Larian Studios Forums Beyond Divinity (English) General After all the Starforce Complaints, HL2 is worse..

Id like to start to say that my copy of BD has no problems at all with starforce. However every time i have finished playing a session i use SFclean.exe to remove it from my system or it acts sluggish. Starforce will install itself automaticaly anyway next time you try to run the game. But its annoying that it requires a reboot after every clean.

But the point i wanted to make is that for halflife 2 thats about to be released now they have already started to sell it in stores. But they have a new kind of copy protection. Kinda the same thing that Microsoft uses. They require people to log on to STEAM and get an authentication key to be able to even install the game let alone run it. Then during regular intervals during the game it will be checking for auth keys so you need to keep your connection to steam while you ´play. So while people have their copies of the game now they cant play it yet as the official release of the game over the internet authentication hasnt taken place yet.

This has caused an even larger outcry than starforce as this requires people to have an active internet connection to be able to play HL2. People without an internet connection will be wasting their money if they buy it.

Also after all the hype and such around HL2 valve havent even included a manual with the game. Not even as a PDF file <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> Cheap.

So i dunno about the rest of you, but i prefer The halflife 2 version of copy protection personaly as it wont affect my system negatively the way Starforce does. But of course people without an internet connection wont be as happy with it. I guess you cant please everyone. But for an overhyped title as HL2 i somehow doubt people will claim that they refuse to buy it cus of the protection.

Whats your opinion? :P

edit:
Just wanted to add that another area where this kind of protection is used is in industrial design programs like alias studiotools. We use that at the university over here and every licence costs 30000 dollars. This program will require you to have a TCP connection to the internet to be able to render anything at all :P

If you thought HL2's online Authentication was VICIOUS, go check out the NWN Premium Mods ordeal.

At least w/ HL2, if you Authenicate it, you can play SP (single player) offline. Still, that stinks -- if I buy a hard copy (CD/DVD), I shouldn't need to authenicate it. That's CRAP.

For NWN Premium Mods that are SP even, you have to have a LIVE COnnection -- so when you load a new game or load a saved game, it does an "ONline Authenication" check.

Even with that, it wont take "them" too long to code a program that emulates the online authentication....

But personally, i think a lot of people will be irritated beyond repair.... being online is ok for most people in the USA, UK, Europe and Asia...where internet is cheap and most of the time its a permanent connection... Countries in Africa dont have the infrastructure yet for permanent connections.

In SA its only become available now in the last 2 years, and most people cant afford it. So they are going to have a lot of irritated buyers...

Not entirely true, in 1996 or so I went to Africa, and we had internet. Once or twice. In the big cities... Yep.

I'd hate to still be on dial-up Internet... <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/memad.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/disagree.gif" alt="" />

So, we can have

1. Some crappy copyprotection, wich installs some drivers and causes lots of trouble and forces us to seek the dammned CD everytime we want to play.

or

2. Authenticate our games *once* online as we install it, and we don't have to bother findig the [nocando] CD when we want to play.

I prefer the second option, thanks.


I hope Steam is the first step to kill the publishers. At least for the self funding, independent studios.

And then several times while you are playing.

Thats a lie.

In reality it's like this:

"During installation the user will be prompted to authenticate the copy and create a Steam account. After that is complete, the single-player and LAN games do not require an Internet connection." - Doug Lombardi, Valve Software

From this Interview: http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/half-life-2/558931p1.html

In that case, I do support the method. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

If its only once i can cope with it.... so will most people be able to.... but i can assure you that everything i found on it, indicates that it will check for authentication every half hour or so....

And yes, while africa has internet, its not permanent connections... and dialup is expensive... dialup to a local number (less than 50km) currently costs R 27.00 per hour. To $ its $4.50 per hour!!!!

i feel sad for u, lady rain. i myself, don't have any landline to my house, let alone internet connection of any kind. have to rely on mobile phones & even then the signal tends to fluctuate.

as for the cd protection, only time can tell. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/think.gif" alt="" />

That is exactly what I have expected : Modern internet connections are based on assumptions regarding people living in cities ... I mean that telecommunications companies would rather tend not to invest on rural areas (cables etc.) because there is few to earn there. The average gamer (I guess) - from the view of the publishers - sits possibly in american or europe cities.

Thank heavens i am living in a city, and due to my studies and business demands, i HAVE a permanent connection... but 90% of the people living even in our cities dont have it.

I suppose it is true that most of the "top of the range" gamers do live in cities, people in rural areas normally tend to know that there is a life other than computers... to us city-people, that is a myth...

In belgium theire are only two major Broad band connection companies. So the copetition between those two is fierce.

Dance monkey dance if you want my money Dance I say. isn't free market cool <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />

A lie you say? Well its all about the wonderful subject at university known as "media criticism" What says gamespy isnt wrong or didnt lie to us? <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" /> Its all up to us who we trust and dont trust and due to this and how people normaly deal with it, it makes propaganda possible in the world as people rarely bother to look up on the sorces. Is it in a paper or teh news its true thats all they bother with. Look past the news you read and see on the TV etc. What are they NOT telling you? etc. What is a fact? Is it a fact just cus its printed in a book? Are books infaliable? and so on. Can be an eye opener. Anyway In this case gamespy are wrong.

anyway about the subject at hand, Halflife 2 IS checking the internet for auth while you play. I should know as i bought the game. It does it after certain time periods on your computer clock from the time of first execution. Thats why people thats trying to make a pirate warez version of it have problems cus sure they can get past the first authenthication and such but after they have played a while the game kills the AI and script engine cus it cant get a valid steam connection. Sure the pirates can reenable some of it with the built in console commands but then the scripts etc are out of sync with the sound and flow of the game. Wich means it dosnt work :P Gabe himself from the Hl2 team has posted that they made it this way as an experiment now after the release. If you had not removed your internet connection and ran a pirated version your usage would be registered with steam and Valve now. Wich is nothing the crackers could have predicted as there wasnt "supposed" to be this kind of protection <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />


Now its not surprising that the gamespy review people havent discovered this as they usualy havent played long enough before printing out the review to experience it. The market for reviews etc has a lot of builtin stress. And you can be pretty sure of that they havent spent all their hours on that day playing hte game. And even if they have, its nothing you notice if you have a legit copy on an already internet connected computer as it wont tell you its checking unless it messes up.

I have the UK version of the game. Atleast this is how my version works. I cant speak for hte american version etc but i see it as highly unlikely that it is any different.

This is of course nothing we law abiding people need to worry about but it still means that if you dont have internet dont bother with HL2. I have internet
and that means i prefer valves version to protect their software rather than Starforce 3 cus that the game auths at the steam servers dosnt negatively affect my computers performance when im not playing the game like starforce does. Negative about this kind of protection is that if Valve now goes belly up in a couple of years how will i even install my game when they arent there to auth it for me? Does this mean we are now buying a licencse for the game for a limited amount of time whereafter the game will be unusable? Seems so in halflifes case atelast.

Finaly let me say that calling something a lie just because you do not belive it yourself hardly makes it a lie. So be careful with how you respond to people. Im a very understanding person but had it been someone else they might have taken offense and gotten upset. Guard your words, Good lesson to learn for RL to save you a lot of problems <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I don't like Steam -- what about Joe Blow who has a laptop that has not I-Net Connection there and puts HL2 on there? Guess what? He's been ripped-off b/c he can't play his SINGLE PLAYER game offline. SINGLE PLAYER means alone -- so, I should not have to go online to authenticate a product I purchased. SINGLE PLAYER portion of the game should NOT require Steam authenication -- end of story.

Multiplayer is another story, since MP does require a connection.

I cant say that i am too concerned about steam... if it took them less than 3 days to break doom3 copy protection..... (yea i know its SF), then it wont take them 7 to write a "Authorization server emulator". or to just chuck the whole check out of the game all together....

it is irritating though.... there shouldnt HAVE to be hacking involved just to play your game when you are forced to go to gramma's farm in the middle of the rockies mountains.

HL2 maybe worse but it playable under Linux. And isn't that what is important????

@larian: I don't care if you put security on Divinity² that rivals nuclear missile systems just make sure that it can run under Linux with a emulator like Cedega. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/disagree.gif" alt="" />

Now thats something i LIKE.... no wait.... LOVE.....

But then again, its a whole different ballgame.... its a load of new bugs.... a load of different concepts.....


But that would be an absolute Chart topper!!!!!!

It would also push a fair amount of game sales..... not too many games gets advertised with Linux functionality <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />

If it is do-able... it would be an absolute killer!!!!

from what i know, at least hl2 requires online access only during installation. i'm not too sure about that, as i have no plans of buying hl2; don't play such kind of games.

the authentication method for the nwn premium modules is worst. it requires online connection...every single time you play...a single player game...for which you've already paid about, what, $5,, $7? so on top of your intital cost of buying the game, your cost will run up some more due to internet use, especially if you have dial-up connection.

it has caused a furor in the bioware forums and it's not dying down.

might as well buy a full game that doesn't demand internet connection.