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Blizzard Patches No-CD Support Into Warcraft III
Rock, Paper, Shotgun notes that in Blizzard's never-ending quest for perfect balance, they've added a handy feature for still-dedicated Warcraft players. Players will no longer need to have the disc in the drive in order to conquer Azeroth. This kicks off a discussion by blogger Alec Meer about the role of copy protection and anti-piracy in PC gaming: "I don't need the Paint Shop Pro disc in my DVD drive whenever I want to butcher my holiday photos, after all. It was always doubly unnecessary for a game like W3, which also employs serial number checks if you want to play it online. Having the CD check as well seems like leaving a polite post-it note on the windscreen of a driver prone to double-parking. Don't bother. Just wheel-clamp the bastard. While there're still some reasons to be circumspect about online distribution systems, they do spell an end to miserably sorting through quivering towers of plastic discs or popup-heavy crack websites. This brave new world, in which the data already installed upon my hard drive is all that's required to play a game I've paid for, is one I know I want to live in."
I really hope this sort of thing happens more often. I remember some games I used to play only required the CD if you hadn't copied the CD onto your hard drive, and that was because the normal install didn't include all the data needed for the game to run. But now that hard drives are so much larger, it'd be nice for more games to do that, even if they are on DVD.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
Feature Changes
- StarCraft and StarCraft: BroodWar no longer require the CD while playing the game. To play without the CD, please follow the following instructions:
Windows Users:
- Make sure you have "Hide extensions for known types" unchecked under Explorer Folder Options.
- If you own only StarCraft, copy "INSTALL.EXE" from the StarCraft CD to your StarCraft folder and rename it to "StarCraft.mpq".
- If you own StarCraft: Brood War, copy "INSTALL.EXE" from the StarCraft:Brood War CD to your StarCraft folder and rename it to "BroodWar.mpq".
The 1.21b patch notes can be read as:
- The game no longer requires the CD to play.
Or as:
- The game no longer requires a no-CD crack to play.
I never really understood the CD check. I mean, why can't the "signature" of a CD being present just be emulated? And that's indeed what all the pirated game downloads come with. I don't think I've seen a game where you actually have to have to actual game CD in order to play it: an image of the disc could be mounted using some program and the game played thinking that it is the actual CD.
The benefit to No-CD patches is that it makes it so much easier to play games under WINE on Linux. While I never had an issue with War3, other newer games give me grief such as Supreme Commander and C&C3. Both of these require a No-CD hack to run as neither will recognize the DVD sitting in the drive. (Yes, I do have the CD mapped to WINE D: drive) Removing the CD-In-The-Drive requirement would really take many of the barriers to playing these games under WINE and would open up that 1% of the market that are Linux users!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
They annoy me to no end. It was one thing to keep the disc in the drive back when the data had to be pulled off (I wouldn't want to install Wing Commander 4 and it's 6+ CDs on my hard drive back then). Recently, this has been driving me nuts though. Valve has done such a good job with Steam, that it makes the problem even more obvious.
I bought Sam & Max Season One in the retail box, and it uses copy protection. I use a Mac and the game isn't available for my platform, so I have to play the episodes in Windows. I can't use Parallels because the copy protection thinks I'm using a copied disc. I can't use a disc image for the same reason. I can't play it under OS X. I have to boot into Windows. That takes a long time to shutdown OS X, start Windows, start the game, check the CD, then get into it. It's an amazing pain.
Sam & Max is not an intensive game at all. Even with the lowered performance of 3D stuff in Parallels, it should work fine. I understand Half-Life 2 not running well (it likes a beefy system), but there is no good reason I shouldn't be able to play Sam & Max that way.
But I paid for the physical media, because I prefer that. And because of that, I get copy protection. I'm seriously considering not playing Season Two at this point.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
If only other developers would spend about 10% of Blizzards amount of support to their games I'd be spending a shitload more money on purchasing new games.
WCIII is almost 6 years old now, and still Blizzard looks for ways to improve the experience.
This dedication to strive for perfection is the sole reason I have every single game they released sitting on my shelf.
Alternatively, this is also the reason I have only one EA game sitting on that same shelf. I got fooled once, won't happen twice.
You could argue that this patch is long overdue, but the fact that they even spend some resources on it is something to be hailed.
Life starts at the end of your comfort zone.
The article says this is a "brave new world" to not need the CD... How old is this guy? Does he not remember the days before they required the CD to play? This isn't a brave new world, it's a return to the way things used to be. Funny, wasn't it Blizzard that started the "Disc Required" movement? I may be wrong, but I think it was Warcraft 2 or Starcraft.
I remember the old days when the games asked you to find the 23rd word in the 7th paragraph on page 18 in the game manual.
That really sucked when you didn't actually buy the game. Because it didn't come with a manual, you just copied a floppy.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
I disgree entirely. I care about needing the original disk. Moving towards a steam-like system of DRM where you don't need an easily malable sub-gigabyte coaster to unlock usage of your software license is a step long overdue.
MMOs caught on to this secret early on - when the value your game offers is mostly or completely through online play, you don't need a disk, you can do a much much better job checking accounts as they authenticate with your server.
And consoles are being released with built in HDs rivaling those in gaming PCs now. I wouldn't be at all surprised to be less than ten years away from never needing the gaming disk there, either.
Kudos to Blizzard, though as was stated above, a few years too late.
You can get 15 minutes of fame, but you can go down in history for infamy.
I care. These days, a consumer can reasonably have a terabyte of storage on his PC. With that kind of storage, I should be able to have hundreds of games sitting on my hard drive waiting to be played on demand. However, because of this stupid "CD required" garbage, I have to maintain a stack of CDs that have no purpose other than to verify I actually bought the game (never mind that in most cases, I also have to enter a license key during the install phase anyway).
Requiring a CD may not be a big deal if you only ever play one or two games, but if you're like me and have a varied taste in games, and may play even 5 or 10 different games in a week, having to switch around CDs is a major pain.
Gaming on OSX (enjoy the laugh for the moment) has one advantage very few of the CD checkers check the actual hardware only the mount point for required data. I can create a disk image of the cd in question and mount that before playing. It does take up some storage space but generally you only need one disc in particular in a multi disc set.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
All of the Stardock games have had this for awhile. Galatic Civilizations II was awesome, and apparently the new Sins of a Solar Empire is awesome too. It's nice to not be treated like a criminal.
> Not only must you have a internet connection just to play the single-player game
You need the connection to activate it. Once that's done, you can play offline as much as you damn well please.
Killing the resale market isn't so great though. But I'm still sick of having to keep track of a stack of lexan dongles.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
I care quite a lot when the game's check fails due to some weird SecuROM system that determines my drive isn't really a drive due to a bug.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
MacBook Air and other no-optical systems will require this.
.dmg for the original game and a 480 MB .dmg for the expansion right now. This way I can play the game anytime I like and not have to worry about carrying my original CDs with me. I'm happy for this news because it will allow me to delete these as well as the Starcraft .dmg files. A few GB on a laptop is a big deal.
Disk Utility -> Create Disk Image -> mount image -> play game.
I am looking at a 631MB
It's taken far too long for the gaming companies to figure this out. Ten years ago games would have no-cd patches out the same day that new copy protection came out. The really invasive ones took maybe a month or two but the crackers could play them. The only people who suffered were the legitimate buyers. Blizzard really should have learned this lesson back in 2000 when Diablo II was causing issues with legitimate disks but pirated copies worked fine.
Oh, c'mon. My UID's bigger than 500K. What do you expect from me?
I can't tell you the number of games I've lost over the years due to damaged CDs. Yeah, you try to protect them, but when you end up switching CDs every few days because you wish to play a different game for a bit, sometimes the CD sits on your desk for a few minutes.
My copy of Temple of Elemental Evil worked fine for the orignal release, and the first patch. The second patch to come out wasn't compatable with DirectX 9.0c, so it was pointless. Applying the third patch to fix the second patch made my CD fail its check. So, the game worked out of the box, and through the first patch, but the 2nd/3rd patch broke my CD? You've got to be kidding me! And SecureROM analyzed my data, and said that it was because I had Daemon Tools installed. So, I uninstalled that, re-ran their program, and they said I must have a copy of an orignal CD. Since it's an Atari game that isn't being supported any longer, I can't get a new CD from the company.
Heck, my current copy of Hellgate: London acts up in single player mode (which requires the DVD to be in the drive. Multiplayer does not, as it should be.) Half the time I have to reboot my system, because SafeDisc doesn't recognize the DVD being in the drive. It spins, then stops and hangs. It's even told me that my OS isn't high enough, and I need to upgrade to Windows 98SE or 2000. I have XP installed. Some of that was the multi-language support, which can be clicked off, but the bottom line is, the copy protection makes the game sometimes unplayable without a reboot.
With the way today's games are, with the zero-day release always having a fatal bug (I believe intentionally) that requires a patch to be downloaded, there is no real need for this. Very few if any gamer systems aren't internet connected, so just make a simple verification check go out on the serial number, and let them play. No connection or a failure of that check, and no game.
It's one of the reasons I play MMOs so much, even though it is often solo. No copy protection to annoy me, no CD/DVD to keep track of, and less clutter in/on my desk.
Consoles also have longer load times on average
Not if you play on a Nintendo console. Wii games usually take a few seconds to load at startup and then rarely have noticeable load times after that.
Steam allows you to unregister a key and sell it to someone else but you have to pay Valve to do that.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
It's not even the space fact. People like me ( I am a student in a university). I am always on the move, and one day last week I had the urge to play some dota in between classes, and alas I couldn't becuase I don't carry my WC3 cd around with me. Or Diablo2, etc. I think this should be implemented right away in all programs, seeing as how it would actually have people like me... play more. That simple.
Blizzard cares, they are looking to put forward some goodwill out for the benefit of players, and are sooner realizing that unmitigated piracy is not as rampant as the accountants are claiming(at least in terms of damaging their bottom line). Considering that the major draw for games nowadays is the online play, it's relatively trivial to track down who is a legitimate player and who isn't.
Back in the day when online gaming was the novelty, companies were trying to lock down who can play their game or not. That is now the obsolete mindset, as companies with half a brain are now looking to lockdown who can play their game _online_, which is much much simpler to control with the benefit towards consumer convenience.
I just read on an rss feed that Steam just broke the 15 million users barrier, and I believe Blizzard is looking for a peice of that cake. And if Blizzard is looking to widen their audience with regards to their other products, they are going to need market penetration. This move means they are trying to literally going to 'give' their game away - they want their game to be pirated. Because in the long run, if the consumer wants to get the full experience(the online play as opposed to the single player stuff), he's going to need to buy a copy sooner or later. This also means that Blizzard has faith that the products that they release are that good.
However, the disturbing trend may be that the single player experience may be compromised, since it would be considered a freebie at the cost of developers making the single player stuff. More and more games are either going to have a crappy single player experience or it's just gonna be too damn short (like an hour of solid gaming).
But overall, companies are soon realizing the benefits of offering 'the first hit free.' But l2drugdealing will only work when their product is of real quality, so it better be a damn good first hit.
CD-check is just a really basic, broad-spectrum, anti-casual-pirating deal in most cases. It's become increasingly common to patch it out at some point in a game's lifecycle. You want to have it present during the bulk of your sales (ie, early on) but particularly with a game that has a significant online component (that is, vocal users), you also want to get rid of it sooner than later (of course, Blizzard is a special case, and mmo's are a different story).
Last game I worked on, we had the CD-check already removed for the 1.1 patch (which itself was completed before the game even hit the shelves), and we released it in less than two weeks from the date the game appeared on the shelves.
The easy to circumvent things like this really are just there to discourage casual copying amongst average Joe's. While of course this and pretty much anything else can be gotten around, the people who do, know how to do, or would make the effort to do, these kinds of things are a subset of the larger market. So, studios/publishers will add in some of the basic old school protections as a kind of first order protection.
These kinds of things are kind of annoying, but the idea is to not have a Tribes 1 experience (zero, and I mean *zero*, copy protection of any kind: you could literally drag-and-drop the install folder into ICQ, so to speak, and send the whole thing to your buddy). It was sad to see the sales-vs-players numbers for Tribes 1: seventy thousand copies sold with 350,000 players online has got to bring a tear to the eye.
The fact they've done it at all is great, even if it about 4 year too late. (When did WC3 come out anyway? The irony is I bought it close to it's release date and don't even remember.)
I shall reinstall WC3 now. Half the reason I don't have it installed for the occasional game is because it needed a CD crack, and I get tired of having to track them down. (Though most of the games I play these days either have no disk (IE. Steam or Elicense), or have no protection (Stardock titles).
It's all very well bitching about "kinda late", but as the saying goes, better late than never. *runs off to find Warcraft III disk.*
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/02/06
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Gaming on OSX... oh, so you mean Warcraft3?
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Back when I played a bunch of games that had the "CD in the drive" requirement, I got a product called Virtual CD. It allows you to create a set of virtual CD drives on your system, and mount images of the CDs you need on those drives. (You have to create the images by copying the CDs or DVDs first, of course, and store them on your hard drive.) This meant I could take my laptop anywhere without lugging around a bunch of discs and fiddling with them every time I wanted to run one of these programs that insisted on seeing its installation CD before it started. It was a bit of a hassle to configure Virtual CD so that it would automatically mount the appropriate CD when you double clicked on an application, but once I set it up, it worked flawlessly.
These days, I don't run much software that has this requirement, so I haven't used Virtual CD (http://www.virtualcd-online.com/) for a couple of years. But I'd highly recommend it if you do have this need.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
I just read on an rss feed that Steam just broke the 15 million users barrier, and I believe Blizzard is looking for a peice of that cake. And if Blizzard is looking to widen their audience with regards to their other products, they are going to need market penetration.
Hm...interesting...they should make an online version of Warcraft... give the game to people for free or very cheap for a month, and just charge them for online play...yeah, Steam is definitely on to something here....Countless times I've wanted to replay SC and see if I can still hold my own against a zerg rush but everytime i get that nostalgia im confronted with 2 problems, 1)I don't have the disc and 2)im far to lazy to go track down an actualy copy of the disc, if I do actually go through the trouble of getting a copy playing the game only makes me miss D2 and WC so the problem was very cyclical however now that I don't need those pesky discs I can start destroying people online again. fear the !Tsoat