Assassin's Creed 2 Will Require Constant Internet Connection On PC

Confirming their dedication to previous announcements, Ubisoft has recently said that the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 will utilize their latest attempt at DRM, necessitating an always-on internet connection for the duration of your game time.

Previously, Ubisoft said that it would first be rolled out in their beta test of Settlers VII, but future titles would make use of it. As the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 comes out mid-March, this doesn't leave a lot of time to gauge how well the new system will actually work, but PC Gamer Blog received an advance copy of the title and their prognosis was rather nasty.

As said, you need to be connected to the internet in order to even log into the game and play. Your internet connection must be maintained for the duration you want to play. If at any point you get disconnected, whether intentionally or due to intermittent issues, the game will pause and give you the option to wait for your connection to return, or save your last checkpoint and quit to Windows; you cannot save your progress at the very moment the game was disconnected from Ubisoft's authorization servers, and any progress made between your last checkpoint and the disconnection will be lost.

Going further, even if your internet connection is stable, you must have constant access to Ubisoft's "Master server." Such a connection can drop out for any reason having nothing to do with your connection to other sites or the internet, up to and including Ubisoft doing system maintenance, connection trouble on their end, denial of service attacks or meteors hitting their colocation facility while you're trying to meet Leonardo di Vinci.

While it's uncommon for major companies to have issues with their data centers (generally), it does happen. The launches of most MMOGs are usually met with lag, players unable to connect, unforeseen bugs or any other issues that can crop up when you have a significant amount of players connecting to a service en masse. Considering how popular Assassin's Creed 2 has been, and how popular it's expected to be, it's not unreasonable to have concerns with the uptime of these master servers. Steam recently announced planned downtime on their servers for three hours, but while they were doing it players couldn't buy games, utilize Steamworks matchmaking services or access their friends list. Such downtime is exceedingly rare for Steam, but it does happen and it's one of the pitfalls of relying on such a system. Warhammer: Dawn of War 2 was absolutely unplayable for most people for the first two days of its launch because the Games for Windows Live servers were slammed with connections from eager gamers-- a fate I suspect Assassin's Creed 2 will share when it launches.

The intended benefit from this system, at least as far as gamers are concerned, is that saved games will be stored online and made accessible to any machines you have authorized to your account. However, as PC Gamer Blog notes, the number of people who actually make use of playing games across multiple computers is small, but the number of players affected by getting kicked from their game in the middle if their connection suffers fault is significantly higher. Anyone who really needs to sync saved games and files across multiple machines has probably heard of services for exactly that, or knows how to drag and drop files to a USB key.

In the end, I personally find this really frustrating. I buy everything I play myself, and it's becoming more and more annoying to be penalized for being a paying customer when downloading a pirated version of software gives me more freedom than buying it. When I have less rights purchasing something than I do stealing it, something is broken in the system. I shouldn't be treated like a potential criminal because I had the audacity to financially support a company and not demonstrate the behavior these arduous DRM schemes are intended to prevent. And when an enterprising hacker will strip this check out of the game or fool the local authentication check in a matter of days after launch, this whole system and all the servers Ubisoft has set aside to support these players will amount to nothing. The game will still be stolen, people who don't want to pay for it will still pirate it, and once again only honest consumers will end up being the ones carrying the burden. Rock Paper Shotgun says that this is "open contempt for paying customers" and, frankly, I agree with them.

mixvio
Posted to Hot Stuff, Miscellany on 19 February 2010 · Comments (22)
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