I've been talking to some friends who've pirated the game and checked up on the torrent sites to see what what and it seems the game is indeed NOT cracked. A person who's downloaded it can get in-game, but once they first get into the Animus, they get a white screen forever. The only way to get past this is finding a save that's already beaten the game and put it in your save folder, but at that point, it's pointless playing cause everything is unlocked, can't play the story missions, etc. You can just run around and kill people. So, sure it is getting pirated, but they certainly can't play it right. Has to be one of the first games in a long while that hasn't been cracked already a week after release. Though the "always have to be connected to the Internet" is annoying to paying customers, it seems to be working to detract pirates from playing, not pirating. Ubisoft might be on to something here. They only need to find a way to not have to be always connected to play an SP game and should be good, though that'll be probably hard since it's probably one of the key points of the DRM for SP games at least.
Personally, I'll probably be purchasing it at some point when a slight price drop comes to the game, but the being always connected to the internet doesn't bother me so much. People were complaining about the Ubi servers going down and such (which was cause of DDoS attacks of pirates and whiners :roll:), but they seem to forget Steam was exactly the same back with HL2's launch and such. It took it a while for to get where it's at. Also, when you think about it. Steam as a DRM is not that different from Ubi's solution. I mean, yeah, people defend Steam by saying there's offline mode, but honestly when has that ever worked? It worked 1 out of 3 times and only just recently they fixed it to work 100% (haven't checked though). Before even playing a game on Steam it has to be authenticated on the internet and when newer games get released, it happens that you can't even access your SP games because it says "This game is unavailable right now. Please try again later." or not to mention that for non Valve games, you sometimes get the patch much later than the rest of the internet. Steam isn't perfect, but we've come to live with it and love it since it's been here so long, it's grown on us and is pretty convenient despite it's few hiccups. In the end, I'd say give Ubisoft's DRM solution time to grow. It can't get everything right, right off the bat.
(Sorry for bumping, but got into an argument about this with a couple of friends at school and it got me thinking about it and I was thinking we could further discuss it here. They were pretty adamant about Steam being a godsend and weren't listening at all to what I was saying :/)
). I still pirate a few ds game now and then, mostly due to the fact they are too expensive for what they are (mostly amateur'ish titles) and because R4 is sooo convenient. I still buy the ones I like the most though, like Pokemon and Animal Crossing.
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