We had this problem with NWN1, and the same crap is happening again...

Serial keys are DRM. They are DRM. Has the world gotten so insane that Serial Keys, the most easily-broken, smack-to-the-face shut-out of software to legitimate buyers, are able to sneak in a so-called 'DRM-free' zone?

I buy from GOG and nowhere else because of the freedoms from those horrid chains. If you could get Ubisoft, the monarch of horrible software lock-in/deployment, to strip the DRM from AssCreed, why on this good green earth is this crap allowed?

The serial keys are not needed for solo play, but they are hard coded into the MP. There is no way to remove it. Many skilled hackers have tried. Combine this with Atari's loss of the D&D license and there is no longer a developer with the legal right to remove it.

The choice is deal with the inconvenience of the CD keys, or don't carry the games at all.

Personally I'd rather have access to the games.

The CD key issue is only an issue for users who want to abuse the license anyway.

If there are no longer 'rights' to change these items, who distributes these keys that we have to request manually (and unreliably?) - Getting my NWN official key was such an irritating nightmare that I ended up just getting warez copies just so I could run a LAN session.

At least it's with NWN, the crappier of the D&D CRPGs. The infinity engine titles are without scars.
I would greatly appreciate it if GOG would explicitly tell us these things on the product page as it directly violates their vision. It's so insulting to have this happen to me (only twice on GOG, but the humble bundles have pulled that shit a few times).

It's like a vegetarian coming to a vegetarian restaurant. They order, receive their food, and are then told 'by the way, there's chicken broth in this. It's only to thicken, it's no problem, yeah?'

The legal arbitration between Atari and WOtC allows Atari to continue to sell games it has already made, but it does not allow them to add new content or update them in any way other than to patch overtly broken parts of currently supported games (which would exclude both NWN and NWN2 in any event, as neither is officially supported any more). They must sell NWN and NWN2 as is. Any attempt to make them more competitive, to improve their marketability by changing them, would be a violation of WOtC's legal ownership of the DnD IP and make Atari financially liable for infringing on WOtC's copyright and trademark.

The need for a CD Key to use the MP elements of the game is clearly stated on the product description page for NWN1. Next time you might want to take a closer look at the menu before ordering. As for NWN2, it's a new product. I expect we'll see a similar notice added in fairly short order. In the meantime it's an understandable oversight.

I'm afraid I cannot locate any such announcement on the page.

[EDIT]: You ninja-edited your post. NWN2 not having it because it's a 'new' product doesn't excuse it.

I was editing while you were posting. It happens. As for what's excusable, that's in the eye of the consumer. I'm OK with it. If you continue to buy GoG games, you're ultimately OK with it, too. But the GoG team is pretty awesome. I'm confident that they just didn't think of it, and when they realize they are upsetting their customers they'll add a MP warning to the NWN2 product description. Rather than waving your little fists and railing at the community in a forum that GoG rarely visits, I would recommend contacting them by Email and suggesting it.

You have to manually request a CD-Key from GoG in order to play this online now? Where are these keys being generated from if the game is now unsupported by its original dev and publisher? Is there a limited amount?

I was going to buy it, but I don't want to if there's even a slim chance I won't receive a key/won't be able to play it online.

You only need to request Keys for NWN 1. NWN 2 already comes with them.

If you can store the key somewhere (e.g. in a text file) for later use and never have to contact the company to update it, then I disagree with your statement. DRM is Digital Restrictions Management and it is the management part that a fixed serial key is missing.

As long as you don't have to contact the company after receiving the key and don't need to connect to their servers, you can keep using fixed-serial-key software even after the company has vanished off the face of the earth (I have several programs in this category including security software). That is what qualifies software as DRM-free for me.

Fixed it for you.

You have very sad definitions and leeways as to what software restrictions are and are not.

If you are going to let a little thing like a multi character key stop ou from playing one of the best RPG's out there, then by all means, coontinue. You don't have to use if for single player, you don't have to authenticate to a server, it will work forever until the cows come home. In essence, you have no argument. But feel free to yamer on about it. :)

I just tested it out, I deleted the "nwncdkey.ini" file (a file which contains your CD keys in plain text) and ran the game. It asked for my CD key. I clicked cancel and it exited the game.

NWN had the CD check DRM (securom based) removed via official patch years before gog (because securom kept on making the game crash); heck it was before the Diamond Edition first came out on DVD... However it still retained cdkey dependency for online play, single player, and premium modules.

Online play: The master server has been taken down. As such the only way to play is for servers to be hacked (in a way shown in bioware forums) so as to use the CDKey as a user identification token. When you log in it shows you the characters associated with your key, there is no username and password and AFAIK it doesn't have to be a valid key, it just has to be a unique one. - Justified to keep. But it would be nice if the game was modified for direct connect online play to be smoother and use a login and password handled by the servers rather then CDkey (would require modifying the server code... note that the servers come with the diamond edition and all existing world servers are hosted by players not by companies)

Solo play: It still has the DRM for checking CDKeys fully intact and I don't see any justification for it. It is not a deal breaker (I still bought it after all)... but it is disappointing and I expected more from GOG.

Premium module play: Despite promising all the extras, only half the premium modules come with the GOG version... only those which had their DRM subdued by the kingmaker. The DRM is still there, it merely emulates a DRM server locally which makes authentication very rapid. However it is tied to the CDKey used to install them. As such, modifying the cdkey (such as changing it from the generic one that it installed with to the one given to you by GOG) prevents the premium modules from authenticating.

Yes, the DRM on the online play and the DRM on the premium modules is incompatible and you can only have one of them work at a time.

GOG did not remove a single IOTA of DRM from this game, they simply repackaged the diamond edition as is with all of its DRM methods intact. And the only bit that could actually be justified in keeping was the online play

The "nwncdkey.ini" for NWN2 doesn't contain any CD Keys. You need to add the Keys yourself, if you want to play multiplayer. For singleplayer, however, you don't need the Keys.

Everything in my post was discussing NWN1