Yo MyD. The UK version definitely doesn't employ StarForce or anything quite as invasive. The German version of the game uses TAGES, and I think the UK version uses X-Prot. I can't say I know much about X-Prot, but as far as I could see from the game is it's not abusive or irritating in any way.
From what I've read online, a few people seem to complain about TAGES, but nothing like the level of complaints about StarForce. Mostly just people complaining that they can't run the game without the disc, or they can't find NoCD cracks. I generally use cracks or mini-images, because I find it annoying having to put the disc in every time I wanna load the game.
CD Media World has a pretty decent description of TAGES.
The only game I've played that uses TAGES was Fahrenheit (a.k.a. Indigo Prophecy). I'm pretty sure the UK version of Gothic 3 doesn't use TAGES though. I don't know much about the US version, but from what I've been hearing/reading people are filling out petitions to remove StarForce, which would suggest that it may have SF. Shitty.
I've looked around on the Net. The petition was done before-hand, before G3's release. Apparently, they sent it to JoWood and Piranha Bytes -- b/c JoWood has been known to use StarForce in the past and didn't want them using it for G3. Funny enough, even PB's lead programmer, Kai, signed the petition even! LOL. So, this all prompted them to talk w/ JoWood about getting a different CR Protection -- which was planned to be Securom. But, ti doesn't look like all editions got Securom.
From what I been reading, looks like the UK Edition has TAGES, while the NA edition might have SecuRom.
Though, someone has said that they believe both editions have TAGES.
So, hell -- I dunno', but at least it don't have StarForce. SecuROM, I've never had issues with. TAGES, doesn't sound like it's too horrible.
Seems G3 UK Edition doesn't work on Win Vista w/out the latest 5.5 patch for TAGES' drivers, which you can get
here.
So, Mr. Xessive -- how was TAGES w/ Fahrenheit???
