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Vuvuzelas Blare On Pirated Copies of Music Game
An anonymous reader sends this quote from Wired:
"A novel anti-piracy measure baked into the Nintendo DS version of Michael Jackson: The Experience makes copied versions of the game unplayable and taunts gamers with the blaring sound of vuvuzelas. Many games have installed switches that detect pirated copies and act accordingly, like ending the user's game after 20 minutes. Ubisoft has come under fire multiple times for what players have seen as highly restrictive anti-piracy measures that annoy legitimate users as much or more so than pirates. But some more-mischievous developers have used tricks similar to the vuvuzela fanfare to mess with pirates. Batman: Arkham Asylum lets unauthorized users play through the game as if it were a normal copy, with a single exception: Batman's cape-glide ability doesn't work, rendering the game impossible to finish — although you might bash your head against it trying to make what are now impossible jumps. If you pirate Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, brace yourself for an explosion, as your entire base will detonate within 30 seconds of loading the game."
Seriously, people would copy a game playing Michael Jackson? Seems like the vuvuzelas are redundant.
John
if they can tell it's pirated... why all the crazy piracy schemes in the first place? Why even LAUNCH the game? how can they tell?
I wish I played those games (except the C&C, I play that every now and again), I'd buy multiple copies just to show my support. (:
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
"Batman: Arkham Asylum lets unauthorized users play through the game as if it were a normal copy, with a single exception: Batman's cape-glide ability doesn't work, rendering the game impossible to finish — although you might bash your head against it trying to make what are now impossible jumps. If you pirate Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, brace yourself for an explosion, as your entire base will detonate within 30 seconds of loading the game..."
So how is this different then the purchased, bug-ridden, unfinished versions that are pawned off on us with every release?
Anyone know how they detect pirated copies?
I have played a pirated copy of Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2 for years.
At the end of the day, game publishers have only upped the annoyance factor (vuvuzelas aside) with this type of tactic. Ultimately these things can still be patched/cracked in the same way they have always been
all this will do is just spur the warez scenes to create better cracks. and annoy everyone else who just applies a nocd patch to play the legit game.
Ah, yes, I remember that. It was always fun to uninstall and reinstall the whole fucking game because the DRM flipped a shit over nothing at all.
I wonder how many times these have burned legit users. The game thinks that it's pirated even though it isn't and cripples its self. It's bound to happen some time.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
If the game can detect that it was pirated, the circumvention isn't good enough. These little pranks will fool the 0-day groups, but within hours a "proper" fix will come along, and these childish stunts will have been in vain.
The thing to remember about warez crackers, is they tend to be more skilled than the people who release the games. Trying to outsmart them is a fallacy.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Congratulations on unlocking an easter egg that gives you much more challenging games.
ever.
Ramping up difficulty, then freezing at the ENDGAME clearing the SRAM entirely.
YAY!! TAKE THAT 99% OF MOTHER FANBASE who don't even own the games they love!
Well then, looks like I'll just have to torrent RA3, Tim Curry will protect my bases from anti-piracy explosions! Really though, why bother protecting the Michael Jackson game? I would think the latest Pokemon games would have a far higher rate of piracy. . . or perhaps because people really don't want to be caught actually purchasing the game they are much more likely to pirate it.
Insert witty sig here.
LET them play the game about a rich pedophile who ruined his face with plastic surgery.
Horrific doesn't even begin to describe it.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The vuvuzela noise isn't a copy-protection technique. It's just that the South African version of the game was the first to be cracked; it's in the legit .za copies as well.
Am I the only person outside of South Africa who wasn't annoyed with the sound of vuvuzelas? CBC seemed capable of keeping them low, but audible, in the live mix.
That said, disabling game functions strikes me as preferable to draconian DRM schemes that end up causing unnecessary frustration for paying players.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
The space shooter DarkStar One tad such a "feature".
Improperly cracked games would shake the screen, making targeting pretty much impossible.
Why someone would pirate, let alone pay for either of these mentioned games kind deserve far worse...Michael Jackson? Cmon... Hopefully they'll start putting porn into "pirated" copies of TV series so I can see some cute British guys doing it in between scenes of Merlin, Dr. Who and Skins.
The original Titan Quest was like this, except even more nefarious. The pirated version would crash randomly, and not after a short period like 30 seconds, but sometimes as long as an hour. I completed the first quest in that game so many times trying to see if it was successfully cracked that the ending sound byte still resonates in my skull to this day; "You saved my horse!". At least, I THINK this was because the game was pirated, maybe it really just was a buggy piece of shit. Most people probably got to know the difference.
GTA IV had a copy-protection prank too: the pirated game plays fine until you get in to a car, which then accelerates uncontrolably while handling as if the character has been drinking.
Pretty funny, but it did bite a lot of legit, paying customers, contributing to the general verdict that the game was much too buggy at release.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
Surely if it did some cool undocumented thing in the pirated copy you would be impressed enough to pay for the full version - kind of like a "tip" for a job well done.
I dont think they should put annoying stuff in the pirated copies, but if it subtely made winning impossible, yet by the end of the game it becomes obvious, then I think credit where credit is due - the developers are really trying to win you over. and a job well done should be rewarded.
Much better than the stupid "check the internet every time you load the game" piracy prevention techniques. Either its a pirate copy or it isn't. There's no point going after all illegal downloads etc. - just the ones where people were too lazy to go to the shop and pay. Getting the target market right in the first place is half the battle.
This seemed like a reasonable sig at the time.
I remember when Operation Flashpoint came out, people were complaining about degraded performance over time; like sloping crosshairs, shifting of the screen, etc - where it got to the point where it was unplayable. Turns out it was FADE technology that had detected a pirate copy. I don't know how it affected legitimate users though...
The old school RPG EarthBound for the SNES had a similar, albeit HORRIFYING copy protection mechanic.
If the anti-piracy measures flagged, it would jack up the encounter rate twentyfold--the game would literally be swarming with monsters.
Worst part: if you make it all the way through to the final boss, after his first form the game will lock--the only way out is to reset it, only to find that every single one of your save files have been erased. Starmen.net has an entire page dedicated to this at http://starmen.net/mother2/gameinfo/antipiracy/ .
Then why don't they try, I dunno, maybe writing their own games
Because their own games won't run without a jailbreak, and the console makers have managed to successfully sue sources of jailbreak tools out of existence.
Really though, why bother protecting the Michael Jackson game?
Probably because either the Jackson family or Sony Music, each of which owns half of the copyright in the game's music, demanded it as a condition of licensing the music for use in the game.
but if it subtely made winning impossible, yet by the end of the game it becomes obvious, then I think credit where credit is due - the developers are really trying to win you over.
But then how do you distinguish this from a game that's genuinely difficult, like Tetris The Grand Master 3 that gets ungodly fast starting around 3:00, and then turns off the lights around 5:00 and you have to beat the game by sense of feel?
I purchased *ONE* game from these people back in 2006. Due to the unwanted software that was installed on my system and the almost unreadable CD-Key, it will never happen again. Dear Ubisoft: If you wanted to drive away a customer who was otherwise happy with the stealth game that he purchased -- mission accomplished.
I will not even buy any of your games from gog.com.
In other news, developers come up with a great way to drum up press for a game that otherwise no one would have paid any attention to.
Generally will fix whatever anti-piracy gimmicks they impliment. The same thing was done to Chrono Trigger on the DS where when you made it to the first time warp it would repeat that scene infinitely. As soon as somebody found out the trigger for what makes it repeat that they released the cheat codes to put onto your cart and you could play the game just fine.
Leaving aside the inevitable flamewar about piracy and sales and that endlessly retrodden path of discussion, to interject some technical details: to a cracker they're usually called a 'trap', 'flag' or, if you will, a 'logic bomb'.
Some of them might be obvious, but of course if they're obvious they'll be found right away. The idea is that by making the traps subtle or to require you to actually play the game to some extent (and essentially playtest it) to uncover them, they'll be harder to track down because you'll have to complete the game 100% to be 100% sure you've de-fanged all the traps (or for a non-game piece of software, use every feature quite extensively - some pieces of software like AutoCAD infamously contain subtle traps as well which slowly corrupt your designs, which can be extremely unfortunate if the protection is not working as it ought to).
A couple of decades ago, I even once saw a trap that released a bootsector virus if you tripped it (yes - really). Unfortunately, it appears the developers had inadvertently tripped it during development without realising, so the second disk of the pair had the virus already in the bootsector - in every copy of that game someone bought at retail, they could get a very unwelcome surprise if they ever booted off the 'Data Disc' by mistake...
Very few houses develop their own copy protection these days, even fewer now than before. They tend to buy systems in wholesale like SecuROM, TAGES or StarForce - all of which work in basically the same way, which is to wrap the executable (like an executable packer, although they actually tend to expand it considerably) and turn parts of it into complicated puzzle-box style interpreted virtual machine code - hidden amongst which will be protection checks, and anti-debugger code (none of which actually works well on a modern, state-of-the-art debugger, especially since the development of hardware hypervisors - but that never stops them putting it in anyway) and the executable will have callbacks which rely on the results of those protection checks to determine whether the booby-traps trigger or not.
Incidentally, those new-fangled online checks are almost always simply a more elaborate callback, where the code that returns the response lies on a remote server and would possibly have to be emulated or bypassed for a 100% crack. (This can be a lot easier than you think: Ubisoft have no excuses for their hubris, it's just not that effective.)
Of course, frequently, these intentional logic bombs can trigger by accident on a legitimate copy, or when hardware (or software) that wasn't planned for or tested is present, or if you are running software that the copy protection vendor doesn't like - this has been true since the dawn of such systems in the 1980s (Rob Northen, etc). Some of these bugs are often confused for traps too, and a rare few of them don't appear if you crack the game.
Naturally a properly-working crack (a "100%") will have had all of the traps systematically removed - with many schemes it's possible to do so in a frighteningly automated fashion, with enough work on the system, and since a software house tends to re-use the systems and only changes specific details of the callbacks, you can see one reason why they appear so quickly.
That, in turn, leads to properly working 100% cracks also being very widely used by legitimate purchasers of the software - because the copy-protected version of the game doesn't work right: and the more complex, sensitive trigger-happy the protection, the more likely it is to fail incorrectly. (Ask anyone who ever bought a game with StarForce, or, say, Spore, what I'm talking about here.)
Ideally, developers would stop putting logic bombs into their code deliberately. It's poor ethics, bad programming practice and can occasionally be incredibly dangerous (especially in non-gaming fields). There are probably enough bugs in your code to worry about without intentionally adding some - that's simply being re
The best anti-piracy measures ever were in Maniac Mansion (1987). The game came with a book of door lock combinations, and if you entered the wrong combination, the house's nuclear reactor would explode, killing everyone within a three-mile radius.
Interestingly enough, they tried to remove this copy protection measure from the NES version of Maniac Mansion, but they didn't completely succeed. Instead of reimplementing the entire game, they just implemented the game's scripting engine on the NES and use the same scripts than ran on the computer version. They made sure that the steel door was never locked, but instead of removing the keypad where you entered the lock code, they just reduced its size to 1 pixel and put it in a spot where nobody would click on it. Soon enough, some enterprising gamers found this "hidden keypad" that caused the house to explode, and it was considered an easter egg...
I found one of these when I was a teenager. Freaking subtle. Brilliant.
Steve Jackson's OGRE, for the Commodore 64.
I bought it. And did what any good geek would do. Made a backup and played that. And I could never beat it. But I did eventually screw up that disc - the old 5 1/4 discs did mess up fairly often. Especially in the 1541 drive.
So I played the original. And beat it. Made another backup. Couldn't beat it. A light went off.
I did a statistical analysis. All I did was fire at treads for several games. They're supposed to be hit 33% of the time regardless of weapon or circumstance. On the backup copy, it was close to 17%. On the original copy about 33%.
They built a single column shift into the game if it detects its a copy.
EVIL.
Especially seeing as how - wait for it - I was a paying customer. Thanks guys.
On the plus side, I did get really good at that game. You had to be playing at a column shift disadvantage.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
and likely added a time delay so pirates thought they cracked it without problems.
The point of this is to annoy pirates who play the games, not the crackers.
Trying to outsmart crackers is not a fallacy. PS3 piracy has been difficult for crackers due to how tightly the security is tied to games and PSN. If they had simply burned bare games onto Blu-rays the PS3 would have much higher piracy rates.
I remember a game from the mid 80's call Starflight that used a code wheel to decipher the correct response every time you wanted to leave space dock. If you gave the wrong answer, in about 6 in-game days, a group of 6 or more heavily armed Interstel Police ships confront you for one last chance to give the correct response. If you fail, they open fire and shoot you down.
M$ should add removeing the old DRM systems that don't work in X64 to the MS malware remove windows update.
I am pretty sure that.. uh... my friend could play a torrented C&C: Red Alert 2 without any hassle.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Operation Flashpoint got a reputation for being incredibly hard because the anti-piracy measure was to increase the accuracy of the enemies to super human levels. You could always tell someone who had a cracked version as they complained about super accurate enemies shooting them from miles away. (Op:Flashpoint was a hard game with accurate enemies but not that hard and not that accurate).
Puzzle Daze is now my job
This "novel" idea is a standard mechanism in everyone's favorite DRM, Starforce. Like the rest of Starforce, it's a feature that largely backfires. Here's your typical sometimes-pirates-sometimes-buys swing-consumer:
"Hey, Game A looks neat. I'm gonna download it."
"Hey, Game A IS neat. I'm gonna buy it."
The next day...
"Hey, Game B looks neat. I'm gonna download it."
"Hey, Game B is broken. I'm not gonna pay for this shit."
And that is what a real "lost sale" looks like. Meanwhile, in the game publisher's customer support department:
"Dude, we are getting like 50 calls/day from pirates who don't realize that the game is broken because it's pirated. And they have the nerve to call tech support for a game they pirated. This is costing the company thousands of dollars per month."
"Dude, if it wasn't for that, one of us wouldn't be here. We get paid $10/hr no matter what, so the only question is whether they need one of us or both of us. And we both know damn well that we both have torrent clients at home to download the games we can't afford to buy because we're here every day to help make the executives rich."
"Oh yeah."
There is a problem with every pirate detection. In the Netherlands (and a lot of other countries) you are allowed to make a copy for private use, so you won't damage the original. All games with so-called piracy protection will damage this right.
We even pay a levy on each recording disk in order to pay artists/developers for this right (not that they actually get it. It stays in our version of the RIAA)
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Ideally, developers would stop putting logic bombs into their code deliberately. It's poor ethics, bad programming practice and can occasionally be incredibly dangerous (especially in non-gaming fields).
Ideally people would pay for the software they liked. Ideally the filesharing of copyrighted material would only be used as evaluation, followed by deleting the software (after an evaluation period of a week or so) or paying for it. Ideally the distribution of disks would be stupid, because it's cheaper to set a filesharing server to send it over the interwebs.
The companies have reacted wrong, but the pirates incited the reaction.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Can you recommend a free linux VM player that does good (emulated if necessary) hardware 3D acceleration?
Everyone's talking about removing drm, but look at the leaked US cables. The use Government has been lobbying foreign countries to change their intellectual property laws. Slightly off topic, but it shows you how far the US government is willing to go.
sounds like a task for the application compatability doohickey
Or conversely, people wouldn't have to pay for software that they DIDN'T like. Sort of like when you go to a restaurant and they serve you crap. You are legally allowed to just get up and walk out. Of course the "restaurants" that make a business out of selling crap charge money up front...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Ahhhh I remember the old 'code discs' on C64 and old PC games where you had to line up the discs to enter the numbers that appear to unlock the game for that play. As a child it felt like something out of James Bond :-)
At least it wasn't DRM...
Sort of like when you go to a restaurant and they serve you crap. You are legally allowed to just get up and walk out.
You can do it when they served you bad quality food, but not when you simply didn't like the taste. I'm curious as to how you propose to distinguish the two in case of games.
What made you think that they know how to do that? Or that it's possible at all? The whole point of those schemes is to mess up the system in a weird, convoluted way that most likely goes terribly wrong if you don't have exactly the same architecture that developers expected.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
"Batman: Arkham Asylum lets unauthorized users play through the game as if it were a normal copy, with a single exception: Batman's cape-glide ability doesn't work"
That was not the only thing changed, for example multiple grapple points were disabled throughout the entire game.
It was actually the most effective any piracy I have ever seen, they keep on having to recrack the game when they discovered more places that players could not get past.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I have Red Alert 2.
Actually, I have two copies of it. The pirated one was the first I got. And the non-pirated one, which I bought because I actually liked the game.
Well, the legal version sits on the shelf. The disc's only been out of the case once, when I tried to install it. Installer crapped out on some copy protection routine.
The pirated version, on the other hand, runs just fine if you just copy over the directory. No installer, maybe a REG file, I don't remember, no problems at all.
But the paid version does look nice on the shelf :-)
Pretty funny, but it did bite a lot of legit, paying customers, contributing to the general verdict that the game was much too buggy at release.
How does anyone know this? Are there anecdotes from one or two players (or even fifty) who this happened to?
What makes you think those players AREN'T pirates? I ask because I'm a console game developer and we've seen piracy rates in the 90 to 95% range, measured through various measures (like how many times patches or updates are downloaded in the first few days of release, vs. the number of copies of the game actually sold by that time).
Remember, pirates can whine on the Internet about the game being broken just as easily as paying customers. They can CLAIM to be paying customers as they scoff and rage.
the console makers have managed to successfully sue sources of jailbreak tools out of existence.
Grab a DS, a flash loader
Then please allow me to rephrase more specifically: Nintendo has been managing to sue makers and sellers of DS flash cards out of business. Please see, for example, this BBC news article: Game copiers for Nintendo DS ruled illegal in UK.
If Nintendo (and other console manufacturers) were more open with development, they might not be seeing their platforms cracked so fully.
Apparently being open doesn't have noticeable benefits to a console maker's bottom line, or Sony wouldn't have shut down Other OS in PLAYSTATION 3 system software starting with version 3.21.
Or conversely, people wouldn't have to pay for software that they DIDN'T like. Sort of like when you go to a restaurant and they serve you crap. You are legally allowed to just get up and walk out. Of course the "restaurants" that make a business out of selling crap charge money up front...
Not really a good comparison, as the food would have to be pretty much inedible before you'd be allowed just not to pay for it, not just "not very good" or "I thought it was crappy".
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Rareware was doing this back in the SNES era...
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/e2iho/
Try it some time. I have walked out on a restaurant bill several times, when I felt the food was bad. Just be sure that you leave most of the food on the table in case law enforcement are called.
I have also walked out without paying for a haircut where my hair was butchered.
The people in whatever establishment have no authority to hold you. They can try a citizens arrest, but you simply laugh and walk away. If they touch you, you can successfully sue for assault. 99 times out of 100 the cops won't even show up for a someone walking out on a meal bill.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
Ideally, software, music, and movie developers would be smart enough to figure out that someone without the monoy to buy it won't, and there are people who wouldn't buy it even if they had the money and no way of getting an illic copy.
Ideally they'd realise that DRM costs sales, not piracy. Piracy has either a negligible or positive effect on sales, depending on what research you look at.
Free Martian Whores!
Dudes. Don't use the term "x64", it sucks the balls. "x86-64", "AMD64" or (hell) even "IA-32e" is more descriptive and unambiguous. I spent quite a bit trying to figure out who the fuck had released a new console named "X64".
Not to mention the ones that are detected by the OS's 'compatibility' check -- one driver that was needed for a game to function, was denied loading -- after much probing I found out that the driver wasn't needed for the game to function at all - but was a DRM system that an out-of-business company and designed and wasn't going to be creating an update for in Win7.
The seller of the game 'CDV' software is still selling the game as compatible for Vista and XP, but claims win7 is too buggy to support the game -- when it's their DRM driver that kept crashing OS's, that wasn't able to be disabled until Win7.
Another vendor, 'Got Game, Inc' puts out a whole bunch of games that are complete crap -- many won't even install -- there is no patch, and the link to their support site results in a DNS-not found error -- not transient, either. Yet they continue to sell their games to exhaust their stock and whatever sales they can get -- I found a copy of a game "WorldShift", at Fry's in a Bargain bin -- where it's double-no refunds (no refunds on sale software and no refunds on opened software) -- thus stuck w/it.
Another company that puts out 'divinity II', also has Suck-U-Rom, when I had problems I talked about in the forum, I was told that my symptoms were things it did when I had DVD-emulation products instead of a real DVD -- except that my game was a download from Amazon! Same problems happen on downloads from the download-only game services. The only answer that anyone would give as to why securom was included in the download versions, was that it was required by the distributors. Unfortunately, these games that use these malware-DRM products, generate DRM-bugs that indistinguishable from actual bugs, and support personal can't tell the difference.
Supposedly, the company that produced divinity, claims it will "eventually" remove the DRM in a download -- but whether this will be before or after[sic-not possible] they go out of business wasn't clear...
Now, I never know when I see a game -- since they don't say on the outside, if they contain game-bug introducing code or not -- and whether or not any problems I run into, in the game are due to suc-u-rom or a real bug -- and the developers often won't tell you which it is (they've been directed not to say which by the publishers)....
Unfortunately MS is on the same team as the people with the DRM, so there's no chance in hell of that happening.
why would M$ not want to drop DRM that does work at all and just crash's the system?
Demos, or shareware if you like, were the way games actually got popular. Apogee (or was it Epic?) released a fully functional demo episode of Wolfenstein 3D, if you liked it you paid up and bought the full version with 6 episodes. Id Software made it a standard practice with Doom - I still remember the message on your DOS screen at the end:
"Sure, don't order Doom. Sit back with your milk and cookies. Or, act like a man! Slap some shells into your shotgun and get ready to kick some demonic butt!'
followed by ordering information - how quaint the 1-800 lines and BBS links sound now!
The same was done for Quake, Duke Nukem 3D and all the others that came out in the mid to late 90s. You got a fully functional episode of the total game so you could see the gameplay, and if you liked it you got extra levels and maybe newer weapons/enemies in the full version. Valve took it even further by releasing the demo as a separate single player mission distinct from the full game (Halflife Uplink), essentially a free teaser.
No one seems to make demo versions anymore - partly perhaps PC game installs have bloated to multiple gigabytes of high-res graphics that might take ages to download. Or maybe because of releasing the same game for consoles as well as PC - it's apparently not worth the trouble for game publishers to take the extra effort. Personally I'd much rather try out a demo to see if the full game's worth paying up for.
"..One hosts to look them up, one DNS to find them, and in the darkness BIND them."
Well, your response may not be on the front page, but for anyone paying attention to the thread and not writing anon, we get notifications.
Thanx for the heads-up on G'o'G, -- already clicked and bookmarked -- will check them out -- but either gonna make Divinity work w/copy I got or return it first since I don't wanna keep throwing good money after bad for a game that has so many flaws apart from the bugs -- it's not like it's Oblivion or such (Divinity is so much more limited, the flight system is *lame*...like driving a bus from the rear seat -- and lots of 'magic' arbitrary restrictions that make no sense other than to limit player game play.
_Some_ Divinity-II limitations (mostly dragon-form limitations):
Even though you are able to turn into a dragon as a special power, the flight control system is the same as human running (always running unless you turn on caps lock, then it's a slow walk) walking+running. Right+left are for moving right & left (x-axis movement), not turning; as a dragon, it tilts you right or left, but doesn't actually 'bank' as though you were in a turn.
Turning is with the mouse only -- but it's not a turn like with a steering wheel, it's "rotation" on the Z axis -- there is no banking or gradual turn to the right or left, it's like turning a bumper-car. But the visual feedback is BAD -- you have about a 120 FOV, but it's completely flat/uniform no shrink at the side, so it looks like panning of a 30-60. There is no tilt (rotation on Y (forward-backward axis).
Even though you are above mountains @ distance, as you approach them, you are forced DOWN, so that even when you get to a pass, you can't fly through a pass, but instead have to go around, just as if you were walking -- the height away from mountains is such that you should be able to fly over all of the mountains in the central playing area (not at the edges where the mountains are higher), but as you approach any barrier, you are artificially forced down, so that you can't fly over any barrier, but must take the same path as though you were walking -- many places are like that, where you should be able to fly over things, but are artificially forced down -- would make sense if it was at the edge of a map where there was 'nothing' beyond, but it's done over all surface area except minor height objects like fences and low buildings.
To turn into a dragon, you must have a clear space above you and a space around you the size of a baseball field, even though as soon as you transform, you are placed 10 feet above the ground (you can't land or touch water in dragon form, though if you are in a clear area in water, you can turn into a dragon). But the restrictions mean that turning into human form is often a one-way transformation -- there are lots of areas where you can exist (fly into) as a dragon, but when you want to CHANGE into a dragon, you are told there isn't enough room for a dragon.
The space limitation causes a nasty game bug in one cave, fighting a demon, where the game forces you into dragon form to fight the demon, but if you change into human form to kill it (it's easier to kill as a human), you can't change back into a dragon, -- it says there is no room to take you dragon form, even though you just did it, when the game forced you to. It's completely clear overhead where you end up when you morph, but there's no baseball field of *level* space around you, so you can't change. Unfortunately, that leaves you trapped, since the entrance you come into the cave in is closed by a rock slide as soon as the demon dies. The only exit is by flying up to the top of the cavern, and approaching a path -- where you are then forced into human form and can walk out.
Note -- that in other areas, where the game isn't putting artificial restrictions on you, you can fly into rather tight spaces, but again, if you morph to human, you can morph back. In several areas, the game artificially restricts your movement like on the mountain approach -- it forc