I agree, and don't see what's the point in doing that either.

Still, their games have online activation, which for me ends up being the same thing: your game is still tied to an internet connection/3rd party server. And the fact that they call that type of DRM "industry standard" is really frightening, even though I can already see it for quite some time.

All I got left is to keep faith on GOG, GamersGate, Amazon and the like to increase their DRM-free catalogue.

Yeah but once in awhile my internet does take a shit. It may be rare, but it does happen, when it does it's out for the evening. It sure blows to have the game I wanted unavailable on a Friday night (fwiw, this has actually happened to me this year).

Activation isn't great, but it isn't nearly as vulnerable to random acts of the internet gods.

It's about time. I wonder when they (Ubisoft) will make their changes permanant? I hope they change all of their games on Steam asap.

Great news. But. When will this change be effective from?

I think people are misinterpreting this. They're not going to get rid of always-online for all of the older games, at least not yet. Assassin's Creed 2 and Settlers 7 will continue to have it for a while yet. What they're saying is that they've decided to stop using always-on DRM as a matter of policy for new releases, and that they've done this since the middle of last year, whch started with Driver: San Francisco.

It seems to me that it goes even further beyond this. As others have mentioned they actually stopped using the always-online DRM on new games a while ago- this latest bit is mostly a PR move. To me this says two things. First, it says that they saw the always-online hurting their sales pretty significantly and pretty quickly, which is why they stopped using it. Second, this PR move says to me that they haven't yet seen their sales rebound- that the use of the always-online DRM hurt their reputation so much that people are still avoiding their products even after they tried to quietly drop it. So now in a "please don't hate us" move they have to publicly announce that they're no longer using the always-online DRM, that basically they made the wrong decision and lost customers as a result, except that they really, really don't want to publicly say that (thus we get the PR goon squirming in the RPS interview).

AFAIK, AssCreed 2 doesn't use it anymore. Only Settlers 7 and that HAWX thing, or whatever its name is. They did patch the requirement out of several older games.

So AC2 savegames are now being stored locally?

I don't know that, try the Ubi forum. I have the game, but it's on Steam, which means it's still stuck with the always-on system because of a bug, and I haven't played it yet. But I do know for a fact that PoP: Forgotten Sands on UPlay do not use always-on, even though it used to.

I believe so, I had AC2 in offline mode a week or so ago (when my internet dropped for some weird reason) and it could load up my recent saves without any issues

[url=http://forums.ubi.com/forumdisplay.php/195-Assassin-s-Creed-General-Discussion-(PC)]I briefly looked at the forum[/url] and it seems that it saves locally, but the cloud saves synchronisation is possibly borked.

It's Ubi, they never get things right on the first attempt.

For me it is about two separate issues (which both are issues to me when I consider buying a game):

1. Always-online requirement is vulnerable to internet hiccups. I may actually be more vulnerable to this than many PC gamers, as I am gaming on laptop(s) almost exclusively, and do that many times elsewhere (outside my home) where the connectivity is many times in question. In many places, I seem to barely get very slow and flaky GPRS/EDGE connectivity (with a mobile 3G USB stick), and this is even in the urban area here where I live.

2. DRM that requires online authentication only during installation: for me this doesn't have the issue mentioned above. I think the only reason I consider this an issue is if in the distant future the authentication server is taken permanently offline for any reason, preventing me from (re-)installing my game(s). Legitimely, safely and hassle-free (meaning, no 3rd party pirate cracks). So naturally I prefer DRM-free games over these too.

In some ways, I consider #2 a bit similar (but still worse) _potential_ nuisance as some of those games that don't have offline updates/patches, but the only way to get the latest updates is to install the game, and use the in-game automatic update function. So, if those update servers are ever taken offline, apparently I'll be stuck into playing those games with the initial buggy 1.0 versions. Such games as Rise of Nations and Rise of Legends (aka RoN2). Apparently the publisher (Microsoft?) has hunted down sites that tried to offer the latest patches as offline versions. Apparently their idea of DRM, ie. you have to register your copy online in order to get fixes. The update servers for those two games still seem to be operational at the moment.


Games that fall into category #2 can get to my shopping cart, but mostly only when I feel I will play them in the near future (coming months), and I'm also inclined to pay less for such games.

Games that fall into category #1 will hardly ever find their way into my shopping cart, or at least it would have to be a very exceptional game. Come to think of it, I don't think I have so far ever bought a game so far that would require always-online connection, even if we are talking about online multiplayer games. (At some point I was close to buying TeamFortress 2, but luckily Valve released it for free a bit later, so I didn't have to.). Or then I am forgetting some title I have... But multiplayer games are a different case anyway, because there is a valid reason why they need to be connected to internet all the time (duh!).

Games that don't require online authentication at all, I buy pretty much unrestricted, even if I'm unsure when exactly I'd get around to playing them. Might be next week, or 5 years from now, doesn't really matter.

That's the main issue I have with it, and the main reason for why I don't buy games with that kind of DRM. I don't mind offline DRM schemes, though. At least I know that if I can't play that game in 5/10/15 years, the problem is on my side.

Finally they realised that the always-on approach is not the way to do it.

But that's not good enough.

As far as i am concerned they need to get rid of that one-time activation too, before i am going to buy anything from them. I am going to wait until that happens - or until the affected titles show up here ;)