It appears that Ubisoft was taking itself rather seriously when it made the announcement that users would need “an active Internet connection to play the game, for all game modes” as part of its new digital rights management technique.
Early reports on advance copies of the first two games to apply the solution, namely Assassin’s Creed II PC and The Settlers 7 PC, show that upon the termination of the internet connection the game automatically shuts down.
In the case of Assassin’s Creed II the player will lose all progress since the last checkpoint in the event that they even briefly lose connection to Ubisoft’s servers.
This may pose a problem for South African gamers. Although the local broadband situation has improved immensely over the past year, with international bandwidth prices dropping as low at R14.50 per GB at times, there is still a large number of PC gamers who are without a reliable internet connection due to price or in lack of availability in their area. Furthermore, reports of intermittent disconnects an downtime are still common.
Even the broadband equipped members of the local gaming community may find Ubisoft’s addition troubling. The reality behind South African bandwidth is that, due to distance, latencies and pings are often higher than those experienced in first world nations. As a result errors are bound to occur from time to time between international servers and local gamers.
A locally hosted authentication server would help, but unfortunately the chances of something like this happening are very low.
According to the company “most upcoming Ubisoft PC games will make use of this system”.
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