Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed II may have the new DRM scheme by the time it's released on PC.

UPDATE | Good lord. They really have been as stupid as to boot you from the game if your internet connection drops. Short of the usual blog fury and forum explosions, I’m not sure how to treat this. Boycotting is not the answer — the game studios just see that sales are down on PC, assume piracy has won, and it gives them more excuses to slowly strangle the life out of the platform by focusing on console.

Last week, Ubisoft revealed its new DRM scheme, effectively doing away with CD checks by moving the tech online.

Ubisoft hasn’t had the best run with DRM, although fortunately this seems to be a small step in the right direction.

All you need is an ubi.com account, and to associate your game with that account. The technology then authenticates whenever you run the game, and syncs your save games online so you can transfer between machines, or install the game later and still have access.

In short, Ubisoft is doing its best to mimic Steam. It will be fascinating to see if Ubisoft eventually takes it one step further, cutting out the middle man and selling titles direct.

As usual, there are a few troubling things about the whole idea:

1. Double dipping DRM. This is speculative, but I’d hazard a guess Ubisoft titles sold through Steam and other digital distribution platforms will likely still require an ubi.com login, forcing a pointless double-dip DRM process akin to the GFWL games on Steam, or the GTA IV Securom/GFWL/Rockstar Social Club fiasco.
2. Destroying the game experience. A “permanent online connection is required”, and if that is lost then “the game will pause while it tries to reconnect. If the Internet Connection is unable to resume you can continue the game from where you left off or from the last saved game.”  Interruption of the game and destroying the suspension of disbelief is unacceptable, especially if this event occurs at no fault of the player. At the most, the game should only check when it is first launched. If you’re going to make background checks, they need to be in the background. If a check fails, wait until the game process is terminated before enforcing a policy.
3. Mobile users are cut out. Pity the laptop gamer. If you don’t have WWAN or reception drops, too bad. Unlike Steam, there’s no way to set an “offline” mode.
4. We’re asked to trust the untrustworthy. If the service somehow disappears from existence, then Ubisoft “will create a patch for the game so that the core game play will not be affected.” Which is all very nice, but Ubisoft hasn’t exactly established itself as a shining knight of consumer favour. Its version of  Beyond Good and Evil on Steam and GoodOldGames requires a lot of system tweaking to even get working properly on modern systems, despite selling for US$9.99. Prince of Persia Sands of Time, Two Thrones and Warrior Within require you to turn off fog in order to be able to see anything, otherwise it just turns the screen white. These titles are also selling for US$9.99 on Steam. All should be considered broken goods, and a portent for how Ubisoft treats its old code with new customers.
5. Growing pains. It took Steam years to become the reliable service it is today. I suspect we’ll see a few reports of Ubisoft’s servers being unable to cope with the load in the early days of the scheme’s release.

All this is summed up with the remarkably sheltered comment of Brett Wilkinson, Ubisoft’s Director of Customer Support, who states: “We think most people are going to be fine with it. Most people are always connected to an Internet connection”.

Who are these “people”? Brett, you might want to take a look at the most recent internet penetration stats (at the time of writing, 25.6% world wide), or at the very least adjust your sentence. Perhaps a more accurate statement would be: “The bulk of our sales come from densely populated cities with always-on internet connections, and as a business, we follow where the dollar goes”.

At least it’d be honest.

No doubt Jade would be unimpressed with her treatment

Sometimes publishers don’t bother updating old games before they put them on Steam. They just upload and watch the money come in, ignoring the complaints as the game fails to run optimally on modern systems.

Ubisoft sure screwed Beyond Good and Evil up in this fashion, from texture issues, to performance problems, to audio synch screw ups. The fact that they sell this broken version on both Steam and GoodOldGames is appalling. Thankfully there’s a few steps you can take to make things friendlier, but you’ll have to accept lower graphical detail and some textures, like the moon in the sky, will always flicker.

Firstly, if the game claims it’s not installed properly, you’ll need to edit the registry.

1. Run regedit.
2. Browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Ubisoft\Beyond Good & Evil. If the key doesn’t exist, create it.
3. Create a new String Value and call it Install Path. Set the value to where Beyond Good and Evil is installed (e.g. C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\beyond good and evil).
4. Restart Steam and the game should now launch settings application.

If it’s loading the game, here’s how to fix some of the performance issues:

1. Run the SettingsApplication.exe file from Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\beyond good and evil. Select the Advanced Settings tab.
2. Check Manual compatibility settings. Deselect HW Vertex Processing, Fastflip and Triple-buffering. This should fix the majority of graphical glitches, although comes at the cost of slowdown. You’ll still get the occasional texture flicker.
3. If you own an Nvidia card, move the Water detail slider to Low to fix the performance issues in the city. Setting Shadows quality to Low and Antialiasing to Off should also help the overall game. These settings should run the game comfortably on a GeForce GTX 275.
   

   Yes, against all your better judgement, you need to turn things down or off.

4. If you own an ATI card, things aren’t quite as rough, although you will be nagged at every launch about out of date drivers. You’ll need to take AA down a couple of notches so particles don’t slow the game down, but in testing a Radeon HD 5870 handled the game fine with the AA dialed back two notches at 2560×1600.
   

   ATI users are a bit better off, but will get nagged about driver updates at every launch.

5. If you have a multicore PC, you may experience audio synch issues. To fix, upon running the game Alt+Tab out and invoke Windows Task Manager by pressing Ctrl+Shift+Esc. Go to the Processes tab, select BGE.exe,  right click and choose Set Affinity. Deselect everything except CPU 0. Return to the game and begin playing.
   

   Setting affinity for BGE.exe

If you don’t want to set affinity every time you run Beyond Good and Evil, you can modify the .exe using a program called ImageCFG.

1. You’ll need to first right click on the Beyond Good and Evil entry in Steam, and choose Properties and then hit the Updates tab. Select Do not automatically update this game and click Close.
2. Download ImageCFG and copy it into your Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\beyond good and evil folder.
3. Open up a Command Prompt, browse to the above directory and use the following commands:

imagecfg -u bge.exe
imagecfg -a 0x1 bge.exe

The first command modifies the .exe to be uniprocessor only, the second defines the core affinity it should run on; in this case it’s been associated with CPU 0.

Using ImageCFG to modify BGE.exe to single core.

Enjoy this stylish and excellent old game.