2K are scrabbling around, trying to make up for the bit of a whoopsie that represented BioShock’s PC launch. While a 360 player can indulge in such crazed madness as lending the game to their friends – gasp in horror and disgust – PC players were limited to two activations of their code, and three re-installs (meaning anyone with a typical crappy PC would be screwed in moments), as well as being scuppered by scrappy driver issues. To run the game with any success, you need beta drivers, and the game failed to come with the latest version of Direct X. Not pretty.
So in an effort to apologise, it seems that 2K are listening and responding to the moans. As of now, the activations have been raised to five, and the number of re-installs on the same machine is up to five. (Although why this should be limited at all is bewildering). They continue,
“As for other technical issues, we are bringing on a team of tech support that will be on the 2K forums 24/7 to help people resolve their technical issues. Our QA guys are in the offices and on the forums, too, reproducing issues and looking for workarounds and compiling information that they can put towards making you a patch and updating the knowledge base.”
There’s an updated FAQ, along with a fix to prevent yesterday’s collapse of the activation server, and they’re even addressing the widescreen woes.
“And as for widescreen, we also want to say we completely understand a user’s desire to augment their FOV. BioShock is a harrowing experience, but we don’t want anyone to feel limited (or motion sick!). So we are in the process of working on an official PC patch to give widescreen PC users a choice to expand their horizontal FOV, and are investigating creating a similar update for the 360.”
And finally, for those disappointed by the pathetic and irrelevant 3-track Moby single stuck in the collector’s edition purporting to be a “soundtrack”, they’ve even addressed this. You can download the 12-track score (composed by none other than the guy who wrote the A-Team theme) album everyone was likely expecting directly from The Cult Of Rapture here.
EDIT: Ken Levine is interviewed by Joystiq about Bioshock’s success and the issues. Relevant quote…
There have been some concerns that the copy protection was something nobody had ever seen before, except for the online procedure, there’s nothing different. There’s nothing wacky going on there, at some point we’ll move back from online activation. If people want to play BioShock ten years from now, they’ll be able to play it. We have a commitment from 2K that that is going to happen and we’ll hold them to that commitment and they’re serious about it, we’ll make that happen.
In other words, the online activation will be turned off eventually.
