The Diablo III Dilemma

Diablo III comes out in less than two weeks. A lot of my friends have been following the release date of this game very closely, personally I haven't, for some reason I have not had that much interest in Blizzard's games since the first World of Warcraft expansion. I enjoyed the Warcraft RTS series, I played through the first third of Starcraft at a friend's place, I remember playing a ridiculous amount of the Diablo 1 demo and effectively racing my younger brother through Diablo II. All of these are games I played as singleplayer games.

The key problem I have with Diablo III is that they have implemented a system which is effectively always online DRM. While technically the game still offers single player, you are still required to be online and the game is hosted on Battle.net servers. I do not support these game which are using this form of DRM.

This is not a new stance I have taken, I refused to pay money for Assassin's Creed 2 and only played it after Ubisoft were briefly selling it for free. This was despite being very interested in that franchise and reviews indicating that it is a genuinely great game. Singleplayer games that require a permanent internet connection are something I do not accept and I do not believe should exist. I do not want to implicitly support this by purchasing and using those products.

This made my plans regarding Diablo III straight forward, don't purchase it and largely ignore it unless they provide an offline option. I can simply wait and play Torchlight 2. It is a game in the same genre, I enjoyed Torchlight 1, and Torchlight 2 has offline singleplayer along with multiplayer, it even has LAN multi player.

What has made me reconsider purchasing Diablo III is my family. My younger brother has been really excited by it and has even bought a new desktop specifically for this purpose. My oldest brother has also been planning on grabbing it though he won't be able to play on launch day.

Whilst I talk to my brothers about games a lot I don't actually play many games with them. Typically they are playing on platforms I am not (i.e. consoles) or they are simply not playing games I am very interested in. The last game we played together was a few sessions of Titan Quest, which was a bit complicated to get working and we didn't end up playing together much.

Most of the multiplayer gaming I've done with my siblings has been split-screen on consoles and given that we have almost all moved out now, I don't really see us returning to that any time soon.

I am also I must admit, pretty bad at keeping up with communication, it is fairly easy for me to forget to reply to an email, especially if I see it on my phone but don't want to respond to it immediately. This is why I try to get to my parents place at least every couple of weeks to try to make sure I am keeping in touch with them. This does not work quite so well for keeping in touch with my brothers. Whilst I guess there is always Facebook, gaming with them would help. This is actually an idea my older brother has suggested a few times, but since he primarily plays Call of Duty on the PS3, it has never really happened.

So that is where I am at at the moment, trying to decide whether or not to get Diablo III. Basically it depends whether or not I expect that I can get my siblings to play Torchlight 2 with me later on in the year which is possible but uncertain. If I can do that, then it probably isn't worth compromising my values regarding always online games. If that isn't going to happen, I would rather get Diablo III and play with my brothers and friends.

What do you think?

A Textbook Example of Frustration

My university classes have begun for semester one and thus the subject of textbooks has come up. One of my subjects has no recommended textbook, they will provide readings for us to do, the others however do have books they recommend we have.

Ideally I would rather purchase digital versions of these textbooks. I have a kindle on me pretty much any time I am out, even if I don't I have my phone which also runs the kindle app, not to mention a tablet and a desktop. So a kindle version of a textbook is available to me any time keeping track of notes I make and any highlighting I have done. The same availability would apply to a digital version without DRM or available from another company that had similarly invested application platforms.

However, when the textbook in question, Integrated Business Processes with ERP Systems, is available from Amazon, but only if you are in the US. While you can lie to amazon in order to purchase it even then, due to an unusual variant of the kindle format, Print Replica, it is only compatible with the Mac, PC and iPad kindle clients, my tablet is not an iPad these days.

The other option according to the Uni provided link is a company called CourseSmart, they have the digital version of the textbook available from their site for a similar price, they even also have android and iOS apps... which are unavailable in Australia. Looking at the FAQ they have I am no longer sure they actually would sell me the textbook if I tried. I am leery of buying from them as I have never previously heard of them and in any case if it is only available on my desktop at home then it is not a good enough plan.

Still it is amazingly frustrating to know that there are perfectly adequate solutions out there that are stupidly locked off because the companies capable of providing them will not do so to my region, my device (why can't the android kindle client show these print replica textbooks when running on a tablet?) or even just won't put in the effort to put out a textbook in a more standard ebook format.

As a result I am going to end up getting a textbook that will cost me twice as much and is far less likely to get nearly as much use as it could.

I am BatSecuROM

This has been a fairly leisurely week, given that NF finished on Sunday and Uni lectures do not begin for me until Tuesday night next week.

I spent some time going through android development tutorials, had another karate class on Tuesday and made the first of my lists. I have gone through my Steam, Desura, GOG and even my ubisoft and telltale accounts to record all of the games that I own that have some kind of relevant completion status and recorded it.

It was a fairly lengthy process and I was pleased when it was done. The plan is to maintain this list, adding and moving around games as I either complete or abandon them, including some notes as I do so along with more substantial posts here. The current priority game (marked in bold) is Batman: Arkham City, as there are a couple of posts on Shamus Young's blog I want to read that I have reason to believe are a little spoileriffic regarding this title. This is only likely to last until next Thursday when I pick up Mass Effect 3.

That said I haven't been playing as much Batman as I would like because of the DRM that it uses. Warner Bros decided that the DRM provided by GFWL and in my case also Steam was simply insufficient for their needs, they also needed SecuROM. Not something I approve of but also not a DRM that has caused problems for me in the past.

However, now it has requested to activate 4 times on my PC, each time using up one of the "This title can be activated on only 5 machines" uses. I find this particularly strange given that I have made no hardware changes to my machine and licence specifically gives two limits, one on PCs and one on activations. There is no activation revocation tool for it either, unlike Arkham Asylum.

After the 4th activation I decided I had had enough and contacted Warner Bros support to ask them 1) Why is this happening and 2) Can I get the limit increased/removed or have all my existing activations revoked so I would be able to start again. They responded fairly quickly and said this is a SecuROM issue, please contact SecuROM support.

I then contact SecuROM support with the same questions and they take a fair bit longer. They finally replied this morning with a short response saying unfortunately we cannot raise the limit, with matters regarding this we have been asked to refer you to the publisher support. Which is a bit frustrating given the circumstances. I have responded by providing them with the initial email and response from Warner Bros and requested that even if they cannot raise the limit they can answer the question regarding why it would request extra activations and revoke my current activations.

Now to wait a few more days I guess. I can't play much at the moment anyway since this weekend I am in Mudgee, a place to which Batman is ill-suited.