Why does Arkham City encrypt their saves?

[A.Nonymous]

My computer crashed and burned. I'm in the process of restoring everything. No problem. Of all my saved games that I had to restore, my Arkham City saved games were by far the hardest and most difficult. I have no idea why, but the saved games are encrypted. So you need both the save and the encryption key. Does anyone have any idea why a game would actually encrypt it's saves? I can understand the reasoning behind DRM on a game even though I don't like, but I can't fathom why you'd DRM a game save. Who cares if I download a saved game and have 100% progress off the bat? (pun intended) I still bought the game.

 

[9to5cynic]

Yeah that's pretty strange. If the game files are protected, it wouldn't make any sense for the saves to be encrypted. Is AC one of those games that requires an online account or anything like that (akin to xbl or what bf3 uses)? If so, then I would guess it has to do with achievements and that type of progress.

Never heard of something like that, I'm just glad oblivion didn't do that, cuz then I would have had to start over like, four times O.O

I don't really see why the devs should car how you play the game, so long as it was bought... weird

 

[A.Nonymous]

It does. It uses Games for Windows Live. It also saves the game save to your My Documents folder (which is commonly backed up), but the encryption key to the AppData folder (less commonly backed up). Thus, you are left with a very real scenario where you have the game save, but not the encryption key. Apparently the encryption key is randomly generated each time the game is installed so if you don't have a backup of it, you're screwed.