From my earliest days as a fan of gaming, I can remember one series standing out for allowing its players to act out the role of a megalomaniac demi-god/emperor, Sid Meier's Civilization. This adaptation of a board game quickly spawned a sequel, and Civ 2 and I shared a long romance that only ended due to reverse-compatibility issues between it and newer, hipper computers. Civilization 3 was notable due to my owning one of two mega-continents, and having a standing state of war with a four-kingdom alliance that dominated the second. Civilization Four was a new take, but one I sadly never got to embrace very well.
Most of all, however, was that in my odd taste I absolutely adored Activision's spin-off of the series, Civilization: Call to Power, as it allowed players to advance far beyond modern day (something Civ5 seems to allow) and due to its simplistic yet intricate gameplay. It was always the glowing weakness of the 4X genre of empire-building sim; as new ideas were introduced and old ones kept, series kept getting so bloated that entire games wound up virtually unworkable - see Master of Orion 3, a great idea which failed mostly because of its ambitions to do everything badly instead of some things excellently.
But if Civilization 5 promises a return to simpler pleasures, and if Gametrailer's review of Civilization V was far from alone in its excellent and geek-drool-inspiring commentary, why would I entitle this article as "unfortunate?" If the game itself is by all accounts great, what's the big problem?
Digital Rights Management in Civilization V.
The answer is Steam. Yes, that Steam. For reasons that can only be justified as Digital Rights Management (DRM) oriented, Firaxis and 2K Games decided it would be a brilliant idea to require players to install Steam and go online with it in order to activate it.
Having a long-standing dislike of Steam already, but having only one decent day to play the game before I took a vacation for the weekend, I grumbled and inserted the Civ V CD into my computer and installed Steam; I provided it with my product code, it was approved, and I clicked "install." I was informed that I would be downloading the game, not installing from the CD. I was stunned: Why spend the four-or-so hours I had to play the game downloading it? I tried to install the game again - and was again told I had to download the game, a process expected to take four hours.
This runs as a direct contradiction to 2KGames' own explanations of the installation process: When confronted with a hypothetical question about how Steam will differentiate between Boxed and Digital purchases, it states, "When you install from this disc, it will install Steam if necessary and then place all of the game files on to your hard drive, negating the need to download the game from the Internet." Clearly, this is not correct.
Its certainly a reasonable question to ask whether or not a game review should be based on one technical hiccup, or whether or not its fair to judge the game without actually playing it. Is it even responsible to have planned to play a game for four or five hours and then been brazen enough to write a review? Is it possible, even, that the reviewer simply made a procedural mistake in installment and ended up stuck with the less-convenient distribution mechanism? And isn't it downright petulant to complain about having to wait for something? (Probably)
The one Caveat with Sid Meier's Civlization V
The response, however, is this: Games are supposed to be relaxing, accessible, and easily played. There should never have been a requirement to install Steam to use a CD. There should never have been a requirement to input a product code into Steam, then download the game from it (especially as it should "know the copy is boxed," according to its distributors) when I have a CD in the drive that, supposedly, has all of the files. Was it so hard to make a game that can be popped into a CD drive, installed, and played
The game cannot be played without validating the user's copy upon installation, a common and irritating DRM tactic, forcing consumers to create Steam accounts to do so. Players without internet connections are inherently unable to play the game; this cuts customers out of the market, and undermines convenience and enjoyability - something that games should, by design and due to the purpose of relaxation, be. If I'd wanted to install the game from Steam I wouldn't have driven to the store to pick up the CD.
If companies are going to go forge insane and idiotic alliances - especially over a game about forging alliances - then the outcome of their DRM-spawned, convenience-undermining actions are not only a legitimate target for complaint, but an unnecessary one. Hopefully, next week, I'll be able to play the game - because it looks great in videos.
Jesse Pohlman - Jesse Pohlman is an avid writer and a researcher of pretty much anything. His latest novel, Physics Incarnate, is available for Kindle.
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