I think this will be my last post about single player games requiring a constant internet connection for a while (unless Ubisoft patches out their DRM, which I don’t expect to happen).

I’m not inherently against DRM, but I do play single player games. I don’t like the idea of being required to be online to do -anything- not related to the internet, but CD-checks or one-time online activations are not things which have really bothered me.

There were two questions I had about Ubisoft’s permanently online DRM scheme:
- Would it work?
- Would it be accepted? (ie: Is this something I would just have to learn to accept?)

I honestly assumed that the scheme would work. Turns out, I was wrong. Over the past weekend, there were widespread outages of Ubisoft’s OPS servers, which are the DRM managing systems for AC2 and SH5. Ubisoft variously blamed “excessive demand” and “hackers launching a DDoS” attack for the outages. (Interestingly, Ubisoft’s apologies to their customers gives a time frame shorter than that reported by their customers, and I was unable to find a hacker group claiming responsibility for the DDoS attack.) So, for whatever reason Ubi was unable to keep their servers up, making the question of whether the end customer has a permanent connection irrelevant.

The object of a DRM system is to allow paying customers to use the software, while not allowing pirates or other non-payers access. As implemented, Ubisoft’s DRM does not work because paying customers are unable to play.

As to whether the system was accepted– I really have no way to find out. Certainly people bought, are enjoying, and are actively modding SH5. There’s also certainly a vocal group of people who probably would have bought SH5 but didn’t because of DRM. However, because modders have taken interest in the game, I think it’s probably fairly launched towards overtaking it’s predecessor SH3 as the most realistic WWII submarine simulation ever.

As a last tidbit, EA has apparently drawn the opposite conclusion as me as to whether this type of DRM system works… Tom Chick at Fidgit is reporting that Command and Conquer 4 will have a persistent online requirement. It’s disconnect screen looks eerily similar to SH5s.

I’ve been out of town for a couple of days, and it looks like now larger media outlets are covering the Silent Hunter 5 DRM issue.

Eurogamer, reported yesterday a “Day-0″ crack. Note that this actually suggests that this DRM scheme provides a 4-6 day deterrence to piracy, as the game was widely available as soon a 27 Feb 10. Ubisoft denies the crack entirely, but has issued a patch to the DRM system in the upcoming AC2, which suggests that some type of vulnerability was uncovered.

Although I write flash games, I certainly admit to playing big studio developed games. So, to the best of my ability I’ve been trying to follow Silent Hunter 5 release.

First copies were in user’s hands as early as Feb 27th, but on a large scale the game won’t be available until sometime on March 2nd, when Steam, D2D, etc begin to allow downloads. First players seem to be saying “Good, but not great” which isn’t surprising given the history of the franchise.

An extensive modding community is what seems to make hardcore sims have legs. SH3 and SH4 have extensive mods which address various issues ranging from the size of the stopwatch to making the games conform better with known historical performance and specifications. SH5 appears to support the modding community by providing a scripting engine and tools! Ignoring the elephant in the room, the long term future for this game is pretty bright.

Speaking of elephants, both at subsim.com and on Ubisoft’s own forums, DRM remains a contentious issue, first players appear to be having little to no problem with the OSP system.

Interestingly, while trying to find coverage on the SH5 DRM issue, I ran across Rise of Flight, a WWI flight sim released last year by neoqb* which required users to log in online even to play the single player mode. With their next update, they’re introducing a “Login Offline” mode. Although players are still required to log in and validate their account initially, and to activate DLC, subsequent to that activation they will be able to play offline. This development apparently as a result of community pressure (quote from neoqb’s official blog, emphasis mine):

“Of course, the main gaming mode is still ONLINE, as it was initially designed, so not all game features will be available in offline mode. But this should address the main problems you asked us to handle, which is really our main priority. You can now spend (most of) your time within Rise Of Flight without connection to the internet.”

It will be interesting to see what Ubisoft ends up doing with this. Despite suggestions from the indie community that DRM-free leads to higher sales and better performance, Ubisoft tried that already with the 2008 release of Prince of Persia, sales of which were lower than expected. Still, PoP is far more similar to the contentious Assassin’s Creed 2 than the Silent Hunter series. It remains to be seen whether all PC gamers should be treated alike.

*- High fidelity WWI flight sim? And the first I find out about it is from a DRM discussion? I’ll give a nod to Tom Chick at fidgit.com for initially letting me know that SH5 was near release. However, I think the general gaming press does a very poor job of covering the industry except for AAA releases.

OK… I probably won’t release any games in the near future because my development computer died hard. Too bad for me. I’m now using an old laptop, and while I can run my IDE it’s like trying to sprint while waist deep in water. Since I write Flash for fun… I’d rather mostly just not deal with it until I save up for a replacement. In the meantime, for the sake of having content, I’m going to occasionally post my thoughts on stuff in the wider gaming world.

Ubisoft made a stir recently with the announcement that the soon to be released PC version of Assassin’s Creed 2 (AC2) would have DRM which requires the player to be online for the entire duration of play. Of particular note, the game is reputed to kick you out of the game and take you back to your last save point if your internet connection drops while playing. This appears to be a first step towards thin client single player games– MMOs are generally thin client, they take the player input, send it to a server and then the server tells the client what happens next. MMO’s are also resistant to piracy for this reason… you have to have an account which the server recognizes before it will let you move your spaceship (or Nightelf, or whatever) around.

Although there are ‘grey shards’ and private WoW servers, for the vast majority of players the whole reason to play an MMO is to interact in at least a minimal way with the other players. It’s intuitively obvious that there needs to be a server to mediate, and no one is bothered by an MMO requiring a constant net connection.

Single player games… not so much. Here, there’s no obvious benefit to the player for requiring a constant server connection. The game isn’t streaming data so that it can be a larger world than would fit on a DVD. There’s no interaction with other people to mediate (in single player mode). And many people just don’t have reliable or always on internet connections to begin with. And of course, some people don’t like the idea that they won’t be able to play the game 2 years from now if Ubisoft shuts off it’s validation servers, a concern made extremely plausible by EA shutting down the multiplayer servers for several recent releases just last month.

But AC2 is a AAA title, with a huge marketing push. It’s going to sell a lot of copies, we’re going to be hearing about it for months. Lots of people are going to buy it off retail endcaps on the basis of cover art without having ever read a thing about it. AC2 selling 1 million copies (for the PC) in its first month will not be proof that consumers will accept this style of DRM, nor will 4 million pirates* be proof that they won’t.

The real story will be Silent Hunter 5 (SH5), also by Ubisoft, also with some form of this new DRM system, having no meaningful large scale marketing, set for release in … well, sometime in March anyways**.

SH5 is not a AAA game, it’s a submarine simulator– a niche game with high production values.  In the hit driven video game market, this should have been a safe, modestly profitable venture- the $5 million dollar film that will take $15 million at the box office worldwide, rather than a $100 million gamble. The competition is Ubisoft’s own products– SH3 and SH4***, which are almost 5 years old at this point. Much like the flight simulator fans, the sub simulation players take to these games rabidly, making after-market patches for years after the game is released to increase realism or tweak UIs. These aren’t hyper 13 year old kids, they’re wargamers– guys who watch the History Channel, read submarine captains’ memoirs for fun, and can tell you all about how quality control failures at the plant which made the magnetic detonators for American torpedoes affected US submarine effectiveness in the Pacific.

While I don’t think the average release day buyer of AC2 will attempt to play that game in 2012, these guys will still be playing in 2015. If the validation server is still there, anyways.

AC2, being a console port, the player can reasonably expect to reach checkpoints every several minutes. In an engrossing simulation, saves can be hours apart. I know I’d be upset to lose hours of progress because a moose decided to eat a junction box 3 streets over. In a key paragraph in Neal Stevens’ preview of the game, he describes what happens when he unplugs his cable modem. (The game keeps running for a few minutes, then pauses.) What happens next, what point the game recovers to isn’t made completely clear.

So are the hard core fans upset? On Subsim.com, a forum where the average active thread gets around 100 comments, the thread discussing the proposed DRM has over 1600 comments , and a thread with a poll asking if the DRM will affect purchase has another 500+ text responses alongside 1200+ votes. (Like all internet polls, it’s not exceptionally well worded and has a horrible self selection bias, but 61% chose ‘I’ll wait for UBI to remove the online DRM’)

Ubisoft isn’t stupid. They’re selling this online requirement as being additional features. The saves will be safe and incorruptible. In exchange for constant online presence, Ubisoft won’t perform a check to make sure the original DVD is in the drive. There will be no limitation on installs… players will be allowed to log in and use their save from any computer. And Ubisoft promises “If any [validation] service is stopped, we will create a patch for the game so that the core game play will not be affected.”

I don’t know how this is going to end up playing out. Ubisoft can’t ignore the hardcore sub players any more than the Microsoft Flight Simulator team can ignore the guys who buy add-ons and participate in virtual airlines. Submarine simulation hasn’t been a hot genre since Gato and Silent Service in the mid-80s, and it’s unlikely anyone but Ubisoft is going to spend the money to build from scratch a WWII submarine simulator with the realism the subsimmer’s demand. The hard core fans need this game to be a success for the genre to survive. Either the fans will cave in and buy the game despite the DRM, or Ubisoft will back down signaling the end of this particular DRM strain. Either way, what happens with this game is going to be more important in the long run than whether AC2 sells 800k copies or 1.2 million.

-TF

*- Despite constant online being the new evil DRM solution to piracy, what reports are out suggest that AC2 has a large “analog hole”, in that a local copy of the save gets retained. If that’s the case, there will no doubt be a no-server crack within a few days of release. See the comments to Jeff Vogel’s take for more.

**- Seriously. The game’s product page at ubi.com says March 2, Gamespy says March 20th, a couple of random sim sites say March 4th…

***- SH3 (2005) was a u-boat sim, and SH4 (2007) simulated American WWII submarines.

Anything to do with the web generates reams and reams of statistics, and the end of the year seems to be a good time to share those. So, without further ado, here’s some selected stats from 2009 for Nightflyergames. (This is mostly screenshots from my stats packages, edited for space but not content). If you’re waiting on a new game or design notes… I promise there’s stuff in the works, but I have no idea when my next release is going to be.

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I’m making this post because I’ve had a sharp increase in the number of comments lodging themselves in my comment spam filter. (Askimet if you’re curious, and it seems to work extremely well.)

Although I occasionally enjoy Tolstoy and Dostoevsky (in translation), I can neither speak Russian nor read Cyrillic. If the comment is not in English, I will not approve it.

Translation courtesy of google:
Хотя я иногда пользуются Толстого и Достоевского (в переводе), я не могу ни говорить, ни русский читать кириллицу. Если комментарий не на английском языке, я не утвердит его.

To the commenter who I couldn’t figure out if it was a real comment or not– feel free to quote with attribution. Please don’t lift posts entirely. And I have no intention of signing up for twitter, facebook, myspace, etc…

Beyond that, please feel free to use the comment form at the bottom of every post. My comment fields are moderated, but if you’re clearly a real person, and actually talking about the post you’re commenting on it will be approved. If you think you’re comment should have been approved, email me using the address found on the about tab.

As a sideshow to my real job, I recently acquired an “Enterprise” level project which really needs to get some attention. However, my productivity has been nil for the past week thanks to Dwarf Fortress.
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I was working at my real job all weekend, so wasn’t able to participate in Ludum Dare 16 which was just held. The theme this time was ‘Exploration’. Check out the 121 entries if you get the chance. The next LD will be held in April.

Also this past Friday, Mochi announced the results of their November contest. The game which won, Sixty Seconds to Live by Chris Underwood, is a game in the ‘room escape’ genre which did an excellent job of the having the 60-second time limit integral to the game, had a distinctive crayon-drawn art style, and even made use of well executed vocals!

Minute Dungeon didn’t place in that contest, but I still think the exercise of developing it was useful. I received enough feedback to encourage me to strip the time limit out and extend the game. Plans for the As-Yet-Unnamed-Future-Roguelike-Built-In-Flash (AYUFRBIF.. doesn’t really work as an acronym) include a larger dungeon with a scrolling camera and limited field of view, as well as additional monster behaviors and the possible reintroduction of water and other elements dropped from 8PRL when I implemented my game. If you have a feature you want to see, now is the time to let me know!

-TF

Minute Dungeon is my entry for Mochimedia’s Novemeber ‘Flash Game Friday’ contest. Flash Game Friday had been a $100 bonus awarded by Mochi on a near weekly basis to a game in their distribution feed selected by Mochi staff. There were no codified rules, and I don’t think anyone paid too much attention to it.

In early November, Mochi announced they were discontinuing the old FGF program, and replacing it with a monthly development contest which would also be called ‘Flash Game Friday’. November 6th, they announced the rules for the first running of the new monthly contest “60 seconds to fame”. The theme of this first contest was ’60-second game’– ie, the game had to be over in 60 seconds or less.

Key rules were:

• Entries must use Mochi’s version control and Mochi’s distribution feed.
• Entries must use Mochi’s Leaderboards, and automatically submit scores on game completion

Beyond that, there were some instructions on how to tag your game so it could be found in the distribution feed by the judges, and that’s about it. Everything else was left to the developers.

WARNING! Long and rambling discussion of my design methods ahead. I write these in large part so that I have a record of what I did, and definitely not to suggest you should emulate what I do.

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WASD or Arrow Keys to move, Spacebar to use items, comma or period to rotate inventory
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