Ubisoft's Constant Net Connection DRM Confirmed

A few weeks ago we discussed news of Ubisoft's DRM plans for future games, which reportedly went so far as to require a constant net connection, terminating your game if you get disconnected for any reason. Well, it's here; upon playing review copies of the PC version of Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers VII, PCGamer found the DRM just as annoying as you might expect. Quoting: "If you get disconnected while playing, you're booted out of the game. All your progress since the last checkpoint or savegame is lost, and your only options are to quit to Windows or wait until you're reconnected. The game first starts the Ubisoft Game Launcher, which checks for updates. If you try to launch the game when you're not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft's 'Master servers.' The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen — all my progress since it last autosaved was lost."

Comments

Re:Finally

[Dunbal]

I'm sorry to say that since you have not saved the game, we have no choice but to start you back at the beginning.

      I haven't played the series but knowing the types of games these people produce, it's probably a linear "follow the path and the game will auto-save at pre-arranged spots" type of game. Not that sucky game design is an excuse for sucky DRM. But then again considering the intellect that is attracted to this sort of game, they probably are willing to take whatever Ubisoft wants to do to them.

Re:Let'see..

[Dunbal]

because electricity went off for 1-2 seconds. Good luck trying to play your game with that "disconnection" too.

      It's called an "uninterruptible power supply". I know they've been around since the late 80's, but still they might not have reached your corner of Africa and I pity you. Especially since I live in a two bit country in Central America and I have 3 of them, which I bought at my local Office Depot. I can play my games through power outages lasting up to an hour or more, and if you're real smart you put your router/modem on one too and that way you don't even lose internet when the power goes!