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Pfft. I'll be rocking the singularity by then, my friend. WE WON'T NEED EYES WHERE I'M GOING.

...wait...

The online component in both (at least from what they have revealed about Destiny) is meant to ADD gameplay features NOT limit players' accessibility. I think the thing that's really killed Maxis/EA for example is the fact that people have hacked SimCity and shown that gameplay is not hampered by not being connected to their servers.

This makes no sense. How can it ADD gameplay features if there's no offline component? You just have one thing: the game features that are there.

I meant compared to the hypothetical scenario where it's an offline game instead.

I believe me means features that in always online's absence wouldn't be doable or hold up to the same quality.

To be perfectly honest, I'll be a but bummed if this is true, but I'm already playing a game the same way they are suggesting, Borderlands 2. There is zero chance I will ever play that game single player again. The co-op features and modes offer too much for me to feel in any way fulfilled playing solo. I play it whenever people are able, and it is a nice cadence to have a game that isn't vying for my all consumed attention all the time like the rest of the FPS's of today.

Lets hope there are at least provisions for offline competitive play. LAN parties will suffer otherwise.

~M

That's a fairly valid - though incomplete - definition, but it doesn't match up with what we know about Destiny. The game's always-online state is to allow the player access to the persistent world. It's an integral part of the game's functionality, not a restrictive measure.

I want to agree, and I totally see where you are coming from and have the same sentiment, but in practice I don't think this is so, simply because Microsoft or Sony is the one determining who can connect, and thus who can play. With something like say, Unreal Tournament, which is likewise nearly essential to play online, you can play regardless of what anybody from the industry says, either by connecting to your favorite private server, or by creating one yourself.

It doesn't sound like a private-server model would work for what Bungie has in mind for Destiny. You're comparing apples to oranges and telling me the apples are awful because they don't split into nice sections.

Sure, Destiny will be unplayable on a banned box, but that doesn't mean Destiny will have DRM, it means XBL has DRM.

And since XBL and PSN are integral parts of Destiny, then Destiny by extension has DRM.

However you put it, that DRM is a moot point when discussing Destiny itself, as any online Xbox or Playstation game will be subject to the same rights management.

Be it DRM or not, the measure isn't in place to control Destiny specifically.

Always being required to connect to the publisher's / developer's server seems to me to be the epitome of trying to control their game. If the game won't operate without a connection, and they mediate the connection, then they control who has access to the content.

Whether it's about piracy or not is a totally separate question. DRM can be used for much more than just stopping pirates.

Take out the R in DRM, and you're completely right. A constant connection to Bungie's server is absolutely about digitally managing the game - but I don't think you have any reason at this point to believe it's about managing the rights of ownership.

To bring Sim City back into the discussion, its online connection can be said to be DRM-driven because it had no necessary effect on gameplay. Destiny, from what litle we know, seems to be toward the other end of the spectrum: gameplay necessarily relying on a connection to a server. The game's all about exploring the galaxy with your friends. It simply wouldn't work without an internet connection. Stop reading so much into it until you have more to read.

In practice, of course, all it means is another hoop. Someone will figure out how it works, and the process of hacking/copying the game and modding the console will be extended to include telling the game it's OK to run even offline. Since we already know you'll be able to play Destiny solo, you won't actually be forced to use any of the online features.

If you're playing Destiny without using those features, the only thing the "always online" functionality does is... work as DRM. Until it's defeated. After that, all it does is inconvenience those who paid full price to play on a legitimate console. Those who pirated the game and play on a modded console, as usual, will barely notice.

This is one thing we don't know for sure though. If all the online features are for playing with other players than you are definitely right. But since from what they've said I understand the world will be constantly changing and that cannot be done with out being connected to their servers. Now I'm not necessarily arguing that doesn't make it DRM, but it does mean it's more than just keeping you connected just so they can prevent pirating or whatever.

That's not DRM, that's a banned box.

Yes, it is DRM. When you combine the XBL ban (regardless of the reason) with Destiny's online requirement, you have DRM-- a software restriction put in place to prevent you from doing something you'd otherwise be able to do.

Ok, regardless of platform, does DESTINY have DRM?

The question isn't can you banned from a platform and thus access to the game - the question is will the GAME block you from playing if you don't have the rights to that game?

If you have a pirated copy of Destiny on the PC, will you still be able to connect and play (always-on) or will it sense that you have a pirated copy and block you?

Always-online just means you have to connect to the server in order to play, and remain connected in order to play. The gameplay takes place on the server. If you want to play offline and it doesn't let you, that's not DRM, that's juhst how they created the game.

Do you have the RIGHT to play online - that is the question.

Emulators have long been an ethical and legal grey area.

This is a myth. Emulators are 100% legal. Distribution of BIOS files is 100% illegal. Distribution of game ROMS is 100% illegal. It's pretty simple and clear cut.

Yes, emulators are 100% legal, but they're also 100% useless without BIOS ROMs and games, so even when talking about the (tiny minority of) folks who are using them to run homebrew games there is still lawbreaking involved. Is it wrong to do this? There are arguments for and against, not least of which is historical preservation (when the companies involved clearly only care about this if there's money to be made). Ergo, it's an ethical grey area.

In order for it to be DRM, it needs to be designed with rights management in mind. The connection itself doesn't mean there's DRM in play. As I've said, of course there will be - but as you said, that's not a bad thing. Unless they do an online pass. Then it's kinda shitty.

But Destiny not only requires you to be online, but it requires you to be connected to a particular server run by the people developing / publishing the game. There's no other way to get around this. So if they don't want you playing, you can't connect, and you can't play, even if you have all the hardware to run the game code.

Wow, you really know a lot about how Destiny works! I wish I had your in with the developer; I certainly don't have anywhere this level of certainty about how Destiny's gonna be when it comes out!

I do not think you are understanding the point. First of all, we are talking about running game code and playing a game you have purchased. I don't think anything up there on your list is a game, nor do you purchase it.

No; I understand it perfectly well — the examples given just serve as analogies; you might not be able to buy ‘email’, but you could buy an email client (or more accurately, license an email client), and when you ‘purchase’ a copy of a game which operates in a client-server fashion, that's exactly what you're doing: purchasing a software license.

Notice how Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 - games which are all but useless offline, can be played online without any input from ID / Epic? If for whatever reason ID didn't want me playing Quake 3, they could do nothing about it since I already own the game, and I can just connect to whatever server I want, host my own, or run a LAN.

As I recall, this wasn't the case when Quake 3 was first released; in order to play online you needed a valid serial number, and the game would check if your serial number was valid when you attempted to connect to the server browser. Maybe that's changed subsequently (it's a pretty archaic system, after all) but even this doesn't constitute DRM — it's a pretty basic anti-piracy check.

Again, DRM is anything that the publisher or developer puts in place which gives them control over how folks can play the game, and / or gives them control over who can play their game, or otherwise prevents someone from playing the game on a system otherwise capable of executing the game code.

I agree with this. But I completely refute the suggestion that the design decision to go for a client-server architecture with Destiny was one led by the desire to implement any kind of DRM controls. When they sat down to decide what kind of game they wanted to make, ideas like making it use a persistent world, with seamless drift-in-drift-out cooperative multiplayer would have been on the whiteboard way before anything along the lines of ‘prevent people from playing the game for some reason’.

What reasons are you even envisaging that they'd have for preventing people from playing? It seems like a recurrent theme with you and DRM that it's about piracy, but I really don't think they think that's as big a deal as you think they do.

2. If you have something capable of executing the game code, and you need something, or need permission from the developer /publisher, then there is DRM.

‘Capable of executing the game code’ means what exactly in the context of a client-server based game? Are you including working connectivity to the server portion of the system in that equation? Or just the local client code itself? Because if the server ain't running, you ain't playing, and that ain't DRM.

As long as you're going to include the 'R' in the middle of that acronym, I am going to refuse to accept your definition - because RIGHTS management means the management of RIGHTS, explicitly, not implicitly. If your rights are being 'managed' as an incidental consequence of an always-on connection that was put in place for reasons other than RIGHTS management, DRM is not the appropriate term to use. Until you accept that, we really can't talk about this stuff.

Let me try to convince you.

Are CD keys DRM? Most people would say yes, since if you have a game disc, but no CD key, you can't play.

So you want to play online, and you can't do so without a CD key. The server checks your CD key to validate it, and if it's not valid or pirated or in use by someone else it refuses you a connection. DRM? Most people would say yes.

So explain how that's ANY different than connecting to a Destiny server. There's no CD key to validate, but the server still has to authenticate you and choose to accept the connection. It's the exact same thing. You can only connect because the server allows you to connect. The reasons might be different, but the exact same process is happening.

It does not matter what the intent is. All the matters is the result.

This is why you need to break things down to their core. I hope I showed you why they are the same situation, but feel free to dispute anything I just said, as I value the discussion and it will either strengthen or make me change my stance.

Agreed — also I suspect that their online play will have a more distributed peer-to-peer nature than games like Sim City and Diablo III, which should hopefully ease the burden of online play.

However, there is one potential issue that I'm concerned about (perhaps it's already been voiced) with Bungie that's unique to Destiny amongst all their titles so far: each game they've released has included a major offline campaign too, which for a lot of players will be the first thing they play. The difference in difficulty level that players choose, how much they choose to smell the roses etc. will also stagger how quickly these players finish the game before moving on to multiplayer, and so the sudden burst of players going online isn't nearly as dramatic as it was with a game where you have to be online to play at all.

I still theorize that they'll do what they (like not putting in Invasion for a couple weeks) and MMO's do to manage traffic, which is not enabling all online features until they know they are able to manage the traffic. They may disable random joining in Destiny until they know they can handle the traffic but you can still play with friends.