Larian Studios Forums Divinity II The Dragon Knight Saga / Flames of Vengeance (English) Technical problems SecuROM on the Steam version...what the hell!

After having the firmware on two of my previous DVD drives destroyed by that malware masquerading as software known as SecuROM, I vowed that when I finally upgraded my gaming PC, I would never let any game that had SecuROM anywhere near it.

Anyway, I now have a new PC which is SecuROm free and I intend to keep it that way.

So, today I'm looking on Steam and I see Dragon Knight Saga on there. I read some reviews and thought that this would be just my kind of game, then looking closer, I see that the Steam version comes with SecuROM embedded as well. WHAT THE HELL! Steam is already a form of DRM, why did you need to put another layer of DRM on top of it, especially one as malicious as SecuROM?

I am more than happy to have Steam on my system, as it has never given my PC any problems but would it really have hurt to have just used Steam on it's own? Due to this ludicrous decision, you have now lost a sale from me...I guess I'll keep playing the Steam version of Fallout: New Vegas a little longer.

Pirates crack any SecuROM game within days anyway and they don't get their DVD drives rendered useless...unlike paying customers!

Feel free to google all about the massive problems many thousands of users all around the world are having with SecuROM.

If you search around you can find ways around the securom nightmare and still enjoy the game. I doubt I would be permitted to go into further detail but there are ways to enjoy games without ruining your system.

Um, its the publisher's decision and they use it to determine sales.

Let me guess what really happened. You were trying to update your firmware to your drives so they can accept Securerom, you probably did something wrong or the company who made the drives and the firmware screwed up.

If Securerom actually messed up your firmware, that is pretty rare, to happen to you 2 times means that something else is wrong and it is not securerom.

How can Suckurom mess up firmware? I thought it just looked for the DVD/CD -- which makes no sense for a download though. What does it do for a download? Check that my internet cable is plugged in?

It disturbs me, because someone else mentioned that suckurom also causes game bugs if it thinks something is wrong -- how do I know if I've encounter a game bug or if it's a suckurom feature? At this point, I don't know enough about the game to know how it is supposed to behave -- like I went to kira's flying fortress -- and on about 70% of them, the enemies were invisible -- ok that's fine. But when I hit them, they just stood there like statues. Even enemies that were visible just stood there like statues!!!

I didn't know if this was some securom 'feature', or it was a game bug, or if that's how it was supposed to be. On some of the platforms, the characters attacked normally, and on 2 other flying platform type areas, nobody was frozen -- so I can only guess that this was intentional, but it felt like slaughtering sheep. I felt I should do it, though, in case I came out from some room and everyone started jumping me -- better to clear them on the way in, I thought, than be surprised on the way out.

But I still don't know -- so much of that level was just killing frozen/dummie 'monsters' (enemies, whatever)....

Someone is telling me that SecurRom may be at fault in my download version in corrupting the game play as well...

That's just peachy!

How can I get a version that has this Securom bug fixed? I don't
need a version that corrupt game play randomly -- makes for a crappy experience -- considering that it's impossible for me to put a CD in my drive with a download version!

Yes, it could do that. There was a lot of threads (in Div2 ED section) about securom triggers working on legal version.

But you can't do anything about that xcept using crack/nodvd.

And someone told me, that then it went and ate my neighbours dog and proceeded to dig up all my dead relatives.
Look. Div2 is not the first nor the last game on Steam to use other means of DRM than Steam itself. From Larian's track record i can also tell you that the DRM will almost certainly be removed with a future patch.
No sane person likes DRM. In many cases i have been forced to use cracks for my legally obtained older games, because the type of DRM used is incompatible with todays OS-es. There is no reason for such an obnoxious witch hunt though. Securom is certainly not the worst kind of DRM around these days. Have you played any Ubisoft games recently? Even Steam has its problems as a DRM, the offline mode is not the most bug free thing since sliced bread.

Yeah, I know I could use various cracks and whatnot, but I prefer not to get involved in all that malarkey.

I know it is not Larian's fault, but surely they deserve to know that their publisher's decisions have an effect on their potential customers. Then they can try to convince the publisher to try something different.

You would not believe what SecuROM can do to your system, given half a chance. It does far more than just check for a CD/DVD. Google "reclaim your game" for a website that details the DRM related woes of lots of people.

If they get around to removing SecuROM in a future patch, then I will certainly purchase the game, until then I can happily live without it, after all upcoming games like "The Witcher 2" won't have any of that crap, so I won't exactly be short of games to play.

As for my so-called witch hunt, in what way have I been obnoxious? I am only expressing my concerns to the developers of the game, if they feel my concerns are justified, they can pass on those concerns to their publishers, if not, they won't. I don't have a problem with publishers using DRM if they must, even if it's use has a negigible effect on piracy, my main issue was the complete overkill of having 2 forms of DRM in one game- both Steam and SecuROM. I'm glad you don't find SecuROM too bad, compared to some other forms of DRM, but everyone's PC is different, with different specs, configurations and components, therefore reacting differently to the same software. I know what SecuROM did to my old computer, so I refuse to take the risk with my new top spec one.

I can tell you from personal experience securom can and does mess your system up as it has happened to me several times, my first issue was after installing the Bioshock demo. After installing Bioshock and securom, it proceeded to screw up my DVD drives and render them unusable. Essentially after the install, Windows could no longer see them, regardless of what I did updating drivers, uninstalling the demo/securom, reinstalling Windows, they were simply invisible and unusable. Soon as I formatted my system as in zeroing the damn thing out, like magic they reappeared, reinstall securom and poof gone like David Blaine all over again.

This has happened to me on several occasions, with different games having securom on it. Sometimes it doesn't happen and other times it does, but it only happens after installing a game that has securom in it. As soon as my system is wiped the drives work flawless until I take the risk in installing securom again. securom is not much better than Malware, there are much MUCH better solutions if the publisher/developers feel they really need copyright protection.

This!

How is that relevant? I'm talking about Securom causing game bugs in playability. These are real problems, not the bull you are coming up with. It would be one thing if securom said it found a problem, and to tell me I needed to correct it -- at least then I would know there was a problem, but this business with it altering game play is just ridiculous, since you don't know if it is a game bug, or what the problem is.


I haven't because they haven't produced anything worth playing enough to tolerate their DRM. Seriously! If they didn't have the DRM, I would have tried a few titles, but given the bad rep of the DRM and the so-so nature of the reviews, it wasn't worth it. On any game title, I figure in the DRM as a negative -- like the recent versions of Assassin's Creed -- I tried the first version, and wasn't horribly impressed (the DRM wasn't too bad -- just an activation thing), but I REALLY wanted to try AC-II, it looked so much better, but it's DRM requirements were a complete show stopper for me. Plain and simple. They lost a sale for something I wanted to buy. Similar problem for Bioshock 2 -- I found a cheap copy of Bioshock I in the bargain bin for $10. Decided to give it a try -- I couldn't get it to activate -- kept saying it couldn't contact the authorization servers -- so again, Bioshock II was a non-starter.

These stupid publishers that put in Crap DRM -- ARE losing sales -- because their DRM stops the games from working on more and more people's systems.

So don't tell me I should put up with DRM that alters my game play to make it unplayable because others are worse -- I don't even buy those -- and I would because they look very cool, but the DRM puts me off every time. I *buy* my games, only time I used a hack was on a game (Oblivion) that I purchased (and purchased all the extensions), only because I didn't want to keep inserting the CD (I only had 1 drive at the time and needed it for other things). When I play a game I want to be able to pause the game and switch in and out -- to go do other things like work -- I use the games as break (or is it that I use the work as a break from the games? )....but the games need to play fair with my system -- at least the more recent versions of securom no longer lock me out when I'm running process Explorer -- there was no reason for that -- and ProcExp, I have that in my auto-start, it's something I always have running. One version of Suck-U-Rom, was so bad, that if you had run ProcEXp, any time since boot, it would detect that fact and refuse to run -- it required you to reboot!! You had to NOT run procexp before you ran that game, and anytime you did work after that -- if it required procexp, you were screwed -- since you couldn't re-enter the game w/o another reboot. Stupidly lame. Thank god they fixed that bit of stupidity...

Believe me, the amount of loses (customers) is very small, compare to successful "hits". Nobody cares about such minority.

@Astara: The bug you encountered is solved in the next patch. It should be released in the next couple of days (hopefully tomorrow). We're making the installers now and when we finished testing those, we'll put it online. The same bug was responsible for the overpowered dudes, the invisible npcs and some other artefacts. It didn't show up during testing because the QA guys usually approach the game in a different way than typical players do, and this particular bug requires a set of specific circumstances to be in place. Given that DKS is gaining in popularity, we're obviously seeing more reports of it, and support has been quite busy with it. If your savegame was affected by it, send it to us and we'll fix it. When you continue playing on a fixed savegame, chances are low that it'll occur again as it's an accumulation of a lot of things, but if you have the patch, it definitely won't occur anymore.

Re: Securom: Speaking as a player, DRM drives me nuts too. For two games I bought this year I had to go look for a crack myself as I couldn't get them to work (though they were use something different than Securom). It understandably pissed me off, even if I can understand the reasons for including it. I know this argument has been done many times before, but I'm actually quite interested in a viable alternative. Afaik, experiments done show that no copy protection is worse than having copy protection. Or am I wrong ?

Since you have replied in this thread Swen, was it secuROM fail? Asking just to clarify some things.

Is that an alternative to DRMs that cause trouble or DRMs in general? For the former, Impulse Reactor is worth looking into. It does not install anything on the user's computer.