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[Busted DLC]

About 30+ years ago I used to be a PC gamer. Consoles never really matched the experience I wanted from my gaming. Then PC's started to come in all sorts of shapes and flavours, their technology raced on and changed almost on a weekly basis and getting any game to run on your average PC became a chore. That's when I decided to be a console gamer. It was easy, it was painless, it was the very definition of plug-and-play.

Sega, Nintendo, Sony and recently Microsoft knew how to keep consoles that way and developers had  to abide by stringent compliance testing before their titles are allowed on these platforms. They still do. As someone who has been making games for his entire adult life, for over 25 years now, I can attest what to how these compliance regulations have been both a curse and a blessing. For all of the major stakeholders a "poor user experience" is taboo.

Bioware, one of my favourite developers, has managed to take my love of console gaming, the compliance testing on the 360 and - along with EA and Edge of Reality - flush that all down the toilet.

For the first time ever I find myself with a console game I've spent good money on rendered completely unplayable because of the encroaching of the online side of the technology. My staunchly single-player gaming experience with Dragon Age : Origins now needs to check with online server (online servers which, it transpires, rarely ever work) before I am allowed to play. When I had the original game and nothing more, the failure of these servers was not a major obstacle. However, by continuing to pay for additional downloadable content, I now find myself in a position where I can no longer play any part of the Dragon Age content I own.

After playing through the first hour or so of The Darkspawn Chronicles, any later attempts to restore my save game are met with an error message that has been oft reported on these forums;

Unable to load save game as the required downloadable content is not present on the selected storage device. Please insert a storage device containing the required downloadable content, or download thee downloadable content again.

This is followed by the phrase Embril's Many Pockets, which I believe is an item I have acquired from somewhere?

To cut a long rant a little shorter (and to avoid deconstruction of that appallingly structured message), I have only one storage device, my 360 HD. It houses all my Bioware content, a not inconsiderable amount in terms of footprint and financial expenditure, and always has done. Attempts to download the content again achieve nothing and it would appear this particular issue prevents me from progressing with my game. Worse still, this issue is now attached to EVERY saved game for the whole Dragon Age set of content. If I switch to my Awakenings save, the same message is returned. My Origins character too is stalled by the same problem. I have absolutely zero opportunity to use any of the content that I have paid for.

At the moment, under UK law at least, this product is no longer fit for the purpose for which I purchased it and is, therefore, in breach of the Sales of Goods Act of 1979. This applies at the very least to the main product (Origins) as it was not bought online, which is the only area of doubt in this case. However, most importantly of all, this product has severely broken many of the compliance testing standard of Microsoft, and really have no idea how something of this magnitude - basically causing a complete failure of the software - could have slipped through their QA departments unnoticed.

Now, in order to give Bioware the benefit of the doubt, I've checked through a number of forums in order to track down information on forthcoming patches and fixes (let's not get into why this is unacceptable in the PC market, let along the console market) but obviously, even if a 360 patch exists, this is not something that one can do without a level of automation. And for that we need the Dragon Age servers to be worked, and there seems negligible chance of that happening.

All I'd like to know is how this is being addressed and when is the deadline date for addressing it. If there is no obvious answer to these then I'd like to ask how I recoup the money spent on the products which are clearly no longer fit for the purpose for which they were sold.

Now, will there be an answer to this, or is my next stop Xbox Live themselves? I'm fortunate enough to know many of the senior people within the European arm of this part of Microsoft, and to be able to reach those with loud enough voices to make this an issue. It might prove amusing to see the result.

[switzki]

Busted DLC wrote...
Unable to load save game as the required downloadable content is not present on the selected storage device. Please insert a storage device containing the required downloadable content, or download thee downloadable content again. 
This is followed by the phrase Embril's Many Pockets, which I believe is an item I have acquired from somewhere?

Yes. Embri's Many Pockets is a reward unlocked by playing through DA:J (the flash game). You've almost certainly unlocked other items from the same content pack, but because of the ill-conceived many-to-one license model you don't have all the licenses for offline play.

Fortunately, there is a solution to your problem that should enable you to play DA:O while offline, with all of your DLC intact. Unfortunately, the solution requires you to connect to the DA servers and is somewhat arcane. You can read details in the following thread:

social.bioware.com/forum/1/topic/67/index/172548

I agree that it's a pretty appalling way to implement DLC for a single-player game with no real online component, and I have no idea how the game passed QA without at least one person trying to play with the DA servers offline. It seems like the game should be able to determine which licenses you're entitled to based on your purchase history and just fetch them for you.

[Busted DLC]

Now THAT solution is so much like every reason I stoopped playing PC games! :-) Thanks anyway.

And, of course, for me to do this the DA servers need to be up and running, and I genuinely cannot recall the last time I found them as such, so I'm still locked out.

Very poor design decisions and pretty dreadful execution all round. Unprecidented amonst a Bioware game and, for me, a real shame that they've succombed to the rather artifical need to add aa second layer of servers.

Oh, and just to add, I really don't mind playing the game online, offline or half-and-half. Any solution would be good if it meant I could actually play it in any form. Right now I have no options available to me.

Modifié par Busted DLC, 19 juillet 2010 - 10:32 .

[switzki]

Busted DLC wrote...
And, of course, for me to do this the DA servers need to be up and running, and I genuinely cannot recall the last time I found them as such, so I'm still locked out.

That is the worst part, actually. In order to prevent the problem, you need to do something obscure and mildly complicated before you even know there's a problem. Once you realize you don't have the offline licenses you need, you can't get them, because the servers that provide them to you are the same ones that authenticate your DLC when you don't have them. A better approach would be to (a) push the offline license to your box after a successful authentication or ( have a one-to-one license-to-data model. Instead, we currently have DRM that treats paying customers no different than the pirates, if the DA servers are unreachable for any reason.

Also, having that workaround stickied in the tech support forum so users could get all their licenses while the servers are online would be helpful, but after 8+ months I've given up hope of that happening.

Modifié par switzki, 20 juillet 2010 - 03:26 .

[Busted DLC]

After having just read another "workaround" that involves unplugging your console from the 'Net and resetting the clock to factory defaults, I must say I'm utterly amazed that something like this remains unaddressed, and that neither Bioware or EA have raised its priority in terms of required fixes.



Astounding really.