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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
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.
@ 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.
It’s not that easy to keep your motherboard when they keep released new socket processors every year.
“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.
“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.
Don’t worry, DK always hates everything.
@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.
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.
How did you people survive CD games before the internet was widely availble and cracks existed?
Oh, probably weren’t alive/old enough.
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
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.
This is all well and good, but I hope it’s available on Steam as well.
“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?
You mean this one or perhaps this one?
Scans really do not do code wheels justice…
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.
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?
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.
Has anyone else seen this? Would seem vaguely April 1st ish if it weren’t posted today:
http://dragonage.bioware.com/penpaper.html
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I really don’t see what the problem is with disc checks. Online verification, however..
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!
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.
I agree though. +1 for free garlic bread!
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
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.