12 Classic Things Most Modern Video Games Are Missing

6. Copy Protection That Isn't Totally Obnoxious

Copy protection, or DRM as it's largely known these days, is one of the many banes of modern gaming, a system which punishes those who purchase games while doing little to deter pirates. Games such as SimCity and Diablo III insisted on persistent Internet connections in order to be played, and unsurprisingly, server issues left them both unplayable for a disgraceful period of time, by which point pirates had released a crack to bypass the online authentication process. It's a ridiculous system because anyone who pirated either of these games or, in fact, any game that requires a persistent connection, won't be subject to these checks: they will be patched out by whoever releases the game, and they'll be able to play the offline portion with greater fluidity than those who actually paid for it. Anti-piracy measures need to also ensure that they're not anti-consumer, and back in the day, there was a far simpler way of dealing with things, what with manual codes and code wheels. While the advent of photocopiers pretty much killed these dead eventually, they deterred plenty of pirates for a substantial period of time, and did absolutely nothing to penalise those who bought the game. In the age of the Internet, though, devs have yet to come up with a way of satisfying their need for control without p***ing players off. When it's less hassle to pirate a game than obtain it legitimately, something has gone horribly wrong.