Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

In our last podcast, we talked a little bit about the new DRM scheme that Ubisoft was going to take regarding their PC game releases.  At the time, there were lots of rumors and innuendo, but nothing completely concrete.

Now with early review copies hitting some sites, it seems that we have some clarity on how the DRM will work, and it is leaning towards the “sounds good on paper, but extremely flawed in practice” route.

First and foremost is how the system works.  As it stands, Settlers 7 and Assassin’s Creed II will be the first games from Ubisoft to use this system.  It should be assumed that it will be in Splinter Cell: Conviction as well next month.  The system will require users to create an Ubisoft account, and install a front end Ubisoft application that will run in the background everytime an Ubisoft game is launched.

When you load up a game the application will run as normal, and the user should see no differences with the game.  Saving your game works just like any other game, as it will create a save file on your local hard drive, most likely somewhere in the My Documents directory.

However, when you quit your game, your save games will upload to the Ubisoft servers, and will be tied to your account.  This option can be turned off, if you choose to take that option.  So, people like myself, who thought there would be no local save option, have been proven wrong, with one huge caviat.

It appears that you will not be able to play an Ubisoft game if your lose connection to the Ubisoft servers.  This connection works both ways.  If the Ubisoft servers go down, you cannot play your game, as it will not load.  If your Internet connection goes down, you will again, be locked out from playing.  Even worse is if you are in the middle of a game, and you somehow lose contact with the Ubisoft servers, the game stops running, and you lose any progress from your last save point.

I get that companies want to protect their games, but using a system like this without any means to play the game without a connection to Ubisoft, aka Big Brother, just screws the legitimate customer out of a good gaming experience.  Most DRM systems like this, ie. Steam, at least allow people to play offline if they lose their connection to Steam.  And as most people know, Internet connections are never known to be 100% reliable.  Unless you have an infallable Internet connection, and Ubisoft has fault free servers, this will only end bad for both Ubisoft and the consumer.  However, if this is a ploy by Ubisoft to move people to console gaming, they may have finally found the golden bullet, because after my third or fourth disconnect, I may end up just killing the game off of my hard drive.