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Thursday, 20 November 2014 10:23

Ubisoft Tries to Slam Pirates by leaving out the FOV slider in Far Cry 4... Too bad it seems to have Backfired

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The idea of hardcoding a flaw into a game to identify pirate is a pretty old one and one that has been used on more than one occasion. Ubisoft has done this with their most recent game Far Cry 4 by removing a control from the game. The control is the field of view (FOV) in the game. Apparently when the game was put out this control was missing and it was not given out until a patch that you can only get with a legally purchased copy of the game.

Ubisoft’s Australian Creative Director Alex Hutchinson, went on Twitter to make it clear to people complaining about this that they were giving away the fact that they were playing a pirated game.

“PC players! If you're online complaining about the lack of FOV control ... You pirated the game.”

The problem with his Twitter statement is that is caused more bad feelings as it appears the lack of the FOV slider was a flaw in the release of the game and not intentionally coded to ID pirates. According to a few comments in reply to Hutchinson’s tweet the FOV controls came as part of a patch that players get after installing the game if online. There were multiple people that have responded pointing out the flaw in Hutchinson’s damning statement including:

“What about them people from Aus and New Zealand? They got access to the game hours ago, and people who used VPN to get access”

“Could also be someone who decided to play offline can't it?”

One player commented on a rather common items these days “offline mode” saying: “setting Uplay to offline mode, unless it has has an update function within the game itself too, which I don't know.”

Hutchinson did not reply to that one and seemed to lose his steam as many other replies commented on the way Ubisoft views PC gamers as a whole. Some were very much to the point:

“good old Ubisoft, never missing an opportunity to shame PC gamers. Btw, that FOV slider sucks without actual numbers.”

“Clever. But maybe some of them pirated the game because they couldn't play the one they paid for thanks to Uplay (?)”

Sometimes you just cannot be that much of an ass to the community that supports you. As we pointed out with This War of Ours, there is a way to deal with the people that pirate games and trying to screw them over is not it. The people that hack the protection out of the games will find a way to fix this or will simply grab the patch and hack it too. This is all too common an occurrence to even put a dent in piracy. Right now all people see if Ubisoft trying to alienate PC gamers and not a clever or unique way to combat piracy. I guess they will never learn.

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Read 6024 times Last modified on Thursday, 20 November 2014 20:01
Sean Kalinich

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