Brian's Blog

My friend Chris mentioned a desire to play a little Neverwinter Nights when I hang out with him and that Bioware had recently released some nice looking Premium Modules that he'd like to play. Last night I went on over and spend the $8 on Infinite Dungeons which is a randomly generated 10 level dungeon with a minor storyline but includes puzzles and the ability to dynamically adjust to your character or party of characters. Basically, it's a mindless dungeon crawl with essentially zero plot, but that's OK because that's exactly what I bought it for.

So, I downloaded this thing and in the purchase process I had to feed the website my original Neverwinter Nights CD-Key to authorize my key to play Infinite Dungeons. What I found out after I installed it and tried to play is that you absolutely can't play it at all without an Internet connection. The reason being is that it calls home to check it's validity when you start a new game, load a saved game, or save a game. The trouble is, I installed NWN on my laptop and there may be times I won't have Internet connectivity. And, sure enough, searching the Bioware forums came up with a few people who bought it for play while traveling without Internet access. Needless to say they were not all to happy of the situation because Bioware will only refund your money if the module hasn't been activated or played on-line. At least for me, it wasn't painfully obvious that was the case and if I'd want my $8 back I'd be basically screwed. I know, it's only $8 but it's the idea.

I think what I'm running into here is the future of game and possibly application copy protection. I've seen things moving in this direction for quite a long while and am honestly not surprised in the slightest. Since the number of people with out Internet access is so small this sort of thing effects such a small number that, even if Bioware really pisses them off, it will have nearly no influence on their profits for the product.

I've never liked things that phone home. You never be sure exactly what they are up to and what they are sending back home unless you have the skill to put a sniffer on the line and analyze the network traffic. Besides, what happens when the company goes under? Or decides to stop supporting the game? What about people like me who love our retro games? I hope that Bioware has the where-with-all to issue a patch removing such silly check prior to abandoning support.

I'm fairly certain that this sort of protection will be a native part of Neverwinter 2 and that having such drastic phone home methods in the premium modules is simply a test bed to see how well it is accepted.