The facts of life: A heartfelt defense of Ubisoft and DRM

[|TG|gunjunkie]

Originally Posted by tater

1. Adopt a system like Napoleon: Total War where players can "drop in" and take the place of what would be AI in other players' campaigns. You'd never know if the DE near that enemy convoy was one of the various AI skill levels or some player hell bent on sinking a u-boat. Priceless.

2. The limiting factor on the immersiveness of the AI avatars is almost certainly their repertoire of audio files. Have the online connection trickle a new one to every copy of the game for every X hours of play (they'd need to have a special folder that these are pulled from so it doesn't continuously break mods that use the same files).

3. Weather? Perhaps a system that populates the game world with "real" weather where the clouds match current satellite pictures updated every so often (maybe pulled from X days back).

4. Streaming audio content (radio traffic, music, etc).

There might be more, though #1 would be a huge selling point, and #2 cool, but less spectacular.

This really, is the huge gap that exists between the right way to do this and what we currently have...

(first post by the way, hi all).

If only the suits thought this way. Kill two birds with one stone. Achieve the goals of the DRM, in a way that benefits customers and moves a game from evolutionary to revolutionary.

Sadly, this kind of thinking in the corporate echelons of the game biz is incredibly lacking. Quite frankly, I bought SH5 (besides reservations on the DRM) because I felt that I preferred this type of DRM to Starforce/Securerom that does things to my operating system that I would prefer not to have done to my operating system. That UBI can't run a server is the problem. That is the issue for me. I don't take their excuses for a second, because I do server stuff professionally, and I know that the issue they are having was completely, 100% avoidable, with enough care and design. That's sloppy. That is the problem. Spend the money, make it robust, this stuff isn't actually that hard.

I can only hope that developers of traditionally single player games (like sims) will figure out N:TW's drop in system (revolutionary), and decide to use it. I wouldn't complain about the DRM at all if it lead to this.