What do you think about Ubisoft's controversial DRM applied to Assassin's Creed 2?

While people that buy it will probably have issues and be terribly inconvenienced by it, the people who pirate a cracked version will have no trouble and enjoy (possibly) it.

Such is the way it is, such is the way it always has been.

I think it’s a brilliant anti piracy method.
Who doesn’t have an internet connection?

@Captain_Fantasy Hard working military personel in Iraq who use games to pass the time between being shot at and blown up on patrol.

@Captain_Fantasy Some people in the military it seems.

And what if you want to play during a storm, where you have power but, say, your cable or DSL went out? It’s not brilliant, assumes people have something they may not have, and it’s going to be broken if it hasn’t already been.

@Captain_Fantasy if your internet connection fails, or has a hiccup – or their connection fails. You can’t use your product. Meanwhile. I hear hacked versions are already working fine. So I’m sitting here, a paying customer and can’t play due to DRM server issues. Absolutely ridiculous.

Most games like this require a logon but you can still play offline just without certain content that may only be available for logged on users. Is this not the case with Assassin’s Creed.
If you’re using Steam you can play offline definitely.

@Captain_Fantasy According to ARSTechnica:

“Ubisoft has long had some controversial ideas about how DRM should be used, but when PC Gamer was given a review copy of Assassin’s Creed 2 on the PC it seemed as if the reality was going to be much worse than what opponents to DRM had feared: the game requires an always-on ‘Net connection and constant communication with the home server. If your connection is dropped, the game kicks you out, and you lose any progress you had made since your last save.”

Original source is here.

@Captain_Fantasy Assasin’s Creed 1. The first. AC 2 no. You are required to be online the whole time.
I bought the first through steam. Bought the second off an online vendor.

@Captain_Fantasy I lived out in the middle of nowhere for 5 years. I had an internet connection, sure.
But most days, it would disconnect every 35 minutes. When it wasn’t disconnecting, it was absurdly slow.
A game like AC2 with that anti-piracy method would’ve made the game absolutely unplayable for me.
I purchased many games specifically to play offline, for days when I just didn’t bother dealing with my bullshit connection.

There are many more people out there (yes, even Americans) in this situation.
There are also people who may have internet at home, but want to game somewhere that doesn’t have available internet. Like if you were a college student who had 2 hours between classes which I had for a few semesters.

And the bottom line: It’s a single-player game. There should be no reason to require an internet connection.

Their whole idea of preventing piracy bothers me to no end. The problem is that there are still people buying their games regardless, so they’ll never get the message.
There are companies like Gearbox who don’t seem to give half a damn about pirates. Even if you pirate Borderlands, you can not only play it uninterrupted, but you can even play it online!. That is one of the reasons I felt so damn good purchasing Borderlands and the 3 DLCs. another reason being that it’s an amazing game.

PC gamers are second-class now because people pirate games and don’t end up supporting the developer once they realize how amazing it is. While I can’t say that I take part in it, I heavily support the idea of “try before you buy”.

Not being able to play a game you paid for is epically lame.

I’m having a great time watching those:
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ubisoft+DRM&search_type=&aq=f

Reminds me of the first time I bought The Sims. It wouldn’t work for me and after doing some research it turned out that the copy protection wasn’t compatible with my CD-ROM drive.

My choices at the time were to buy a new CD-ROM drive (wasn’t possible) or to download the crack.

While searching for the crack I found the whole game available for download.

I had to wonder what the point of buying it was when I could have just downloaded the cracked version and never would have had to put up with it not working in the first place.

But copy protection hasn’t never worked, anyway. Not back when you had to type a word out of a manual, or try and read black print on dark maroon paper, or had color wheels or anything else. It was always a pain in the butt for the person who bought it, not the person that pirated it.

On a related note, Fallout did not have copy protection and came with the full manual on the CD in PDF format. I’ve bought that more times than I can count.

Um…I bought the physical DVD of Assassin’s Creed II and never had to connect to the internet to play—so it’s not like you have to have an internet connection to play the game—only if you choose to have it distributed online. Is this just a PC thing, then?

That said, requiring the internet connection at all times does seem a little crappy—but such is the cat and mouse game of piracy.

@andrew so this is a console version then? Yes, find a friend with the pc version. Ask them how stable it is. It’s like they’re trying to kill off PC gaming.

@phoebusg Correct. Xbox version doesn’t have this DRM.

@andrew Yeah, it’s pc-only. PS3/360 game piracy is much less rampant, so Ubisoft isn’t taking the extreme measures to the consoles that they’re using on PCs.
That’s what my “PC gamers are second-class now” comment above was meant to be about.

This DRM?

Personally, I feel that all forms of DRM are a violation of the Fair Use doctrine and only serve to impede legitimate users while doing NOTHING to stop piracy. This one is no different.

And as for assuming that everybody and their dog has an always-on broadband ‘net connection, move to NH and see what the really real world can be like. I guess everybody lives in big cities with mass transit and broadband so ~50% of Americans don’t actually exist.

Last night Ubisofts DRM servers went down in Europe (don’t know about the rest of the world) meaning the game was unplayable to the people who’d paid money for it while pirated copies worked just fine.

UBI Twitter reads today. So, again PC people can’t play – any pirated versions out there – probably fine. Oh the irony.

“Our servers are under attack again. Some gamers are experiencing trouble signing in. We’re working on it and will keep you posted”

http://twitter.com/Ubisoft/statuses/10184920360

I have a nice variety of facepalms to convey how things fail, but I don’t think I have one that fully conveys this degree of utter fail.