Development Info Gothic III and StarForce break up

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Tags: Gothic III; Piranha Bytes

From the Gothic III forums comes a <a href=http://forum.jowood.de/showpost.php?p=1736910&postcount=29>post</a> in German explaining (according to a thankfully Anglicized <a href=http://bluesnews.com/cgi-bin/board.pl?action=viewthread&threadid=68817>Blue's News news post</a>) that the RPG three-quel is dumping the infamous copy protection scheme in favour of<blockquote>According to the post, the RPG sequel will have a protection scheme that will be more "gentle" (translated) to the end user.</blockquote>Some people like it rough, though.

Wonder if the Starforce guys are gonna urge people to pirate Gothic 3 like they did with that other game that dumped Starforce

You mean Galactic Civilizations 2?

Let's suppose they did urge people to pirate Gothic III -- They'd have a lot of angry Germans coming after them...

Theyt even posted in their own forums a torrent file for the pirated Galactic Civilizations II. That's low.

The original post even says "very gentle".

Some weeks ago members of the Jowood community decided to start a petition not only against Starforce but also against any other "Unacceptable Copy Protection Techniques" in Gothic 3. About 7000 people signed it so far, here is the english version:
http://mondgesaenge.de/PETITION/EN/

The info sounds as if previous Gothics had StarForce... funny, never heard about it and they gave me no problems.

I doubt it - i dont think Starforce was even in existence when Gothic I & II were released

Gothic 1 and 2 used their own properitary copy protection, AFAIK

No starforce can only be a good thing, the worry of that cancerware kept me on "Will prolly buy" now I know it wont be there I can move up to "Must buy even if I have to sell a kidney"

They'll prolly use tages or securom.

yeah well the publisher tested starforce with spellforce 2, but they had so mutch trouble with it (i was at the german spellforce board after its release ,and it was very bad their they had to give out codes to disable starforce to most people ) that they decided to drop it completly.

Good news. If it had Starfarce, I wouldn't be buying G3.

Oh yeah ? Like what ? A big red 'Piracy is not cool' sticker maybe ?
Starforce is the only effective copy protection system and that what's making it unpopular.
Gamers are hypocrits.

I hope you are being sarcastic ...

Besides, it's not "effective" anymore, ever since reloaded cracked it thoroughly and posted detailed instructions on how to do it.

some like it hot so lets turn up the heat till we fry

Right. 75% of SF protected games are still uncracked though and latest SF won't be cracked for a good few months in my opinion. All SF warez releases are lame ass clones that need to use USB optical drives without IDE drives or latest Daemon Tools+ a bunch of hider programs and blahblah. That's far beyond the average joe skill and that's what I call effective compared to other protection system that are bypassed with a mere crack or a mounted iso/mdf.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a SF fan and I condemn their bully attitude and lack of transparence. But that boycott stuff is a fraud. People who spit on SF are pirates who can't stand to HAVE to fork out $50 to play the damn game or to wait for months for a crack.
Be honest, nobody moans about safedisk, securom and all other protection systems that are usually cracked on 0day. Yes, people are hypocrits.

EDIT: I have a dozens of SF protected original games and I have a burner and burning software as well as Daemon Tools installed and I never had any problem with those games nor that I know of anyone having problem with SF (in RL).

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Bollocks. Koch Media and UbiSoft stopped implementing Starforce not because they love pirates or because some pirates threat to boycott stuff - it's the buying crowd who is annoyed.

Yeah. Or maybe because most of these protection systems don't dictate what you are allowed to install on your system to run the game, don't cause such an amount of trouble and don't make customers return the product, promising never to buy shit like this again from the involved publisher.

I never experienced any problem with SF so as far as I am concerned, this is bullshit.
Most importantly 'most of these protection systems' don't protect games effectively against copy so they are pointless anyway.
You guys make it sound like nine customers out of ten got their computer fucked up by SF but Ubisoft (who dropped SF like you said) clearly stated that they had minimal complaint about SF protected games (something like 0.2% of total customers for a game like Splinter Cell: PT which is a huge bestseller).
So, sorry but that still sounds like bad faith to me.

I have, I had a StarForce protected game that would reset my pc everytime I tried to load it, the last thing that would be displayed before it reset was "StarForce is checking the disc...(i didnt have time to read further ahead)" I admit this was 6 months ago and would guess they have fixed this problem. But I dont care if they have, once bitten twice shy.

After trying to install a Starforce game recently, my computer crashes 3/5 times every time I restart it. It would crash every single time after restarting until I uninstalled the game.

It's a load of bullshit and you're a retarded sheep if you support it.

Did you remove it separately?
http://www.glop.org/starforce/remove.php

I don't see how supporting SF makes someone a retarded sheep. The sheeps are rather all the idiots jumping on the 'boycott SF' bandwagon.
Anyway, I'm just being the devil's advocate here and people are now insulting me (as they tend to do when someone disagrees with them) so I think I'll stop here.
I think SF is intrusive and that SF staff is ruthless (see the GalCiv episode) as much as you do. I'm fed up of rebooting my system every time I install a SF protected game or demo and the 45s wait each time SF checks the CD makes me grind my teeth and finally, I AM frustrated when I can't play an 'extended demo' of the game (lame ass SFClone release...)
BUT, people don't want to see SF evolve into something more transparent and harmless for your system while remaining the most effective protection system. They want to see it DIE. The majority of people slandering SF are warezers and the problems some people experience with SF are just an excuse for them.

On topic, I'm rather pleased that Gothic won't be SF protected because the first two episodes where released in France months after the German and US versions. So I'll probably play a downloaded copy at first and will buy it when it's released at my local store. Is that theft ?