Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time has finally come to PC, about five months after its initial release on consoles last October. Unfortunately, the PC version is exclusive to Battle.net and will require players to stay online at all times, despite the game not having any online functionality of any kind. As noted by Twitter user
@RibShark and confirmed by the r/pcgaming subreddit, if a player attempts to boot the game without being able to log in to Battle.net, it will close and force you to try again. Of course, players aren't only prevented from logging in to Battle.net if their own connection is down; on the release day for
Crash Bandicoot 4,
Battle.net servers were down for
two full hours, preventing players from playing the game they just purchased.
Always online requirements are often implemented as a form of DRM to prevent piracy. It doesn't appear to have helped in this case, however, as,
according to Crackwatch.com,
Crash Bandicoot 4 was cracked only a day after release. (We should also take this moment to remind readers that GBAtemp does not support or condone piracy, and any requests for or links to pirated content will be deleted and result in disciplinary action from the moderation team.)
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