You shouldn t always give people what they want. This is focus testing s fatal flaw. It s also the reason that Far Cry 2 – a game which doesn t give you what you want and slaps you for asking – is the best game in the series by far.

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I Am Alive was never coming to PC. Then it came to PC. You can get it now from Ubi’s shop and Steam, for around £13. It’s the dark, gloomy tale of one man’s attempt to climb his way to his wife and daughter, and I’ve been playing it for ages. So now I can tell you Wot I Think.>

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The good thing about always online DRM is, well, nothing. The problem with always online DRM is, well, everything. Perhaps the silver lining to the cloud that is Ubisoft’s UPlay system – the infrastructure for its DRM, DLC and other faintly sinister words which begin with D – being offline for a large chunk of the weekend is that it might> cause important people to worry, no matter what their paranoid personal philosophy of IP protection might be, that singleplayer games having a total dependency on remote servers is inescapably flawed in a practical sense. (more…)

Yesterday, I noted that I haven’t played many god games lately, so I suppose it only makes sense that some RPS-reading deity would start flinging the things at me. “Know my burden>,” it seemingly bellows from on high. “With great power… you know the rest>.” And hey, remember that neato whizz-bang pow space streaming technology that allowed Bastion to run in your browser – as if by teleporter from Mars and also the future? Well, it’s back to from said future, this time with Ubisoft’s once-DRMed, still poorly ported From Dust in tow. So maybe it could’ve brought a better god game, but still, I can’t entirely knock something of this fidelity when it’s playable in my browser almost instantly.

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Research at the RPS news desk means someone asks a question in chat and the others ignorantly speculate. Google is right there, but you don’t get good responses to keen, incisive questioning, in this case about the newly announced Anno 2070 Deep Ocean expansion pack: “Anno 2070: I’m trying to find out if the main game has water, or if the additions bring watery goodness to it? I mean to live under?”

John: I’m fairly sure old screenshots had wet bits.Adam: I think the new expansion just has a new even deeper watery bit

Adam is correct, and it allows Ubisoft to legitimately claim that it makes it “A deeper game experience”, which makes marketing copywriters froth like a windy sea. The main game is a rather watery real-time management game, where you raise a happy empire in a world ravaged by global warming. What will the expansion bring? Does it have hidden depths? (more…)

Ubisoft are issuing apologies after it seems their server migration isn’t only taking down the games they warned it would. Reports of both Driver: San Francisco and Anno 2070 also not working properly are coming from gamers (cheers EG), as Ubisoft acknowledges more games than they’d planned are being affected. Once again it’s impossible not to observe that if they hadn’t tied single-player games to such draconian, useless and self-defeating DRM, none of this would be happening. To find out the details of why the games are down, along with others, read our earlier coverage here.

If making a fuss keeps working, it’s only going to encourage us. In the last week we’ve – among others – reported on the extremely peculiar choice in Ubisoft’s chosen DRM for Anno 2070, to have it use up an activation every time you do something so simple as change a graphics card in your PC. Assuming this was a mistake we contacted Ubi, who genuinely surprised us by coming back to say it was completely intentional, wasn’t a problem, and that was that.

Well, after attention was brought their way, co-developers BlueByte got in touch with Hilbert Hagedoorn at Guru3D – who first brought the issue into light – and gave him more activations for the game. And now it’s just been reported that they’ve changed the DRM such that the game will no longer spit up if you switch a PCIe slot.

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On Monday we reported the strange discovery by Guru3D that something so simple as changing your graphics card could use up an activation on Ubisoft game, Anno 2070. At the time I suggested that this was perhaps a bug in the DRM Ubisoft uses, Tages, meaning it was overreacting to hardware changes. It seems I was wrong, and Ubisoft have confirmed to us that this is how they intend the DRM to work.

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Ubisoft have managed to go a month or so without anyone loudly throwing their hands in the air and despairing at their DRM ways. They’ll be relieved to know the drought is over, with tech wizards Guru3D discovering that Ubisoft’s limited activations of their games are not just limited to specific machines, but specific graphics cards.

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Blue Byte and Related Designs recently finished their latest trading and building game, Anno 2070 – this time set in later part of the current century, in a world where climate politics underlie the tale of commercial striving – and released it onto the wild seas of the internet. I’ve been wading through its depths for the past week or so and I am now able to tell you Wot I Think. > (more…)