Commander and Conquer 4 No DRM no worries.

Electronic Arts has announced that Commander and Conquer 4 will require that players have an active internet connection in order to play the game.  They have confirmed that this applies both to multiplayer and singleplayer gameplay.

This is a sure blow to laptop gamers who sometimes find themselves away from a hardline or wifi hub.  Though I’d like to point out that EA has stated that dial-up will allow you to play the game.  I find this a bit funny as you can probably count the number of gamers with dial-up on one hand.  There just arn’t that many.

According to an interview, a designer for the game,  Samuel Bass, stated that “as a nice side effect, since C&C4 requires players to be online all the time in order to prevent cheating, we’ll be shipping without any form of DRM.”

This is an interesting statement.  While I believe that he meant what he said that there is no DRM in the traditional form (ie software) the simple fact that you require the player to have an active internet connection in order to play the game means that that in itself is a form of DRM.  I can say that because I am relatively certain that the game will check, at startup (at least), whether or not your CD key is valid.  I do not believe there would be a point in having an active internet connection otherwise.

So I think that while Commander and Conquer 4 will not ship with a piece of DRM, like FADE that will slowly delete the game if it detects that you have a pirated copy, it still has a DRM system in place in the requirement that the player must have an active internet connection to play the game.

Interview article: http://game-preview.tungtram.com/2009/07/pc-command-conquer-4-q-exclusive-first.html

Evony and comment spam

I came across a short article on gamepolitics.com today and it spoke about Evony’s use of comment spam to advertise their game.

Now the first question one might ask is:  what the heck is Evony?  You’ve probably seen a million and one adds for the thing but maybe haven’t clicked on one to find out.

Well Evony is a web browser based MMORTS game similar to the 1997 Age of Empires game in both graphical quality and game play.  Players start off with a small town and must upgrade their productivity, army, and technology buildings in order to progress.  Players can also conquer other areas which give bonuses to resource production.

Now back to the gamepolitics.com article.  Apparently there has been a recent string of comment spam events where users will post spam advertising the game.  I was intrigued as to why a legitimate business would resort to a method usually employed by less than legitimate sites/services.  I decided to dig further into this and I found out that the makers of Evony have created “iEvony” a sort of test server that most MMOs have where players can get a sneak peak at new content and features.  The only difference between iEvony and most MMO test servers is that iEvony is invite only:  you need a code from the developers to get access to iEvony.

I then decided to see if the makers of Evony have had anything to say about this.  Low and behold there is a posting from yesterday morning about this very issue:

“07-12-2009, 08:41 AM

Dear Players,

We have been excited at the success of iEvony, but we have also come across an unintended side effect of the iEvony system. Some players have abusively and unethically engaged in spamming practices on a variety of websites with the intent of boosting their credits. This practice affects site traffic and makes headaches and extra work for moderators on a variety of websites. It reflects poorly not only on these users, but also on Evony as a whole.

For this reason, we will absolutely not tolerate such spamming practices. Players who engage in spam practices (posting multiple threads from multiple accounts on the same site, attempting to get forum users to follow a link) will be aggressively pursued and sanctioned. Penalties may include: being stripped of ALL earned Credits and any Coins or items they were exchanged for; having your iEvony account permanently disabled; being temporarily or permanently banned from Evony.”

I’m a little unsure about how posting links would benefit players, but the posting suggests that somehow if you link to a certain site your in-game character will benefit.  The gamepolitics.com article was apparently under the impression that it was Evony staff doing the spamming.  But according to the Evony team it is in fact players of the game who are doing the spamming.

This would make sense to me – with a credit system in place that is based on internet traffic.  What is unclear though is why the developers would institute that sort system in the first place.  It seems as if the spam issue is an obvious consequence of that sort of system.

I myself haven’t tried to play Evony (I have gotten addicted to browser based games before and it began to interfere with my work ethic so I stay away from them) but I hope this sort of thing doesn’t impact Evony which appears to be a good game.

Update:  Please see the first comment for more information, but there appears to be much more going on than meets the eye.

Look out its an Asteroid!

Well, we’ve seen quite a few movies over the last decade that have been based on video games, from Doom, Resident Evil, to Silent Hill.

But look out!  Now Universal Studios has announced that it will bring you a movie based on the arcade classic Asteroids!

That’s quite an admission and may not bode well for the future of Hollywood.

Though there is a big difference between making a movie about Doom and making a movie about Asteroids; Doom has a plot – such as it was – and characters.  Asteroids has neither a plot nor characters.  It was simply a game where you are a spaceship flying around blowing up chunks of interstellar debris.  On the one hand moviegoer/gamers can’t complain that Hollywood botched the story (see Aliens Vs Predator – which would have been a better movie if they’d followed the storyline from the AVP2 video game).  It also leaves the scriptwriters with a nearly blank slate.  All they have to do to satisfy the Asteroids requirement is to set the movie in space and have asteroids.  Lots of asteroids.

With all the remakes of old classics like the Taking of Pelham 123 or Inglorious Bastards (a sure ripoff of the Dirty Dozen movie) and now with Asteroids – The Movie I have come to the conclusion that Hollywood is like a Red Giant about to go supernova.  It has exhausted nearly all of its usable fuel (original creativity) and is about to go nova.

We can only wait and see but with the failure of Doom and the last two Resident Evil movies I cannot help but be pesimistic.

Piracy Hits Stardock Where It Hurts…

Demigod, Stardock and Gas Powered Games’ latest game, was released by GameStop on April 9th (five days early).

Within a day the game became unplayable for many users because of the number of connections established with Stardock’s multiplayer servers.  This is a very big problem for a game that relies so much on it’s multiplayer component.

Why was the game unplayable?  There are a number of issues that I can think of that caused this.

The first is Stardock’s DRM philosophy.  Simply put Stardock’s position on DRM in games is that no matter what DRM system a company comes up with pirates will be able to crack it and that in the end DRM systems only hurt the legitimate customers (one need only look at EA’s initial draconian measures with Spore).  Because of this, and perhaps the early release so close to the weekend, pirates were able to get a hold of the game in near record speed and Stardock’s employees were all off for two days and thus unable to fix the issue.

Indeed Stardock reported that of the 100,000 connections established with their servers only 18,000 were from legitimate retail copies.  The rest were pirated copies.  Apparently Stardock never conceived of the possibility that so many connections would be established with their update and multiplayer servers and thus the servers did not have enough resources to deal with the large number of people online.

I do not believe that the lack of DRM on Demigod caused this issue.  In fact it appears as if the game was designed to connect to Stardock’s servers even if you were playing the game in offline mode.  It is at start up that the game connects to the server to automatically check to see if your version of the game is the latest version.  Ironically with so many connections established even the pirates were having an issue playing “their” game.

I have always questioned the logic of having a non-MMO game automatically check for updates.  While it adds an extra step I would much rather have to look for patches on Fileplanet.com or click on an in game button conveniently labeled “Check for Updates” than take the risk of this sort of thing happening to me.  It appears obvious to me that because the game automatically checks for updates the illegitimate users were having a major impact on the people that actually paid for the game.

When I first read about Stardock and their hit game Sins of a Solar Empire I was very excited that a developer finally agreed with me that DRM is not the way to deal with piracy.  This case has not changed my belief but it has certainly made me examine ways to limit the effect of piracy on the consumers and promote the purchasing of one’s product.  I think Stardock has hit on the first part of this equation but the automatic update check probably negated it.  That first part being that you must have a account with Stardock to play the game online and receive game updates.  Without the automatic updates I think that there would have been no impact on legitimate consumers at all.

The other part I think can be found in Steam’s digital distribution service.  Steam allows the purchasing and updating of games all from a simple program, but you must have an account in order to access your games.  Ideally it would be great if all the developer’s could get on board with Steam but realistically, human nature being what it is, that would give Steam far too much power over the future of the entertainment industry’s distribution system.

I think the solution to any game developer’s fear of piracy is to work with companies that provide digital distribution – such as steam – instead of slapping harsh and often invasive DRM on the legitimate consumers.

OnLive

Those of us who follow the game industry are probably already aware of the OnLive service and its potential impact on gaming.

For those of you that are not familiar OnLive is a completely Internet based gaming system.  While not an existing service yet (OnLive goes into Beta this summer) the developers have stated that it would be a subscription based service and it would allow you to play newly released games and even older games as long as the rights holder (Such as EA, Ubisoft, and Activision) allows OnLive to put the games on their servers.

The service is not client side hardware based.  Instead it is reported that any computer that can play streaming video would be able to play the latest games.  Essentially games are stored on OnLive’s servers and everything is rendered there and then streamed to the user’s computer over an Internet connection.  OnLive has stated that the resolution would be dependant on the speed of your connection, with 1.5 Mbps allowing Wii level image quality and higher 4-5 Mbps needed for High Definition resolution.

Now I was a bit of a traditional gamer in that it took me a year to begin using services such as Direct2Drive to purchase games instead of going down to the local GameStop.  I suppose I am still a bit traditional in that I would be hesitant to subscribe to OnLive for a few very important reasons.

The first and most important reason is that bandwidth speeds change depending on the time of day, and with ISPs frequently bandwidth throttling at peak hours this would severely impact the image quality of the games I was playing.

Another important thing to note is that many ISPs have either implemented, or are in trial stages of, a monthly cap on the amount of data their subscribers can use per month.  Like a cell phone overage charge these charges can be very expensive.  I can imagine that the hardcore gamers like myself who migrate to this system could quickly find themselves hitting their cap early and being forced to pay overage charges.

An equally important issue is the fact that you wouldn’t be able to play the games if you had no Internet connection.  Sometimes my ISP has hardware issues following a storm here in Virginia and outages are common during the summer months and obviously people who have no Internet connection wouldn’t be able to use the service.

A question that I would pose to the developers of OnLive is whether or not I would be able to play older games on their service.  I would love to be able to play Mechwarrior 2 again, or even Privateer 2: The Darkening (which requires a hard to find slowdown patch because of the increase in clock speed on modern CPUs).  If these older games were put into the “cloud” I could potentially see a resurgence in the play of those games much like Id Software’s recent endeavour to put Quake into a browser window.

It remains to be seen how OnLive will work given the limitations mentioned above.

A long while…

Its been a long while since I last posted.  I was very busy for awhile with work and didn’t really have anything to post about.

I was employed by Mythic Entertainment over the summer but was laid off shortly thereafter as part of a larger customer service department layoff.  I guess following that, and the promise of the job, I became discouraged with getting a job in the game industry.

Getting a job in the game industry has been my dream since I first played Chess Master in the mid 90’s.  In college I was led to believe that getting into the industry would be a matter of knowing how to write design documents and conceptual documents.  But sadly this has not been the case.

I’ve found that most jobs require the knowledge of certain 3D level editor tools such as UnrealEd or some scripting language.  Its rather hard for me to learn these programs and develop something on my own without any structure.

I’m not a programmer nor an artist so my only avenue has been either through customer service, quality assurance, or level design.  Sadly most jobs in customer service are on a contractual basis with little or no job retention.  The quality assurance jobs require experience in QA before even being considered and the level design jobs requires you to have been a part of several published games.  This for me makes it nearly impossible to get into the industry as my skillset now stands and in the last few months I’ve become heartbroken as it becomes clearer that I may never get into the industry.

I want more than anything else to become part of a creative team, even if only on an internship level.  This avenue however also appears limited as most internships require you to be a current student, which I am not.  Many companies also do not offer internships.

At this point I’m just not sure what I can do to get my foot in the door.

iPhone 2.0 and the future of mobile gaming

The recent release of Apple’s iPhone 2.0 software has unleashed upon the world the possibility of graphically impressive MMOs and RPGs into the realm of mobile gaming.

While games have been on other mobile platforms for some time now a truly powerful graphical platform has been absent until iPhone 2.0. With this powerful platform it is my belief that MMOs and RPGs sporting decent graphics can now enter the world stage.

One particular game caught my eye when I was browsing the games section of the iTunes’ app store: Aurora Faint: The Beginning. This is a puzzle based game which allows you to create a character and then level the character up by solving Tetris-like puzzles. Once you level up you gain access to new abilities that assist you in solving even more challenging puzzles. This RPG even takes advantage of the iPhone’s unique motion sensing technology when playing puzzles which adds an entirely new level of gameplay.

While I am unsure of the multiplayer aspect of the game and how that factors into the overall enjoyability of the game (I don’t know anyone who owns an iPhone other than myself) the game does feature an email search function so you can add them into the game. The game has some sort of party system and again, since I don’t know anyone to invite, I am unsure how the party system effects gameplay.

But regardless we may in the next few years see pay per play MMOs as graphically impressive as Ragnorok Online or Twelve Sky.

Here are some images of Aurora Faint.

Will they get the message?

I have asked myself whether or not game critics will get the message about what truly ails the youth of this country many times over the years.  With the recent “I got the idea from GTA IV” crimes (a repeat of several other instances) and the spouting of certain pundits about the proof this provides to their arguments I have to ask myself again; will they get the message?

The message of hundreds of studies done by various psychology study groups who say that “yes… violent games do cause increased aggression and a numbness to the violence they see in the world.”  But is it really the game industry’s sole responsibility that we have youth crime in this country?

http://www.gamepolitics.com/2008/07/02/games-not-major-factor-newsweek039s-depth-report-violence

I have to ask with all the violence in the media whether or not some of the other sectors of the entertainment industry bear some responsibility.  Surely the ESRB has been the most responsible in giving parents the tools they need to know which games are and are not appropriate for their children – at least compared to the horrid record of the movie industry.

And let us not forget that violent and very inappropriately dramatic television shows are on all hours of the day.

So who is really to blame for the desensitized state of our nation’s children?  Is it the people and corporations that supply violent entertainment?  Or could it be something much closer to home?  I would argue that the responsibility ultimately rests with those supposedly ever present people called parents.  I say this with the caveat that it is most likely impossible for parents to prevent children from viewing violent and dramatic television; especially working parents.  However I think parents can sure well prevent their children from buying violent video games and to a limited extent from viewing “R” rated movies.

Some might ask “What if my boy Johnny goes over to Sam’s house and he has GTA IV and he plays it?”  I would say that it isn’t that difficult to call Sam’s parents and make sure that little Johnny isn’t playing GTA IV.

The responsibility lies not with the games industry, nor with the government, but with the parents, and that is where it should stay.  Until an irrefutable study finds a direct cause and effect relationship between violent media and violent behavior this is the way it will remain.

Age of Conan Review

Age of Conan was officially launched on May 20, 2008 though this reviewer signed up for the Early Access program which gave me access on the 17th. I choose to play an assassin and as of this writing I am currently level 56.

The Good:

Age of Conan features a innovative combat system involving combos which, once initially triggered, requires the player to press a certain combination of follow-up buttons in order to complete the combo thus doing damage to the target. Different combos have different effects such as damage, healing, and debilitating effects. This system in itself is where Age of Conan shines and is its best feature.

In addition the fatality system is a nice little addition to the game as if the player kills a mob or a player with a combo then there is a small chance that the player will do a fatality at which point the player will regain a small amount of stamina for a short period of time.

The game world is another of Age of Conan’s best features. The world is lush and detailed much more so than any previous Massively Multiplayer Online Game. The game takes advantage of the latest graphical technology and the system requirements for the game are very extreme.

The Bad:

There are many things wrong with Age of Conan at the moment and many of these issues lead me to believe that the game did not go through a proper testing phase.

Most if not all of the dungeons in the game have ludicrously short respawn timers and if a group inside dies on the way to an objective then they must fight their way through most if not all of the mobs they had previously encountered. This in itself is a severe problem as it requires players to spend a disproportionate amount of time in a dungeon. I feel in this respect that FunCom did not properly test dungeon progression or else it is intentional.

There are also many graphical issues as well. Many times for no apparent reason combo buttons in the interface will “lose” their graphics. While the combos are still there and the user can still use them the graphical loss makes it sometimes difficult to know which combos are being triggered unless the user has memorized where he or she put any specific combo.

Animations for monsters are also currently bugged. Many monsters seem to “float” across the ground while waving their arms because their walk animations did not properly initialize. While this is comical at best it is still a major graphical issue.

In addition textures on players, when they are killed by an electrical fatality for example, stay on the player’s character for up to half an hour even after the player has died and respawned.

While the graphical issues are not game breaking issues the bugged quests and the lack of working end game content are. For example:

Currently most if not all of the crafting system quests are bugged. Players are supposed to be able to choose only one profession, but because of some sort of coding mix up players can choose two professions only one of which will work. In addition the end game crafting is not worth even taking up because FunCom has yet to properly scale crafted items so as to compete with items garnered through quests and drop rewards. There is also currently no way to drop a profession once it is chosen.

In addition many quests simply do not work. Objectives are not always present in the game and for those that are sometimes they do not work even when the player has properly completed them, leaving the player with a sense that they have wasted whatever the amount of time it took to do the quest.

Another game breaking issue at the moment is the lack of a banking system or an auction house where players can sell their items to others. Because of this lack of an auction house (which are known as traders in Age of Conan) there is no in game economy to speak of and because crafting is not worth even taking up there is little need for a banking system or trading system, a fact I’m sure FunCom is aware of. Though it must be noted that the reason there are no traders is that there is a game exploit of some sort with them.

The greatest issue at the moment involves the Player versus Environment cities that each and every guild can create. Currently guilds can build their cities but other players can attack and destroy them much to the dismay of the city’s owners. This is an unintended ability and FunCom has acknowledged this fact.

Another issue is game crashes. Currently the game client is not very stable. This reviewer has had his entire computer crash while playing game and was forced to power off the system to resolve it. There is also the issue of certain areas of the game world forcing users to crash. The solution oddly enough for some people was to turn off the game’s sound completely while in those areas. These crashes happen often and to many different players with different hardware setups.

While there are other issues with Age of Conan I believe that I have listed the major ones that effect every player of every class.

In conclusion I must say that while a certain amount of bugs and glitches are a reality with every newly released MMO I must conclude that there are too many game breaking bugs to even suggest that this game was ready for release. The game has a lot of potential and only time will tell if FunCom can deliver on that potential.

SecurROM

Well, I’ve heard of some intrusive DRM’s but this one really bothers me. In an article on Arstechnica Ben Kuchera talks about how this new system will require the game to connect to the internet and re-validate the CD-Key once every 10 days in order to prevent people from pirating the games. SecurROM is already on the PC version of Mass Effect and is expected to be in Spore when it is released. The PC version of Assassin’s Creed uses a similar system. I also know that Company of Heroes uses this sort of thing in lieu of a CD in the DVD-Drive in order to allow people to play the game. However there is a difference between having a system the bypasses the normal “must have the game CD in the drive thing” and one that forces users to be online and connect with the game company’s server.

If the check is not validated through the internet every ten days then the game will stop working. What if I’m on my laptop and don’t have an internet connection on that day or for an entire month. Should I be penalized for buying a legal copy of the game?

When are PC developers going to realize that piracy doesn’t subtract from total sales of PC games as much as they think it does. The reason why PC game sales are slipping (and why you see very small PC sections in game stores) is not because of piracy, but because PC game makers make games for a much smaller segment of the market than console game makers do. One need only look at the types of games that are on the PC. Most of them are not casual and only appeal to the hardcore gamer. Everyone knows that console games are casual by nature and that most of the consumer community is made up of casual gamers so of course games tailored towards casual players will sell more than games made to satisfy the hardcore market.

While I think piracy is wrong and does take away some profits from game companies I think there can be better ways to discourage piracy. As mentioned above, making games for a more casual market, and most importantly adding value to games. Adding valued to products is part of the natural life cycle of any product and in terms of games there are several things that game studios can do to add value to their titles. One is to not require a CD key for installation, but require it for anything official coming from the game company, such as patches, online play, and expansions. Another is unlockable content; new in game items that the player can download off the game company server if they register their key. A third is contests, one of the oldest things marketers across all industries do to increase interest. Having a contest and having the ability to win prizes just for registering is another added bonus. This I think will help to lower the amount of piracy of games.

Anyway these DRM measures are only temporary fixes as hackers/pirates are always two steps ahead of whatever industry the DRMs are trying to protect. There is one constant in the entertainment community. As long as there are people who want things for free there will be people who are there to crack and pirate the entertainment for them.

See the article here: Link

[UPDATE] BioWare has stated that SecurROM will not be in the PC version of Mass Effect.