Is it possible to load the game without an internet connection?

[TheGroobster]

title

[every1hasnames]

after you set ea app and steam(if you infact do purchase it on steam and not from ea app itself ofcourse) to offline mode sure.

mass effect trilogy has a drm requirement. which is the ea app. you have to have the ea app.

whether you purchase it on steam or from the ea app or anywhere else it may or may be sold for pc. in order to play mass effect legendary edition. you must have ea app downloaded and installed. (when you first download the game if you dont have the ea app installed you will be directed to download and install it. ea app is literally a hard requirement.


hard requirement means. must have.


which means you will have to set the drm to offline mode inorder to play the game offline.

[dinosauriac]

Seriously, what the hell? They patched this in later? I was genuinely impressed at how frictionless it was first time I played Legendary Edition when it originally released, and now they've added this nonsense?

2K's been doing the same terribleness with the BioShock games lately, why can't they just leave well enough alone? There's some Steam guides that go into working around the EA App requirement, but it's getting to be ridiculous that we need to do this for singleplayer titles.

[every1hasnames]

Originally posted by dinosauriac:

Seriously, what the hell? They patched this in later? I was genuinely impressed at how frictionless it was first time I played Legendary Edition when it originally released, and now they've added this nonsense?

2K's been doing the same terribleness with the BioShock games lately, why can't they just leave well enough alone? There's some Steam guides that go into working around the EA App requirement, but it's getting to be ridiculous that we need to do this for singleplayer titles.

firstly, yeah forced drm requirement wasnt a thing when mass effect legendary edition first released. They made ea app a hard requirement later on.



secondly because piracy. thats the reason why ea wont leave things be. This is not me saying forcing drms prevents a massive amount of piracy. I honestly have 0 clue as to how effective it is to battle piracy.



i am only saying piracy is the reason. if piracy didnt exist. if every single person payed for the video games they want to play. if there were 0 thieves in the world.

then when you purchase any game all it would take to play is loading the game.



if there were 0 thieves in the world. safes, bike locks, car alarms and any other theft preventive measure ever or will ever be invented would never be invented.
but thieves exist. and when a thief illegally downloads a video game from the internet without paying for it their called pirates.




and if you pay attention to it. piracy is a large enough problem that business are going to try and do something about it.



hence drm requirement.


again im not saying this ♥♥♥♥ works. i have 0 idea on how effective or inaffective it is.


piracy is the reason however some developers will chose to force a drm requirement. especially video game developers who are big enough that the push back would be next to impossible to bankrupt them. EA for example.

[TheMisled]

The irony is, ♥♥♥♥ like this only encourages piracy. Why pay for a game I can't play when offline when I can pirate it for free and play it anywhere

[barzai]

Originally posted by TheMisled:

The irony is, ♥♥♥♥ like this only encourages piracy. Why pay for a game I can't play when offline when I can pirate it for free and play it anywhere

Um...because you'd prefer not to think of yourself as a thief? A criminal? I mean, that's why *I* don't pirate stuff, at any rate. YMMV.

As the fella says in the video about "Are We The Baddies?" pirates may be cool but they're still not very nice.

Your piracy argument comes down to, hey, that guy locks his door, or his car, or his bike, so I'm gonna break in just to show him. To my thinking, that doesn't seem like a rational response. But again, YMMV.

As @every1hasnames has pointed out in great detail, this isn't exactly limited to games and DRM.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess you don't leave your door, your car or your bike unlocked when you go out--does that mean you think everyone who might come by is gonna rob you? No. It's just ordinary, simple, garden-variety prudence.

To be clear, I'm not defending any particular practice or any company. But I just wish that folks who claim that DRM "encourages piracy" would think about their own motivations in analogous situations.

[Mr_Faorry]

Originally posted by barzai:

Originally posted by TheMisled:

The irony is, ♥♥♥♥ like this only encourages piracy. Why pay for a game I can't play when offline when I can pirate it for free and play it anywhere

Um...because you'd prefer not to think of yourself as a thief? A criminal? I mean, that's why *I* don't pirate stuff, at any rate. YMMV.

As the fella says in the video about "Are We The Baddies?" pirates may be cool but they're still not very nice.

Your piracy argument comes down to, hey, that guy locks his door, or his car, or his bike, so I'm gonna break in just to show him. To my thinking, that doesn't seem like a rational response. But again, YMMV.

As @every1hasnames has pointed out in great detail, this isn't exactly limited to games and DRM.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess you don't leave your door, your car or your bike unlocked when you go out--does that mean you think everyone who might come by is gonna rob you? No. It's just ordinary, simple, garden-variety prudence.

To be clear, I'm not defending any particular practice or any company. But I just wish that folks who claim that DRM "encourages piracy" would think about their own motivations in analogous situations.

Nah it's a valid point.
When they put layers on layers of drm on it only makes only makes it more inconvenient for the people who pay since people who pirate it don't have to deal with the drm. Particularly when it's something like always online requirements in a singleplayer game or something like Denuvo which has been proven to shorten your storage lifespan.

And what separates it from other types of theft is the very same thing that drives people to be more toxic and rude over the internet than they would in real life. Anonymity, lack of risk, and the lack of visible consequences for the other. A lot of people will be willing to pirate something even if the idea of physical theft is something that never crosses their mind because of those things, and that will only increase if you give them more reasons to do so such as punishing them for buying a legitimate copy.
And to briefly be in defence of piracy here it is actually less harmful than it's physical counterpart since digital goods don't have an associated cost per individual item while physical ones do. You steal a physical copy of a game and they lose however much money in materials needed to print but you pirate a digital copy of a copy and they lose nothing.

I know what a lot of people do is they will buy a game but then download a pirated copy instead so as to not have to deal with drm. Because frankly drm does nothing to stop piracy, most games are still cracked day 1 anyway and some even get cracked pre-release, meanwhile games like Witcher 3 or anything else on GOG which have no DRM still sell in huge numbers despite lacking any piracy protection. All drm has done for years now is punish the paying customer.

[barzai]

Originally posted by Mr_Faorry:

Originally posted by barzai:

Um...because you'd prefer not to think of yourself as a thief? A criminal? I mean, that's why *I* don't pirate stuff, at any rate. YMMV.

As the fella says in the video about "Are We The Baddies?" pirates may be cool but they're still not very nice.

Your piracy argument comes down to, hey, that guy locks his door, or his car, or his bike, so I'm gonna break in just to show him. To my thinking, that doesn't seem like a rational response. But again, YMMV.

As @every1hasnames has pointed out in great detail, this isn't exactly limited to games and DRM.

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess you don't leave your door, your car or your bike unlocked when you go out--does that mean you think everyone who might come by is gonna rob you? No. It's just ordinary, simple, garden-variety prudence.

To be clear, I'm not defending any particular practice or any company. But I just wish that folks who claim that DRM "encourages piracy" would think about their own motivations in analogous situations.

Nah it's a valid point.
When they put layers on layers of drm on it only makes only makes it more inconvenient for the people who pay since people who pirate it don't have to deal with the drm. Particularly when it's something like always online requirements in a singleplayer game or something like Denuvo which has been proven to shorten your storage lifespan.

And what separates it from other types of theft is the very same thing that drives people to be more toxic and rude over the internet than they would in real life. Anonymity, lack of risk, and the lack of visible consequences for the other. A lot of people will be willing to pirate something even if the idea of physical theft is something that never crosses their mind because of those things, and that will only increase if you give them more reasons to do so such as punishing them for buying a legitimate copy.
And to briefly be in defence of piracy here it is actually less harmful than it's physical counterpart since digital goods don't have an associated cost per individual item while physical ones do. You steal a physical copy of a game and they lose however much money in materials needed to print but you pirate a digital copy of a copy and they lose nothing.

I know what a lot of people do is they will buy a game but then download a pirated copy instead so as to not have to deal with drm. Because frankly drm does nothing to stop piracy, most games are still cracked day 1 anyway and some even get cracked pre-release, meanwhile games like Witcher 3 or anything else on GOG which have no DRM still sell in huge numbers despite lacking any piracy protection. All drm has done for years now is punish the paying customer.

Well, those are certainly valid points, except for the idea that software piracy is without cost.

If you write a book, and someone else scans it and then gives away copies for free, do you suffer a loss?

If you come up with a brand-new idea for some whizbang doohickey and someone else copycats you and gives it away for free, do you suffer a loss?

The answer is, yes: you lose out on potential sales that you would have garnered in the absence of the violation of your property rights.

Now to be clear I'm not endorsing the nonsensical claims by software companies that each and every pirated copy costs them the value of the lost sale. Far from it: as someone who understands economics, I realize that everything happens at the margin.

However, even leaving aside the value of intellectual property as discussed above, you suffer a material loss merely through the fact that your effort in writing the book or inventing the gadget is devalued. If you invest your time and energy doing something, generally speaking you do so in the expectation of a material return--a future profit.

Does your labor have no value merely because it doesn't entail a material cost? I mean--you don't work for free, right? And if you earn a weekly paycheck and someone offers to do your job for free and you get laid off--surely it's obvious that you suffer a loss in consequence?

Just because there is no material cost to produce something doesn't mean it has no inherent value.

[WhateverWorks]

I just tested it to make sure, and yes you can launch Legendary Edition without an internet connection. You DO first need to put the EA app and Steam in offline mode. But after that the game works just fine when launched from the EA app without an internet connection.

[Mr_Faorry]

Originally posted by barzai:

Well, those are certainly valid points, except for the idea that software piracy is without cost.

If you write a book, and someone else scans it and then gives away copies for free, do you suffer a loss?

If you come up with a brand-new idea for some whizbang doohickey and someone else copycats you and gives it away for free, do you suffer a loss?

The answer is, yes: you lose out on potential sales that you would have garnered in the absence of the violation of your property rights.

Now to be clear I'm not endorsing the nonsensical claims by software companies that each and every pirated copy costs them the value of the lost sale. Far from it: as someone who understands economics, I realize that everything happens at the margin.

However, even leaving aside the value of intellectual property as discussed above, you suffer a material loss merely through the fact that your effort in writing the book or inventing the gadget is devalued. If you invest your time and energy doing something, generally speaking you do so in the expectation of a material return--a future profit.

Does your labor have no value merely because it doesn't entail a material cost? I mean--you don't work for free, right? And if you earn a weekly paycheck and someone offers to do your job for free and you get laid off--surely it's obvious that you suffer a loss in consequence?

Just because there is no material cost to produce something doesn't mean it has no inherent value.

I'm not saying they don't lose out on potential sales, that'd be silly, I'm just saying they don't spend money on something that they get no money back for. Not that piracy has no costs, but that it has less costs.

A physical copy takes lets say $5 to create the disk/ case that goes on the store shelf. If someone steals that physical copy from the store that's $5 they spent and aren't getting back.
A digital copy however has no production cost, so someone making a copy of that and hosting it on their website for free isn't making them lose money it's just not making them gain any either.
As a result piracy ends up being less bad for the company than shoplifting would be which was my point and that as such (along with other mentioned factors) some people who'd never consider shoplifting in their lives might end up being ok with pirating.

Everything you said just now is right, you just misunderstood what I was trying to say.

[barzai]

Originally posted by Mr_Faorry:

Originally posted by barzai:

Well, those are certainly valid points, except for the idea that software piracy is without cost.

If you write a book, and someone else scans it and then gives away copies for free, do you suffer a loss?

If you come up with a brand-new idea for some whizbang doohickey and someone else copycats you and gives it away for free, do you suffer a loss?

The answer is, yes: you lose out on potential sales that you would have garnered in the absence of the violation of your property rights.

Now to be clear I'm not endorsing the nonsensical claims by software companies that each and every pirated copy costs them the value of the lost sale. Far from it: as someone who understands economics, I realize that everything happens at the margin.

However, even leaving aside the value of intellectual property as discussed above, you suffer a material loss merely through the fact that your effort in writing the book or inventing the gadget is devalued. If you invest your time and energy doing something, generally speaking you do so in the expectation of a material return--a future profit.

Does your labor have no value merely because it doesn't entail a material cost? I mean--you don't work for free, right? And if you earn a weekly paycheck and someone offers to do your job for free and you get laid off--surely it's obvious that you suffer a loss in consequence?

Just because there is no material cost to produce something doesn't mean it has no inherent value.

I'm not saying they don't lose out on potential sales, that'd be silly, I'm just saying they don't spend money on something that they get no money back for. Not that piracy has no costs, but that it has less costs.

A physical copy takes lets say $5 to create the disk/ case that goes on the store shelf. If someone steals that physical copy from the store that's $5 they spent and aren't getting back.
A digital copy however has no production cost, so someone making a copy of that and hosting it on their website for free isn't making them lose money it's just not making them gain any either.
As a result piracy ends up being less bad for the company than shoplifting would be which was my point and that as such (along with other mentioned factors) some people who'd never consider shoplifting in their lives might end up being ok with pirating.

Everything you said just now is right, you just misunderstood what I was trying to say.

Fair enough.

But I think your argument is based on the common confusion that marginal cost is the same as average cost.

You are impeccably correct in arguing that the cost to produce an extra digital copy is (close to) zero, as compared with the marginal cost of producing a physical copy, but the average cost is only slightly lower, owing to the fact that most of the cost of bringing a game--or almost any other product, these days--to market is in the development and marketing phases of the product's life-cycle. And the only way to recoup those costs is--by selling copies.

If I spend six million dollars--roughly sixty man-years--developing a game, that's six million in costs that I have to recover somehow. At $60 a copy--and that's a dramatic oversimplification, as each and every step in the publisher-to-buyer chain has costs as well--the developer needs to sell 100,000 copies even if they cost him zero to produce just to break even.

If as you argue the cost of producing a physical copy is a relatively small amount, e.g. the $5 you suggest, that obviously factors into the equation, but it's swallowed up in the whole: in this scenario it would only add roughly ten percent to the total cost.

[funkynutz]

Originally posted by barzai:

The answer is, yes: you lose out on potential sales that you would have garnered in the absence of the violation of your property rights.

You're looking at it like a lawyer... It would be more accurate to say:

You potentially lose out on sales that may never have happened in the first place.

When demos stopped being common practice, and piracy became common place.... People resorted to pirating games to see if they liked them. Some of those pirates, then went on to buy legitimate copies of games they liked.

[every1hasnames]

Originally posted by funkynutz:

Originally posted by barzai:

The answer is, yes: you lose out on potential sales that you would have garnered in the absence of the violation of your property rights.

You're looking at it like a lawyer... It would be more accurate to say:

You potentially lose out on sales that may never have happened in the first place.

When demos stopped being common practice, and piracy became common place.... People resorted to pirating games to see if they liked them. Some of those pirates, then went on to buy legitimate copies of games they liked.

become a thief to check if something is worth purchasing.

i just call that being corrupt.



nothing like going to payless and stealing some shoes. wear them. then decide to go too payless and finally purchasing it after a week or two..


i highly doubt that thought process would have even entered peoples brains if the internet didnt exist and the fact that theres extremely more anonymity on the internet then a physical store. a place you have to go to. with cameras.


infact im pretty sure.


the internet would be the only place many of those people if not all would even think to attempt that practice. but who knows.
they maybe thieves for all i know. wait they are. because that is theft. point blank period. thinking like a lawyer or otherwise. its theft anyway you slice it. its dishonest anyway you slice it.

i hate to break this to you. but you have to purchase a video game you want to play. regardless of if you decide later you dont like that mofo.


not liking it doesnt magically make a price tag go away.
and sorry if a person does that. pirates a video game. to try it. and purchases it because they do like it. . they also bloody dont purchase video games because they dont like the game.


its still bloody thieving. any way you slice it.



so sure some pirates do go on to purchase the game they stole.


its countered by the times they didnt.


not really an argument.


they do infact steal and never pay for it.

[barzai]

Originally posted by funkynutz:

Originally posted by barzai:

The answer is, yes: you lose out on potential sales that you would have garnered in the absence of the violation of your property rights.

You're looking at it like a lawyer... It would be more accurate to say:

You potentially lose out on sales that may never have happened in the first place.

When demos stopped being common practice, and piracy became common place.... People resorted to pirating games to see if they liked them. Some of those pirates, then went on to buy legitimate copies of games they liked.

It would be more accurate to say I'm expressing myself like a lawyer. And I'm not a lawyer: but I know a great deal about IP rights, owing to my career buying guns and bombs for the Haze-Grey Navy.

But regardless of my mode of expression, taking possession of something without paying for it--be it physical or not--is...theft. A violation of the item owner's property rights. That's a fact, and no amount of euphemistic dressing up of this cut of mutton will be sufficient to allow it to pass as lamb.

And as far as "potentially"--I've stated clearly that I find the one-to-one correspondence between pirated copies and lost sales that the companies make to be nonsense on stilts. But calling it "loss of potential sales" doesn't deny the underlying reality here either.

Let's pretend for a moment that companies could wave their magic wands and make it outright impossible to pirate their games. That actually used to be true, back in the days of key disks and similar protections. Nowadays they could make you buy a dongle--a hardware key you'd have to physically plug into your machine and that wouldn't be easy to replicate. That actually happened back in the day, though in the world of business software rather than gaming.

Are you suggesting that in the outright impossibility of piracy, some people wouldn't then--however reluctantly--buy the game? Or are you suggesting that no one would buy the game if they couldn't play it without the dongle?

[pheonixhalo]

I dunno but EA updated something and now I can't even set it to offline mode and actually boot, and now I can't even get Legendary edition to launch with it online. I'm about to request a refund of Legendary Edition and Andromeda because neither game will work now and on top of that I have anew computer with absolutely nothing wrong with it or the setup, it's all EA! Everything was working fine two days ago. Now both games are complete trash to my PC. I intentionally setup everything to be played offline because I have almost no connection out here, and now they have made the games impossible to play for me! I am pissed that I wasted my money on this game and got shafted like this!@