Far Cry 2, while having SECUROM DRM as well, has been additionally under fire for game play.  Seems some things need to be worked out in the wideopen sandbox environment created in the African forests.  Complaints have included repetitive missions, excessive rebel re-spawns and damage to the rebels as the only means to increase the difficulty of the game,  and lack of gamer immersion.  Graphics are truely a sight to behold but if a game isn’t compelling, most gamers will simply shelve the game and move on to the next.

Today we’ll see Call of Duty: World at War hit shelves (or coming off shelves as we speak).  The hype following this game is the opportunity to do 4 player co-op through missions.  After playing the multi-player beta, the co-op is will save the game.  In all honesty, multi-player moves just like Call of Duty 4 and feels almost like a clone with new graphics.  I truly miss the days of Call of Duty and CoD 2 where it felt less like a game of Quake and more like what most combat shooters felt like.  So if co-op doesn’t turn out to be all that it could be I’ll be quite disappointed.  For MP I would rather just stay with CoD 4 and it’s player spamming.  Maybe some of the additional maps will have some redeeming value but who knows.  I’ll post back later after I

At the end of the Ars article I was most amused with the comment:

“Without the ability to protect our work from piracy, developers across the entire game industry will eventually stop investing time and money in PC titles,” Gibeau stated.

As I had already pointed out that with the torrents available for all 3 titles it looks like PC titles are going to disappear.  I guess the conspiracy side of me makes me wonder if they’re just looking for an excuse to dump PC games.  After all EA has been outspoken in the past about how the console is really the only way to go with gaming.

I’m really not well versed in all the protection schemes but it seems to me that they are wasting money by continuing development of new methods.  I understand they have no intention of removing DRM but a quote from Vegas Vacation comes to mind…

“You don’t know when to quit, do ya Griswold?… Here’s an idea: Why don’t you give me half the money you were gonna bet, then we’ll go out back, I’ll kick you in the nuts, and we’ll call it a day”

I personally like the Valve method of installing the game and using their launcher.  If you want to protect your product, tie it to an account/email and whatever else you need for my registration.  I have no problem using this method and I’m not sure why other companies haven’t signed on to do this or maybe it’s just that no one has been able to implement it as well as Valve.  I was actually close to buying Warhead from Steam until I saw the same limited activation exists on Steam as does buying the game (and it was $7 more w/o media).  I’m not sure if it also includes SECUROM since I believe that is part of how it maintains it’s licensing.  Regardless I think there are ways to go about this without being intrusive on a user’s system.