Death to Online

Two interesting things happened this week. First, Ubisoft is promoting free premium versions of its upcoming games!

Here's how it works. New Ubisoft games will require you to be connected to the internet to play, while granting the following bonuses: you can upload your savegames, you can probably store your profile, and presumably host your unlocks and achievement cookies in the Ubicloud. I'm not actually sure on the bonuses -- I stopped reading after the first part, because this is the kind of game an idiot would buy. And because this is the kind of game an idiot would buy, I can only imagine Ubisoft want people to get the full, unencumbered, premium version from their favourite piracy site at no cost. Why else would they encourage them not buy their games?

Frankly, I don't have anything else to say about the matter, except that Ubisoft is clearly allergic to money and that Gamespy is what happens when games journalism dies. Then again, I'm always surprised by the deep, deep depths that gamers will sink to in order to have game publishers fuck them over, so perhaps the Ubidemon is making a genius move. Prove me wrong.

On a slightly related note, Monte Cristo is de-MMO-fying Cities XL after only three months. I like to think of Cities XL as single-player city-builder game wrapped up in social layer -- you built your city on your own, but you could trade with other cities and chat to other builders. It was like sitting in a sandbox with a bunch of other kids, where everyone natters away while building their little castles, occasionally swapping a spade for a bucket.

But although it was going in the right direction, it was taking the wrong path. This social layer was warm and kind of elegant (in principle), but it just wasn't anything like an MMO. Even though Monte Cristo were lovely guys that just wanted to make everyone happy, the subscription felt like a rort, especially when the game was buggy as hell and clearly incomplete.

I say this is 'slightly related' to the Ubidiot affair because they both represent a kind of misguided approach to online. In Ubi's case, it assumes people will be happy with just an online login and some half-interesting cloud 'features' but will overlook the fact that they can't leave the cloud. Monte Cristo thought they could just bolt on some online-ness -- something, anything, as long as it was online -- but it was rejected so strongly that it makes you wonder how it got to that stage in the first place.

Ultimately, online just isn't an automatic win. It doesn't guarantee fun, and it doesn't mean people will sell their souls. It's 2010 -- how can we still not get this?