Thief 2X: Shadows of the Metal Age Review

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            Thief 2X: Shadows of the Metal Age

Review by SteerpikeJuly 2005

Mea Culpa

The official Thief series could be represented as a line moving progressively, diagonally down. The numinous glory of The Dark Project gave way to the clumsier but still excellent Metal Age, which in turn handed the reins to the passable but ultimately mediocre Deadly Shadows. The Gold Star I gave Deadly Shadows last year has been the cause of much pain and self-doubt, and the truth is I cut that game more slack than it deserved. The mission design ranged from very good to astounding, it’s true—and the technology was highly impressive. But the story, while well-written, was nonsensical, the villain comical and the closure unsatisfying. Moreover, what had been billed as a major selling point—free access to the City—was so disastrously implemented that it cast a pall on the game’s many redeeming qualities. I was overly forgiving, and I was wrong.

But there’s more than just the official Thief series out there. Jumping onto the fan community bandwagon begun with Quake and Unreal, in 1999 Looking Glass Studios shipped its DromEd level editor with Thief 2: The Metal Age. DromEd is one of the most fantastically buggy, obtuse, thick, frustrating and cantankerous development tools ever to grace the PC. It is the Battlecruiser 3000AD of level editors. Even Looking Glass developers admitted that DromEd was not a valued tool, but a reviled arch foe with its own malicious sentience that attempted to thwart them at every turn. But such was the passion for Thief that hordes of fan-made missions, and even whole new games, soon appeared.

Five years after the all-amateur Dark Engineering Guild announced its intention to create a full-length original game set in the same world, Thief 2X: Shadows of the Metal Age was released and is available for free download here.  You’ll need a complete install of Thief 2 patched to version 1.18 in order for 2X to work; this is available in assorted bargain packs, and the patch can be found online. Amateurs or not, these people know their stuff, and Thief 2X is a great game. It’s faithful, technically sound, well-written and fun to play. If you’re a Thief fan, it deserves your attention.

When Something’s Going Wrong, You Must Glyph It

Garrett, that curmudgeonly antiheroic cat burglar of near-miraculous obfuscational ability, is not to be found in Thief 2X. This game takes place parallel to the events in The Metal Age. It tells someone else’s story and introduces a new perspective on the City and its powerbrokers. The City is as much a character in the Thief universe as any speaking role. It’s difficult to find words that aptly describe it, that nameless, immense urban gulf where twisted magic and lumbering technology exist in wary partnership.  There’s a novel by Paul Auster called In the Country of Last Things, and it has always reminded me vividly of the City—or, rather, what the City would be like if it were even more grim and menacing. In Thief 2X, we’re awarded a perspective on the place from a true outsider.

This time you’ll play a young woman named Zaya, a visitor from a sunlit country as far removed from the City’s looming tenebracity as you could possibly imagine. Zaya’s the favorite daughter of a wealthy merchant family and, having just come of age, is dispatched with a ship full of goodies bound for the City, where she’s to hook up with her cousin Kedar upon arrival at the wharf. It doesn’t work out; on the way back to Kedar’s shop, some Very Bad Men bonk him on the head with a club and Zaya has to run away.

The first minimission is great; dodging Kedar’s attackers, Zaya inadvertently seeks refuge in a haunted house. It’s no Shalebridge Cradle—nothing compares to that two-hour ecstasy of terror from Deadly Shadows, a mission so relentlessly petrifying I’m surprised it hasn’t killed someone yet—but it’s quite unsettling.  As she picks her way from room to rotting room, it seems that someone is leading her in a very specific direction. After lots of tension and more than a few jump-out-of-your-skin scares, she bumps into a gentleman named Malak, who insists that she must seek revenge on the men who squished Kedar’s skull and offers to train her in the art of stealth.

Malak, who is a little too over the top in his creepy-lookingness, may or may not be a Keeper—a member of one of the City’s most powerful factions. The Keepers were thoroughly explored in Deadly Shadows; they employ ancient Glyphs that only they can read to predict and meddle in the future. There are some Glyphs that even the Keepers don’t understand, and others are so powerful that in the wrong hands they would be nightmare weapons. There’s also the matter of the missing Last Glyph, the final symbol with power over all of the others. The Last Glyph is the primary plot thread of Deadly Shadows, and when you finally realize what it is, it’s pretty cool. Zaya has no idea who the Keepers are and wouldn’t care anyway—but they know her, as they know everything that goes on in the City.

The game’s 13 missions—it’s actually longer than The Dark Project—see Zaya performing tasks intended to first identify the men who attacked Kedar and then shove their clubs somewhere painful. It turns out (natch) to be a more complicated proposition than she’d originally assumed. A great number of City bigwigs are involved, and much of the activity deals with the ongoing rivalry between the Hammer Church and Mechanist seceders. It’s a good story, rich in Thief mythology and well-spiced with personality and occasional bits of well-placed humor. The narrative takes a bizarre turn at the end, and much of the main plot is predictable, but all in all it’s gripping enough to keep you interested.

Honor Among … Well, You Know

Built in the same mission-based structure as Dark Project and Metal Age, Thief 2X is a first-person sneaker game that calls for stealth, careful observation and patience. Some people just don’t see the appeal in lurking quietly in a dark corner, waiting for just the right moment to break cover. Sneakers aren’t for everybody, and like the game on which it is based, 2X is very unforgiving in combat. Zaya is no more a fighter than Garrett, and she is hard pressed when toe-to-toe with an armed opponent who knows she’s there.

Luckily, the game is designed in such a way that you’re only likely to face that situation if you get impatient or clumsy. Zaya has learned Garrett’s art of vanishing completely in dim light and can remain invisible as long as she’s careful. Your equipment is designed to facilitate this stealth, though she is able to use deadly force when necessary. Zaya’s hammer, used to knock unsuspecting opponents out, is her most important tool.

2X also includes several new pieces of equipment, such as EMP grenades—useful against the howitzer-carrying Mechanist robots. Elemental Catalysts, provided now and then by Malak, are exceptionally useful tools. The right Catalyst will turn your water arrows into ice arrows, able to freeze an opponent in place or create little icebergs as stepping stones across deep water. Stuff like this, along with the fact that all the original weapons have been remodeled, are signs of how hard the Dark Engineering Guild worked on this project.

There is one serious flaw in the gameplay, though, and it’s the reason that Thief 2X isn’t getting a Gold Star: level design, while artistically beautiful, is frustrating to say the least. Structures are labyrinthine, showing no particular respect for architectural logic or traffic flow. In some of the larger levels, it’s nearly impossible to find your way around. You just blunder from place to place until you’ve achieved all the objectives, hoping you didn’t miss anything really valuable. It didn’t by any means ruin the game, but it’s quite an irritant.

That’s just architecture, though. The missions have layered and complex goals, they’re well-balanced and often very creative in style and setting—a Mechanist “Iron Carriage” (that’s a train), posh museum, even a brothel. You will find yourself not only on City streets but those of a nearby suburb as well. There is almost always more than one path—some of them very creative—to any goal, and you’d be wise to explore and plan carefully. There are no “bad” missions, it’s just annoyingly hard to find your way around in them.

Hello Darkness, My Old Friend

Thief 2 is now six years old, and 2X employs the same basic technology with some tweaks and new art. Yet the Dark Engine that powers these games has somehow aged more like David Bowie than Jon Voight—it still, at six, looks surprisingly good. There’s something about its angular, stylized appearance that holds up where other engines don’t.

Pretty much anyone will be able to run 2X at 1600×1200—unlike the other Dark Engine games, it supports this maximum resolution in the video menu. This not only further improves the graphics, it slows down the game enough to make it playable without other tweaks on a modern system. Users with certain ATI cards may notice some misbehavior in fog effects, but otherwise the expansion performs admirably and is very stable.

Thief 2X is no half-assed cobble. Its production values are as good as those of a studio game. The creators added dozens of new 3D models, along with myriad new textures, art pieces, sprites and effects. More than 3,000 lines of original dialogue were recorded for 2X, along with many thousands of words of narrative.  Each mission is preceded by the same style of animated briefing we saw in Dark Project and Metal Age—Zaya’s narrative punctuating a choreographed mélange of hand-drawn stills and Photoshopped effects.

There are also new rendered cutscenes. While attention to detail is simply excellent in these, and the directorial skill is unmatched, the cutscene team might have done well to study human kinetics more carefully—people don’t walk or move in a natural fashion. But that’s nothing, and overall the cutscenes are great, with a keen eye for the camera and the play of light and shadow.

One thing that Thief 2X does suffer from is a distinct lack of Eric Brosius, the mad genius sound designer for the official series. While much of Thief’s environmental audio can be, and is, recycled into 2X, the new stuff they created just can’t compete. The choice to include a musical score in some levels was also ill-advised, as environmental noise is so crucially important in Thief that any distraction creates a problem. The music also gets very repetitive after a while. Additionally, many conversations are too faint to hear, while action and audio in scripted sequences are often wildly out of sync.

They didn’t skimp on voice talent. While it might be going too far to call the voice work exceptional, it’s certainly good.  The lead roles are very well played for the most part, stumbling at times on a script that more than once crosses the line into melodramatic but is generally pretty tight. Malak, as I said, is a little much, but otherwise there’s a lot of skill on display here. Heck, most professional studios still don’t bother with good voice talent.

I do have a minor, subjective issue with Zaya. April Lurty’s quavering alto is a far cry from Stephen Russell’s wryly menacing Garrett.  It’s occasionally difficult, when listening to Zaya speak, to imagine that this girl is capable of the sort of thing Malak is asking of her. She seems persistently close to tears. Now, the actress is pretty good—she falls flat only the really hammy stuff (which is more common than it should be); it’s just the tone she chose doesn’t fit the milieu. We needed someone more bemusedly sinister, like Russell’s Garrett.

2X Time Is the Charm

A lot of people, five years into an exhausting project for which they’d receive no recompense and possibly no recognition, would have called it quits. Especially when one considers how far technology has come from the Dark Engine—sure, it holds up really well, but it is obviously old, and that’s got to be discouraging. That this team chose to stick it out says a lot about their tenacity, dedication, drive and ambition to create something genuinely worthwhile.  The people who really get Thief stop being players and become disciples, fiercely defending it and sometimes so philosophically embroiled in the opulence of its mythology that we must seem weird to those who haven’t played or didn’t like the original game. These developers are true disciples.

Even if this game were mediocre, which it is not by any stretch of the imagination, it bears recommendation because it’s free, and complete, and seems so professional in its exhibition of itself that I think the Dark Engineering Guild could go to any publisher right now, ask for funding to do an original game, and expect to get it. Shadows of the Metal Age, while not precisely a Thief game, fits snugly into the Thief universe, and it’s a welcome addition.

The other major Thief conversion project is called The Circle of Stone and Shadow. It’s been in development for more or less the same amount of time, and it may or may not be released episodically over the next few months or years. You can track these things, and all things Thief related, at Through the Looking Glass, a site dedicated to eulogizing Looking Glass Studios.

Thief 2X is getting a lot of mainstream gaming press attention and has been positively reviewed elsewhere. With luck, this will encourage other creative souls to get behind steam shovels of their own, to really go for broke on an independent project that truly matters to them. The Dark Engineering Guild did pure good for the industry in releasing something so professional, so enjoyable and so obviously a labor of fervent passion: they proved that independents can make magic too. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Dark Engineering Guild Publisher: Dark Engineering Guild Release Date: May 15, 2005

Available for: Windows 

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Screenshots

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System Requirements

Thief 2 installed; patched to v. 1.18Thief 2 specs: 266 MHz Pentium II or equivalent Windows 95/98 48 MB RAM DirectX 7.0 compliant 3D accelerated video card DirectX 7.0 compliant sound card DirectX 7.0 or higher (included) 4X CD-ROM drive 250 MB free uncompressed hard drive space Keyboard and mouse

Where to Find It

Thief 2X site (free download)

      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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