When I first heard mention of Hard Reset, I must say I was more than a little intrigued. A PC exclusive? Being released in the same year it was announced? With no multiplayer?(!) To quote my fellow eGamer writer, Alessandro, “Hard Reset must think it is from the 1990′s or something.” Best of all, there are (as yet) no announcements regarding any sort of retarded DRM function to screw legitimate buyers over while the hackers frolic in the comparative joys of convenience and illegality.
In short, it seems like Hard Reset’s developers may well have their heads screwed on right. While I am not quite optimistic enough to hold thumbs about the prospective awesomeness of this game just yet in terms of actually delivering to the market what they bloody well want (see: announcement of no LAN support a month before the release of Call of Duty 6), I am excited nonetheless to see how well this game does.
On paper, it seems to be set up to be a pirate’s playground:
On the other hand, this seems to be the first game in a while to (as I said earlier) really care about delivering an experience which their market can enjoy — an emphasis on visuals for the Graphics Whores, greater environmental interaction and destructibility, story-focused, quality-focused singleplayer campaign… I could go on, but you get the idea. If you want to find out more on all of this specific nonsense, check out this article.
Given these two aspects, Hard Reset seems to be a game which, upon its release, is going to do one of two things...
Thing 1: Get pirated to Jupiter and back, make an enormous loss, fail horribly, and get laughed at by all the consoletards (and Activision) because it dared to stick its neck out, only to have it chopped off. Viciously. With some sort of blunt implement. Probably a spoon or something.
Thing 2: Be (as Borat would say) great success. The PC market receives it with favour, no one decides to pirate it out of spite (as some have with titles such as Modern Warfare 2, where their most beloved elements, such as LAN support and the lean function, were removed) and it does pretty damn well… regardless of piracy.
I would say whether Hard Reset tends towards my oh-so-elaborately titled Thing 1 or Thing 2 is actually pretty damn important for us as the PC community and market.
You see, if Hard Reset just gets pirated a lot, makes an enormous loss and has to run home crying to its publisher, it would simply act as more ammunition in the metaphorical clip of those developers such as Activision (and, with the recent announcement of the DRM of Diablo 3, Blizzard too), who disregard the wants of their market under the justification of DRM or more general piracy prevention. Which is not that cool.
BUT! If Hard Reset doesn’t epic fail into the ground, does well and is well received by the community then we as the PC community don’t just receive a clip, it would be pretty full of ammunition as well.
Why?
Well, if a game which is almost ideally disposed to being pirated to ridiculous heights manages to succeed regardless of piracy, developers using the excuse of piracy to remove things like LAN play are going to have far less ground to stand on. We are going to be able to call them out on their decisions and maybe, just maybe, see a bit of positively inclined changed from our perspective.
Only time will tell, however, and with the release of Hard Reset due for sometime this year, the best thing we can do as the upstanding PC gaming community is to indoctrinate all of the pirates we know into actually purchasing the damn game. If that doesn’t happen, beat them to death with a blunt object. Preferably a chair in this case.
For legal reasons, however, you didn’t hear that last part from me.
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