Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts: HUGE DISAPPOINTMENT!
Well, it looks like the CoH series is about to go the way of the EE series.
Yep, thats right… you can’t share it at LAN parties.
The new “anti piracy” measures require that you login to an account as long as you have a network connection active. This means that we either disable the net connection or log on to a relic server for key verification. Either option keeps us from joining a game.
I get together on occasion with a bunch of friends for LAN parties. Generally, we all have copies of a game if we have been playing it for a while. If you know that you’ll be getting together with friends every month or so, you usually want to practice up with the featured games so that you don’t look like a fool.
Most game companies have been content to allow us to share the CD at a LAN party. If we want to play a game that we don’t own, we install it, start it, then pass the CD back to it’s owner. Since most games don’t allow you to start the game without the copy-protected CD in the drive, those who don’t actually own the game aren’t able to play it without the owner being present. This exposes all of us to the game, gives us all a chance to preview it, and eventually leads directly to sales. I like to call this CD-passing “LAN party mode” or “the LAN party shuffle".
Now we have a situation where I won’t be able to share my copy with another prospective buyer at my next LAN party. Since I don’t feel right forcing everyone to buy a copy of a game on my “say so", I’ll probably remove it from the list of games.
… but that’s not all… Not playing it at LAN parties will probably cause me to lose interest in it VERY fast. That’s exactly what happened to me with Empire Earth 2. That was the last LAN party game that disappointed me by removing itself from LAN parties. (by the way… how’s that working out for them? brisk pre-order sales of EE3? I think not)
To add to the confusion, there wasn’t a bit of warning that I would have to create an online account to use the game in single user mode. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. If there had been some kind of warning on the box, I would have been able to return it unopened. As of right now, I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t bought it.
Oh… I almost forgot… CoH 2 won’t co-exist with CoH. It won’t install until it uninstalls your copy of CoH. There may be some kind of logical explanation for this, but I can’t think of one. The end result is that I can’t even specify the old version of CoH for my next LAN party. It is no longer installed on my machine, and it will no longer be installed on any machine that gets “upgraded” (it really hurt to use the word “upgraded” there).
It’s really a shame when gaming companies change their tactics like this. It makes their customers feel like criminals before they even start the game. Color me disappointed.
