I feel it should be added that this is one use of anti-cheat, but it also gets used on noncompetitive single player games, too.
Usually if a game has micro-transactions, but also to “protect our IP” as has been seen with a number of older non-MTX single player games recently being retrofitted with it.
A number of the best games of all time are quite cheap:
Tetris (pretty much any version)
Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 (use OpenRCT2 to run it well on a modern PC)
Star Wars: Knights of The Old Republic 2 (use The Sith Lords Restored Content Mod to add back in the stuff the devs had to cut for time, otherwise the ending is disappointing)
Balatro ($9.99 on mobile or $19.99 when bundled with Slay The Spire on Steam)
Slay The Spire
Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead (free and open source)
DOOM (the original, not the 2016 game, very cheap and there are literally millions of mods and community made maps)
My goodness this game feels like it was made for me. I feel the magic of Zelda (LttP, maybe Link’s Awakening) and Dark Souls, and I would say the game wears those influences on its sleeve.
The game drops you into the world with no explanation. Signs are in a foreign language. You can collect pieces of the instruction manual which includes map pieces. The manual is littered with the occasional word in English, just enough to guess at what you can / need to do. There’s basically no hand-holding at all. Combat is similar in that it can be difficult if you find yourself in an area you aren’t ready for yet (like I did).
There are lots of hidden pathways, ladders and chests to find. They do a good job of showing you treasure chests and shortcuts that are just out of reach, and you have to really observe and think about how to navigate to get there. To me the world design has big Dark Souls 1 energy in that way - already I’ve had that same “omg it’s Firelink Shrine?!” experience as I explore and open up paths.
I really enjoyed Tunic. I loved collecting all the pages and learning about the world. I had to turn the difficulty down for the final boss as it just wasn’t fun but everything else was great. The ending was really good after I found all the collectables. Though I did look up where to find them after working out what I was looking for.
The ship named “software does shit I don’t like on my own hardware” sailed the day proprietary software became a thing.
Mind you, it’s scary how many people applaud kernel-level anticheat. “This game was just ruined by hackers until they added kernel-level anticheat. Now it’s great again!”
How would a campaign against kernel-level anticheat “succeed” exactly? More awareness? More people boycotting kernel-level anticheat? Laws prohibiting the practice?
Like, obviously I’m never running any software that involves kernel-level anticheat, but I’m a Gentoo neckbeard with an EFF-approved tinfoil hat surgically attached to my scalp.
(Hell, I think it would be great if most of the games out there had cheater and bot servers where it was encouraged to run your cheat tools and/or bots. If they allowed that but just kept it separate from non-tool/non-bot players, that’d be a fantastic way to get kids more interested in STEM.)
(Also, if anyone made and sold a boardgame that made players want to cheat (in a bug-not-feature kind of way), it would get negative reviews and no one would buy it. In a way, kernel-level anticheat can almost be considered a type of “externality”. The game studio, rather than going to the trouble to tune their game to make cheating less appealing, they break their users’ computers and invade their privacy. And the game studio then rakes in more money as a result.)
But how would we get through to normie 12-year-olds who just want to play Valorant and not have their face constantly rubbed in the dirt by “hackers”?
Been playing a bunch of stuff lately! Still deeply in love with Caves of Qud, a modern (ish, 14y of development) rpg in the classic rogue format. A true rogue like. Beautiful music, cool setting…
I got a steam deck so couch-compatible games like Cobalt Core, Get to Work and Enter the Gungeon.
Besides that, the usual rounds of Tarkov, and some Delta Force to try it out post release
Just got Legend of Spyro: Dawn of The Dragon working on RPCS3 last night on steam deck. Absolutely love that trilogy, even if I did play the games in reverse order. Only problem is how I cannot properly save and need to save state any time I wanna save. Hope I can reload those save states easily from the steam game mode thing.
Other than that, played through a short Christmas themed side story VN for Brok the Investigator called “Natal Tail” last night. Short, simple, expanded a little bit of world lore, and was in general a fun enough experience. Didn’t have voice acting, but it was more than okay without it.
A bit more World of Warcraft. I got most of the anniversary items I want, now I’ll do some more achievements.
Then I started Windblown, the next game from the Dead Cells devs. I guess it’s coop, isometric Dead Cells. It’s very fun, but I feel harder than Dead Cells. I finished my first run today, and the end was pretty nerve wracking. As for the coop part, that seems pretty dead right now. The game’s in Early Access, so that doesn’t help, but I only ever a saw a single open lobby. I might check it out a bit more, now that I have won once.
Then I was about to re-play Disco Elysium, but got sick again, and was in no mood for any story games (which I why I started Windblown). Maybe this week, maybe next, but definitely this year.
Also, pretty good timing with me re-playing FF7R last week, since Rebirth is coming to PC end of January. I’m really looking forward to it.
The Talos Principle. After a short bit in the game, you go to a hub area that goes to other areas like the one you just came from. Eventually, you find out that there is another hub area above this which leads to other hub areas. I didn’t remember if there is another layer on top of that, but either way, once I hit that second hub layer, I remember realizing that the entire game was multiple times larger than I had thought, and I had no way to know if it would expand again when I made it to the next area.
My wife and I each 100%'d Talos 2 and it was abundantly amazing. It had been years since either of us completed 1 but the way the story is structured you hear about the events of the first game in detail pretty regularly. I’m trying to be vague for spoilers. And of course I’m not trying to talk out of replaying 1, but just know you don’t have to, understand 2, and in my opinion it might be a touch tedious to do them back to back.
Both fantastic games tho that started a lot of good conversations between us.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne