Looking for good games similar to Arcanum

Interesting... two of your cards are NVidia chips too, one is old and one is a mobile version. What graphics settings are you playing Witcher in?

I usually choose Asus, who I also buy my motherboards from. All the NVidia cards I bought from them are rock solid; there're problematic games before, but I shared those problems with a lot of people, and those are eventually solved with game patches or newer drivers. The Witcher is the first and only game that gives me so much grieve. That I reached chapter four before and it was so great just makes the frustration even greater.

I'll update to the newest 191 driver, but I'm not having any false hope here.

Quoting my own post:

In which I said I don't like TAGES, which is not in the vanilla, added in the EE disc version, a dependency whic is subsequently removed by the 1.5 patch.

Thus there is absolutely no reason to install TAGES, a defective disc protection software, on a system when there's no other games using it.

TAGES not only cause problems in not recognizing the disc; people have reported a lot of other problems too.

Plus I only hate DRMs that have to "call mothership". Those DRMs require the company to be around and willing to continue supporting the authentication server for you to continue to play/reinstall. Those are not purchases, but rentals. If I buy a game, I expect to continue to be able to enjoy it 10 years down the road (I'll take care of the hardware and OS myself). I'm still playing Fallout 2 and Arcanum. If those have DRMs that phone home? You can forget about playing them. When the company's no longer around, there's no one to pay SecureROM or whatever company hosting the authentication server, no way to install or play.

Think in assembly level. You only need to debug it and locate the braching/jumping instructions, then change them. There may be more checks and thus takes more patience and lots of experiments, yes, but it can be done in just the same way.

Well, the fact is Witcher vanilla has no TAGES. EE disc version has it. TAGES caused a lot of grieve and people hate it (a fact well known for years). And now 1.5 patch removes it.

And you think avoiding TAGES is not practical?

It depends on what you've been doing. If you have 6 odd years of Java experience and nothing else, there's no doubt you won't know how to patch an EXE to remove a disc check...

 

I wasn't aware the original Witcher didn't have Tages - and I never said not to avoid Tages itself, just a DRM like Tages which was once again a misinterpretation of your original post.

Of course it's still possible to crack a DRM-protected game, just the effort to do so is rather high. Changing the instruction to jump to something else might work, sure, but filechecks or "calling home" might not make it so simple. I bought a legit copy of Sacred 2 (which was dribble) a while ago, was unable to play due to my internet being disconnected and ended up resorting to cracks downloaded from a friends. None of which worked for more than a day or two, by the way.

I don't like the "calling home" part either, simple fact is it's going to start appearing in more games.

I never did more than a couple of months of java, the forced OO was overdone and I'm more familiar/productive with C in any case. My point was that unless you've seen the source to a particular, propitiatory DRM like Tages or SecuROM it isn't really fair to use that as a basis for an argument. We can still discuss it, though.

The witcher is playing on mid/high on my laptop on the moment. I had to turn down some of the effects but the resolution is still at 1280x1024 and so on. No AA/AF, though.

 

Don't you all miss the awesome Master of Orion and Earthbound copy-protection schemes?

 

They might as well just stop trying to escape pirates. Only Mass Effect was successful as far as I can recall. Everything else gets pirated and is available on piratebay two days before release.

They could probably give us a price decrease by not paying through the nose for more and more security firms, thus attracting more consumers and actually making more money. This won't happen unless all developers do it at once (and even then it won't happen, because game publishers don't know what economics is, or why trying to reach a price equilibrium is a good thing), but still. Mindlessly slapping copy protection that costs resources and causes aggravation is a fallacy.

At least there's no more "Find Code C6 from your Manual". I can't believe I had to actually pirate the Police Quest II manual to play the game I quite clearly had the floppy disc for. Bastards.

King's Quest VI was just as bad, but at least I was able to figure out the code through trial and error over the course of a couple months.

I always have to take the bullet to uphold tradition around here. :*(

 

I was just a little strung out on trucker speed and a wee bit edgy that night. All hazing was due. No worries and a sincere "fuck off" right back at ya!

 

What a load of crap, the vast majority of people wont pay for anything they don't have to. Period. Hindering piracy is the only plausible way of protecting their investment; having a server to contact is the only real way to (temporarily) prevent it for the moment.

I don't like it for the reasons kcwong mentioned above, but it's still better than nothing.

 

Stardock Entertainment would disagree with you. They actually encourage piracy of their own games*, since it amounts to free publicity, and people who pirate it often buy the game later, or else they pimp the game to their friends and their friends buy it. The sales figures for Sins of a Solar Empire, where the copy protection amounts to "Hey, trade it all you like," amounted to over 500,000 copies sold, on a total game budget of less than $1 million, so I'd have to conclude that the results bear out their hypothesis.

Imagine that. A game company taking piracy as a given and turning it into their marketing department. That's gotta take brass balls.

*And they also don't make games for the Chinese market. They make games for the best customer base they can find, and the developer himself has said "hey, pirates don't get a vote in what we make."

 

You don't think their revenue would have been even higher if it was impossible to pirate it?

 

Marketing is expensive. Any potential increase in revenue would have at least been partially subsumed by marketing expenses. Either way they made a profit, and got positive pr, which is something that can't be bought just by throwing large sums of money at it.

 

That may be the case, actually. A large chunk of the pirate population wouldn't pay for it anyway (there's a reason the PSP is more popular on a user level in the Philippines than the DS), so the math comes down to:

Is (pirates who buy the game that wouldn't if they couldn't pirate it) + (customers first introduced to the game by pirate friends) + (all others who got the game because of piracy) + (people who buy it that wouldn't buy it if the copy protection was too much of a pain in the ass for them) + (everyone -else- turned off by copy-protection, bad PR, what have you who would otherwise get the game) - (pirates who -would- buy the game if they couldn't pirate it) > 0?

We can't study alternate universes to test this, but my hypothesis is yes. (Even -without- considering the fact that, by saving the money they'd spend on copy protection and reducing money spent on marketing and exposure, the reduction in expenses may be worth the loss of revenue. But since you specified revenue, this is merely another angle to the situation and not a direct answer to your question.)

And, of course, given the world that we live in, copy protection is worse than useless when it comes to driving sales, since as we know, it pisses off the customer royally (for an example of this killing a game and a company, see Titan's Quest...to be fair, that was really -bad- copy protection) and doesn't stop hackers from probably getting it onto a torrent site before it's even publically released.

 

Of course not, but saying "hey, you downloaded our game for free, so now you know it's out there, go buy it!" and attempting to use that as a viable marketing scheme is moronic. 90% of the population just aren't that ethical about something they'll throw out in 20 odd hours.

Edit: Also, badly designed copy protection schemes are annoying to the consumers. ME's works rather well, despite my grievances with it and I'm sure it's not the only case.

 

It has worked for Stardock.

 

Restrictive DRMs can't hinder pirates; all it takes is one bastard to crack it and post it on the net (and they often do it within a week of official release). You can see countless examples for that; EA's Spore triggered a lot of noise, and the result? EA backed down and announced they would not longer use restrictive DRMs that need to phone home.

All DRMs accomplished is annoy paying customers.

The fact is, any DRM running on people's computers, people can crack it. Uncrackable DRM is an impossibility; a logical fallacy.

Want a good solution to software piracy? I'll give you one.

Run everything on the server. Users connect to your servers to play, their computers acting as nothing but a front-end for display, audio and taking user input. Users login with their account information, the communication channel protected by PKI (public/private key infrastructure), e.g. SSL or TLS.

To gain free access to the game you will have to hack into the servers, which is a lot more difficult (provided they use their brains when setting up the servers and networking), and by laws of today, illegal (unlike using a piece of pirated software at home).

That's the ultimate version of online authentication DRM - you never own the game, you merely rent it, and the software never runs on your computer either.

 

I never said restrictive DRM's were the -only- solution, just the only ones in-use at the moment. Games will always be crackable, but even after breaking through the more difficult DRM, a simple forced update/filecheck before playing (which some games -are- getting close to doing) can counteract that. Cracks these days don't last forever.

The situation described in the last half of your post is more or less how the average MMO works today and I can see it becoming more prevalent later in any case.

Any copy protection is better than none though. Saying that "because it worked for Stardock" is like saying radiation therapy is effective for every cancer patient. Good for Stardock, but I guarantee for every person that bought the game, there's probably another 2 who haven't.

 

I use pirating as my purchasing scheme. I acquire a game. If I like it, I buy it. I started this after I started looking at demos, and the demos tend to be one of the following: 1)barely functional 2) an early, crude, beta 3) fucking enormous. Every game I have ever acquired through this means has been either purchased within a month or two, or removed from my hard drives. I hold a dislike for pirating as well as security software. I personally feel that, at the end of the day, it comes back to content: I think a well-made, enjoyable game will, regardless of anything else, sell better. I think that a high-quality game with no security is more likely to sell well than a low-quality game with security features.

p.s: the only thing I refuse to pay for is porn. It's like paying to have sex with myself.

 

First off, if there's a million illegal players of Sins of a Solar Empire, the game would be hitting MMO popularity and people would still be pounding the net about it for reasons other than the antipiracy chic and the Starforce copy protection team's backfired attempt to extort Stardock on another game.

Second, seriously, the number of illegal players has no direct effect on company revenue. Wipe that out of your head. The evidence is there that one pirate does not equal one lost sale. What matters is how much revenue is made and how many sales are there. If a company's reputation and goodwill bring in more sales than are lost to not having copy protection (which is of course hard to measure, since as I have -repeatedly- said, a pirate is only a lost sale if they would not be able to pirate it with the best possible copy protection -and- if they would buy it if they couldn't pirate it), then copy protection is a bad business decision. Simple math here.

Third, "any copy protection is better than none?" Look above for what happened to Titan Quest: people pirated it anyway, causing the usual copytraps to fire and even legit copies got a reputation as a buggy game. Bad copy protection is worse than none, which drives home my point.

 

Are you proclaiming that piracy did not kill Arcanum?

 

So what everyone is saying is to not even bother trying to protect your investment? Every tom dick and harry will be burning copies for their friends and I very much doubt hard copies will be sold at any decent rate. Sure, every tech-savvy tom dick and harry is already doing that to some extent, but that's no excuse.

Ramidel, can I see that evidence please? Why the fuck do you think they're bothering with DRM's in the first place? It's not going to be 1:1, sure, but you can't honestly tell me everyone is as moral a Sal and buys every bloody game they pirate. Like I already said, the vast majority of people will not pay for something if they don't have to.

I've already said games will be cracked anyway, but stripping out the entirety of copy protection (and I didn't mean disc checks) isn't exactly going to make the issue any better.

High-quality games will, naturally, sell better but by increasing the chances (greatly) that the average script kiddie could crack it for his equally pathetic friends is, overall, going to hurt revenue albeit not sales.

I am talking from a completely commercial viewpoint though, publishers don't particularly give a shit about the customer as long as they pay for the game. Capitalist pricks.