Blizzard Patches No-CD Support Into Warcraft III 198
Rock, Paper, Shotgun notes that in Blizzard's never-ending quest for perfect balance, they've added a handy feature for still-dedicated Warcraft players. Players will no longer need to have the disc in the drive in order to conquer Azeroth. This kicks off a discussion by blogger Alec Meer about the role of copy protection and anti-piracy in PC gaming: "I don't need the Paint Shop Pro disc in my DVD drive whenever I want to butcher my holiday photos, after all. It was always doubly unnecessary for a game like W3, which also employs serial number checks if you want to play it online. Having the CD check as well seems like leaving a polite post-it note on the windscreen of a driver prone to double-parking. Don't bother. Just wheel-clamp the bastard. While there're still some reasons to be circumspect about online distribution systems, they do spell an end to miserably sorting through quivering towers of plastic discs or popup-heavy crack websites. This brave new world, in which the data already installed upon my hard drive is all that's required to play a game I've paid for, is one I know I want to live in."
Please please please be a trend (Score:5, Interesting)
Steam/Battle.net (Score:4, Interesting)
That really sucked when you didn't actually buy the game. Because it didn't come with a manual, you just copied a floppy.
Re:Never really understood the CD check (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Honestly, who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
MMOs caught on to this secret early on - when the value your game offers is mostly or completely through online play, you don't need a disk, you can do a much much better job checking accounts as they authenticate with your server.
And consoles are being released with built in HDs rivaling those in gaming PCs now. I wouldn't be at all surprised to be less than ten years away from never needing the gaming disk there, either.
Kudos to Blizzard, though as was stated above, a few years too late.
Re:Disks on OSX (Score:3, Interesting)
Disk Utility -> Create Disk Image -> mount image -> play game.
I am looking at a 631MB
It's taken far too long for the gaming companies to figure this out. Ten years ago games would have no-cd patches out the same day that new copy protection came out. The really invasive ones took maybe a month or two but the crackers could play them. The only people who suffered were the legitimate buyers. Blizzard really should have learned this lesson back in 2000 when Diablo II was causing issues with legitimate disks but pirated copies worked fine.
So long overdue, it's painful (Score:4, Interesting)
My copy of Temple of Elemental Evil worked fine for the orignal release, and the first patch. The second patch to come out wasn't compatable with DirectX 9.0c, so it was pointless. Applying the third patch to fix the second patch made my CD fail its check. So, the game worked out of the box, and through the first patch, but the 2nd/3rd patch broke my CD? You've got to be kidding me! And SecureROM analyzed my data, and said that it was because I had Daemon Tools installed. So, I uninstalled that, re-ran their program, and they said I must have a copy of an orignal CD. Since it's an Atari game that isn't being supported any longer, I can't get a new CD from the company.
Heck, my current copy of Hellgate: London acts up in single player mode (which requires the DVD to be in the drive. Multiplayer does not, as it should be.) Half the time I have to reboot my system, because SafeDisc doesn't recognize the DVD being in the drive. It spins, then stops and hangs. It's even told me that my OS isn't high enough, and I need to upgrade to Windows 98SE or 2000. I have XP installed. Some of that was the multi-language support, which can be clicked off, but the bottom line is, the copy protection makes the game sometimes unplayable without a reboot.
With the way today's games are, with the zero-day release always having a fatal bug (I believe intentionally) that requires a patch to be downloaded, there is no real need for this. Very few if any gamer systems aren't internet connected, so just make a simple verification check go out on the serial number, and let them play. No connection or a failure of that check, and no game.
It's one of the reasons I play MMOs so much, even though it is often solo. No copy protection to annoy me, no CD/DVD to keep track of, and less clutter in/on my desk.
Re:Honestly, who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not if you play on a Nintendo console. Wii games usually take a few seconds to load at startup and then rarely have noticeable load times after that.
Re:Honestly, who cares? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Honestly, who cares? (Score:3, Interesting)
Blizzard cares, they are looking to put forward some goodwill out for the benefit of players, and are sooner realizing that unmitigated piracy is not as rampant as the accountants are claiming(at least in terms of damaging their bottom line). Considering that the major draw for games nowadays is the online play, it's relatively trivial to track down who is a legitimate player and who isn't.
Back in the day when online gaming was the novelty, companies were trying to lock down who can play their game or not. That is now the obsolete mindset, as companies with half a brain are now looking to lockdown who can play their game _online_, which is much much simpler to control with the benefit towards consumer convenience.
I just read on an rss feed that Steam just broke the 15 million users barrier, and I believe Blizzard is looking for a peice of that cake. And if Blizzard is looking to widen their audience with regards to their other products, they are going to need market penetration. This move means they are trying to literally going to 'give' their game away - they want their game to be pirated. Because in the long run, if the consumer wants to get the full experience(the online play as opposed to the single player stuff), he's going to need to buy a copy sooner or later. This also means that Blizzard has faith that the products that they release are that good.
However, the disturbing trend may be that the single player experience may be compromised, since it would be considered a freebie at the cost of developers making the single player stuff. More and more games are either going to have a crappy single player experience or it's just gonna be too damn short (like an hour of solid gaming).
But overall, companies are soon realizing the benefits of offering 'the first hit free.' But l2drugdealing will only work when their product is of real quality, so it better be a damn good first hit.
Re:Was I the only one... (Score:3, Interesting)
I shall reinstall WC3 now. Half the reason I don't have it installed for the occasional game is because it needed a CD crack, and I get tired of having to track them down. (Though most of the games I play these days either have no disk (IE. Steam or Elicense), or have no protection (Stardock titles).
It's all very well bitching about "kinda late", but as the saying goes, better late than never. *runs off to find Warcraft III disk.*
You can always get around this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Back when I played a bunch of games that had the "CD in the drive" requirement, I got a product called Virtual CD. It allows you to create a set of virtual CD drives on your system, and mount images of the CDs you need on those drives. (You have to create the images by copying the CDs or DVDs first, of course, and store them on your hard drive.) This meant I could take my laptop anywhere without lugging around a bunch of discs and fiddling with them every time I wanted to run one of these programs that insisted on seeing its installation CD before it started. It was a bit of a hassle to configure Virtual CD so that it would automatically mount the appropriate CD when you double clicked on an application, but once I set it up, it worked flawlessly.
These days, I don't run much software that has this requirement, so I haven't used Virtual CD (http://www.virtualcd-online.com/ [virtualcd-online.com]) for a couple of years. But I'd highly recommend it if you do have this need.
Re:Honestly, who cares? (Score:2, Interesting)