Since it was announced months before its official release that SimCity would require an online connection to play, fans of the urban planning game have voiced their frustration. Their angst only intensified after this month’s launch, which was plagued by crashes and server connection issues that made the game unplayable at times.
Those problems have largely been rectified, but a game modder has created a demo that suggests the game can be played in an offline setting, contrary to the game maker’s claims that SimCity needs a persistent connection to play.
A word on steam - Unless the game is intended to support some online things, like pvp, its only needed to track achievements, or verify the original install/update the game. Most of them will run without it, though, there might be some issues with a small number of them, if the server is "offline" at the time.
That said, no, there really isn't any other sort of DRM that works. They have tried all of them. If the DRM is on the CD, its a pain in the ass, and people hate it, because unless you have like a drive server, with 50 DVD drives in it, having to constantly load/unload the disk to play a game.. well, why the F not just buy a console system then? And, of course, no matter what sort of DRM you use on the physical media, someone will find a way to break it, hence the applications out there that let you copy the disk image straight to your HDD, and then "mount" it as a real drive.
As for DRM in the software itself.. Again, without persistence, all they have to do is find a way to activate it, one time, and it keeps working. Short of updates to patch new DRM in, and an at least semi-persistent connection, to constantly check on the game, even making it runnable without a connection is feasible, by just working out what gets passed back and forth between servers. This is the method used by people, like the ones running clone servers for the original Ever Quest I, which allows them to use better scripting, and their own DBs, to either recreate the world, and even fix long standing bugs in it, and/or create entirely new everything, including landscapes and character models. The drawback being, you need an "older" version of the game, since the newer ones have their protocols and DRM modified, so the clone servers don't know how to talk to them.
Which hardly matters, since they can just, eventually, work out what the changes where, and implement them anyway, if they have any desire to do so.
In other words, even "persistence" isn't permanent, but.. its still the only way that anyone has found to DRM something, which actually bloody does what its intended. That it also leads to the same sort of, "Damn, I own the game, but lost the disk, WTF do you mean I can't play it now?", situations (or the even stupider situation I ran into where the old The Sims collection is now defunct, the original codes unreachable online via the company that now owns the title, and the code was on the manual, which I don't have any more - result: I had to hunt around to find a working key, illegally, because I had no legal means to play the game I owned the discs for...
The biggest thing DRM via web does, if done right, and I agree, in this case, it seems to have been done stupidly, is that you can a) buy a game without the physical media, b) in theory, still access it, as long as the company is still out there, to get a key, or verify ownership, and c) the activation, normally, is painless (sometimes so painless that the game/content is "activated" even without having to enter the keys that, for example, Steam shows as, "You will need these, in theory, to activate some parts of the game"), which is always a lovely surprise.
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SimCity Mod Gives Gamers a Glimpse of What Could Have Been
Posted by: Peter Suciu March 14, 2013 01:19 PMSince it was announced months before its official release that SimCity would require an online connection to play, fans of the urban planning game have voiced their frustration. Their angst only intensified after this month’s launch, which was plagued by crashes and server connection issues that made the game unplayable at times.
Those problems have largely been rectified, but a game modder has created a demo that suggests the game can be played in an offline setting, contrary to the game maker’s claims that SimCity needs a persistent connection to play.
That said, no, there really isn't any other sort of DRM that works. They have tried all of them. If the DRM is on the CD, its a pain in the ass, and people hate it, because unless you have like a drive server, with 50 DVD drives in it, having to constantly load/unload the disk to play a game.. well, why the F not just buy a console system then? And, of course, no matter what sort of DRM you use on the physical media, someone will find a way to break it, hence the applications out there that let you copy the disk image straight to your HDD, and then "mount" it as a real drive.
As for DRM in the software itself.. Again, without persistence, all they have to do is find a way to activate it, one time, and it keeps working. Short of updates to patch new DRM in, and an at least semi-persistent connection, to constantly check on the game, even making it runnable without a connection is feasible, by just working out what gets passed back and forth between servers. This is the method used by people, like the ones running clone servers for the original Ever Quest I, which allows them to use better scripting, and their own DBs, to either recreate the world, and even fix long standing bugs in it, and/or create entirely new everything, including landscapes and character models. The drawback being, you need an "older" version of the game, since the newer ones have their protocols and DRM modified, so the clone servers don't know how to talk to them.
Which hardly matters, since they can just, eventually, work out what the changes where, and implement them anyway, if they have any desire to do so.
In other words, even "persistence" isn't permanent, but.. its still the only way that anyone has found to DRM something, which actually bloody does what its intended. That it also leads to the same sort of, "Damn, I own the game, but lost the disk, WTF do you mean I can't play it now?", situations (or the even stupider situation I ran into where the old The Sims collection is now defunct, the original codes unreachable online via the company that now owns the title, and the code was on the manual, which I don't have any more - result: I had to hunt around to find a working key, illegally, because I had no legal means to play the game I owned the discs for...
The biggest thing DRM via web does, if done right, and I agree, in this case, it seems to have been done stupidly, is that you can a) buy a game without the physical media, b) in theory, still access it, as long as the company is still out there, to get a key, or verify ownership, and c) the activation, normally, is painless (sometimes so painless that the game/content is "activated" even without having to enter the keys that, for example, Steam shows as, "You will need these, in theory, to activate some parts of the game"), which is always a lovely surprise.