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…)

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…)

This year has been unusually rich in the kind of game that I most enjoy: those that are open-ended, or provide a sandbox world for me to mess about in. We usually get a couple of these every year, but in 2011 we seem to have run into a minor bounty of the open stuff, which is good news for explorers and meanderers alike. I’ve gone into a bit more detail about why this pleases me below. >

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Anno 2070 came out on Friday. Did you see? It’s Anno, but in the future! Although I’m now so used to having ridiculous year names from science fiction like “2011″ that I can no longer register “2070″ as sounding that far away. Heck, it’s reasonably likely I could live until 2070. I think futuristic sounding things now require at least a “2200″ century, if not ideally the third millennium. Please take note. Anyhow, the Anno launch brought with it an Anno launch trailer, which is below. And I believe one of our number is currently playing the game in order to let you know what you should think about it.

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