Details are emerging about the new Ubisoft DRM scheme that was announced a while back. Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII will be the first two games to employ this scheme, and according to PC Gamer, the system is simply horrible.
Okay, so we already knew that UbiSoft's new DRM system uses online authentication to verify your license. That is not so bad - Steam does the same thing, authenticating you every time you launch the game. UbiSoft also offers online storage for your saved games, simplifying things in case you play the game on different PCs - a nice value-added feature.
However, PC Gamer reports that in practice the system will maintain an active connec213dtion to Ubisoft authentication servers at all times and should you lose the connection, the game will lose all progress since your last checkpoint , offering you only the option to either wait for the game to reconnect and continue from your last checkpoint (however far away that might be) or to save the last checkpoint and exit to Windows.
Excuse me? Are UbiSoft completely bonkers?
I can understand online multiplayer games and MMOs effectively saying "game over" should you get disconnected - the gameplay requires you to talk to a server at all times. However, even then you never lose anything on disconnect. It is the first thing MMO developers pretty much have to tackle in their code - saving of the play state as perfectly as possible in case of disconnect, as disconnects will happen.
Instead, we have a single player game that will lose your game state on disconnect to some DRM server. I don't care if UbiSoft servers have 99.9999999% uptime with multiple ISP connections, disconnects and unplanned downtimes can and will happen and if every internet glitch or server crash means that a few thousand people will lose an unspecified amount of progress in a single player game they were playing... Mind just boggles on how someone can come up with such a system.
I could perhaps understand a system that requires authentication server polling at every checkpoint save as you need that internet connection to save the game to the online storage, with the game pausing until it can do that or, as a last resort, quitting and saving to local disk if connection cannot be restored... but not this.
Can't wait for my review copy of Assassin's Creed 2 - should this "feature" be still present and functioning as reported when the game is launched, expect a few stabs for this idiocy.
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