Anti-piracy measures by Batman developer unearth bugs in player morality. This isn’t a first.

I can’t wait to play Batman: Arkham Asylum this week. The potential game of the year hit those not-so-cutting edge consoles almost a month ago, but I didn’t want to touch it. My new PC’s a much more comfortable home for Batman and his incomparable rogues gallery of villains. Here, with the help of my GTX 275 graphics card and intel i7 920 processor, he can spread his bat-legs and show off significantly improved bat-graphics and added support for Nvidia’s Physx system. Check out the video below to see what I mean.

The differences may seem slight to some, but even the most insignificant of changes can improve a title’s perceived immersion. And, in a title like this, aren’t we all looking to wade in the deepest immersion waters as possible? So, “yes,” a more realistically flowing bat-cape matters.

Oh, and did I mention I can modify the PC version with custom-built content? Last month, with only an asset and gameplay-limited demo in their hands, the modding community designed dozens of costumes for Batsy Watsy – transforming him into Dark Claw, a Green Lantern, Batzarro, Nightwing, and many others (none of which will scar villains with sharp protruding nipples). Now, with the full release in absurdly capable hands, I expect much, much more. Are community-architected expansions and gameplay improvements less than six months away? Definitely.

Apparently a “leaked” PC version of the title hit the torrent communities last week. I could’ve downloaded, installed, beaten the game, and prepared a review for release date in just a few days, but I didn’t.

Plausible justification even lied within arm’s reach. If I pursued this potentially shady route, I wasn’t technically becoming a pirate, right? The PR team at fortyseven communications, who are working with developer Rocksteady, guaranteed me a free copy!

Deciding against tossing another game on my immediate platter (more lie on shelves, in closets, and somewhere in a plethora of internal and external hard drives), I decided to wait for my copy to arrive via snail mail.

Late last week, a funny news item surfaced regarding Arkham Asylum and piracy. According to multiple complaints on the various forums, a growing number of PC users began encountering various bugs in some of the game’s most simplest features. One in particular, prevented Batman from gliding over poison gas. Instead, he’d fall directly to his death. They needed a solution.

A user by the name of “Cheshirec_the_cat” went to the people who would probably know best – the developers. On September 4, he or she posted the topic “Problem with glide” in the official game forums and said:

“Hi!
I’ve got a problem when it’s time to use Batman’s glide in the game. When I hold <Space> , like it’s said to jump from one platform to another, Batman tries to open his wings again and again instead of gliding. So he fels down in a poisoning gas. If somebody could tel me, what should I do there.”

Less than 15 minutes later, “Henke123″ replied:

“Try buying the game.

There is no poison gas in the demo and the game has not been released on PC yet.”

An additional 20 minutes later, an official admin named “Keir” from publisher Eidos responded.

“What Henke said.

The problem you have encountered is a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free.

It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code.”

Keir then locked the thread.

The guys and gals at Rocksteady intentionally laid a trap for pirates. And apparently not just one. On a very popular torrent site, one user complained “There are multiple broken grapple points. They seem to have been randomly moved through out the map so you’ll end up grappling through the map to a random desolate area. I have currently come across a broken grapple point that keeps me from continuing the game…”  Dozens of people soon after expressed their own frustrations with the same problem.

Various cracking communities claim to have solved all apparent problems. Some users claim the fixes work, others report otherwise. Either way I’m laughing. And so are many, many others.

As much as I’d like to give Rocksteady full credit for the unexpected tomfoolery, this type of anti-piracy measure isn’t the first of its kind.

On December 4, 2008, Gamasutra ran an interview with the PC Gaming Alliance’s Christian Svensson. In it, Svensson explained, among many things, the DRM implementation found in EA’s Mass Effect.

“They had tripwires all through that thing that basically would do an authorization check at certain activities… if any failed, it would trigger weapons overheating, or you’d level at a slower rate… it was really well thought-out, and really well-engineered.”

In March of the same year, developer/publisher Square Enix turned an epic role-playing game with dozens of hours of gameplay into a 20 minute title. Chris Kohler at Wired explained “Users of certain DS flash cards, like the popular R4 device, are reporting that after twenty minutes of playing Crystal Chronicles, they see the screen below and the game ends — just as if they were playing a demo.”

Just a few months later, the company held pirates captive on an eternal boat ride. According to dailytech.com,  game characters in Dragon Quest 5: Hand of the Heavenly Bride were unable to progress forward in the opening scene after boarding a boat. Square Enix later confirmed the “bug” saying ““If gamers are playing a pirated copy the ship from the opening scene will never reach port. This is an Anti-piracy measure we decided to implement.”

But there’s a side effect from these shenanigans. In the aforementioned Gamasutra article, Christian Svensson said “You have those pirates saying, ‘what kind of buggy POS is this?’ and then legit copies didn’t have that experience at all, but potential buyers say, ‘I don’t want to buy that buggy game,’ because they didn’t really message, or give people any awareness.”

Small publishers and/or new intellectual properties probably can’t afford the bad press, so they might not want to take this route. But for the majors like Eidos and Square Enix, it’s a good way to kill post-submission time and get some free press.

For the record: Piracy has positive uses any modern day publisher can’t ignore. In fact, the indies might want to take a serious look at pirating as an integral element of title distrubition.

This entry was posted by Kyle Stallock on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 1:34 pm and is filed under Gaming, Multimedia. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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