A new expansion was recently released for Might & Magic: Heroes VI. I really liked the old Heroes games, so I asked Sky if he knew anything about this new version. He said it was like the old ones but without any real improvements. Well, that was good enough for me! Steam had the base game on sale (this is how I found out about the expansion) so I figured it was a reasonable thing to pick up. Not the expansion, not any of the DLC content... Just the base game that came out in 2011. I don't need cutting edge here, and actually tend to actively avoid cutting edge games because they tend to have bugs or be unfinished...
I download the huge game (11 gigs!) and settle in this morning to give it a spin. Steam launches some other game service (uPlay) which in turn launches Heroes VI. I eventually get into the game and find a bunch of options... Campaign, custom game, load game, options, unlock content... Those sorts of things. I want to play the campaign! Click on it and get given a list of locked campaigns and get prompted to go buy them. That's weird... I bought the game, right? It must have come with a campaign! Each of the locked campaigns has an 'enter your key here' window, so maybe I need to use the CD key again? Nope. When I try it says the key was already used (when I registered it in uPlay). Huh. Maybe when I bought the base game on Steam it didn't come with any campaigns?
Oh well, I can still figure out how the game works on a custom map, right? Wrong. It turns out every single custom map is also locked. I don't own any maps at all, but uPlay is happy to give me a link to the store so I can go buy them if I want. I don't want. I already paid money for the game and it should let me do SOMETHING!
Maybe I'm just missing the 'obvious' button that lets me play my game? I donno, I'm generally pretty good about figuring out new UIs. Eventually I turned to searching the internet for a solution. It now sounds like a patch Ubisoft put out for the new expansion completely broke the base game. uPlay isn't passing the CD key through to the game itself, so while it took and used my CD key it didn't actually do anything. So despite buying a game that's been out for a year and a half I've been burned by shoddy DRM and a buggy release.
How is this so hard? I should be able to buy an older game and just play it. I'm all for paying for games, but when garbage like this happens it makes me just want to go pirate the game. I can't play the game I paid you for because of your bad attempt to keep me from stealing it. It isn't actually keeping anyone in the know from stealing it. It's just pissing me off.
Showing posts with label DRM. Show all posts
Showing posts with label DRM. Show all posts
Friday, May 10, 2013
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Buying New Games
Last week saw the launch of the newest SimCity game which had great reviews from the gaming media. The launch ended up being a complete and utter disaster. SimCity is designed with DRM requiring you to log in to the EA servers before you can play the game. You need to stay connected or you won't be able to save your game. The servers were completely overwhelmed. People couldn't connect, they couldn't find out how long it would be until they could connect, and even once they did connect they had problems playing. I heard about how you could lose connection to the server without knowing it. You'd play happily for hours but as soon as you tried to save the game you were screwed. EA has been scrambling to try to fix the problems. They've been adding more servers, they've been throwing free stuff at the masses. But the bottom line is they got most people's money on launch day and they're not giving it back so I have to believe the suits interested in the bottom line are content.
I've had discussions with a few people about it, and in each case I've been reiterating my stance that buying a new game right away is a trap. Video game companies, especially PC game companies, have seemingly given up on selling finished products. Even games that are reasonably fun at launch (once you get beyond any server issues) aren't done. Diablo III and Civilization V, for example, have both seen huge content/balance patches which made them significantly better games. The way I look at it I have plenty of games I want to play and not nearly enough time to play them all. So why should I spend time waiting for a server to let me in? Why should I play a game before they iterate it into a polished state?
Now, anyone who read yesterday's post will know that I went out and bought StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm even before it launched. I've preinstalled it and I can't wait to get home and play it. This is seemingly at odds with what I just said. Part of this is going to be that I have no willpower/am a hypocrite I'm sure, but there is a bigger thing in play. My experience has been that Blizzard expansions launch in a polished state. World of Warcraft, as I understand, was a bit of a disaster at launch. Not nearly enough server capacity or copies of the game in stores. I started playing that game a few months later so I missed the problems. I have been there, at launch, for all of the subsequent expansions. The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria. All of them have been fantastic. Not perfect, mind you, and MoP in particular had a brutally bad quest right at the start. But even that problematic quest only cost me what, 45 minutes of frustration? I spent longer than that trying to log into Ultima Online!
Why have all those expansions had solid launches? Well, part of it is going to be a willingness on Blizzard's part to wait until the expansion is actually done. But part of it is also going to be their ability to really test most of the new features. How? They launch them in pieces on the live servers in advance. How did we know the new talent trees were going to work in Cataclysm? They had everyone on the live servers using them for a month before they launched Cataclysm! There are also some people are also really committed to killing bosses first. So when they put them up for a 2 hour window on the test servers you know they're going to get tested by some really dedicated players who see that 2 hour window as potentially the key to a world or server first kill.
Which brings us to StarCraft II. It actually had, if memory serves, a super smooth launch itself. Why? A combination of the above coupled with an offline mode. Blizzard had every intention of making StarCraft II a huge thing in eSports, and part of that intention required them to launch a polished game. Not just polished in the sense that you could play the game without crashing. No, they needed it to be polished in the sense that every race, every unit, was balanced. The game wouldn't have taken off as an eSport if the Zerg won every game with a zergling rush and they knew it. So they were more than willing to iterate in testing until they got it to a good state. They ran big tournaments on the test servers. There was a lot of prize money up for grabs for people who got good in the beta. This meant they got a lot of dedicated testers who were willing to find balance issues and abuse them for cash. On top of it all, the one thing you couldn't test in the beta, the single player campaign, didn't require a permanent online connection. You couldn't get achievements if you played offline, but you could totally play your single player game without an internet connection if you wanted. So even if their servers had gone down during the launch a lot of the players would be able to play just fine.
So, yes, I am pretty much done with buying new games at launch. I may well pick up the new SimCity in a couple months if things smooth out, but maybe I just won't feel like adding it to my huge list of things I want to play. But I had faith in Heart of the Swarm being a good game at launch, and one I do really want on my list of things to play. So I got it right away. I didn't take the day off work to play it, but a quick internet search makes me think I could have done that without worries. I searched for a variety of crash related terms for Heart of the Swarm and didn't find a single complaint from anyone. Contrast that with the deluge when searching for SimCity crashes!
I've had discussions with a few people about it, and in each case I've been reiterating my stance that buying a new game right away is a trap. Video game companies, especially PC game companies, have seemingly given up on selling finished products. Even games that are reasonably fun at launch (once you get beyond any server issues) aren't done. Diablo III and Civilization V, for example, have both seen huge content/balance patches which made them significantly better games. The way I look at it I have plenty of games I want to play and not nearly enough time to play them all. So why should I spend time waiting for a server to let me in? Why should I play a game before they iterate it into a polished state?
Now, anyone who read yesterday's post will know that I went out and bought StarCraft II: Heart of the Swarm even before it launched. I've preinstalled it and I can't wait to get home and play it. This is seemingly at odds with what I just said. Part of this is going to be that I have no willpower/am a hypocrite I'm sure, but there is a bigger thing in play. My experience has been that Blizzard expansions launch in a polished state. World of Warcraft, as I understand, was a bit of a disaster at launch. Not nearly enough server capacity or copies of the game in stores. I started playing that game a few months later so I missed the problems. I have been there, at launch, for all of the subsequent expansions. The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria. All of them have been fantastic. Not perfect, mind you, and MoP in particular had a brutally bad quest right at the start. But even that problematic quest only cost me what, 45 minutes of frustration? I spent longer than that trying to log into Ultima Online!
Why have all those expansions had solid launches? Well, part of it is going to be a willingness on Blizzard's part to wait until the expansion is actually done. But part of it is also going to be their ability to really test most of the new features. How? They launch them in pieces on the live servers in advance. How did we know the new talent trees were going to work in Cataclysm? They had everyone on the live servers using them for a month before they launched Cataclysm! There are also some people are also really committed to killing bosses first. So when they put them up for a 2 hour window on the test servers you know they're going to get tested by some really dedicated players who see that 2 hour window as potentially the key to a world or server first kill.
Which brings us to StarCraft II. It actually had, if memory serves, a super smooth launch itself. Why? A combination of the above coupled with an offline mode. Blizzard had every intention of making StarCraft II a huge thing in eSports, and part of that intention required them to launch a polished game. Not just polished in the sense that you could play the game without crashing. No, they needed it to be polished in the sense that every race, every unit, was balanced. The game wouldn't have taken off as an eSport if the Zerg won every game with a zergling rush and they knew it. So they were more than willing to iterate in testing until they got it to a good state. They ran big tournaments on the test servers. There was a lot of prize money up for grabs for people who got good in the beta. This meant they got a lot of dedicated testers who were willing to find balance issues and abuse them for cash. On top of it all, the one thing you couldn't test in the beta, the single player campaign, didn't require a permanent online connection. You couldn't get achievements if you played offline, but you could totally play your single player game without an internet connection if you wanted. So even if their servers had gone down during the launch a lot of the players would be able to play just fine.
So, yes, I am pretty much done with buying new games at launch. I may well pick up the new SimCity in a couple months if things smooth out, but maybe I just won't feel like adding it to my huge list of things I want to play. But I had faith in Heart of the Swarm being a good game at launch, and one I do really want on my list of things to play. So I got it right away. I didn't take the day off work to play it, but a quick internet search makes me think I could have done that without worries. I searched for a variety of crash related terms for Heart of the Swarm and didn't find a single complaint from anyone. Contrast that with the deluge when searching for SimCity crashes!
Monday, October 18, 2010
Happy Birthday NES!
25 years ago today the Nintendo Entertainment System was launched in the US. As anyone who has an original generation NES knows the system didn't age well. By this I mean 25 years later the consoles don't exactly work optimally anymore. Plug a game in and you're apt to see the power light blink on and off. On and off. On and off. I knew all the old wives tales on how to fix it. Blow in the game! Blow in the machine! Hold he reset button down and power it on and off! Hit the NES! Don't push the game all the way in! Force the spring thing down lower than it should go! Hold it a little higher than it should go!
Very rarely did any of that stuff work. Today I did a little poking around to try to figure out why the blinking happened and the actual reason really surprised me. You see, it all comes down to DRM, and none of that earlier stuff dealt with that underlying problem at all.
What those other things tried to deal with was two other flaws in the design of the NES. The first is they made the internal connectors out of low quality metals so they easily corroded with dirt and wear. The second is that the whole spring loaded system slowly but surely bent the low quality connectors with each use until eventually they stopped connecting as well as they used to. (Both of these problems were fixed with the second generation NES which loaded the game in from the top like the SNES did. Also, you can argue the spring loaded system was needed due to wanting the NES to look like a VCR instead of an Atari what with the console crash and all.) These two reasons would make the console not work at all, though. Lose connection with the game and the system should become unstable and possibly crash. Why would it turn on and off, on and off?
It turns out that Nintendo was worried about bootleggers making their own NES games, so they built a system into the console and into every cartridge to verify that the cartridge was a legitimate Nintendo authorized game. (Nintendo Seal of Quality, as Andrew would say.) So what they did is they put identical chips into the NES and into every cartridge (apparently the chip was $9 per for third party vendors) that would communicate with each other when the power was turned on. If this chip had voltage on its 4th pin and the cartridge didn't properly echo the right response to the chip then it would power off the console. Hence, if you put a bootleg cartridge into the console it would blink on and off, on and off.
But why does my NES blink? Due to a combination of the shoddy connectors and this chip if the connectors lost connection for even an instant the chip in the console would decide you were on a bootleg game and turn the power off. So even if the game itself didn't crash (maybe only the one pin for the DRM chip gave out for that instant) you were screwed.
I pulled out the NES I have here (once owned by Byung) and decided to try it out for the NES' birthday. To no one's surprise, blinky-blinky. It was time to operate! I took some pictures but sadly they didn't turn out well, but I managed to fully disassemble the console and find the DRM chip. I took an exacto-knife to the 4th pin and eventually managed to cut it apart, negating the DRM. I also took out the connector and gave it a quick wipe with windex and a q-tip in the hopes that might do something. I put it all back together and gave it another shot... No blinky-blinky! No game either, though. I definitely managed to turn off the DRM chip but the connector itself must be shot (or I blew something up playing with the motherboard, but the power light did come on). The plan now, if I want to resurrect the machine, is to buy a new connector. I just may do that, especially since I know now how easy it is to open the machine up.
But I wanted to play a game for the NES' birthday, so I downloaded Nesticle and a TMNT rom. Possibly my favourite NES game of all time, and I was surprised that I remembered the end to Shredder's speech on the TV after you save the dam from stupid bombs.
Very rarely did any of that stuff work. Today I did a little poking around to try to figure out why the blinking happened and the actual reason really surprised me. You see, it all comes down to DRM, and none of that earlier stuff dealt with that underlying problem at all.
What those other things tried to deal with was two other flaws in the design of the NES. The first is they made the internal connectors out of low quality metals so they easily corroded with dirt and wear. The second is that the whole spring loaded system slowly but surely bent the low quality connectors with each use until eventually they stopped connecting as well as they used to. (Both of these problems were fixed with the second generation NES which loaded the game in from the top like the SNES did. Also, you can argue the spring loaded system was needed due to wanting the NES to look like a VCR instead of an Atari what with the console crash and all.) These two reasons would make the console not work at all, though. Lose connection with the game and the system should become unstable and possibly crash. Why would it turn on and off, on and off?
It turns out that Nintendo was worried about bootleggers making their own NES games, so they built a system into the console and into every cartridge to verify that the cartridge was a legitimate Nintendo authorized game. (Nintendo Seal of Quality, as Andrew would say.) So what they did is they put identical chips into the NES and into every cartridge (apparently the chip was $9 per for third party vendors) that would communicate with each other when the power was turned on. If this chip had voltage on its 4th pin and the cartridge didn't properly echo the right response to the chip then it would power off the console. Hence, if you put a bootleg cartridge into the console it would blink on and off, on and off.
But why does my NES blink? Due to a combination of the shoddy connectors and this chip if the connectors lost connection for even an instant the chip in the console would decide you were on a bootleg game and turn the power off. So even if the game itself didn't crash (maybe only the one pin for the DRM chip gave out for that instant) you were screwed.
I pulled out the NES I have here (once owned by Byung) and decided to try it out for the NES' birthday. To no one's surprise, blinky-blinky. It was time to operate! I took some pictures but sadly they didn't turn out well, but I managed to fully disassemble the console and find the DRM chip. I took an exacto-knife to the 4th pin and eventually managed to cut it apart, negating the DRM. I also took out the connector and gave it a quick wipe with windex and a q-tip in the hopes that might do something. I put it all back together and gave it another shot... No blinky-blinky! No game either, though. I definitely managed to turn off the DRM chip but the connector itself must be shot (or I blew something up playing with the motherboard, but the power light did come on). The plan now, if I want to resurrect the machine, is to buy a new connector. I just may do that, especially since I know now how easy it is to open the machine up.
But I wanted to play a game for the NES' birthday, so I downloaded Nesticle and a TMNT rom. Possibly my favourite NES game of all time, and I was surprised that I remembered the end to Shredder's speech on the TV after you save the dam from stupid bombs.
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