Seven [actually five and a half - Basic Arithmetic Ed] years on from release, Warcraft III is still seeing new patches. Blizzard forever chase the elusive spectre of perfect balance – the RTS equivalent of absolute zero.
I wouldn’t usually bother mentioning a patch unless it did something incredible, but of note in this most recent is that it adds official no-cd support – in other words, you no longer need the game disc a-spinnin’ inside your PC whenever you want to play the game.
I’ve always found it fascinating when games do this after release. It’s an admission that copy protection is just an irritation to legitimate players, and that disc checks are a particularly buffoonish and archaic anti-piracy measure at that.
I don’t need the Paint Shop Pro disc in my DVD drive whenever I want to butcher my holiday photos, after all. It was always doubly unncessary for a game like W3, which also employs serial number checks if you want to play it online. Having the CD check as well seems like leaving a polite post-it note on the windscreen of a driver prone to double-parking. Don’t bother. Just wheel-clamp the bastard.
While there’re still some reasons to be circumspect about online distribution systems (my web connection fell over yesterday; I almost wept when I found I couldn’t play Bookworm Adventures or Garry’s Mod or Puzzle Quest or whatever else was already installed unless Steam could report back to the mothership. Better offline modes plzkthx), they do spell an end to miserably sorting through quivering towers of plastic discs or popup-heavy crack websites. This brave new world, in which the data already installed upon my hard drive is all that’s required to play a game I’ve paid for, is one I know I want to live in.
And is there really anyone still playing W3 after all these years who didn’t apply an unofficial no-CD crack long ago? I guess it’s a kind courtesy on Blizzard’s part, and it certainly saves yet another visit to Gamecopyworld come the next patch, but it does seem futile this late in the day. Epic, on the other hand, were pretty quick to add official no-cd support to UT2004, and I remember thinking it quite the consideration at the time. In stark contrast are 2K, who promised they’d eventually chop the icky installation restrictions out of Bioshock – no sign of that yet.
Anyway, educate me: what other games have officially removed their CD checks?
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Speaking as a developer (from Stardock, as it happens), it seriously annoys me when I see programs that do the check for Process Explorer. It’s stupid, because it’s not like those it’s targeted at can’t just patch such a check, anyway.
Like many developers and IT professionals, I use Process Explorer in my work. Those of us who are trying a demo and encounter this problem will not stop using such software – we will stop using your software. And guess what? Being geeks, we’re probably among your biggest fans…
An amusing sidenote: a year or so back a competitor used Process Monitor to copy features from one of our programs, literally lifting the layout and description of those features word for word from our program (their motto is “often imitated, but never equaled” – perhaps they should start looking in the mirror).
They neglected one thing, though – actually testing the features worked. As it happened, the registry settings changed in the final version of Windows Vista. It took them a whole year to figure out the problem.
Oh, and they have a check for the Process Monitor driver too. I guess they didn’t want a taste of their own medicine. :-)
Given that I have installed a great many No-CD hacks for Warcraft 3 over the years, I can safely tell you that the hacks for Warcraft 3 disable Battle.net, the online portion of Warcraft 3. That is the only reason I put up with CD checking madness, because DOTA is oh so fun.
Enemy Territory: Quake Wars similarly doesn’t require the disc in the drive at the time of play. Handy.
There was a way to play without the CD and without no-cd cracks, this allowed battle.net game play. There was a “mini iso” image of like 500 KB you could mount in daemon tools to fool their CD protection.
I’ve seen UT(1) mentioned a lot, but not the Original Unreal. I’m not 100% positive, but I think the PC version originally required a CD, patched out at 1.6 or 1.06 or something. (Although I do recall that originally Tim Sweeney had said the wouldn’t…so maybe I’m confusing it w/ UT?)
I *do* know that the Mac version of Unreal 1 originally had a CD check. (Patched out later.) It was a simple “Look for this hardcoded path” which was a small .utx file, so you could just make a small disk image (say, 1 meg), name it “Unreal” and put the single file and required folder structure on it. Then make a 2 or 3 line applescript to mount said image and launch the app, and “Bob’s your uncle”.
This was back in the OS 8 (7?) days mind you, so back then disk images were tres cool. But it’s 2008, and you all are going on about CD checks as a horrible thing. Just do the smaller/partial install, and run the image w/ Daemon Tools. (Which emulates Starforce, etc, btw) If you’re not on a laptop and drive space is an issue, host the image on another comp and mount it over the network…
Somehow related to all this, I wish to point out that Blizzard was the first that I saw implement the “You can install the network version to play with friends, and only need one CD to play with them” policy/technology/option. Thingy. It was brilliant as the English might say.
Same with Drakan – they removed cd check in patch 4.45 IIRC – which was out pretty soon (in nowadays terms).
One game I haven’t got into is Gothic 2 – mostly because of its protection (it was late EU release with stronger protection and there wasn’t/isn’t no-cd fix out) – and I was unable to create working image… One of those bad purchases :-(
I guess I haven’t played with medium in optical drive for years now.
Flight Simulator X doesn’t need a disk… then again it’s 17 GB and has a brutal activation system, so they balance each other out.
Warcraft 3 is also due for a balance patch (possibly the last one) within the next month or so. It was slated to be released at the end of last year, but it has been pushed back.
Kudos for Blizzard for taking time to look out for the competitive gaming scene.
Egosoft release a no-CD patch a year or so after release which is fair enough really. I’ve never had any problems with starforce for it to raise my hackles.
@Rob
Atari made themselves very unpopular when they used Securom for NWN. Bioware removed if from SotU and Atari pointed at their contract and made them put it back on for Hordes. Consequently Bioware refused to work with Atari again.
Take command 2nd Manassas has a no-cd patch.
Of course, having tc2 in the same sentence as warcraft 3 is an insult to tc2, even though both are considered RTS games.