Don't buy Ubisoft games, clearly. Games which require servers to work at all (vs. just the mulitplayer components working) are also a big no. This is likely a good thing: it will educate gamers about unnecessary DRM.
Exactly this. I try to avoid any software that requires an internet connection to work or continue working, unless an internet connection is obviously necessary. Taking perfectly good software and ruining it by making an internet connection mandatory for DRM purposes does not constitute "obviously necessary."
Looking at you Microsoft Office, Quickbooks, and every Adobe product.
Ubisoft actually sells some DRM‐free games on GOG—the first Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry 1 and 2, Rayman Origins (but not Rayman Legends).
If you have disk space to spare, I would recommend downloading GOG’s offline installers as a backup. The risk of the service disappearing or games you’ve bought being removed seems pretty low, but DRM‐free offline installers are just as good as the classic “physical copy,” provided you actually saved them!
> DRM‐free offline installers are just as good as the classic “physical copy,” provided you actually saved them!
Better even as the classic physical copies often had DRM to prevent you from making backups. Not that there weren't workarounds but still, being able to just back them up like any other file is better in my book.
Unfortunately the "if you have disk space" part is not always irrelevant. Would be nicer if we could share that backup space by chunking up the installers into blocks and then advertise via a distributed table of hashes who has which blocks available. Ideally we'd also have a protocol to let these blocks of bits flow from those that have them to those that need them.
In principle, yes. In practice it's really hard to find a game like Assassin's Creed that offers me a relaxed world, where I can decide how engaged I want to be. Most of the team I just wander around a beautiful historical world and occasionally use long-range weapons like a sniper without worrying about dying every few minutes. This kind of experience, at least for me personally, is really hard to beat.
Last game I purchased was Far Cry the one with mammoth. funny thing is I have less than 1 hour. I bought it based on the trailer footage and I was disapointed.
Ubisoft appears to be largely propped up by generous tax credit in French speaking parts of the world and I don't think its going to last.
Question is who stands to buy them out? Their market cap is way overvalued.
I guess in general I'm bored with these new titles. It feels like I'm watching a movie and I'm just going from A to Z with a GPS
I miss the old days where you had to figure stuff out. Literally remember spending days in FF7 talking to everyone until it triggered an event. Frustrating but rewarding.
Or just imagine that you don't own the game in the first place, imagine that you're buying an opportunity to experience something for a while. Better laws could help of course, but I'm not holding my breath.
Situations like this will educate nobody about anything though. Many irate forum posts will be written, and the course of the world, and these people's lives will change about 0 percent. If gamers, as a group, would be able to learn anything, there wouldn't be hype for early access titles, or they wouldn't pre-order, but I'm not seeing either.
The actual best thing to happen to these franchises, in my view, is pirates freeing them from their corporate shackles that is DRM. This helps them to be actually relevant and to give people good experiences consistently - although, you could argue that this also helps them not sink into their well deserved irrelevance, so in the end piracy is helping to sell the original like in the case of Windows or Photoshop, or how people knowing the music drives the sale of concert tickets. Still, at least pirated copies can be used by the people who are genuinely missing the experience after the DRM servers inevitable shut down.
