The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One Review

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            The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One

Review by ScoutJune 2004

Imagine, if you will, it’s the early nineties. You and your partner own a growing game development company based in Las Vegas called Westwood Associates. Your name is Brett Sperry or Louis Castle, and you have this new adventure game called The Legend of Kyrandia.  The two of you are trying to convince one of the big dogs of gaming development, Ken Williams of Sierra Online, to publish it for Westwood. Never mind the concept. It’s your basic thinly plotted fantasy wrapped around a modest bit of puzzling, some colorful graphics and some nice music. That’s not the point. The point is you’ve created a new interface especially for this game, an interface you’re sure is going to get you noticed. No more typing text messages like in that game you just finished for Infocom, Circuit’s Edge. Parsers are dead. This new interface is better. You use a mouse, see. That’s right. A mouse, and you run your cursor directly over a character or item and click to interact with it. You’ve never seen this before, and most people who try it rave about it once they get past the offputting novelty of using a mouse-driven interface in a computer game.

You deliver your pitch, your excitement rising, and then you give the demo to Williams. He plays it. You wait for his reaction, certain he’ll be impressed. Instead, he asks if you would like to see something.  Sure, you say. After all, this is Ken Williams here. He takes you into a room, sits you down in front of his company’s newest project and shows you how it works. It’s this thinly plotted fantasy wrapped around some pretty decent puzzling, some very gorgeous, hand-painted graphics and nice music, but it’s got this new interface. No more typing words. All you do is use a mouse to run a cursor around the screen … As you pick yourself up off the floor, you hear yourself ask the name of the game.

“King’s Quest V,” says Williams.

Then he drops the bomb. He asks if you would consider selling Westwood.

What do you do?

You sell, right? You realize that what you thought was your ticket to ride has already been bought and punched and the train has left the station. What else to do but take the money and run, maybe open that bar in Mexico you’ve always dreamed about.

Right?

Wrong.

If you are Brett Sperry or Louis Castle, you go back to Las Vegas and you and the 30 people at your company finish the game and publish it through Virgin. You follow up with two more installments. You go on to make the bestselling Command and Conquer RTS franchise, the Dune series, Blade Runner, the Lands of Lore series and Nox 1 and 2. Along the way you merge with Virgin, later get sold to Electronic Arts for $122.5 million and only in 2002 do the last vestiges of your company finally dissolve into the ever-transmorgifying corporate landscape.

So Kyrandia, had it been finished twelve or even six months earlier, might have secured a place in adventure game history. Instead, it has more or less been eclipsed by, among others, the King’s Quest series. This is no surprise because, in many ways, the above anecdote is the most interesting thing about this game. Still, for the patient gamer willing to tolerate some glaring flaws, this game has some modest rewards.

I recommend that you read the manual before you begin to play, specifically the segment starting on the second page titled “The History of Kyrandia.” I advise this because you’re not going to find much lucid backstory in the actual game. The abrupt manner in which the various characters are introduced and the often enigmatic comments of the main character suggest the developers expect you to do your homework. If you can’t be bothered with all those words, here’s a quick synopsis.

King William the First, king of Kyrandia, calls a meeting with the forces of Nature and they cut a deal. Mutual care and protection all around. As a token of its appreciation, Nature creates a Volkswagen-sized gem right where King William stood, and this gem is called … wait for it … the Kyragem. It’s Nature’s gift to Kyrandia and the royal family’s eternal responsibility. It acts to focus and concentrate magic power and in doing so makes Kyrandia the Magic Capital of the Universe.

The king, being a practical guy, builds a castle around the stone and names it Castle Kyrandia. Things are good and then not so good.  War then peace, the invention of trousers, and then one fateful day, for reasons unexplained, Malcolm the court jester kills the king and queen. Kallak, the chief of the royal mystics who care for the Kyragem, casts a spell to lock Malcolm in the castle and then takes the king and queen’s only child, Brandon, away into the forest. As the game begins, Malcolm has just broken Kallak’s spell and escaped the castle and is merrily wreaking vengeance up on the land and its inhabitants, especially targeting the loathed royal mystics. Brandon is a young man now and Kyrandia’s only hope. Will he defeat Malcolm? Can he restore harmony to the kingdom of Kyrandia?  Will he discover the secret of his birthright? At the end of the game, will we even care?

As you may have deduced by now, The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One has a rudimentary point-and-click control system. The upper three-fourths of the screen contain the viewing area. Here, you navigate by running your cursor to one edge of the screen. If you can advance, you get a clickable arrow. If not, you see the universal “no” icon of a slash through a circle. The bottom fourth of the screen is reserved for housekeeping chores. There is a very limited inventory of only 10 spaces, an options button to take you to the save and load functions, a long, thin, horizontal text message box (holy vestigial holdover, Batman!) and a lozenge-shaped amulet with four darkened, dead gems. These gems light up one by one as you progress through the game and achieve your goals. Each gem represents a power that, once obtained, is available to you for the remainder of the game.

Gems, by the way, are a running theme in this game. As well as the mystical Kyragem and the four gems in the above-mentioned amulet, there are myriad other gems scattered around Kyrandia, blue gems, red gems, gems growing on trees, yellow gems, hidden gems, gems in plain sight … so many gems, in fact, that after a while playing Kyrandia begins to feel a bit like a medieval Easter egg hunt for the Faberge set.

You aren’t far into the game before you begin to see the exposed roots of text adventures peeking through. At times Kyrandia felt like little more than a glorified text adventure with the “rooms” transposed directly to the screen. In fact, in a 2002 interview on Adventure Gamers, Rick Gush, the game’s designer, claims Kyrandia was loosely based on a multi-user text adventure game of the same name hosted by the Galacticomm Bulletin Board in the late eighties. According to Gush, the game’s creators, Brett Sperry and Michael Legg, had been playing the original text adventure and subsequently purchased the rights to use for Westwood’s first graphical adventure. While I haven’t seen the original game, a quick scan of a walkthrough references, among other things, the Kyragem.  Indeed, the paradigms of text adventuring have such a strong hold over this game that a few hours into it I had reverted to mapping the different areas using the time-tested standard of labeled squares connected by lines.

The text adventure “feel” wasn’t the only reason I turned to mapping. It’s not because the game world is overly large or complex (other than the infamous fire berry maze, which I’ll get to soon enough) but simply that everything looks the same. There is a reason for this: several of the screens were reused multiple times in multiple areas. Occasionally the artists went to the trouble of modifying the screen somewhat, closing up a cave entrance, removing or adding a foreground branch, or reversing the image, but just as often they didn’t. A few times the same screen is used next to itself, making it appear as if the player character “pops” from one side to the other, when in fact he has moved over a screen. This becomes especially annoying in the forest regions, where you really need some decent visual cues. Because of this ill-considered production shortcut, the different areas in Kyrandia have a bland, homogenous look. As much of the puzzling entails trudging back and forth to these areas in search of inventory items, mapping as you go helps lower the frustration level a few notches.

This incessant recycling carries over to the music, which often plays in tight, repeating loops, loops that sometimes don’t change for several screens. The tone seemed off as well, sounding awfully light and happy for what is essentially a dark, cautionary tale.  In researching this review, I came upon a website that contained .mp3 files of the original MT-32 midi tunes, and I finally got to hear what I was missing. Quite a bit, it turned out. The composer, Frank Klepacki, created a lushly evocative, multilayered score for this game, but because the files require the true LA Synth playback that only an LAPC-1 sound card or an MT-32 midi module can reproduce, few modern-day gamers will ever get to hear it as they play the game.

Though I played the CD-ROM version with voice acting, the original release was diskette only with no voices. As with King’s Quest V, the developers were quick to exploit the huge data capacity of the newly emerging CD-ROM technology to add spoken voices. The results were a mixed bag but on the whole very serviceable. While a few voices were sort of leaden, most of the actors did a decent enough job of it, especially Gloria Hoffman as Brandywine the dragon and Gimalyn Torrecilla as Zanthia, one of the royal mystics. Gary Hyatt, the actor playing Malcolm, was by far the standout. Sadly, as is often the case, the main character’s voice left a lot to be desired. It was thin. It was whiny. It was a spoiled little boy’s voice. And to be fair, it was probably written that way. Checking my notes, I find scrawled, in capital letters this note to myself: “Brandon. Most annoying player character ever? No. But close.”  Upon reflection, I think that’s a bit of an overstatement, but the general sentiment holds.

My main complaint, though, and what finally brought this game down, was the puzzles. They were simply poorly designed, often coming off as little more than exercises in trial and error. More than once I was reduced to guessing at the solutions, trying this, then that, until finally randomly stumbling across the answer. Thinking I had missed some vital clue or overlooked a crucial inventory item, I would retrace my steps, revisiting each location. I think I spent as much time searching for nonexistent clues than actually working on the puzzles. I even made a point of watching for hints during the second play through, to no avail. To me, one of the pleasures of a well-made adventure game is discovering the clues scattered about the game world. This gives me reason to pay attention, to note the significant detail, to become immersed in the game. Good puzzle design should reinforce the story instead detract from it.  Good puzzle design should exercise lateral thinking, rewarding both leaps of intuition and logical deduction. There’s not a lot of this in Kyrandia.

And then, finally, there is the maze.

Where to start? First, a confession. I’m one of those people who actually enjoys mazes. Yes, it’s true. Maybe it’s because I have an inborn sense of direction or maybe because something went wrong at birth, but when first encountering a maze I’m as likely to rub my hands in anticipation as wring them in despair. I enjoy mapping strange, convoluted worlds and trying to make sense of them. It’s exploration in one of its purest forms. I loved the sewers in Traitors Gate, reveled in taming the beast that was the maze in The Black Dahlia. I even occasionally found myself humming as I explored the vast, convoluted nightmare better known as a Daggerfall dungeon. So what did I think of the maze in Kyrandia?

It was like Zork with pictures.

You remember Zork. You made your way though a vast underground labyrinth full of snarling grues who feared only one thing. Light.  As long as you had lanterns and flashlights, the grues stayed away.  When the light went out, the devouring began. In Kyrandia’s maze, you have the same basic model. You require light to navigate the maze. The only source of light (at the beginning) exists in the maze. This source is fragile and wears out easily. You must find more light or suffer the consequences. This light is readily available to you but usually at the price of repeated dying. In a way, this maze is simultaneously the most elegantly designed puzzle in the game and the most unfair.

It’s obvious that some amount of thought and care went into its design. In fact, a very, very lucky gamer might conceivably stumble through the whole thing and survive. It can be done; in fact, logic dictates that it has to be possible for the maze to actually work.  Still, it felt unfair in that it’s nigh on impossible to map the maze without dying repeatedly. As the chances are excellent you are going to have to traverse the entire maze at least one more time (I can just hear the groans), you pretty much have to map it, and to make the needed map, you must die.

Also, there is at least one place, near the three-quarters mark, where you can easily find yourself at a dead end. Luckily, it doesn’t take long to figure out that something is wrong and reload. Still, I hate dead ends in graphical adventure games. For some reason I can abide them in text games, where they seem more organic somehow.

The game ran like a dream in DOS with not a bump, shudder or crash.  I installed it to my hard drive, booted to DOS and played from there.  There is also an option to install a semi-Windows version via a wininst.exe command that then lets you click on a KYRACD.BAT file from Windows Explorer. I didn’t try it, but at least it is an option.

There is some confusion about the name of this game. It appears that this game, indeed all three Kyrandia games, have two separate titles … sort of. Originally the first game was released as Fables and Fiends: The Legend of Kyrandia: Book One. Later, the three games were packaged as a boxed set titled The Legend of Kyrandia: The Series. In this set the first game was entitled Book One: Fables and Fiends, the second Book Two: The Hand of Fate and the third Book Three: Malcolm’s Revenge.  Open the box, though, and the jewel case inserts all show the original titles, each with The Legend of Kyrandia intact.

Alas, in the end, The Legend of Kyrandia, whatever its official title, didn’t do much for me. All of the parts were there, the story, the puzzles, the exploration, but they never really gelled into any kind of satisfying experience, any sort of real payoff. It’s always a balancing act to weigh an older game’s worth to the modern gamer while still trying to imagine its impact back in the day.  While there are games that are still as entertaining today as they were 15 years ago, Kyrandia isn’t one of them. It’s more “important” than it is “fun,” offering up some tidbits of historic interest but not really delivering any sustained entertainment value. And in a game where the whole point is to find the magic again, that’s just a little sad. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Westwood Publisher: Virgin Release Date: 1992

Available for: DOS

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System Requirements

286 DOS 4.0 or higher 2 MB RAM VGA graphics Sound card Mouse

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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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