DRM News

PC Gamer has had an opportunity to give the Ubisoft accounts DRM system a bit of a test drive while doing review testing for Assassin’s Creed II and The Settlers 7. Their results can be found here.

On initial launch, the Ubisoft Game Launcher automatically checks for updates. Okay, that’s actually kind of nice! If only that weren’t the only example of the system doing anything in any way beneficial to a gamer :

If you try to launch the game when you’re not online, you hit an error message right away. So I tried a different test: start the game while online, play a little, then unplug my net cable. This is the same as what happens if your net connection drops momentarily, your router is rebooted, or the game loses its connection to Ubisoft’s ‘Master servers’. The game stopped, and I was dumped back to a menu screen – all my progress since it last autosaved was lost.

So, in exchange for automatic updating and cloud saves, we get a system that kills any chance to play the game the instant contact with the Master Server is lost. This all but guarantees that if the Master Server is down for any period of time, you won’t be able to play any Ubisoft games during that time period, either.

Nice.