Armello might be described as 100% Orange Juice, except more complicated and furry. That is, it's a game where four people compete for a few different paths to victory, can opt to attack each other or avoid each other, and can use cards to mess with the rules of the game. I have mixed feelings about the game itself; its mechanics are interesting but it lacks the simple flow of something like 100% Orange Juice, and there are unsatisfying balance issuse (like how combats often result in mutual kills due to attack being so much easier to power up than defense.)
But in this essay I'd like to talk about the version of Armello available on GOG's servers, though not its storefront. Armello has the unpleasant distinction of being one of the few games removed from GOG not due to problems with rights, but rather due to violantions of the DRM policy. Honestly Armello's sins are minor compared to many things on GOG now; it really was DRM free, but the issue was that the version on GOG was notably inferior to the one on Steam. It's updates were way behind, and the expansion/DLC material wasn't coming to GOG despite being on Steam for a while. This included crowdfunding backer DLC, which people were pretty annoyed to not get. At first they compromised by renaming it "Armello: DRM Free Edition" which was just a way to say that they'd never update it again, but this angered the community enough that GOG removed it entirely and offered refunds to anyone who had purchased it at any time.
If, like me, you didn't get a refund, you would still be able to get the last version available for sale. And this ended up being quite an interesting version of the game.
The discoveries made appear on these two threads on GOG's forums. Before you get too far into reading them you might want a bit of context. The discoveries were made due to the half-assed way the game was ported to GOG. This wasn't really what got the game axed, but honestly it should have been. The game is designred around Steamworks. For example, your name in the game is locked to your Steam community name and you change the language by changing the language on Steam. This is honestly kind of dumb even on Steam, but it can't work on a DRM free separate program. So what they did was have the game set these settings on install. Your name would be taken from your window account's name, and your language would be selected from your computer's locale. Lucky that the online matchmaking for the GOG version was always dead, or plenty of people would have doxed themselves by revealing their names, if they used their name for their account.
But the bigger issue was with the language. You see, there are plenty of people who run in one locale but prefer reading a different language. Most commonly this is people using an English speaking locale for compatibility reasons but actually having a different native tongue. They would be locked into English on their install. And "locked in" is the right terminology, because there was no way to change languages short of uninstalling and reinstalling the game under a different locale. Same thing with your name. After all, these were handled by Steam in the original release, so they never bothered to put in menu options to control this stuff.
To make matters worse, in the final GOG version of the game some change was made that stopped progression. This might have happened from them linking progression to achievements in the Steam release. In the game you get different starting bonuses from rings, and you can earn more possbilities by winning in certain ways, having a large win total, etc. But in the last GOG version these rings would remain locked even if you did those things. However, if you had unlocked them on a previous version then updated, they would remain unlocked.
Both of these things led to people to start digging into the hex code of the game, looking for where the language and ring options were stored. And they found the locations, as detailed in the first thread on the GOG forums. But somehow in the course of this, they found other options. Basically they stumbled across a "set DLC" variable. That is, every version distributed on GOG had all the DLC, and you simply needed to put in the right variable value to get access to it. Want the new seasons maps? It's as simple as changing a hex value. This was almost certainly the real reason that the game was stalled on GOG; the developers realized that they had no control over DLC security. On Steam they could enforce things through DRM; most likely the game checks the DLC variable value vs. Steam Purchase information before allowing the game to start. But on a truly DRM game, there is nothing to stop you from simply flipping the value.
Of course, the game could have properly controlled the DRM the old fashioned way; by not distributing the files (such as models, game logic, etc.) to people who did not purchase the DLC. From the lazy way that names and languages were implemented, it was of course not likely that the Armello devs would go down this route. And to be honest, people were messing this up even before widespread online distribution. I remember that there was a patch for Heroes of Might and Magic 3: Armageddon's Blade that accidentally added the combination objects from The Shadow of Death expansion. You couldn't add them as map objects, but if you collected the component parts, you would be able to put them together into the corresponding artifact. This was even possible for the Statue of Legion, which required five miscellaneous slots. There were only four miscelleaneous slots before Shadow of Death, but the patch accidentally added a hidden fifth slot; if you had four artifacts and picked up another one it would go in the hidden slot (though you'd never be able to remove it.) I never updated the game again after this patch to keep these features, and I know other people did too since some Armageddon's Blade maps give you instructions for how to put these artifacts together.
Anyway, let's get back to Armello. I find the state of the game now fascinating for a variety of reasons. The first is that you can basically get two and a half expansions for free (I'll get to the "half" in a bit.) For example, let's take a look at the character select:
You can see the name "Fuchs" locked in in several places; that is my account name though not my real name. But if it was, I just would have doxed myself. However, in terms of the new DLC, the character selected (Scarlet the Bandit King) is from the Bandit Clan DLC. The base game only includes the left eight characters, so my selection is double what it "should" be. As a side note, I don't consider this piracy for two reasons: the first is that the Armello devs put this into the game. I didn't have to download any additional files to make it look like this. The second is that this is only possible on a version of the game which is not avaialble for sale, and as far as I can tell hasn't been archived in any obvious spot. So this trick is useless to the vast majority of the people interested in the game, hence there's no way it could drain sales.
It should be stressed that these heroes are (almost) complete in the game. For example, Scarlet does not just have a player model and portrait, but she also has battle animations, which are handled completely separately.
Simlarly each character has proper animations, sounds, etc. The aforementioned rings are different clan by clan (wolves, rabbits, etc.) The Bandit Clan heroes like Scarlet constitute a new clan, and they get seprate rings which are fully implemented. In fact, the "Usurper Heroes" (the ones added to the existing clans) are fully implemented with no problems whatsoever. The Bandit Clan heroes do have some gaps, which is why I said that this is two and a half expansions. (The other expansion is the Seasons expansion, which adds new gameboards for each season.) For example as you can see from the character select screen Scarlet is supposed to gain a card every time she frees a settlement, but this does not happen. She essentially has no ability. Similarly the badger guard is supposed to be able to swap places with royal guards instead of fighting them, which doesn't happen. The otter is supposed to get more attack according to his bounty level; you get the notification for this, but not the attack. The squirrel is supposed to be able to escape more easily and steal a card when she does; she does get the bonus to escaping, but doesn't get the card. So the bandit heroes have the proper animations, stats, etc. but their abilities aren't properly implemented. This code is flat out not in the game, so it can't be enabled by hex editing.
This brings me to another thing that I find fascinating about all of this. The GOG version provides a snapshot of where they were. Clearly they had finished with the first two DLC expansions, but had decided to not put them on GOG. I wouldn't be surprised if someone figured out that you could enable them through hex editing and they just hoped no one would figure it out (and after all, it wasn't until after the game was delisted that people did figure it out.) Eventually they must have made the decision to bail on GOG completely, since otherwise their updates would have just put more and more "free" DLC information. The decision was made before the Bandit Clan DLC was finished, hence the missing abilities. This also suggests that the devs were putting out information for upcoming DLC in the Steam releases too, just trusting the DLC to hide it. But if you're a data miner looking for information abut expansions, that's good to know.
If you go back again to the character select screen, note that there is the word "classic" over a die. This is supposed to be a place to select what die you want to use. In the Steam version of the game they have in fact put tons of alternate dice; it's one of the main "gacha" mechanics. The GOG version doesn't have any separate dice to choose from aside the classic, so that doesn't do anything in this version. But we can see that at this stage they were planning to put in dice. This might have been another reason for them to want to "freeze" the GOG version; players would have been able to edit their files to get whatever dice they wanted. Since dice don't cost anything this definitely isn't piracy, but it would destroy their "gacha" method of trying to keep players playing.
All in all there's a lot of neat things to see in this version of the game, and unfortunately it's only available to people who purchased the game in an extremely narrow window and decided to not get a refund.
July 25, 2023