are available. Of them, many are clever and well-written; others are simple FedEx tasks, and more than a few are tedious and dumb. Unfortunately, some of dumb ones are also some of the most important—such as ones that offer advancement in a faction or guild or progress the plot.  In two significant quests for the Mages Guild, you never even leave the grounds. In one main quest instance, you’re forced to drop what you’re doing and follow a character, on foot, to another location—which, if you’re far away (and I was very far away indeed) can take literally hours.

That Works Fine. We’d Better Fix It.

I think Bethesda believed a lot of things to be broken in Morrowind when they really weren’t, which is the only way I can explain some of the more imprudent design decisions found in this game.  Despite grandiose promises, Oblivion is a highly structured, regimented experience that makes little effort to conceal the massive checks and constraints on player liberty. Though nonlinear and freeform in a global sense, Oblivion denies the player the small freedoms that are the heart and soul of a truly open game.

For example, if you touch the wrong thing at the wrong time (like the door of a shop after hours), it’s a “crime,” even if it’s just an accident, even if you make no effort to pick the lock. I can’t count how many times I got tossed in the slammer because I tried to enter a merchant’s shop without realizing that it was closed. The cursor turns red when some action is criminal, but if you’re in a hurry or not paying close attention, it’s easy to miss it. How about a warning dialog?

If you leave stuff in chests or cabinets, it vanishes after a few days. Were the effect limited to public places, I’d be fine with it—I wouldn’t leave my stuff in a box at Taco Bell, after all.  But it’s everywhere, even places that should be secure. And you simply can’t carry all of the stuff you need all of the time.  Your only solution is to mod the game or buy a house, which, as you can imagine, is a rather pricey alternative.

Thinking I’d come up with a clever way around that, I killed a guy to steal his house (so sue me, I needed a house). I was professional.  No one saw me do it. And yet despite possession being nine-tenths of the law, touching anything in my new home was still a “crime.”  If I put anything in “his” cabinets, getting them out again marked them as stolen property. I couldn’t sleep in the beds because I was “trespassing.” There was a corpse that I couldn’t get rid of on my living room floor. And my stuff still disappeared if I left it there for too long. In a game intelligent enough to assign unique objectives to every one of a thousand NPCs, it’s not unreasonable to expect it to be able to reset possession when the original owner dies.

Look, house theft is probably not something that you’d get away with in real life. And if the townspeople, with their vaunted Radiant AI, had suddenly started wondering where the guy was and checked his house and found me there, that would have been okay. But no one did. No one missed him. The game decreed that I couldn’t have the house. In fact, the game’s habit of doing stuff simply to mess with me, and its habit of forgetting important things I owned or did, contribute massively to my frustrations.

There are also simply asinine mistakes. Apparently no one at Bethesda bothered to download Mount & Blade before implementing an appalling horse system so grossly and inexcusably dreadful that whoever’s responsible for it ought to be whipped. As if to counter that, you can fast-travel to any location on the map at any time, turning the game experience into a series of disparate segments and excluding the player from the linear thread of a world.

The addition of minigames for speechcraft and lockpicking tasks is a good idea in theory, but the execution of both games is trite and ultimately frustrating. It’s impossible to lose the speechcraft game once you figure it out, no matter your character’s speechcraft rank. And once they finish whipping whoever did the horses, they should turn the whip on whatever malice-driven gremlin implemented the shockingly exasperating lockpick game. Minigames for tasks are fine, but if you’re going to do it, do it right.

Here’s another example of stupidity rampaging through an otherwise undeserving game: using their personal psychic twinkle, legitimate merchants just magically know if you’re carrying stolen goods, and they won’t buy them. If you’re not a member of the Thieves Guild with access to their fences, you simply can’t make a living as a thief. Guards automatically know what property is stolen, so if you get arrested, all your stolen stuff is taken away, even if you quite literally stole it five years ago a thousand miles away and were never ever suspected of the crime.

They even managed to screw up the procedure for putting thing down, for crying out loud. If you “drop” an item, it falls to the ground at your feet and rolls away, or it gets kicked away when you move. If you try to “set down” the item by dragging it out of your inventory and into the game world, you fling it halfway across the room because the physics are on crystal meth. Why can’t I simply arrange my objects in neat, orderly rows? Why provide bookshelves if it’s nearly impossible to put books on them? Why? Honestly, we’re talking about dropping stuff here; it’s not a new game concept.

These are all little things, but, as I said before, it’s the little things that bring Oblivion down. Examples like those above (and there are others, believe me) tarnish a game that actually has almost nothing wrong with its big picture.

The Beginning of the End of Steerpike’s Review

Based on the tirade above, it must seem that I hate the game, and that’s really not true at all. There is much to love in Oblivion, much to experience and enjoy. In a lot of ways, it’s simply excellent, one of the greatest RPGs ever unleashed.

One of the coolest things about Oblivion is Oblivion. Soon the gates are everywhere, and even approaching one incites thrills of terror as the sky goes bloody and ominous thunder roils. Wildlife doesn’t usually approach Oblivion gates, and there’s always the chance that some hideous Daedra lord found his way through and is waiting to eviscerate you. Entering one of those chilling portals takes real intestinal fortitude. The Plane of Oblivion won’t win any awards for creativity in art direction, with its lava, spikes, impaled stuff, red sky, creepy towers, and more spikes, but each visit is a nail-biter. Enemies level with you in Oblivion, meaning that you’ll always be challenged by whatever you face—no more god among insects (actually, this makes the game really, really ridiculously hard later on, so ratchet down the difficulty level).  And making it all the way through one of those Planes of Oblivion to actually shut the gate and get the hell out of there will take everything you’ve got, whether you’re first level or fiftieth. They’re like encapsulated superdungeons. You come out battered, exhausted and torn, bleeding from a million wounds, all your stuff broken from overuse. Sealing an Oblivion gate is one of the most wonderfully exhausting experiences I’ve ever had in gaming, and the effect remains strong since it’s fed to you in small doses and you can do it whenever you want to.

Of course, whether or not you choose to follow the main quest, you’re going to find your dance card very full. You can join any of several guilds and factions and work your way up through the ranks—assuming you can survive the cutthroat politics—or just live the life of a freelance adventurer. Or both. Or neither.  It takes about five or six hours of play to really get established in Oblivion, but after that you’ll never be at a loss for things to do.

And for all the little things done wrong, they did plenty of little things right, like adding the ability to cast spells while your weapon is still out. You’ll find yourself in some long fights, and it’s nice to be able to heal up or blast an enemy without having to put away your weapon and get out your spellcasting hands. Blocking is now an active move—it’s up to you to parry or shield yourself from blows in combat. Archery is spectacularly implemented; thanks to Havok, you feel each shot, whether you’re on the giving or the receiving end, and it’s satisfying to lurk in the shadows of an ancient ruin, Garrett-like, and deliver a killer arrow to the throat of an unsuspecting foe.

Dungeon design is very clever, including everything from simple caves to huge subterranean complexes, the remnants of an extinct elven race. Again thanks to Havok, many dungeons feature deadly booby traps, deadfalls, tripwires and even complex Rube Goldberg slice-and-dicers. You can trigger these traps to damage an enemy, using the environment as a tool to aid you. Since most players will spend a lot of time underground, they were smart to focus so much on it.

And, as always, the writing is exceptional. The Elder Scrolls are famous for their devious, convoluted plots and unpredictable outcomes. It’s really nice to see writers who are willing to give us more than the usual rote fantasy fare. All of the dialogue is good, the quest concepts are for the most part terrific, and the hundreds of readable books scattered throughout the kingdom are just as engrossing as ever, especially the creepy Daedric cult initiation texts.

Perhaps most important, despite my laundry list of complaints, the game is fun. It is consistently enjoyable, minus several moments of intense frustration when I try to drop something and instead send it into low earth orbit, or return to a cupboard in an abandoned farmhouse to find that my collection of alchemical ingredients has wandered off, or get arrested for accidentally picking up an apple.  I have not, however, been playing it obsessively for hours on end as I did Morrowind; I think that ties in with the fact that I just can’t feel part of this world for some reason.

Socks Still On

Bethesda has always been ambitious, and this is its most ambitious game yet. It’s visually stunning and usually a lot of fun to play.  During development, the true focus was the Radiant AI, and to Bethesda’s credit, it does mostly work. NPCs get up, go to work, break for lunch, chat in the street, hit the bar for a drink, visit each other’s homes, all driven by the remarkable technology of Radiant. It’s just that none of that had any effect on me.

This game has already sold two million copies and is showing no signs of slowing down. It’s the fastest-selling Xbox 360 title yet and is topping all of the PC charts. Most reviews have been almost gushingly positive, and most fans, as far as I know, are perfectly thrilled with the game. Considering the recent shortage of single-player RPGs and the alarmist claims that indeed the single-player RPG market is about to go the way of the brontosaurus, Oblivion’s release couldn’t be better timed.

No review has ever given me as much difficulty as this one. I’ve honestly never been at such a crossroads in my view of a game. I owe Oblivion a fair shake, I have a responsibility to get my opinion right. I’ve questioned everything from my grammar to my objectivity during the agonizing course of writing this, and in some ways I feel no closer to touching the pulse of Oblivion than I did when I started.

It’s good. It just could—it should—be a lot better. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Bethesda Publisher: Bethesda Release Date: March 20, 2006

Available for: Windows Xbox 360

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Screenshots

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System Requirements

Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows XP 64-bit 512 MB RAM (1 GB recommended) 2 GHz Intel Pentium 4 or equivalent processor (3 GHz recommended) 128 MB Direct3D compatible video card (ATI X800 series, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series, or higher recommended) with DirectX 9.0 compatible driver ATI X800 series, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series, or higher video card 8x DVD-ROM drive 4.6 GB free hard disk space DirectX 9.0c (included) DirectX 8.1 compatible sound card Keyboard, mouse

Where 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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