Rock, Paper, Shotgun

My companions have stopped following me. The map has suddenly blanked out. The dungeon doors aren’t opening. And despite my just having cleared out a two-storey dungeon for the second time, there hasn’t been a checkpoint in over a half an hour. If I quit out to fix it, the entire area map will be reset yet again (a previous quit to see if there was any way to raise the difficulty had already done this to me once, and is how I discovered the dungeon wasn’t checkpointing), so in total an hour’s play time lost, and, well, here’s the thing: Diablo III just isn’t brilliant enough to warrant this.

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A videogame came out recently. If you consider yourself part of the unruly mass that is Everyone On Earth, you’re probably playing it, thinking about it, dreaming about it, or stroking it in a none-too-subtly suggestive fashion right now. (Stop that, by the way. It’s really weird.) Or, you know, you’re not. Because – given Blizzard’s track record so far – there’s a very good chance the servers are down, or lag has hurled you into a minefield of hungry, hungry Diablos, or the unnatural reaction that is Templar-meets-shield has broken reality again. I imagine you’re angry. It’s only natural, after all. You’ve waited more than a decade, and you just want to dive headfirst into hell while the hype fires are still at their brightest. Really, though, it’s probably only a matter of time before PC gaming’s most massively successful giant steamrolls the kinks and turns this nightmarish launch into an ugly, short-lived (in the grand scheme of things) memory.

That perspective in mind, it’s easy to watch the pitchfork-and-torch-wielding hordes storming Blizzard’s walls and think “Yuck, these people sure are blowing things out of proportion – just like they always do.” So a major game launch came down with a fairly violent case of the hiccups. Don’t they all? And now Blizzard’s apologized, so what more could these people possibly want? At this point, you’re just waiting for whiners to swallow this bitter pill and eat their words so they can inevitably start singing Diablo’s praises again. That mentality, however, is precisely why I’m begging you: please stay angry.

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Diablo III is out. (In the UK and Asia, at least, with the US version unlocking in about four hours.) Words that still don’t make sense when you look at them. So after the struggles of server issues all experienced at the start, I finally settled in to spend three very late hours with the game. A game which is, at least so far, action RPG perfection, worryingly troubled by the requirement of its always-on DRM. This is the tale of my first three hours, joyful and infuriating.

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It’s fair to say that RPS has taken Ubisoft to task over its DRM decisions. The company has made some extremely poor choices, that have overtly harmed people’s experiences legitimately playing their games, and no evidence of any reduction in piracy as a result has been shown. However, rather than backing down in the face of the enormous outcry, Ubisoft continued to push it, even telling PC Gamer that they viewed it as a “success”. The hubris, combined with the continuing downtime for single-player games, reached a point where things went from bad to ludicrous. But could things be about to change? Ubisoft’s digital boss, Chris Early, told Eurogamer that he’d like to see the need for DRM to go away. Blimey.

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What do you own? Looking through my possessions, I feel fairly comfortable that the food in my fridge belongs to me. And I have an odd confidence that the hardware in my PC is mine. But the books on my shelves? I seem to have very little rights over them. The CDs stacked up in a cupboard (remember CDs?) certainly aren’t my property. And the software on my computer may as well be tied to a long piece of elastic, just waiting for the publishers to give it a tug. You own a license. But a license for what? This lack of ownership becomes even more concerning when it comes to the digital space, at which point our rights to anything become extremely ambiguous. And that’s something that can bite you hard on the bum, when places like Steam seem to reserve the right to ban you from your account, and not even tell you why they did it. Below is the story of one RPS reader who says he lost access to his entire Steam collection, and thoughts from game lawyer Jas Purewal on whether we really own any game we buy.

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