Same with wowhead or runescape wiki. Really kills the video game wonder.
Good news is that you can just ignore that if you want to. I recently played classic wow without any external tools and it was such a fun, adventurous experience!
I’ve long argued that games like Minecraft and Stardew Valley with their seeming inability to actually teach you the game have become far too overreliant on Wikis and walkthroughs. Minecraft for example: its highly unlikely you will naturally discover the path to “winning the game” and defeating the Ender Dragon. Its arcane nonsense.
Mine
Craft
Go to Hell
Go to the End
Kill the Dragon
The official Guide expects you to do this in ways that are 1 no longer possible and 2 rely on innate understanding of the physics of the game (specifically that beds explode when used outside the overworld [excuse me what the fuck how am I supposed to recognize that can be a weapon?]).
It is heavily implied in “Minecraft: Guide to The Nether and The End” (part of the official guidebook series published my mojang) that you’re meant to use beds to cheese the dragon. This is the easiest and most effective way to handle the Dragon, but its arcane nonsense, as stated in my previous comment t.
All of the Elden-Soulsborne games are like that but it never really bothered me. I would have missed tons of the game without the wiki as help, just because of how crazy their games are with hiding stuff
Those are what’s known as knowledge gated games, where your progression as a player is either wholly or mostly tied to your own personal knowledge of how the game world works. Indeed, many of the mechanics may make no sense due to being crude mockeries of how the real world works. But some of them have become so ingrained in the popular consciousness that developers of later Indie Crafty Survival Sandboxy games can rely on the notion that most players will reflexively begin their adventure by punching a tree, and can probably accurately guess what the crafting shape of a pickaxe will be. This is no doubt down to the Earth-shattering popularity of Minecraft itself.
If you ask me, these games refusing to handhold the player and letting them discover things for themselves is part of their appeal. Expecting to be able to dive right in and know everything right from the starting block really rather misses the point. You have to admit that if you’ve been playing, say, Minecraft since the alpha days, your experience and approach to the game if you spun up a new world right now would be vastly different from your first playthrough, and none of the wonder or sense of discovery would be present.
Gating progression by knowledge (byzantine knowledge though it may be, e.g. in the case of specifically knowing not only how to construct a portal out of obsidian but also activate it by lighting it on fire) mirrors real life in an ineffable way that skill or time/microtransaction/XP accrual gated games can’t.
Some games do both. For instance, ask any Dark Souls player. The Souls games are both knowledge gated and very, infamously, exasperatingly skill gated.
I actually played Noita before. I though I was doing pretty good by myself, managed to get quite deep. Then somebody told me about the outside map and all the parallel worlds and wow…
the thing about noita is that you think you’ve discovered the entire game and you’re impressed with how much there was to find, then you notice something and find another game to discover, then you watch a video on noita and realize you found roughly a fifth of the actual full game content
I’m gonna push back on this idea. Take Rimworld. It’s also a “have the wiki open” game. The game tells you how long plants take to mature, but there is a mechanic that plants “rest” a certain amount of time that isn’t mentioned anywhere, so the figure is just flat wrong for all plants by some factor (same factor for all plants). I love these types of games, but it’s not an excuse for relying on wikis to explain things.
I actually replayed runescape classic as Ironman recently and surprisingly most quests can be solved without the wiki! It’s takes much longer though but so much more fun. You get to explore the world more and its a really good world with most characters having some personality and little areas that have you’d never visit otherwise.
The more time passes, the more I feel Prey was one of the best games I’ve ever played. Can’t really feel bad for System Shock 3 not happening, Prey was the SS3 that I wanted.
I really hope Raph Colantonio’s new game delivers more immersive sim goodness upon this world, games with such reactivity are sorely missed.
I’ve only played parts of the first System Shock, so can’t speak of that or its remake until I finish it. But Prey’s very much a spiritual successor to System Shock 2, devs have said it themselves, and the similarities are a ton. Prey (2016) is still its own thing, different story, world etc., but the underlying immersive sim systems, the once again story of “you’re locked in this space station/ ship gone wrong and have to gradually progress through it while finding all its inhabitants mysteries” - it hits the same notes and it’s exactly what you’d want from a spiritual successor.
I think you’ll get a similar kick of the System Shock 2 remaster, the first one might be a tad more retro and limited even with the modern remake.
Absolutely love this game for a lot of the reasons you listed and more. They really give you a lot of tools to toy around with and solve problems your own way. I spent my first playthrough carrying turrets everywhere with me and setting up killzones to lure enemies into, spent another using my powers to blast the shit out of everything, and then yet another using the goo gun on just about everything I could. That goo gun seems lackluster at first but really is one hell of a useful tool. Black hole grenade things are awesome too, use them wisely to get a ton of good resources.
A lot of people did not like the mooncrash DLC but I found it enjoyable too. Its definitely different, with the way you need to replay and upgrade characters between who each have a different set of skills. The hazards change each playthrough but the map layout itself doesn’t. When you learn your way around its satisfying to do the whole thing in one run trying to get every character to escape. Just takes a different kind of planning. Maybe being on a timer messed people up,
The turrets are a lifesaver. Set up a firing line and bait the enemies into it. Maybe provide assistance fire with the Goo Gun and it makes quick work of everything.
I’m not big on rougelites, maybe I should give it a try though. It doesn’t seem like it’d be too expensive on sale
Maybe I should start a list of everything I’ve played. I’ve certainly got enough for a good list and I’ve saved everything I’ve 100% in a Steam list, so I’ve already got some of them tracked
Orbit data for the Ariane launch is now available. Here’s the Ariane trajectory to the disposal area in the Indian Ocean with impact around 0320 UTC Aug 13 on its second orbit. (Note the earlier pass southbound over Western Australia on its first orbit, about 0140 UTC)
On the other side of the planet, we see the launch trajectory north from French Guiana over the Atlantic and Labrador, circa 0040 UTC, and then on the second orbit over Colombia, Cuba, the eastern US and Ontario circa 0225-0240 UTC. The deorbit burn was at 0235 UTC, 800 km above Lake Superior
Minecraft absolutely deserves it. Especially through the educational versions that are really driving these specific numbers higher.
GTA V’s sales were impressive and it is one of the most recognized games even to non-gamers so it makes sense that it is up there. It’s also a good game. At least, single player. The online shit is kinda fucked for the sake of making profit.
Fortnite is inexplicable. I don’t think it is a terrible game, by all means, I just don’t understand why it is the most popular one in its genre. 🤷♂️
Fortnite is the master of brand based collabs. They aren’t afraid of mixing their ip with others or changing their game. They will change the map by adding a giant travis scott concert in the middle, or put a peter griffin character in game. A lot of other games are scared to add new things or put things unrelated into their games. I dont understand why people love having giant corporations shoved into their games but they do.
That’s part of it and it’s probably part of the staying power, sure. But I’m pretty sure it exploded before it started doing that. Iirc, quite soon after release, Ninja became one of the most popular streamers on twitch, breaking records and stuff and he even did a stream with Drake which at the time was the biggest stream ever. People were speculating even then that maybe epic paid Drake, but well… could just as easily have been just Drake being Drake.
As for why it got popular in the first place… I think it’s just being at the right time in the right place. There was Minecraft hunger games, h1z1, PUBG and probably a few other smaller ones. They were all quite popular and then Fortnite came along and made it more accessible and arguably more fun and stuff as well. A few of my friends used to try pretty much all the popular games, especially shooters. And besides CS, Fortnite was definitely the one that kept them engaged the longest. That’s just anecdotal, but well… if it worked on us, it’s probably worked on many.
Games dont belong in the kernel. Shit should have stayed in userspace. No, I dont care how many billions are on the line, games are not that important.
alternative: Games do not belong on computers that do non-game things.
Anyway, this is going to be resolved as soon as north korea finds out who many people have important stuff on PC they game on, and hack some hapless devs source to install a rootkit on 100m PCs via steam.
I don’t think you understand people don’t have money to buy one computer to work, one to play, or a console to play. People are cheap that way, when it comes to food or a gaming console they choose food.
You could also just not play games that think they are allowed to access the kernel at all. Seems safer, more affordable, and basically without downside. They aren’t even that good of games.
Yes because I truly love my shooters becoming more and more homogenized. Counter strike with hero abilities!?!? Oh my GOD let me spend 100’s of dollars on skins yes PLEASE Riot. Battlefield but it’s more like CoD? YES daddy DICE PLEASE spit in my mouth again, I love the taste.
You liking other type of games doesn’t mean all other games are shit. Most games are pretty basic. I mean csgo is generic as hell and Valorant improves the genre with abilities, good map design, proper character identities, and you say they make homogenized shit?
You not liking AAA games doesn’t mean they’re shit. There’s nothing wrong with making games that stick to a genre but do it perfectly
There isn’t a single character ability in Valorant that does not have an analog from League of Legends. The biggest hype surrounding BF6 is the fact that they’re bringing back a mechanic from BC2, and also that it’s smaller and more like CoD (I know, I played the beta). Yes, it’s homogenized garbage. Also no, they absolutely don’t do it perfectly, there are better tactical shooters against both titles. It is quite literally a video game fast food equivalent.
I’ve played both, granted I stopped playing valorant after 2 games because it’s fucking boring (for reference I stomped both games with +30 kills and a handful of deaths, dicking around with every gun) so I easily could be wrong about my assertion. You would be hard pressed to find a single character ability that doesn’t already exist in CS or LoL.
Edit: That isn’t even approaching the Overwatch comparisons. Like, you can argue that the games are fun — that’s entirely subjective. But seriously, Valorant isn’t homogenous? How many hero shooters exist? The fucking sniper is called the Operator.
Proof is in cheaters existing on day one of battlefield 6 open beta. Client side anti-cheat will never work. It’s good to have some basic preventative measures client-side, but server-side anti cheat is the only way to properly prevent cheaters.
Unfortunately companies keep investing in garbage client side anticheat that just pokes security holes into our machines.
Only Valve to my knowledge is investing money into their server side anti cheat, no other big player is to my knowledge.
It needs to be a mix. Have your clientside anti-cheat look for obvious attack vectors, have your serverside anti-cheat look for suspicious play, and let users report others. Then have humans review suspected cheaters and make the final call.
But that’s expensive, and off-the-shelf anti-cheat gives them someone else to blame.
I agree, there’s definitely some checks you can only do on the client and only some that work server-side. Ideally everything that can be checked on either, are checked.
Currently it’s just all wrong, the client-side can’t be relied upon as heavily as it is.
The benefit factor to the rootkits they install on our machines is nil. Just bloats our systems with garbage that is just waiting to be exploited by hackers.
You're viewing from the perspective of what would be best for the playerbase. These decisions are made based on what's the cheapest possible solution to have the playerbase shut up about cheaters so they wouldn't drive away potential customers.
I would think there’s money to gain by keeping your players engaged longer by having less cheaters, but I guess theres also an incentive to keep just enough cheaters that you can steadily ban them for more game sales (not that I think that’s happening, i hope not).
Anyways they take our money, we expect whats best for us, within reason of course.
I doubt the revenue from sales to cheaters is that significant compared to the risk of losing players. I think the simplest explanation is that catching cheaters is hard (read: expensive), so they’re happy with catching the most obvious cheaters with off the shelf solutions (i.e. the Pareto principle).
I refuse to play them. If they want kernel level anticheat, they can submit the source under the GPL to the Linux kernel devs for consideration, because that’s the only way I’d consider using it. No game is worth compromising my system’s security.
That’s only proof that it will never be enough to stop all cheating. But if the metric is if it reduces cheating then that proves nothing. Not saying I have proof that it does reduce cheating but I would personally bet on it reducing it somewhat at least.
It definitely reduces cheating, but mostly just by raising the bar of entry (not by that much as evident in day 1 cheats being present). I doubt it’s effectiveness though, since most games you can do some quick research and find $5 cheats that will go undetected (hell even free cheats can work if you do a little more research on doing the injection part manually yourself).
You can also never stop cheating, but the anti-cheat they install on your computer is just an extra attack vector for hackers, etc at this point, since it obviously doesnt work as intended.
Hopefully they start to learn from this at some point… they should realise that their current anti-cheat systems are not working as intended at some point right?
Battlefield will lose sales, every game definitely loses players because of cheater infestations. Lots of money lost in my eyes, is it enough to make them see straight?
Valves anti-cheat doesn’t really do anything though, at least not in CS2. It does like to boot me from the game from time to time because I’m playing on Linux though.
True VAC alone is not great (nothing really is), but CS2 (in my opinion) has one of the best systems against abuse, even though legit players like myself can get stuck in low trust factor sometimes.
VAC, trust factor, overwatch (player report reviewing, not sure if this was discontinued) all work together.
Hopefully a big improvement is to come soon with the VAC Live agents that monitor games using AI to predict likely cheaters.
Valve obviously has a big interest in keeping cheaters out, because their skin economy makes them boatloads (literally hehe) of money. I think they are the only company going down this road right now of AI agents, which is unobtrusive to users and should hopefully keep up VACs high accurate ban rate (which is at least a good thing about VAC, when you are banned, in almost all cases, you were indeed cheating (low fase positives)).
I do recognize though that AI agents likely comes with a high cost and may only be implemented in other highly competitive games that make lots of money.
There probably exist other methods, but it’ll take more investment in designing adaptable systems that can work on many games.
I do report a lot of cheaters, but I never know if it even does anything. I pretty much only play casual anyways. The worst is when someone is obviously cheating, and no one votes to kick them, or some special types actually vote against kicking the cheater so they can win …
ETA: the AI agents sounds cool, as long as legit players don’t get mistakenly banned. I didn’t realize cheating was such a huge problem these days until I started playing CS2 again. I used to scrim 1.6 Back in the day and never really had that problem that I can remember.
Client side anti-cheat (the one installed on your PC) will never work, it’s just fundamentally impossible. They can restrict user freedom as much as they want, but the hardware still isn’t under their control.
The only reason they push for those kinds of anti-cheats is because they don’t have to pay for the extra processing of server side anti-cheat, and they also get the benefit of a backdoor into your computer that you may never fully uninstall without buying a new computer.
That statement is to easy. It all depends on how much permissions you give the game and in what kind of environment you execute your game. From sandboxing to inmutable root file systems there is a lot possible to exactly prevent this to happen.
I mean, it’s like saying Pentagon security can’t work because some skilled hackers can someday find a way to spoof / steal credentials. Security always happens on a sliding scale based on the value of the contents.
I think at the very least, they can take steps that inconvenience hackers sufficiently each update without harming players - they can’t make it impossible to hack on the client side, but they can’t make it feel not worth it for them.
The reason I sort of insist on it is that even with serverside checks for game logic like teleportation and instant kills, game engines still load the data for player positions which allow for wallhacks and aimhacks. Those checks can only happen clientside; you can’t even send mouse positions often enough to look for “snaps”.
At the least, I agree that modern coders have gotten very lazy about having the server verify basic actions. “Okay, player 22 deals 8000 damage to every other player in the server simultaneously? Okay.”
Some of it does, some of it doesn’t, the critique is that kernel level stuff is way more than needed against most cheaters but not enough against the most dedicated ones, and it is invasive as hell.
The best anticheat is good netcode and server side checks. You can’t wallhack if your client doesn’t see behind the walls.
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