It appears that the new owners have removed machine-specific DRM from RTW 2 based on issues they were having since the author’s passing. I’m looking forward to buying RTW 2 now (already have 1) since the DRM is what kept me away the first time.
More here:
Diego
That’s great news. It will probably push me off the fence, too.
oh, nice. I likely will get this now
It is the time of year when a not so young man’s thoughts turn to naval warfare. I have long waffled on getting this one, but since I have the original and I’m just not really interested in aircraft for the game, I will probably just play that. I have looked and looked for differences (other than the obvious aircraft!) between the two games, but although I’ve found people very nebulously saying the second game is “better” in many respects, I have never been able to find any indication of what other differences there may be.
Edit: a ha, the RTW2 manual addresses the changes towards the end. There are quite a few, although many (most?) have to do with aircraft, of course. For the rest it’s difficult for me to assess their impact in toto, but I think they are probably not enough for me to want to invest the extra $35 at present.
With the owner/operator of NWS passed away last year, the games under the NWS umbrella are moving on:
I’m not sure I understand. The developer of RtW3 is shown as “NWS” but the owner died? Does that mean that Matrix bought their assets?
Can you still get RtW2?
Parsing this out:
Chris Dean operated the digital (and physical?) storefront for NWS online. He passed away last December. That storefront and any assets it had are likely part of an estate and probate, etc, and knowing how slowly complex stuff like that moves, it may be a while before RtW2 is ever available again.
But Chris wasn’t the owner nor the designer/developer of RtW. And that person has now partnered with Matrix for RtW3, and for NWS releases in general.
I was just able to buy Rule the Waves 2 just fine. Is there a problem?
Perhaps not!
I jumped to the conclusion that if the person who ran the NWS storefront had died then RtW2 might not be available based on my previous experience with purchasing RtW1 which I believe had a hand emailed key and needed email interactions if you wanted to shift the install to a different computer. I might have been too pessimistic.
I did email them to see if I could recover my RTW1 from the original Yahoo store.
They did drop the DRM for RTW2 after Chris died.
If they dropped the DRM nonsense, I might be needing to make a purchase
I was also able to email them and get a new download of the first game along with a key, which I’d purchased via the Yahoo store years ago. Got a response within hours.