Ubisoft caught some serious flak from the gaming community last year over its controversial DRM scheme, which saw some of its titles requiring constant authentication with the company's servers in order to play them - even in single player mode. Even more so gamers were up in arms when those servers inevitably crashed and kept many customers from playing legally purchased copies of games such as Assassin's Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5.
Acknowledging these concerns Ubisfot scrapped the system for the release of the PC version of real-time strategy game RUSE, developed by Eugen Systems, and now it seems that they are taking some retroactive steps to scale back their anti-piracy system and make it less annoying. Although Ubisoft has not issued an official announcement, users began noticing that a constant and uninterrupted online connection was no longer necessary in Assassin's Creed 2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction after a patch was deployed over the holiday week. We'll see if other of their PC titles follow suit.
Users are still required to have an Internet connection to authenticate when the game boots, though. Ubisoft had previously stated that its DRM would still be used most of its in-house PC games, so we're not sure of they're backing down on their plans or simply lowering restrictions on games that pass a certain age, as TheSixthAxis suggests.