This weekend, on a LAN party, I had the chance to play Sacred 2 on a friend’s PC. I already liked Sacred 1, especially because of the detailed and beautiful dragons, but had already put Sacred 2 on my “don’t buy” list because of it’s online activation requirement.
When I played Sacred 2, I came across a guy with really good face textures that looked familiar somehow. Clicking on him, he revealed himself as Hansi from Blind Guardian! After doing some quests in which undead metal fans had stolen the band’s instruments, I was given a performance from the whole band in sunwind. Pretty cool!
The last time I’ve seen a real band appear in a game was Gothic 1, where one night, In Extremo played in the old castle. Now I’m torn between buying the game to support this fantastic idea (and the band, of course) and boycotting it to protest against the silly copy protection.
After thinking long and hard, my final decision was to buy the Collector’s Edition and post in the game’s forums, explaining just like I did here, that the only thing that made be rethink my decision to boycott the game was the performance by Blind Guardian.
Turns out Ascaron, the game’s developers, stand firmly behind this copy protection. Just so much as mentioning DRM in your post will get it deleted instantly, referring me to a forum with one (!) thread where everyone that wants to talk about DRM should post. So much for my attempt at providing friendly feedback to the developers. Apparently this is how it works these days:
a) Make random assumptions about how some crazed copy protection scheme is going to save the day
b) Dump your game out into the world
and c) if one of your customers comes along to give you some friendly, non-demanding feedback, plug your fingers into your ears and shout “lalalalala”
Or, if you prefer an analogy, assume your government would not allow people to voice their opinion except for in a small, dark room where hundreds of people complain to each other without the public being “influenced” by those naysayers. That would be a very ethical use of the government’s power, wouldn’t it?
So, to say it a little bit less friendly this time: Ascaron - you guys suck!
I’ll try to cancel my order on amazon and buy some Blind Guardian merchandise instead. Thanks for nothing.
October 8th, 2008 at 1:40 am
I’m really sorry to hear that you feel this way. I manage the Sacred Intl community forum and if that is where you had this experience I’d love to discuss it with you further (just drop me a PM there, I always see those before posts). We’ve removed a lot of DRM comments, but we’ve also kept a lot - we don’t remove them for simply mentioning DRM. I care about the community, and I’d hate for anyone to go away feeling treated poorly without talking to me about it.
October 28th, 2008 at 11:36 am
I bought and installed Sacred2 without knowing about its DRM (there’s also a key in Sacred 1 to play closed MP, which I assumed was the same case).
I also posted a friendly comment in the forum (http://forum.sacredeng.ascaron-net.com/showpost.php?p=462546&postcount=59), which promptly caused the thread to be locked.
Needless to say this will be the last time I will buy any games without first checking online about the DRM used.
Ascaron now sits in the same place as EA/Bioware in my automatic boycott list.
October 29th, 2008 at 8:49 am
@CarolynHacker: This happened in the german Sacred 2 forums. I wrote a longer post actually praising the game for its continuous world and great combat mechanics, with just a single paragraph mentioning my conflict between the game’s copy protection and the Blind Guardian appearance.
For that, my post wasn’t just locked or moved, it was deleted. I don’t know whether you’re allowed to be more lax in the international forums, but please understand that my interest in frequenting forums that are abusing their power to control what opinions people can voice is next to zero.
October 31st, 2008 at 4:23 pm
They are actively looking to lock any thread about DRM , in some cases mods force users to go delete part of their posts themselves ( that’s what happened to me )
” We’ve removed a lot of DRM comments, but we’ve also kept a lot ”
LOL nice try Adolf