Thief: Deadly Shadows Review

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            Thief: Deadly Shadows

Review by SteerpikeJune 2004

My Words Are Delicious

A couple weeks ago, I waxed glumly cynical in the Thief Retrospective about my low personal hopes for the third and probably final installment in the Thief series. Sudden departures from Ion Storm, obvious tweaks to benefit console players, and the catastrophic PC release of Deus Ex: Invisible War contributed to a somewhat doom-laden sense about this game. Truth is, for people who really love the Thief franchise, there was a lot of emotion riding on this one. Many gamers worried that we’d get little more than the same sloppy Xbox port that Invisible War was.

But every now and then, the glass really is half full. Though not without flaws, Thief: Deadly Shadows is a really good game, deserving of the Gold Star I’m giving it and a worthy addition to the Thief universe. The people who worked hard on it for four years should be proud of what they’ve accomplished, because they have produced a game that’s not only a triumph in its own right, but one that is reasonably faithful to the franchise mythology.

This review is for the PC version, and—from the department of irony—it’s my understanding that the Xbox port is scoring an average of twenty points lower in most reviews. Given all the Invisible War hubbub, that’s a surprise, though not an unwelcome one. Being a PC gamer, I’d much rather the Xbox version sucked.  Well, I’d rather neither did, but I’m selfish enough to say “better you than me” if it has to be one of us.

A warning: Deadly Shadows makes no attempt to fill newcomers in on the considerable intricacies of the Thief plots and characters to date. The first two games encompass probably two hundred pages of fiction, and you’ll be expected to know who’s who and what’s what. You can still play the game if you don’t know who Viktoria is or what the Mechanist Insurgence was, but it might be somewhat bewildering. This is probably one of the reasons that the Xbox version is getting more chilly reviews.

Second Time’s the Charm

Deadly Shadows, like Invisible War before it, employs the mighty Unreal 2.0 Engine, made all the more powerful with the addition of Havok physics. A casual observer wouldn’t see much Unreal beneath Deadly Shadows or Invisible War; they’re not visually very similar. This is a tenebrous, grimy, and altogether less vividly day-glo environment than Unreal technology generally presents. In both of Ion Storm’s recent games, heaping ladlefuls of shader-enhanced lighting and intricate bump maps are added. What’s most impressive is that in the case of Deadly Shadows, the game not only looks astonishing, it’s functional.

I have never seen a game use light the way Deadly Shadows does, nor have I seen such realistic environments rendered on the fly.  For those who can get it to work well on their systems, this is an astounding visual experience. While the previous Thief games depended heavily on a very angular, stylized look, the decision to abandon that didn’t seriously affect the Thief flavor.  From an eye-candy perspective, Deadly Shadows looks like nothing you have ever seen before.

That said, a quick glance at any gaming forum—including our own—demonstrates that for everyone who’s got the thing up and running, someone else has watched in horror as it brought a computer they consider reasonably powerful mewling to its knees. The minimum requirements are similar to what most wags anticipate will be printed on the DOOM 3 box, and some argue that the game can’t be very well optimized if it calls for this much brawn. But they’re wrong.

If you do meet the requirements, Deadly Shadows is a stable, admirable performer—I get a good framerate and have experienced only one or two crashes. With Invisible War, even those well above the recommended specs experienced a frame-a-week snailfest, and I for one crashed out without warning at least five times an hour. That’s not true here; even with all the graphical frosting turned on, within-spec gamers should be fine. Plus the game is breathtaking—it’s clear where the horsepower requirements go. Only Painkiller looks better, and the two are so visually different that it’s unfair to compare them. The one gripe about graphics (two gripes) is that there is visible seaming where some polygons come together—especially on stairs. Also, Radeon owners can expect some blinking shadows if they’re using the Catalyst 4.5 drivers—the 4.4s solve the problem, and no doubt the upcoming 4.6s will do the same. It’s not a dealbreaker either way.

Developers are slowly getting the hang of Havok-enhanced physics, though they’re not quite there yet. In Invisible War, if you brushed against a chair, it’d go shooting down the hall with the force of a bullet. In Deadly Shadows, you have to hurl yourself against a chair to get it to move at all. Perhaps a golden mean between these two can yet be found; still, Havok is so cool, and will bring so much to gaming, that minor problems with its implementation are just that: minor.

Through the Looking Glass

Deadly Shadows continues the adventures of Garrett, master thief and curmudgeon, as he plies his trade in the great mechamystical expanse of the City. He’s approached by the Keepers, who need some stuff stolen but are far too holier-than-thou to do it themselves.

The Keepers, you may recall, are the watchmen, historians, and futurologists of the City, lurking in shadows and recording comings and goings. Garrett himself was trained as one but bolted before full initiation; it’s his Keeper education that fuels his amazing stealth capability. Keepers are strictly observers and maintain a policy of noninterference, which to them apparently means that they interfere all the time in everything.

It would seem that they have stumbled on a threatening prophecy that warns of an impending Dark Age when all knowledge will be lost.  This divination strongly implies that one individual, who may or may not be Garrett, will be the catalyst that triggers the end.  More research is required before they can get a final verdict—they’re not able to translate the whole thing when Garrett first hooks up with them—and part of the reason they ask for his help is to keep an eye on him.

But something is obviously wrong with the Keepers; a few of them are into something they shouldn’t be. And not everyone in the society likes the idea of employing a dropout who’s been as much a thorn in their side as an ally over the years. Add to that concern the fact that there’s plenty of information that the Keepers would prefer he never know, information that might be at risk if he is allowed access to some of their more deeply hidden secrets. As you can imagine, Garrett somewhat inadvertently learns more about the City’s dark underpinnings and even darker future than he was ever supposed to.  At some point he becomes a liability, as the power struggle within the Keeper hierarchy threatens not just the organization but the future of the City itself.

As usual, Garrett wants nothing to do with any it but gets sucked in despite himself. The Keepers initially lasso him by making an offer so rare and so unthinkable that he can’t refuse—but should—and he spends the rest of the game tumbling down an increasingly slippery incline leading straight to the maw of the looming Dark Age.

Garrett’s fundamental problem is that he’s a great thief but a lousy money manager. Every dime he makes on a job is spent buying gear necessary for the next job, so he’s always broke, the rent is always late, and his apartment has as much charm as a toolshed.  When he’s hired for special jobs, he never wonders whether his clients are the sort who can be trusted to pay their bills. His chronically negative bank balance and confidence in his not-inconsiderable capabilities occasionally drive him to very ill-advised career decisions. Seems to me that a few minutes with a Fidelity Investment Planner would eliminate many of Garrett’s frustrations.

The Dark Age problem is the major story thread, and it’s very cleverly written by a team that’s been with Thief since early on.  There’s a whole mess of parallel bad crap taking place in the City that Garrett (naturally) winds up involved with: a hideously deranged serial killer, a ship full of mostly-dead sailors, a haunted orphanage, and the usual criminal goings-on. Much of that is connected to the sharp, witty main storyline, and Deadly Shadows is a terrific narrative experience. This is thanks to both the delicious writing and the stellar vocal talents of the mostly-returning cast.

The Power of the Dark Side

The ability to switch between first and third person is new to Deadly Shadows, and some thought it would be a clumsy console-port hack. Turns out that this feature is gracefully implemented and actually quite beneficial. There are times when you’re positioned in such a way that going to third person grants you the one thing that FPS games cannot: peripheral vision. It’s a tweak that is quite welcome, that could have been done very badly but wasn’t. Garrett’s body is very much apparent in first person, too. If you look down, there are his feet. Look left or right, there are his hands. Most shooters don’t bother with this, leading to a strange visual disconnect from the world and your character.

Thief has always been a very dark game, and Deadly Shadows continues that tradition. You can certainly crank the brightness controls, but that kind of ruins the point. Play Deadly Shadows at night, with all the lights in the room off. If you own a cat, see if you can recruit its aid in walloping you with heart-stopping shocks of terror by getting it to leap onto the back of your chair at the most tense moments.

It’s obvious that Deadly Shadows went through a lot of playability testing, because several tweaks to minimize darkness-related annoyance are present. The gem that indicates how much light Garrett is standing in is much more sensitive. The movement of shadows cast by flame and people is simply stunning (look at the first screenshot over there), and despite the soft realism of the shadows, it’s usually easy to tell where one ends and begins. Perhaps best of all, when in third person, Garrett himself gives off just a slight glow, as though he’s bathed in moonlight—it’s not too exaggerated, and it helps keep you from losing your protagonist in deep shadow.

Sometimes it seems that Garrett wears tap shoes when on a job; when he walks and runs, he makes so much noise that you have to wonder whether he might not be better off in just socks. “Creep,” the third movement mode, is silent but so slow as to be pretty pointless.  And there are bugs in the sound-making system: walk or run and Garrett makes too much noise, but he makes no noise at any speed when crouched or carrying a body. I imagine they’ll fix this in the patch; with luck they’ll also tweak his movement speed too, though you can do it yourself by manipulating the default.ini file in the game directory.

I neglected to mention the sound work of Eric Brosius for the first two Thief games in my retrospective, so his long-overdue props are given here. Thief has always sported innovative sound design, from the low, tonal beats that evoke a chilling spectrum of emotion to the spot-on 3D reverb effects. The ability of ambient sound to create and manipulate emotion is well-documented, and thanks to Brosius, Thief is one of the best at controlling the gamer’s state of mind through audio. The one flaw in the 3D sound system is that in third person, directional sounds come from Garrett’s perspective, not the camera’s; thus, if you’re looking at Garrett head on and you hear something on your right, it’s on his left. Sound should always come from the gamer’s perspective, not the avatar’s.

The only serious Xbox-related gripe is the addition of loading zones: most missions are broken into two distinct areas, and various City neighborhoods are separated in the same way. It’s not that big a deal, as the load times are relatively short, but they’re really not necessary at all—not on the PC, at least. Plenty of titles *cough*Morrowind*cough* demonstrate that a PC game’s world can be almost criminally big and require only the most infinitesimal of load times. Stopping to load a new section is jarring and technically unnecessary on this platform, and it should have been dispensed with. Like so many other courtesies to PC gamers, it apparently fell into the “why bother” box during concurrent development.

The load zones are delineated by a thick portal filled with oozing blue fog. It’s sort of like having a big sign in front of each loading area that says, hey player up ahead is a loading zone so for the next thirty seconds please snap out of your immersion and remember that you’re playing a video game. Come on, people, Thief is about subtlety. No one could think of a less suckerpunchy way to indicate zone separations?

But more serious than the above is that when you leave a zone, time in it stops. If someone shoots an arrow at your head and you hurl yourself into a new zone to evade the hit, congratulations.  When you reenter, even hours later, you’ll get hit in the face with an arrow that waited patiently for your return. This, and the inability of AIs such as guards to move between zones, damages immersion.  It also damages emergent potential, since it eliminates your ability to take action in one zone and expect a reaction in another.

“Did Something Just Move over There?”

The game starts you off with a tutorial mission that walks newcomers through the basics of being the world’s greatest thief. I like tutorials, but I like them skippable—not only is the tutorial in Deadly Shadows required, it’s built right into the game story. It’s just irritating enough to bug those who already know how to play the game.

Deadly Shadows is mission-based, though there’s a little more flexibility in how and when you choose to do missions than there was in earlier Thiefs. Occasionally you’re given a few at a time, you can begin when you want and can do them in whatever order you please. The world is persistent, so items you buy or acquire in one mission remain available in later ones.

I was disappointed to see that the pre-mission cinematics are gone from this game. There are some narrative cutscenes and short opening movies that brilliantly evoke the mythology of the Keepers, Hammers, and Pagans, Thief’s major players as they existed in The Dark Project and The Metal Age, but the collage of Photoshopped stills accompanied by Garrett’s narration that actually define the objectives and challenges of each mission are gone. I miss those cutscenes; they were very good, very well written and appealing, and it sucks that they’re out. They’re not as hard to produce as full motion video or rendered cinematics, and they added a lot to the atmosphere.

There are more difficulty levels available, and AI ratchets up considerably at higher difficulties. On the lower settings, guards will do their job if they see you, or if you leave an obvious clue like a corpse or a spot of blood. On hard and expert, though, they will note if a chair has been knocked over, if a light’s gone out, or (God forbid) if some valuable item is missing from its assigned place. They can be relentless about hunting you down, too—running for help and then returning with bow-armed or torch-carrying reinforcements, poking into corners, and looking for other indications that there’s an intruder.

In the past few days, news of a critical flaw in the difficulty system has trickled out: regardless of the difficulty setting you choose prior to a mission, the difficulty is reset to Normal if you reload your position in-game. In keeping with a long tradition of Ion Storm technical support, they’ve been somewhat ho-hum about this very significant gameplay bug: their official response boils down to “we’ll patch it if we feel like it.” I didn’t notice this bug during the course of my play, but I must admit that in retrospect it explains occasional schizophrenic behavior on the part of game AIs. Despite my references to patchable stuff throughout this review, gamers should be aware that given what’s going on in Austin there’s a chance that this and other bugs will never be fixed, and that Xbox players are almost certainly out of luck barring a major product recall.

Patience and great care are necessary for success in Deadly Shadows, but the levels and AI are designed well enough that you’re never bored by the waiting. There is ample space in which to hide, and guards are not super-sentient—they will give up eventually even if you’re spotted with your hand in the cookie jar.  And you always have the choice of fighting your way out of a situation if you don’t feel like melting into the shadows or hiding in a broom closet.

Surprisingly, Eidos—the publisher—has indicated that Deadly Shadows can be a much more violent, guns-blazing sort of game than its predecessors. Garrett, they claim, actually has a chance of fighting his way out of a tight spot in this sequel … but I don’t see how. If anything, combat seems more difficult in this than the previous installments. This game is high stealth through and through. If you wish to kill as Garrett, you’d better be sure that your enemy doesn’t see you coming—as in the earlier games, an attack from the darkness will kill an unsuspecting opponent with one strike.

You Blew It, Baby

One of the major preview points of Deadly Shadows was the promise of a true, living City to explore. It should have been the most compelling, unique, emergent aspect of this ambitious new game.  A huge City of pockets just crying out to be picked, of homes and businesses begging to be plundered, with an active nightlife and completely realized underworld. Alas, what should have been the most thrilling aspect of the game is in fact the one most desperately botched: the rest of Deadly Shadows is a solid nine out of ten. The City is a two.

It has been made very clear through two previous games that the City is an enormous place: a great, sprawling entity with a dark urban consciousness, packed with districts, neighborhoods, and landmarks.  The City in Deadly Shadows is tiny—smaller overall than a single City level from The Metal Age. Worse, most of the buildings are not accessible. Only a handful of structures can actually be broken into or entered. The rest have doors that won’t open.

City size is one of the biggest failures on the part of this game.  It should have been massive, full of people and activities, with every single building mapped and filled with objects. And lest anyone go squawking that such a thing would be technically nightmarish, allow me to bring up Morrowind again. The technology does exist, it’s existed for years, and because it’s not implemented here, the City is a clunky between-mission irritant, rather than a portion of the game that players will linger in and enjoy.

It’s a devastating visual miss as well. Buildings are squat and ugly. Majestic places like the Hammerite Cathedral that should reach triumphantly for the heavens instead crouch and brood. Little touches like gardens are either nonexistent or crammed into areas the size of a residential bathroom. Ugly 2D sprites are employed for shrubs and trees. And if you’re hoping for a recreation of the joyously giddy, vertigo-inducing Thieves Highway from The Metal Age, forget it—not only are Garrett’s scaling abilities impeded by climbing tools of truly soul-crushing crapitude, but what should be an awesome, sweeping, stone sky-field rooftop vista of a nightmare urban sprawl is instead a tiny, grubby drearville of planking and cobbles.

From an artistic standpoint, stubby architecture and no roofscape are nothing compared to the next crime: the bewildering shortage of the hideous technology that was the basis of the City’s unique and redolent fiction. In the earlier games, it was packed with towering mechanisms whispering of the City’s unnatural symbiosis of magic and technology, all roaring and rumbling and belching smoke. It was a grotesque manifestation of industrial madness. Streetlights didn’t glow; they sprayed fountains of sparks into the air. Huge boilers that never seemed to do anything but boil crouched behind garden walls. Copper tines hurled fingers of blue electricity back and forth. Piping, ductwork, meters, and ticking gauges were everywhere.  You couldn’t go two feet without encountering a bizarre iron monstrosity born straight of Tesla’s worst nightmares. In Deadly Shadows, the City looks utterly generic. It would fit into any bland medieval fantasy game, with just the odd pipe or electric lamp to imply the mechanism-gone-wrong that made it such a creative jewel.

There is ample history of the City to build plenty of great stuff.  We’re not short on landmarks mentioned or visited in the prior Thief games. Yet where is the Haunted Zone? Where are the Bear Pits?  Where’s the marketplace through which Garrett shadowed a renegade, undercover-Pagan constable The Metal Age, or the network of storm sewers from The Dark Project? Where are homes we recognize, the mansions of Bafford and Constantine, or the walled compound inside which thief lord Ramirez lurks? Where is the entrance to the Lost City, the Mages College, the casino fronting for the Downwind Guild, the Necromancer’s Tower? There is nary a hint of these in this game, and as such the City has lost much of its consistency and become something quite frankly pedestrian, dull, and utterly disconnected from Thief mythology.

And those are just the problems with how it looks.

Everyone on the City Watch knows Garrett and will attack him on sight, an addition almost as outrageous as the decision to make the City the size of a Micronesian fishing village. You have to be as stealthy when running errands in the City as you do when robbing a house. It’s absurd to imagine that Garrett has to creep through the shadows every time he wants to buy a gallon of milk. If the guards attacked only when they saw you commit a crime, or when someone reported the same to them, that’d be fine. Since they seem to know him so well, one wonders why it hasn’t yet occurred to them to crash into his home and arrest the man during the day, when he sleeps.  If Garrett is such a great thief, how is it that everyone seems to know what he does for a living?

Citizens and guards move and behave like special-ed flunkouts.  The people of the City walk in tiny, predetermined paths, making at most an oval or figure eight. Why on earth couldn’t they have more freedom to ramble? To leave work and visit a tavern for a drink, to go home or out to some gathering? With the exception of scripted events, people never deviate from their flight plan. It made me want to run down the streets screaming, “Where is everybody,” surrounded as I was by mindless Stepford automatons that would blithely walk off a cliff if one got in their way.

The enormity of the ball-dropping committed by the designers in the matter of the City is less that it’s grating and bland; it’s how good it could have been. All I can think is how much more incredible this game would have been with a Vice City or Morrowind-type environment where the place really was your oyster, where you would want to spend hours dawdling between missions doing whatever you liked. As it is, it’s your rancid and undercooked mussel, and you will run, not walk, to get your errands wrapped up so you can move on.

Sneaking Around

The City may be a monumental disappointment, but thankfully the missions are not. Each one is well and carefully crafted, with stern attention to detail and realism. They’re all very well-designed and each has a unique flavor and environment—the so-scary-you’ll-scream “Shalebridge Cradle” is a favorite of mine, though the sweeping interiors of St. Edgar’s Cathedral and the looming statuary of the Keeper Compound are equally breathtaking. Most—not all, but most—take a good hour and a half to complete.

There’s a nice mixture of the natural and the un-, too. You’ll explore your share of haunted locales and hide, trembling, from your share of repellent monstrosities (though, sadly, none of my beloved Burricks). But there is also ample opportunity to go for the pure stealth appeal of robbing a house filled only with regular old people. It’s very well balanced on this score.

Because the light and physics in Deadly Shadows are so drastically more advanced than those in the earlier Thief games, even veterans will find that there’s a learning curve: Garrett casts a shadow now, and you’ve got to wrangle it. You must be aware of all the light sources around you, because what looks like a puddle of concealing darkness from one angle may be perfectly illuminated from another—and even darkness is only helpful if you’ve got that peripatetic shadow of yours corralled.

Most of Garrett’s equipment is back. He’s switched from a sword to a dagger, which makes sense given his penchant for tight spaces; the rope arrows have been replaced by moronic and awkward “climbing gloves” that work as though a preschooler designed them. They’d have been a fine replacement if, I don’t know, they had worked in any but the most limited and controlled environments, but they don’t. You can’t round corners, cross material changes in stone walls, even clamber over the tiniest of lips. Frankly, the climbing gloves and the City are the only true and utter failures in the game—but they are failures of crushing and ridiculous atrociousness, bad enough to seriously taint what could have otherwise been a lasting classic.

Some tools have been given a needed polish: moss arrows distribute a lot more moss that’s a lot easier to see; Noisemakers, which I could never get working in the other games, work fine in this one.  You can also employ Garrett’s mechanical eye to zoom in and out in a delightful sepia-toned effect. Flash grenades deafen as well as blind but are no longer a free pass to knock out a guard. Oil flasks, which can be used to trip up pursuers or start small fires, are also a welcome new addition.

The lockpicking is the most significant change to the world. In the old games, it was just a matter of switching between the two tools and holding the mouse button down. In Deadly Shadows, it’s set up kind of like a puzzle, but a simple one. It’s very well tuned and designed for a specific purpose: you want some suspense if someone is approaching as you’re desperately trying to pick a complicated lock. And it works quite well.

“Loot glint” is the slight but obvious sparkle given off by valuables in the game, and it’s a new addition to Deadly Shadows. It’s in there because you can pick up plenty of mundane objects, and the designers decided that it was necessary to add some visual clue to call out items of value. At times it’s unintentionally comical: watching fat people in the City with glowing ears and pockets and wrists is a little absurd. It can be helpful, though, especially when you’re trying to meet a mission objective for loot and you’re running out of places to look. There are so many worthless knickknacks that you’d be picking up and tossing away a lot of plates and candlesticks before you find an expensive one. The ability to turn loot glint off, however, is not present—purists are clamoring for it, so I hope we’ll see this functionality in the patch.

This Just In

Deadly Shadows, despite two major flaws, is a great game.  For those of us who expected the worst, our gameplay fears were unfounded and our consternation ill-advised. This is a meticulously crafted and largely solid gaming experience, and one that doesn’t do anything to shame the revered Thief franchise. Missions, story, acting, graphics, sound, physics, engine, stability: all are a solid thumbs up. The climbing gloves are clumsy and so incompetently designed that they should have been left out; but it’s the City that is the real disappointment, and oh, what a disappointment it is. Were it what it should have been, this might have been one for the history books. They came that close to the rank of near-perfect, and tripped a few yards before a finish line only a few dozen games have crossed.

Good as it is, I do not think that Deadly Shadows will become another Dark Project, played again and again long after its technology is long in the tooth. For the most part, I think gamers will play through Deadly Shadows and then, possibly, revisit it just once down the road, when they’re waxing nostalgic about Garrett and his travails.

I have to wrap this review up with a somewhat bizarre piece of news. Deadly Shadows crept onto shelves nationwide scant hours before some very strange rumors began seeping out of Ion Storm.  I mentioned in the retrospective that Randy Smith, the project lead, had left the company under odd circumstances about two months ago.  Last week, the rumor mill began churning out stories of massive layoffs at Ion Storm—to the tune of thirty-plus people—one day after Deadly Shadows was released. It even looks like the venerated game designer Warren Spector is among the unemployed, though stories conflict as to whether he was shown the door or found his own way.

None of this—nothing—is confirmed; Eidos is insisting that it’s all a big rumor. But there is staggering circumstantial evidence for all of it: the layoffs, Spector’s departure, even the rumors that the studio will adopt a new name and devote itself entirely to console development or, some have implied, shut down altogether.  What this means to the future of Thief I do not know. They’ve always said that this is the last Thief game, a fact made manifest by the ending, but it’s getting good reviews and selling pretty well—which can change things dramatically. Eidos, not Ion Storm, owns the rights to Thief. In fact, it’s been suggested to me that Eidos was actually only interested in those rights when it made the failed last-ditch attempt to bail out franchise creator Looking Glass Studios in 2000.

Ion Storm, I think, is finished regardless. We may have to endure an extended death rattle, but the studio was doomed from the start and it has apparently run out of grace. Failing a clue to what the future holds, I’ll just thank everyone on the team for an imperfect but proud and fitting close to a genuinely magical series of games—games that will always glitter in the hearts of their devotees as the a lantern bearer of the profound and the powerful. The End

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Ion Storm Publisher: Eidos Release Date: May 2004

Available for: Windows Xbox

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Screenshots

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System Requirements

Windows 2000/XP (95/98/ME/NT not supported) P4 1.5 GHz or equivalent 256 MB RAM 64 MB video card, Direct3D 9.0, and Pixel Shader 1.1 DirectSound 9 compatible sound card 3 GB free hard disk space 4X CD or DVD drive (DVD required for European versions) Keyboard and mouse

Where to Find It

GoGamer 34.90 (PC)Amazon.com 49.95 (Xbox)

Prices/links current as of 06/08/04Links 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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