By John Walker on May 5th, 2009 at 11:32 am.
A spot of interesting news regarding Dragon Age: Origins. Bioware and EA have announced that the game will be coming out without Securom DRM, or any other form, beyond an old-fashioned disc check before loading. This means the old-skool fantasy RPG won’t require any online authentication at all, and thus will have no install limits. Another sign of EA’s changing mind about game protection.
Blues News reports the story, picked up via the official Dragon Age forums, where Community Coordinator (come on community, follow me in groups of four) Chris Priestly describes the announcement as “good news.”
“We’re happy to announce that the boxed/retail PC version of Dragon Age: Origins will use only a basic disk check and it will not require online authentication. In other words, the retail PC version of the game won’t require you to go online to authenticate the game for offline play. We have chosen not to use SecuROM in any version of Dragon Age that is distributed by EA or BioWare.”
He then goes on to plug a few other Dragon Age bits and pieces, clearly hoping that people picking up on the DRM story will slip it in. Oh, go on then.
“Some other cool stuff that we hope you’ll like – we have already launched the Dragon Age toolset beta, which offers developer-grade tools, and we’re looking forward to what fans will create with it. We’ll also be supporting the game with a ton of great downloadable content that will be available for purchase after the game’s release. Together these features will provide some very cool reasons to go online with Dragon Age: Origins.”
So that’s good then.
Just like Sims 3, EA is changing tact!
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Awww now i won’t have an excuse to pirate it…damn EA! ;)
Seriously though it looks like they have learned there lesson, though if they were not putting DRM on it..why did they delay the PC release to come out at the same time as the 360 release?
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Now that’s good news. Hooray for EA’s rather lovely u-turn.
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“a ton of great downloadable content that will be available for purchase” … purchase? Well, that’s the next thing they can work on, as far as I’m concerned… (isn’t going to happen, I know…)
…but hooray for good old disc checks!
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Wow. I had thought of holding off to see what the community pulled out and am still concerned about bugs (the bane of any far reaching CRPG) but I feel I need to be there day 1 to support this.
Thank You EA. You are listening to us. You deserve some currency for that one. I know the wife is giving some for Sims 3, so that’s double happiness from this household.
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It could mean “Instead we will now require a birth certificate, a photo signed by your kindergarten teacher and your own left teste as collateral.”
Still better than Securom though.
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Personally I much prefer the not-having to have the DVD in the drive online check. It was just the install limits that were mind-numbingly retarded.
As for the PC version delay, it simply wasn’t finished I thought.
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Good news. Now un-announce that it’s being delayed until October to coincide with the 360 release and we’ll be friends again, EA.
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Yes, by the early release date (was it February) the game apparently wasn’t finished, for any platform. In the Bluesnews comments today, Derek French from Bioware states “I am working on the PC version right now and we are not quite there yet. Sorry if you don’t believe me. “
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@Rook
Oh no, the official reason for the delay was that it was ‘too good.’
More realistically I think it was a chance to allow EA to consolidate its advertising campaign for the console and PC versions. Previously it is unlikely that the PC version would have benefited from any advertising, and then any subsequent console ad campaigns would have been hindered by the fact it was a PC port.
I hope Bioware have taken the extra time to apply an extra layer of polish, and further bug testing. It would be a shame to think that the gold master just sat around for an extra six months.
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how about retro-actively removing securom from your former titles like mirrors edge and dead space ?
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Just an aside, but don’t you think the Spore protest business on Amazon has helped in making this possible somewhat? Ironic because that was something that was lampooned by RPS and it’s readership when I thought it was necessary. People here are saying “yay they listened to us” No they didn’t. They were scared the Spore thing was going to hurt future sales; they’re a corperation, why should they care what you think as long as they shift units? The only reason for this u-turn is because of the amazon spore thing.
Don’t get me wrong, its a good u-turn, but people believing EA are some kind of new found humanitarian for listening to them is a little naive.
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Wow this sure changes whether or not I’m going to buy the game! /sarcasm
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Oh great, so back to using NoDVD cracks again, then : /.
I too, much prefered DRM in Warhead or Mirrors Edge which did not require from me the effort of getting up and picking up the box from the shelf and putting the dvd inside my drive……………………………
So..bad news for us lazy people.
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Forcing a disc check is still a dick move, but at least the digital distributions stand a chance of being limit free.
Make me not require a disk in the drive and them I’ll hail you as the savours of the world.
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this is good news. drm protection doesn’t stop games from getting pirated. but going drm free can earn them a few sales and general goodwill.
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Good stuff, I’ve been keeping a close eye on this one. No excuse not to get it now.
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Huzzah! And yeah, it *does* change whether or not I’ll buy it.
Hey, EA, whilst you’re being all friendly and consumer-focussed, how’sabout activation-free budget releases of Dead Space and Mass Effect? Go on, you know you want to.
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Generic Age DRM Free
Fixed.
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@Pavel
The lack of a requirement for the disc was one of the few pluses of the Mass Effect style activation. However on the balance of things I’d prefer to be able to install the game a few years down the line, when activation servers may be down, or after I’ve had a few too many re-installs.
On a related note: did anyone else notice that the disc check of Fallout 3 was ridiculously easy to bypass? Makes me wonder why they even bothered?
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It’s about time they started doing that. If I wasn’t already buying this game anyway, I’d likely have bought a copy to show my support.
Disk-checks still suck, but I’d much rather that than having god-knows-what DRM measures installed on my computer. Besides, it means digital versions should be totally DRM free, which is fantastic.
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Disk checks? Die, EA! DIE!
Those bastards will expect me to own my own hardware to play the game on next.
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I want to like EA for doing this, and I think I do. If payments for add-on content after the release is how EA are going to justify a lack of DRM, that’s fine, it’ll support people like me who never really care about the additional content…
It kinda goes back to what some have been arguing about indie games – if small teams can stay afloat appealing to a select few uber-fans, rather than casting nets wide, maybe big dev houses can appease publisher’s sense of lost revenue that they associate with piracy by milking (or ‘enhacing the experience’) of the larger fans of big release games?
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Reply to James G
Well the people who hacked it would of hacked it with it was ten times harder. But people like me who just handed games like Urban Chaos or Sacrifice (which don’t do disk checks and sold horribly) to just about everyone in my class wouldn’t be able do that. Before you ask, I still know most of them, they all enjoyed both games and absolutely no one paid for it. Personally I don’t use cracks because when I tried it with Pro Evo 2009 (having to hunt down the disk took far too long to be worth an eight minute game) it came with a lovely virus that deleted half my windows install. When I did the same with Space Monkey/Space Mutant for the same reason it installed a little program that sent my old bank details out. The system I support is the kind that is used by CoH Opposing Fronts which is internet activated if you have internet or a dick check if you don’t. Protects the maker and saves me having to rummage in my own filth.
Also it’s presumptive to guess the game will still work on the computers of space year 2020. It would have to be able to be used underwater for a start.
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A disk in the drive!
HOW THEY DARE!
WHERE ARE MY RIGHTS? WHAT DO THEY THINK THEY ARE TO TELL ME WHERE I HAVE TO PUT THE DISK I BOUGHT WITH MY MONEY! THIS IS PREPOSTEROUS, OUTRAGEOUS, AN ATTACK TO MY DIGNITY AS HUMAN BEING AND CONSUMER!
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Add me to the list of people who wouldn’t care no matter what they used. Although technically I guess I would have preferred Securom. Go online for two seconds, then never need to put the disc in the drive ever again. Too bad the internet is so whiney that now we have to go backwards.
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Day 1
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I wonder what happened to all the very loud people who claimed that protesting the DRM in Spore was a waste of time and wouldn’t achieve anything… ;)
Disk checks are a bit annoying, but 1) they’re easily worked around with a no-cd crack, and 2) they never *prevent* me from installing or playing.
The fact that EA can no longer decide if and when I should be allowed to play the game I bought (and that I can play the game even if/when they go out of business or the auth server taken down) trumps all other concerns.
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If it’s going to have an online presence like the NWN games then they probably think tying your account to your CD key is going to be enough to encourage people to pay for the game.
Not really that interested in this game anyway. I haven’t liked a Bioware game since Kotor 1***.
***That’s a personal opinion and not intended as an attack at anybody who thinks Mass Effect or Jade Empire were any good.
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now if only games wouldn’t cost 60$ I’d buy them. seriously I think the problem isn’t DRM (of course there is problemw/ thp who require dental proof that you are the owner of the game). it’s that games cost is so expensive that it becomes harder and harder to squeeze them in the monthly budget, if 7-8 years ago I could squeeze a 20-30$ game into my grocery list it’s almost impossible today making games a luxury that I can’t buy on a regular basis.
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Hurray! One small step towards EA’s redemption. Now they can start dropping some of their subsidiary studios and shrink themselves back to EA Sports, then brood in the corner where they were meant to be from the start. I want Maxis, Westwood, Bioware, Mythic, Pandemic, Bullfrog, etc. Yes, I hold EA accountable for the subversion and demise of each of these (or I’m just needlessly bitter).
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Sold.
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I doubt people rating Spore one star on Amazon really mattered (or affected sales one bit). But a general consensus of ‘this is bad’ from all parts of the industry certainly did.
Disk check is fine by me. I’m confused why people would care about it.
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This is great to hear.
Now, as a Canadain I know the real reason for the delay. All Canadian products are made with a default maple syrup setting. Bioware forgot they were releasing to an international market and thus have to de-syrup the game so as not to cause a pandemic of diabetes.
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@ MetalCircus, jalf, et al.
Indeed it was the (in my opinion) completely justified outrage of the AIM on sites like Amazon that caused this reversal of tactics by EA. What do you think was meant by my original “You are listening to us” comment? :) I wasn’t talking about those that purchased their products that are rented crippleware with a kill switch or unrevokable (now fixed) installs and didn’t say anything. That may describe, by and large, who purchased the product, but that’s not the full market share available for the product, and the AIM let a company know they could make more money by treating potential customers as friends instead of thieves. I think it is as disingenuous to say that not a single sale was lost due to their DRM as it is to say that every single pirated piece of code is a lost sale.
I do think EA realizes that alienating people who are more than willing to purchase your product serves no good business purpose and may be a worse deterrent to your company getting money than the availability of the product through black market channels where you see no revenue. Add to this the fact that Spore, despite being trounced by the community for such draconian DRM, was available on the black market days before it was available for legal purchase. I don’t see how anyone in the company could see that as a success.
Link online (preferably free updates (Much Love Valve)) content and patch distribution with a unique key and put content (persistent worlds, addons, etc) online only. It’s all they had to do for Spore, really. Pirates get a gold master, as they always will, but give them no further content. Want the full experience? Pay for it. Just don’t nickel and dime me after I already spent 50 dollars on what is supposed to be a full experience. That’s a different discussion altogether, though.
As always, my button says Opinion away! so take that as you will.
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Never understood why putting a DVD in a drive was such a problem. Just need a cause and running out of reasons to complain?
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Just started fiddling around with mass effect again. The DRM crashed my computer every 10mins. Fortunately, I managed to fix it so windows just crashes in the background and I can keep on playing with just a hint of slowdown. Wonderful.
Now I can actually buy Dragon Age. Good stuff EA. Would be nice to have a patch to kill the DRM for previous releases though.
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Wait, wait just a minute! If they are not worried about people pirating their game, could some please explain me the purpose of delaying the game by 10 months to match the console release?!
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Never had a problem with DRM, every DRM ‘issue’ I’ve read about has been exagerrated beyond belief or misinformed, topic is a dead horse, let me know when we collectively move on.
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Here’s why having to have a DVD in a drive sucks: I have a laptop at work as well as a desktop at home, and my work often involves 2 hour incubation periods or late nights to just keep an eye on things. Because of steam, I have access to the entire library of my games there to play when I want. I don’t have to take a bunch of separate discs into and back from work because my friends might want to jump onto TF2 or UT3 or L4D or even TQ.
Also as someone that moves a lot for work or study, I don’t want to be dragging 20 or so games with me in the same way I don’t want to be bringing the 100 or so music CDs I have.
I don’t know how DRM became the New Coke for disc checks.
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Anyone else have a feeling that EA will try something else to fuck users over?
TCM, how would you like a game you install to artificially limit what you can do with your computer? To connect to a third party server and transmit unknown details drawn from your computer? To refuse to install just because your changed your motherboard?
TCM = Trusted Computing Module?
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Not having DRM is a good thing, like not having AIDS. But a disc-check is much like having herpes. Is totally anoyng to “hunt” a particular disc on your collection. I have all the icons on the desktop, and all games are a “full installation”, so don’t really need the CD. Maybe this is good news, since theres a cure for CD checks called no-cd patch’s, so is something you can undo. DRM is much more vile, if a game don’t install because the EA server is down, you are much screwed. You are still screwed if the CD break, but at least you can do something, while a server down is EA deccision.
Theres also a special version, clean from cd-checks, drm and stuff. For free.
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@Evangel
I don’t really care either way about what data EA syphons off from my computer, it’d be illegal for them to take anything useful, and Valve does the exact same thing with Steam. (which everyone except the most hardnosed antiDRM guys seems to claim is the model for the industry)
As for refusing to install because I changed my motherboard, that would be bad, wouldn’t it? (To date I have changed my motherboard 4 times (in a row, even) since installing Mass Effect, and it works fine on my first install.)
And artificially limiting what I can do with my computer…Well, I’m running BitTorrent and Daemon tools whenever I play one of these heavy DRM games, and if I’m not limited at all in those, what is it limiting?
(TCM = TheChronoMaster)
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Steam a) sweetens the deal by supplying you with high-quality service and b) doesn’t limit the amount of computers you install to or the amount of times you can install it. In fact, with Steamcloud it encourages playing over several different machines.
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I’m definitely in the group that would much rather have to connect to the internet twice (once to install, once to uninstall) than have my DVD-ROM used as a dongle like it’s 1993. I kinda wish they’d at least give us the choice of which protection to use as SecureROM is far less of a pain in the ass than constantly shuffling/scratching my game discs or waiting 6 months for a nocd to come out every time a game is patched (or, as seems common with more and more games, never getting one at all after version 1.0).
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@TCM: Lucky for you. It seems you missed the point though. I believe Mass Effect requires an activation per installation, but not if you change motherboard without reinstalling. So yes, you got by using only one installation.
Sucks that some people occasionally reinstall games though, for a variety of reasons. I have a couple of friends who’ve been unable to play Mass Effect for a long time because they ran out of activations, and didn’t feel like phoning up EA to beg for another activation.
(I bought the game on Steam, so I didn’t have the install limit)
Several other games require reactivation if you change hardware though, so even you would have been hit by the DRM if you’d installed a number of other games.
But honestly, don’t you see a problem in this? You’ve been able to play Mass Effect *so far*, and therefore, you believe that DRM can *never* prevent you from playing *any* game? That is so shortsighted I find it hard to believe. How about if your next motherboard change blocks your ME (apart from the fact that, like I said, I believe ME counts installations, not hardware changes). But no, that’s inconceivable because it hasn’t been a problem *yet*.
How about “preventing you from running or installing a game because the DRM servers determine that you’ve used up your quota (whether that’s install limit or hardware change limit or something else)? I’d say that is limiting.
The nice thing about CD checks is, like others have mentioned, that it can be easily circumvented by the user. If I want to play games on my laptop without the DVD drive plugged in, I install a no-dvd crack, and voila, I’ve got a game I can play as much as I like.
CD-checks can be annoying, but they are never showstoppers. (apart from everything else, they become complete non-issues if you buy your games through digital distribution). They can be circumvented, and the publisher can not decide on a case-by-case basis whether to allow you to play.
On a side note, let’s not talk about “redemption” or “saviors of the game industry” yet. EA has reverted one of the biggest blunders they’ve ever made. That brings them back where they were two years ago. Well done, but I’d like them to do something *positive*, rather than just undoing the negative things they did previously before I hail them as saviors of anything.
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Still though, I am not often at a point where I’m playing more than 2 games at once, maybe this makes me the minority. Also, the fact that you play games at work probably makes you the minority :) Where do you work and how do I sign up?
Regardless, the disc requirement has never bothered me, probably because it is there on most games and I have a tendency to play my games in a linear fashion, as in, I buy one then won’t play any other games until it is finished.
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That seems mildly…
Hm.
Well, suffice it to say, it’s a poorly conceived plan if nothing else.
On one hand, we have: “Yay, there is no DRM!”
This was happy-making, but then they go on to say: “But it’ll have a disc-check, which is still DRM, but yanno, not big name DRM, so there will be DRM, just not nasty DRM, which is cool, right?”
I mean, by that merit, the PC version of Oblivion had ‘No DRM!’, because that only had a disc-check too. And this is why crack torrents have large amounts of seeders, usually, not because people want to pirate games, but because no one really wants to have to A) keep the game in the drive or B) authenticate online.
As long as there are obstacles, there will be cracks, as long as there are cracks there will be distribution groups and people dreaming up excuses for piracy.
So no, EA, having the devil we don’t know on that disc instead of the one we do doesn’t make the situation better.
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False.
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How is a disc check the devil we don’t know? We know precisely what it is and have somehow managed to game for a decade and a half with it without the world ending or anyone spamming Amazon with AIM reviews.
We’re going from the spy in the machine to the devil in the disc drive. No, it’s not perfect, but at least we’ll actually own Dragon Age.
Try reselling your copy of, I don’t know, Empire Total War…
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Oh, almost forgot!
@jaif: I completely agree.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people fail to take laptops into consideration with the “Bubba-but you can still install it if’n ya keeps yer motherboard!”. It is truth that it’s easy to keep your motherboard when upgrading a desktop PC. But what if one is upgrading laptops? A new laptop is bought and the old one is given away, it’s next to impossible to have the same motherboard, then.
So, three laptops down the line, the game is gone and it can no longer be reinstalled, this means that the game is technically a rental and not really a purchased game at all.
I swear, if not for cracking teams, the PC games industry would die overnight, and by their own hand. Has it ever struck anyone else how much of an Ouroboros the PC software industry is?
Customers clearly want software that won’t screw up their PC, cracks provide for a more safe environment than DRM (this is a fact, unless we’re talking about idiots who’re too stupid to know a crack from malware). So the cracking groups actually allow a game to sell by providing an alternative to the DRM, but because these cracks are often used in warez releases, companies will go after the cracking groups, and never really succeed at it.
The PC software industry is stuck in a continuous cycle of destruction, and money is being wasted on DRM, and to fight those who remove DRM, when really no one actually wants DRM, and DRM harms sales. It’s baffling.
I think that this is why some companies (Ubisoft) have started to experiment with the removal of DRM.
How do you stop piracy?: Make a game that’s good enough to sell, rather than freak out about piracy because a bad game fails to. I mean, the World of Goo devs whined about piracy but have you seen their profit margin? That game has made those fellows rich, and the PC version of World of Goo had no DRM at all. So yes, something to think about.
Good games sell, shit games don’t, DRM has no impact on this. If a game is good, it’s going to be cracked and it’ll sell if it has DRM, and it’ll probably sell even more if it has no DRM (because less knowledgeable PC users don’t feel that they have to trust ‘shady’ cracking groups).
This is a truth that I wish I could drum into the pallid heads of the CEOs of every publisher out there. These days, cracking groups are so adept at what they do that DRM doesn’t really do anything other than alienate people.
Whether it’s a disc-check or online activation, it simply doesn’t need to be there. I’ve bought loads of PC games lately, because they were good, and if Dragon Age reviews well (and gets compared to Planescape) then I’ll end up buying Dragon age, too.
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Superb news, thank you EA for finally really listening on this issue. This will most likely mark my first purchase of an EA game at full price in many years, pending reviews of course.
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Nice to see a couple of the bigger publishers changing tactics. That said, no cooperative multiplayer in a glorified D&D game? My friends and I will pass.
-Snuffles
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What I don’t understand is how short-sighted people saying they don’t mind online authentication are. Do you people really not own any old games? Do you play a game and then never intend to play it again?
Recently RPS featured The Nameless Mod for Deus Ex, a nine-year-old game. I bought Deus Ex, for full price, when it came out. I still have the CD. Luckily, Deus Ex just has a “basic disk check”, not online authentication — because if it did, how likely would it be that I would be able to play? Ion Storm, the developer, is long gone. Eidos, the publisher, has had a very rocky past couple of years and has just been bought by Square Enix. Authentication servers cost money to keep running, and the only money I paid Eidos was nine years ago. My ability to install the game would have nothing to do with me being able to hold on to the disk but with Eidos/Square keeping its authentication servers upright. For a nine-year-old game.
Seriously, a choice between the irritation of needing the disk in the drive vs. not being able to legally install a game I own, I’ll choose the mild irritant.
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I think we are beyond extremist views on piracy across the board. It may not be the profit murderer that companies assume it is, but to ignore it as a problem altogether is a little juvenile as well. Simply making “better games” isn’t going to stop the problem and cracking teams aren’t single handedly staving off the destruction of the PC gaming market. Great games are pirated all the time, World of Goo is one example you used.
Piracy existed before DRM and it will survive DRM by many years. Imagining that it isn’t there won’t change the fact that it is there and saying that “piracy is caused by X” doesn’t make it true. Everyone has different reasons for piracy, and I think number one reason is cost. In my mind, companies that are dedicated to releasing a demo before the game hitting shelves probably deal with less piracy than other games. It gives gamers a chance to see if the game is worth 20 – 50 dollars.
Also, if you think things like disc-check don’t need to be there, consider the state of Russian gaming pre-1C.
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@ Jad
Exactly. People that aren’t bothered by online authentication and install limits aren’t thinking long term. If I buy a game, I want to be able to use it well into the foreseeable future.
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It’s not that easy to keep your motherboard when they keep released new socket processors every year.
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“Anyone else have a feeling that EA will try something else to fuck users over?”
They already are. They’re charging for ridiculous addons that should have been free and would have been free before they started their console porting madness.
They’re delaying a finished game (a game they claimed “Dragon Age is a PC only game! We’re going back to the roots with it!” – so much for that bullshit) so the PC version doesn’t get released before the console version.
Don’t worry – there’s plenty of fucking going on, and you’re on the receiving end already.
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“They’re charging for ridiculous addons that should have been free”
Says who?
I might assert that garlic bread should be free with pizza. But it isn’t.
Just because one games company does something for free doesn’t mean all can, or should. If you feel ripped off, vote with your wallet.
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Don’t worry, DK always hates everything.
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@DK, cliffski: At least with the PC the additional content will actually be downloaded from somewhere. I love when console game discs actually have the “additional” game content already on them and you are just paying to unlock it.
I’m not paying for something that I already own when there are plenty of friendly neighborhood hackers out there to help me access the rest of my game.
Oh, and “voting with your wallet” doesn’t work since all those lost sales just get attributed to piracy.
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I hope it’s available for download then. I’m too anal retentive to let the discs sit around outside their boxes, and I hate having to keep boxes on the desk.
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How did you people survive CD games before the internet was widely availble and cracks existed?
Oh, probably weren’t alive/old enough.
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Jesus fucking christ, you lazy twats.
It’s not that god fucking damn hard to put a fucking disc in a fucking drive. It’s not the god damn devil, it’s a fucking disc check. Believe it or not, companies have a right to try and protect their damn products, and if you think it’s to much of an inconvenience to pull a disc out of a case and put it in your damn CD drive, or at the very least get a crack, then you are beyond saving in every sense of the phrase.
inb4deleted
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I wonder what kids these days would have to do if they had to keep up with a code wheel or a piece of magenta paper with red 3-D like movie glasses to read the code written in blue or the little book that came with the game that wasn’t really a manual but you needed it to solve some esoteric puzzle contained in that game you won’t get to until a good 10 hours in. I wonder…
A CD Check is, by far, one of the least intrusive forms of DRM available and is dependent on only 2 things – Having a drive that can read the media and the media itself being readable. It may be an inconvenience but, at the same time, there are wonderful free utilities that can let me rip my original to an image, put that original back in its case until I need to reload it, mount the image on a virtual drive, enable emulation options and let me play away without having to take a disc out of a container and put it in a drive over and over. Making an authentication server for my disc that didn’t even come with an executable, however, is a different issue. A CD check is DRM, to be sure, but it puts the onus of responsibility where it belongs, on the licensor, not the licensee.
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This is all well and good, but I hope it’s available on Steam as well.
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“At least with the PC the additional content will actually be downloaded from somewhere.”
Sadly, not the case. If you buy HAWX, you can download a tiny less than 50kb hack to unlock an entire host of extra planes – a portion of which is paid-for-content on consoles, some of which are, to quote Ubisoft, “not in the PC version of HAWX”, and the majority are not availible anywhere yet.
They’re all in the game, you paid for them – but you can’t use them unless you resort to 3rd party hacks.
@Markoff Chaney, Code Wheels rocked – anyone remember the hilarious Monkey Island Voodoo wheel?
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You mean this one or perhaps this one?
Scans really do not do code wheels justice…
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This is a welcome move back towards decency in DRM. As has been said, this is about the least intrusive form of DRM, one which isn’t going to screw anyone over in the long term, or at all for that matter.
If they do start charging for DLC, I simply won’t pay. Like with Fallout 3, I refuse to pay for DLC, having paid full retail price for the game already. But that’s where bittorrent steps in to save us from the evil profiteering bastards.
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I’m all for DLC, even paid DLC, as long as it is worth the price. If I am a fan of something, and they create more content for it, then that generally makes me a happy person. Having a price at all doesn’t exclude it from having a value (I should also note that it doesn’t mean there is a value attached to it either, some DLC is trash), otherwise they would just give all of their software out for free, and heaven forbid a company actually charge for spending time, effort and resources on creating something. It’s not as if DLC just pops out of Gabe Newell’s ample bosom, or from the DLC tree, it takes time and effort. Should they get a profit after spending money, time and employees social lives for getting a product, I submit that they should.
However, I disagree with the practice of “unlocking” content already on a disc, that just seems a little too intentional. As if they suddenly realized their efforts should have been worth more after the fact. That to me seems more like profiteering than something that Beth or Bioware is doing. They are actually putting additional production time into something that they hope fans will enjoy. What’s wrong with that?
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It’s great to see EA drop limited activation DRM on Dragon Age and The Sims 3. It seems that lessons have been learned. Now remove it from Dead Space so I can buy it please?
However, what they don’t tell you is that Sims and Dragon Age DLC will use the EA downloader system, which does use Securom DRM.
EA’s downloader also limits the time within which you can re-download your games/DLC for free. Once past that initial time (I think it’s a year) you’ll have to buy it again to download it, unless you pay an extra free to extend that free period to five years.
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Has anyone else seen this? Would seem vaguely April 1st ish if it weren’t posted today:
http://dragonage.bioware.com/penpaper.html
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I’d rather have twisted DRM than disk checks. Hate. Disk. Checks
But as long as I don’t have to buy 2 copies to lan at home, I’m fine. Here’s hoping
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I’m truly amazed by the number of people who are willing to consign games to the trash bin of history just to save a little time, effort and storage space. (A game with an online authentication check -will- be unplayable someday if the check is not removed. No ifs, ands, or buts about that. Unplayable by anyone, ever, not just unplayable by you if you lose or damage your disc. That sucks.)
Fortunately, I guarantee you folks that you will be able to buy a digitally distributed version where you can have all the online authentication you so crave. Have you seen an EA title in recent memory that wasn’t? Hell, Bioware’s last two games are even on Steam.
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We used Neverlock (or similar) for floppy games or we downloaded the cracks from BBS’s if it wasn’t in neverlock.
The amount of CD-ROMS in computers was pretty small before the internet was widely available and most games didn’t need CD-ROM’s anyway. (I didn’t have a computer with a CD drive until 1995, first game I bought before I even got the computer was Mechwarrior 2). Before that for 6 years I owned a 286-12mhz with a 3.5″ and a 5.25″ floppy drive.
Mechwarrior 2 did require the CD to be in the drive, I didn’t mind though because it had a kickass soundtrack.
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This is great news! I much prefer disc checks to secuROM and/or online authentication. This is the exact opposite tune EA was singing this time last year. I’d like to find out what this means for future releases.
In any case, there’s no reason for me not to get this game now.
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Before the internet was widespread, most CD games didn’t full install to the hard drive, also. When you have to have the disc in because of technical limitations that’s a lot easier to swallow than when you have to put the disc in because they want to make sure you didn’t sell it on eBay.
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I wonder what excuses the piracy deniers will use now when this game has a record piracy rate (seeing as how its targeted toward ‘hardcore’ pc gamers’). They won’t be able to trot out the ‘people pirated it to boycott intrusive DRM OMG MY RITES’ garbage that the us sane people can laugh at. The fact they had to delay this game and start working on a console version shows just how little faith they have in the ‘hardcore’ pc audience to support them when they make a game specifically for it.
On a related note, its sad to see Bioware going backwards instead of forward. Every one of their games since they moved to console development has been fun and original, while this is straight off the generic tolkienesque fantasy train that I would expect to see in the bargain bin at Borders. How can anyone honestly see this as a step forward after amazing games like Kotor, Jade Empire, and Mass Effect lined their console library?
This is just a commentary on what is left of the shell of PC gaming: A handful of people sitting around waiting for the ‘next baldur’s gate’ or ‘next planescape torment’, unable and unwilling to move on to new things. Bioware wanted to make stunning, original games so they moved their focus to consoles where they would be accepted. Now since the inevitable backlash of bitter PC elitists that a for-profit company ‘betrayed’ them, they’ve got their B-team working on something that looks like it just stepped out of 1995 for the 12 people left playing PC games who just won’t pirate it anyway.
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heh, that’s a step up from your usual trolling.
Piracy will happen regardless of whether or not Dragon Age has SecuROM. This is about paying customers. They don’t like SecuROM, so don’t include it. But I agree: stealing a game and using the DRM as an excuse is weak.
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I really don’t see what the problem is with disc checks. Online verification, however..
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I really don’t see what the problem is with disc checks. Online verification, however..
Sorry, forgot to add great post! Can’t wait to see your next post!
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Guess I’ll be buying this. I have a strong tendency to buy major games released without DRM just as a show of support. I rarely even game any more outside of my limited City of Heroes/Villains time, but still feel strongly that I need to support publishers that do the right thing. World of Goo, Galactic Civilizations II, Crayon Physics, and so on. I’d love to play Dragon Age, but I probably won’t have time. Still, I love Bioware, and I love companies that release great games without restricting my legal use after I buy them.
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I agree though. +1 for free garlic bread!
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Seriously … guys… AGAIN?!?!, “old-fashioned” disc check IS DRM, dragon age is not drm free, get that article title straight
you know what is “older-fashioned” ? no freaking check at all, you are so dazzled by the blind rage you had against online verification you are accepting something you used to hate just as much before
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I wasn’t refering to it in some sort of anti-piracy measure, I was referring to it in a “How did you cope with having to have the disc in the drive/swap discs to play games like you did when a CD held more data than your (well, my) hard drive” way. Like it’s some sort of terrible chore.
JKJoker – no check at all isn’t old fashioned, there has been DRM in one form or another since games came on tapes.
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