The game's got some bugs, too. Once, it crashed hard, offering to send an error report. Another time I was adjusting some video settings and the whole thing disappeared off my screen, with no errors or anything. Later in the game, I actually fell through the floor inside a building, and dropped to my death in the ethereal realm outside the intended game world. I imagine a patch is inevitable. Maybe said patch will get rid of the DRM as well.
Ah yes, the extremely hot and spiky topic of the Digital Rights Management (DRM) on the software. Electronic Arts (the game's publisher) loves their DRM lately, and caught more headlines than they probably would have liked with the DRM in Spore's limited activations and other problems. The same red flags have gone up with Warhead (and people are giving it terrible reviews on Amazon to try to kill it, just like they did with Spore), but here's what I've seen first-hand. First, the Warhead FAQ says you're allowed unlimited installs on five unique PC configurations. This means that unless you change out your motherboard or some other huge chunk of the system's hardware, you can remove and reinstall the game an unlimited number of times on that machine, and any four others of your choosing. Should you manage somehow to go over that limit in a legitimate fashion, contact EA support to get more activations by running an "activation removal tool" they will provide. I recently went round with EA's support over problems installing and activating Battlefield 2: Complete Collection, and while it took a while to get all the info I wanted and their system was needlessly convoluted, they did the job competently more or less. I'm not terribly worried about them trying to screw me over on activations or installations.
The actual process of installing Warhead took a while (5GB+ to install, I'm not surprised), and the "activation" took place immediately after the installation, all automated. I had to put in the CD serial key during the installation, something Crytek said wouldn't be required except for online play, but I don't really care since I have to do that with most games anyway.
The more troubling thing is that SecuROM 7 supposedly installs silently with the game. Opinions of the program run from "I'm annoyed that it's there, but it doesn't really do much" to "OMG, it's the next StarForce!" which was a bit of disc anti-copy software reported to have damaged CD- and DVD-ROM drives of users. StarForce gained such negative notoriety and so many boycotts were put against products that employed it that publishers finally caved and stopped dealing with the StarForce DRM entirely.
Article comments
1 - Mark Buckingham
Speaking of EA and their obsession with DRM, this showed up in a Google ad:
SecuROM Investigation
I can't verify it, and I'm not suggesting you necessarily get involved. Just found it interesting. I'd love to know if this is legit and whether anyone hears more about it down the road.