Constant Internet connection required for Command and Conquer 4
Over at the Command and Conquer Den, the community manager APOC(Aaron Kaufman) announced that those who play Command and Conquer 4 will always have to be connected to the internet. It stems from a Q&A session with Jeremy Feasel. When playing C&C 4 you will always have to be connected to the internet, much like a MMO; or sort of like a Steam game, but those have offline mode (maybe C&C 4 will too).
This is primarily due to our "player progression" feature so everything can be tracked. C&C 4 is not an MMO in the sense of World of Warcraft, but conceptually it has similar principles for being online all the time. While some may be taken aback by this, we've been testing this feature internally with all of our world-wide markets.
So it sounds like C&C 4 will be optimized so that even a dial up connection will suffice and that it won't lag out your single player game and it won't hurt the multiplayer aspect either.
The announcement for a constant online connection for Command and Conquer 4 doesn't surprise me that much. Games like Company of Heroes already require you to sign in before playing singleplayer or LAN. Granted Company of Heroes doesn't have a player progression feature. Even Blizzard announced that there would be no LAN play for StarCraft II. Just another means of DRM in video games; this allows EA to validate the Command and Conquer install and prevent any pirates from playing single player.
I would guess that the need for a constant connection is also there to prevent people from cheesing their starts before they are uploaded to the C&C 4 servers. It worked pretty well for Company of Heroes after the Opposing Fronts Expansion; but as always, there are ways to get around it.
The MMO like concept of player progression in Command and Conquer 4 does seem very interesting and I would love to hear more about it. Looks like a type of leader board setup with experience tracking, games player, etc. Seems that there will be more info about Command and Conquer 4 and the MMO portion in a few weeks when the info hits the magazines.
We can elaborate more on gameplay details after all the magazines hit, plenty of details for you to check in those! Gamestar will have a very extensive story.
What do you think? A integral part of C&C 4, harmful DRM, or just intrusive? Leave a comment and let me know what your opinion is about Command and Conquer 4 requiring a constant connection.
Demigod faces piracy issues
Demigod was released early by Gamestop and it seems to have caused quite a stir. The early release rushed the developers into quickly turning the servers on over Easter weekend, and also allowed people to make copies for the warez folks. It seems that there was a VERY large number of pirates that grabbed Demigod and the massive amount of traffic they caused sorta broke the Demigod servers. Oops!
The problem is that when the Demigod devs released the numbers--140,000 total, of which 18,000 were legitmate connections, a lot of people jumped to conclusions and blamed those nasty pirates. It seems that they didn't read and realize that no, it wasn't 18,000 copies sold, but 18,000 concurrent LEGIT connections ( the other 120,000 or so were the pirates). The issue was that each time the game was launched, it sent a small http request to the Gas Powered Games' servers to check for updates, etc. That really isn't a problem if you are looking at maybe 50,000 or so connections, but 140,000 was more than they expected. The people who blame pirates thought the server issues were caused by pirates playing on the multiplayer servers (Cant do that.. need a valid impulse account witch is tied to a valid cd-key).
The main reason I love Stardock is the lack of DRM-and hassle that gives- in their games. I also love them because they don't take the easy route and just blame the pirates for their server issues.
But here’s the thing: While piracy is annoying, you can’t blame piracy for this problem. Let’s face it, there’s plenty of data out there about how many pirated games are being played. We should have looked at that. We assumed since Sins of a Solar Empire and Galactic Civilizations, both of which sold extremely well and got great reviews, that the # of pirated copies of Demigod in use would probably be in the same ballpark, maybe twice as much. But had we looked at what other publishers have said, we would have known that it’s not unusual for there to be hundreds of thousands of warez copies in use. And if we had, we could have simply had the retail version not have any HTTP calls in it and instead just had an update button on the main menu to check for updates and voila, problem solved.
The second misconception is the argument that because Demigod’s retail version is heavily pirated that it costs massive sales. But that, again, puts the blame on the wrong parties. If you want to talk about the horrible multiplayer experience on launch day, well, that’s our fault because of what I said above. If you want to say that the horrible day 1 multiplayer experience resulted in negative game reviews which will seriously damage the game’s sales then I say again, that’s our fault too because of what I said above OR we could have just sent out the review copies on release day (Tuesday) and reviewers wouldn’t have had it until Thursday by which point the problem had largely been resolved and the review scores would have been fine. But in either case, it’s still our fault.
Gas Powered Games takes the high road and recognizes that this could have been avoided, but lets face it, hindsight is 20/20. They did a good job in letting people know what happened and why. You can read the whole thread in their forums here.
I played Demigod down at my local iGames center, Treasure I-Lan. They have a showcase going on for Demigod, and I would suggest trying to find your nearest center to head down there and give it a try!