NwN 2: Mysteries of Westgate

[kgambit]

Originally Posted by sirchet

If I understand Alex' (Hughie) Hugon's comments, the adventure has been completed for months now, and is waiting for security type coding to be done.

btw...he doesn't seem very happy about it either.

That's my understanding as well.

On BOTH counts .....

[kgambit]

Looks like MoW is delayed AGAIN.

Here's the latest:

From keehwan_her

Dear NWN2 fans,

As you may have heard Atari, Obsidian, and Ossian have been working together to create a new security system to protect games that don’t have an .exe file. NWN2: Mysteries of Westgate is our first product to utilize this new system, and consequently its release has been delayed until we can effectively implement this important aspect.

The good news is, the new security system is nearly complete. Obsidian has just recently completed work on the client side of this system and Atari is currently setting up the production servers in preparation to go live in the next few weeks. Our priority is to get the security in place for release with NWN2 Update 1.14 in July and shortly thereafter Mysteries of Westgate will be released.

We sincerely apologize for any frustrations these delays may have caused to Ossian, Obsidian, and especially the D&D community. Neverwinter Nights 2: Mysteries of Westgate is a fantastic adventure that should be properly evaluated independent of Atari’s security system delays. We appreciate and thank you for your continued patience and enthusiasm for Neverwinter Nights products.

Thank you,

The Atari Team

[christofeles]

Yeah, good for you Atari! Great Job, no really. How long will it hold the people that get games illegal at bay? 1 Week? 1 Month? That would be utopic. I'm not saying they should drop security totally. But come on.....

Not even 24 hours, but that's not the point. You cannot blame Atari for wanting to protect their work; you can only blame them for not planning ahead. If they had started work on the new DRM, right away, it would have been out by now.

[christofeles]

I never said that they shouldn't, but what they shouldn't do is frustrating costumers and driving them away from their products. By trying to enforce a concept that just doesn't work. How often do people need to install cracks and non-original executables because their original game won't work on account of an f'ed up protection? I'm all for legal purchase of games, don't get me wrong here. I love most of the work the producers of games do, I appreciate most of their work, I really do and they deserve to be paid for that. But the whole "copy protection" is just not working and is in a lot of cases contraproductive, because it drives off some of their costumers. And I don't think that the amount of illegal acquired games would rise in any significance if they'd drop their "copy protection" all together, because it wouldn't get much easier anyway. It's already easy enough.

First of all, no need to quote a post directly above yours, hence I removed it as redundant.

In my life, I've been on both sides of the fence. However, I never pirated a single game. Always bought them. Also, it's been some years now, that I am 100% legit, no cracks, no pirated software, everything is either bought or downloaded as free ware.

I don't think it happens that often that DRM software messes up a machine; it's more the exception to the rule. And while it would really be nice, if game devs and publishers in general would drop the DRM, that will be cracked withing hours, days or weeks (maximum) of publishing, it aint gonna happen. Can you imagine Bill Gates suddenly deciding to drop all his DRM protection schemes and opening up the code to the open source people? Not gonna happen, sorry!

[christofeles]

I know they won't ever do that. But they should'nt make such a fuss about it either. And I don't know if I got you wrong now but by dropping it they wouldn't open their product to the open-source community. Because stealing them would still be illegal. And I am not a supporter of that "legalize gametheft/make every damn thing opensource"-theme. If someone wants something, he should pay for it.

I just don't think it makes that much sense to waste resources on top of the loss by theft, if it doesn't get you anything. I know that I am pretty alone with my point of view and I accept the fact that it may sound rather strange.

Games that are played over the internet are another story however, here the protection works quite good and thus should be further developed and kept. (All those FPS f.e.)

They not making any fuss about it; as I said they are only to blame for bad scheduling, organizing etc. It is us [there is no us!], the community or the vocal part thereof who are making a fuss, because we were promised things and did not receive them yet.

Yes, you misunderstood the open source comment. I would not urge them go open source. In a sense NWN2 and MotB are already open source, meaning that you have a powerful toolset to view and change things and design your own stuff. Let's try and agree that DRM does not stop the determined experienced hacker/cracker, but it stops a lot of casual piracy, like lending disks to a friend, for example. And that's what the companies are after.

Originally Posted by christofeles

I just don't think it makes that much sense to waste resources on top of the loss by theft, if it doesn't get you anything. I know that I am pretty alone with my point of view and I accept the fact that it may sound rather strange.

Well, it does get you something; it gets the casual and clueless pirates. From Atari's point of view that is not a waste of resources; on the contrary, as they have proved thus far.

Originally Posted by christofeles

Games that are played over the internet are another story however, here the protection works quite good and thus should be further developed and kept. (All those FPS f.e.)

Ok, they could have adopted bioware's authentication scheme. They didn't, 'cause they felt they needed something new. I only blame Atari for shortsightedness; they should have anticipated that they would need a new DRM. Instead, they relied first on finding something suitable on the market, once MoW was finished. Then, they realized in a panic, that they would need a new one, 'cause none of the available ones on the market would do. It's that simple real ...

Interestingly enough and in comparison to an other Atari published game that I love to play, namely Gothic 3, they only supplied support for about two patches after release and then left everything to the community. A while later, a community patch came out, fixing a lot of broken things and removing the CD check on start up. Cool, huh?

The latest DRM thread over at the bioware forums!

[kgambit]

Originally Posted by christofeles

How often do people need to install cracks and non-original executables because their original game won't work on account of an f'ed up protection?

Not very frequently actually. If you scan the Bio and Atari forums carefully, you will see a very small number of posts where users are actually encountering trouble playing NWN2 because of Securom. Even in the most recent cases, the problem lies NOT with the Securom within NWN2 but in the Securom that was installed by ANOTHER game.

Originally Posted by christofeles

But the whole "copy protection" is just not working ...... .

Quite the contrary. It is working exceptionally well. Several of the no-cd exe's that are available are fatally flawed and actually cause some critical path scripts to fail to fire and making it impossible to advance the game. What good is a no-cd .exe that makes the game unplayable? So although there is a certain truth to the claims that the game would be cracked within 24 hours, not all of the attempts have been successful.

Quite frankly, Atari is well within their rights to add copy protection to their games. In a perfect world it wouldn't be necessary. Unfortuantely some people think they have a god-given right to pirate games because "they are too expensive anyway", "piracy doesn't hurt the game companies" "I never pay for something I can steal for free", or any number of other lame and immature rationalizations of theft.

The problem with piracy and no-cd cracks etc. is also that you really need to know where to get, so that it works flawlessly and it is virus free. The latter is not as easy as it was a few years back ...