Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Ubisoft are issuing apologies after it seems their server migration isn’t only taking down the games they warned it would. Reports of both Driver: San Francisco and Anno 2070 also not working properly are coming from gamers (cheers EG), as Ubisoft acknowledges more games than they’d planned are being affected. Once again it’s impossible not to observe that if they hadn’t tied single-player games to such draconian, useless and self-defeating DRM, none of this would be happening. To find out the details of why the games are down, along with others, read our earlier coverage here.

Shoot Many Robots has a directness I can appreciate. When I eventually make a game, I’ll call it “Craig Make Gun Bangs”: it will have no story apart from a bit that says “he puts a bullet in his gun” in Comic Sans, and then a few seconds later “bang” spelled out in bullet holes. I reckon Ubisoft will pick it up like they have this four-player Borderlands-esque platform game. Sure, mine won’t have pretty graphics, charm, wit, or be anything more than an idea scribbled in crayon on a cereal packet, but then they already have that in Demiurge’s game.
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BWAARRRR, LOCK AND LOAD, BWARRRRR, LAUNCH DETECTED, BWEEEEEEEE, RATATATATAATA…ARRGHLE…KABOOM…shhhhhhhh.

That seems to be the script for Ghost Recon: Future Soldier judging by the gameplay footage in this new trailer. Sure, there are missiles launching and helicopters strafing entire continents with vicious intent, but there’s also sneaky silenced sniping, creeping up and stabbing, and a great deal of encouragement to fight dirty. “Only the dead fight fair” is the tagline and it’s not a curveball announcing the arrival of hordes of rulebook-wielding zombies but rather a way of saying, ‘do whatever is necessary’. Position yourself within a shrub upon a hilltop and observe the trailer through a thermal imaging binocuscope.

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With Ubisoft’s recent announcement that Rayman: Origin’s splendid arrival on PC will have the barest DRM for the download version (a single activation – a pointless waste of everyone’s time still, of course) and the retail version having none at all (although Ubi have yet to get back to me over whether it will work without the disc in the drive), it makes you wonder if the company is beginning to see the light. With other recent games having only required a single activation, there does seem to be a movement away from their moronic ‘always on’ system. A system that’s proving its idiocy next week, when Ubisoft take their servers down for an indefinite period, meaning any games using it will cease working.

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Well here’s a thing. The absolutely superb platformer, Rayman: Origins, is making its way from console to the PC on the 30th March. Michael “Beyond Good & Evil” Ancel returned to the 2D side-scroller he created, and the result is genuinely splendid. You can pre-order it now at the UbiShop for £20, which is half the price it launched at on 360 and PS3 (although the price most places are selling it at by now). Of course, the big question is: Woah, Ubi, what DRM will it come with? We’ve asked, can tell you that the digital download versions will only have a one-time activation, and retail copies, according to Ubi, will have “no DRM at all”.

You can see the trailer below.

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The hamsters of Ubisoft Singapore’s employees must have the most luxurious cages of all the rodents. I imagine their owners coming home with a pile of Tom Clancy books and world bibles and tossing them at the paper-loving cricetinaes, saying: “we don’t need these anymore”. Ghost Recon Online looks like a fun free-to-play shooter, but realism is not its focus, as is evident in the trailer below.
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If making a fuss keeps working, it’s only going to encourage us. In the last week we’ve – among others – reported on the extremely peculiar choice in Ubisoft’s chosen DRM for Anno 2070, to have it use up an activation every time you do something so simple as change a graphics card in your PC. Assuming this was a mistake we contacted Ubi, who genuinely surprised us by coming back to say it was completely intentional, wasn’t a problem, and that was that.

Well, after attention was brought their way, co-developers BlueByte got in touch with Hilbert Hagedoorn at Guru3D – who first brought the issue into light – and gave him more activations for the game. And now it’s just been reported that they’ve changed the DRM such that the game will no longer spit up if you switch a PCIe slot.

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On Monday we reported the strange discovery by Guru3D that something so simple as changing your graphics card could use up an activation on Ubisoft game, Anno 2070. At the time I suggested that this was perhaps a bug in the DRM Ubisoft uses, Tages, meaning it was overreacting to hardware changes. It seems I was wrong, and Ubisoft have confirmed to us that this is how they intend the DRM to work.

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Ubisoft have managed to go a month or so without anyone loudly throwing their hands in the air and despairing at their DRM ways. They’ll be relieved to know the drought is over, with tech wizards Guru3D discovering that Ubisoft’s limited activations of their games are not just limited to specific machines, but specific graphics cards.

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The argument being, of course “are free to play browser games necessarily hateful to traditional gamers?” The Settlers Online is taking a beloved strategy name and affixing all manner of new business models to it, but is the ol’ Blue Byte spirit safe and sound in there or has it entirely gone over to the microtransaction dark side? You can find out right now, as the open beta’s just gone live. Miracle of miracles it doesn’t require a Facebook account, though that is an option. Seems primarily bound to Ubisoft’s UPlay system, which fortunately I was already signed up for or I might have screamed at the sight of yet another registration page. And lo, it loaded in my browser, and it looked quite nice.

As to Settlers Online’s place on good-evil spectrum, it’s too early to say. I’ve been at it about 20 minutes so far, and it’s glacially slow, has quite a few resource types and micromanagent screens, a little overcomplicated and well.. like the Settlers in many respects. Which is good. But…
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First it was happening and then it wasn’t cos of mad piracy paranoia and there was a bunch of shouting and it was horrible and now it is happening again! Sometimes having a moan really does work, though it is better to moan politely and with words that don’t mostly begin with ‘f’.
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