Losing your Internet connection kicks you out of the game and robs you of any gameplay progress made

Feb 18, 2010 09:19 GMT  ·  By

Ubisoft has announced its DRM plans for the PC version of Assassin's Creed II, but no one expected things to be this bad. We just hoped that, if we blinked really, really hard and snapped our fingers, we'd wake up and it would have all been just a bad dream. But reality is usually worse than what our nightmares can conjure up, and the standard for low performance when it comes to supporting the PC platform that Infinity Ward set with its Modern Warfare 2 has just been shattered. To play ACII on the PC, you need a constant, unflinching Internet connection, at all times.

PC Gamer received a testing copy of the title from Ubisoft, and it confirmed our worst fears. "If you get disconnected while playing, you're booted out of the game. All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost, and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you're reconnected," the site's blog reads. This wasn't a nifty way to make sure that this testing copy didn't get leaked to the hungry, hacking masses, as PC Gamer verified, and this is the same way that the boxed version of the game will work.

And, as with any PC gamer, the editor's curiosity and investigative nature was piqued by this interesting defense mechanism, so experiments soon began. Launching the title without an Internet connection prompts an instant error message that doesn't let you advance. The next step in the investigation was launching the game, playing around a little bit and then losing the Internet connectivity. There was no fancy way of doing it, or an elaborate piece of software that might be picked up by the game and interpreted as an intentional way of bypassing its security. The PC Gamer editor simply yanked the net cable from the computer.

This is a pretty accurate simulation of what happens when your ISP has a bit of a hiccup and the net goes down, which is something that happened to everyone at least a hundred times in their life. The end-result was that the game suddenly stopped, and, as the connection to Ubisoft's "Master servers" was lost, the game reverted back to the menu screen, losing any progress that had been made since the last checkpoint.

This is what could simply be interpreted as a bug, a game crash, but, since we get a scripted message and it follows an exact pattern, it would be more accurate to call it a "deliberate kick in the shin." As PC Gamer also noted, not even MMORPGs were this strict about the fidelity of your Internet connection, and they were "multiplayer online" games. Sure, if the Internet connection fails, you drop out of the game, and your entire raid party will curse your name until its fifth generation, but the title itself doesn't punish you in any way. However, the single-player campaign of Assassin's Creed II will rob you of any gameplay progress you've made.

Also, if Ubisoft's servers are ever offline, you won't be able to play at all, making the game have all the downsides of both single-player and multiplayer titles, with none of the good parts. Because of this system, you can store your savegame files online, but that brings little comfort to a single-player game.

As for how effective this DRM will be against piracy, chances are that it will delay the release of a "cracked" version by two, three days, at best. After all, this is a binary language. Though this is a very, very simplified way of putting it, all you have to do is find out whether the title wants your Internet to be at "1" and change it to a "0," and presto.

Overall, this was a very bad move by Ubisoft, and its decision will most likely backfire. PC gamers proved in the past to be a very proud species, and this kind of things will only discourage those that planned to buy to game to pirate it instead, out of nothing more than pure principle. Pride aside, this kind of system might also discourage anyone that knows they don't have a very trustworthy Internet connection to buy the title, while the ones that don't have a constant Internet connection at all won't even think about buying Assassin's Creed II.

And the sad part is that, since the game has already been released on consoles, the only victim here is the PC platform itself, as the poor sales it will have will only drive other developers even further away from releasing their titles on the PC. Driven by anger, few PC gamers would call themselves victims. Ubisoft could become the Grinch that stole the PC's Christmas.

*The image posted is PC Gamer's best impression of how the game acts, since Ubisoft asked it not to post any actual screenshots just yet. All credits and artistic praise go to it.

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