If you have bought Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII on Steam, you may want to know that you have to be connected online all the time to play it.
The game’s requirement says: “Steam Cloud needs to be active in order to start this game“. This notification also pops up if you try and launch the game while you are offline too.
It feels like this requirement is some sort of always-online DRM. Lightning Returns: Final Fantasy XIII was released on PS3 and Xbox 360 a few years ago, but those versions didn’t require you to be online all the time.
The weirder part is that this game is a single player RPG. There are no online multiplayer modes whatsoever. The requirement to activate the Steam Cloud and to stay online seems a bit unnecessary.
The same thing can be seen about the recent racing games of The Crew and Need for Speed. Both games have single player campaigns, yet require players to always be online for some reason.
Whether or not Square Enix is going to patch this requirement out remains to be seen. It’s just odd that being always-online is needed. The game is not a MMORPG or has any major multiplayer features.
