No Denuvo
DRM-free versions (fuck every AAA client, give me the setup files and piss off)
Linux-friendly anti-cheat
If your game has an online component, release the server files so the community can self-host!
Basically, anything that preserves a game well beyond its prime.
Anti-cheat systems in general tend to be fragile to changes in the game environment.
Honestly, I used to want that, and I’ll believe that game devs could do better than they do today, but honestly, I think that the problem is, end of the day, fundamentally not a technically-solvable one. The only way you’re going to reasonably-reliably do anti-cheat stuff is going to be to have a trusted system, where the player can’t do anything to their system.
I’d say that it’s one of the stronger arguments for consoles in general versus PC gaming. On a console, the playing field is pretty much level. Everyone has the same software running on their system, the same number of frames on their screen. Maybe there might be limited differences to the controller or better latency to a server, but that’s it. It’s hard to modify the system to get that edge. A console is pretty close to the ideal system for competitive multiplayer stuff. On a PC, in a (real-time) competitive multiplayer game, someone is always going to have some level of an edge. Like, the ability to get higher resolution or more frames per second, the ability of games to scale up to use better hardware, is fundamentally something of a pay-to-win baked into the system.
There will always be a place for competitive multiplayer games, but I honestly think that a better route forward for many games is to improve game AI from where it is today and then use computer opponents more heavily. While humans make for a very smart enemy “AI” in a lot of ways, and using them may be a technically-easier problem than doing comparable enemy AI, there are also all kinds of baggage that fundamentally come with competitive multiplayer play:
Limited lifespan for the game. At some point, nobody (or not many) people will be playing the game any more, even if it doesn’t depend on the game publisher to operate online servers. At that point, the game will head into the dustbin of history – it’ll be hard to meet the threshold to get enough people together at any one time to play a game. Multiplayer games are mortal, and single-player games are immortal.
You can’t pause. Or, well, you can, but then that doesn’t scale up to many players and can create its own set of problems. A lot of people need to change an infant’s diaper or get the door or take a call. They can play against computers, but they can’t (reasonably) play against other players.
Cheating.
Griefing.
Sometimes optimal human strategy isn’t…all that much fun to actually play against. Like, I remember playing the original Team Fortress, and that a strategy was to have classes that could set up static defenses (pipe bombs, lasers, turrets, etc) set them up right atop spawn points. That may well be a good strategy in the game, but it’s also not a lot of fun for the other players.
Immersion. Doesn’t matter for all games, but for some it does. I don’t expect humans to role-play, to stay in character, because I know that it’s work and i don’t want to hassle with it myself. But, end of the day, playing against xxPussySlayer69xx is kind of immersion-breaking.
Latency is always going to be an issue. You can mitigate it a bit with prediction and engine improvements or more telecom infrastructure, but the laws of physics still place constraints on the speed of light. There are ways you can minimize it – LAN parties, if you can get enough people. Regional servers, though that guy who lives in Hawaii is always gonna just have a hard time of it. But it’s always going to be there; you’re never going to truly have a level playing field.
The game is intrinsically mandatory-online. If you have a spotty or no connection, the game doesn’t work.
Another issue is the advance of technology. If it isn’t there now, I can imagine a generic AI engine, something like Havok is for physics, becoming widespread. And as that improves, one can get more-and-more compelling AI. Plus, hardware is getting better. But humans are, well, human. Humanity isn’t getting better at being a game opponent over the years. So my long-run bet is gonna be on game AI tending to edge in on humans as an opponent for human players.
Okay so I fully agree on the use of better AI in games as competitors. The AI in games, though sometimes complex, is lacking in a lot of major games and the difficulty setting just basically amps up their damage and health instead of causing them to outplay you.
I think there are two solutions to better competitive games that reduces cheating and they’re already somewhat at work.
The first solution is implementing AI to detect cheating which has been done but very limited in scope. This will require more data collection for the user, but I fully support that if you’re being competitive and not playing casually. Why? Because in person sports also collect plenty of data on you, often even more invasive, to make sure you aren’t cheating. This can be done in collaboration with Microsoft actually because they have the ability to lock down their OS in certain ways while playing competitive games. They just haven’t bothered because no one asks. Same with Linux potentially if someone wanted to make that.
The second important improvement is to raise the stakes for someone who plays any sort of Esport game. I’m reminded of Valve requiring a phone number for CSGO because it’s easy to validate but raises the difficulty and price of cheating and bans. Having a higher price for competitive games is also entirely possible and also raises the stakes to cheat. The less accounts cheaters can buy, the better. Should it ask for a social security card? No. But I think that system bans based on hardware and IP are also important. You can also improve the value/time put into each account to make it more trustworthy. If a person plays CS for thousands of hours, make their account worth something.
And a minor third improvement would be: match people with more matches/xp/hours with other people of similar dedication at similar skill levels. That means cheaters will decrease the more you play and a cheater would have to play for far longer with cheats undetected to get to that point.
There’s plenty that can be done, companies are just doing almost nothing about the problem because cheaters make them money.
. The only way you’re going to reasonably-reliably do anti-cheat stuff is going to be to have a trusted system, where the player can’t do anything to their system.
Even then there are possible options. (hdmi splitter etc)
Gyroscope controls. Especially for first-person shooters and other first-person games. I used to be a diehard mouse and keyboard player when it came to FPSes until I played Quake 1 on the Switch with gyro controls turned on. Now I’m trying to find ways to be able to play every FPS in my collection on a TV with gyro aim because it just feels so much better.
Everyone I know that’s gotten good with it swears up and down about it but 10 or so hours with Splatoon 2 and I felt like I didn’t get ANY better with it
This is from someone who’s pretty damn good at fps games, usually top 3 on the scoreboard no matter what game it is, so I’m not just bad at the games themselves
Splatoon doesn't give you as much control over it as a Steam controller does. It's only the Y axis, and it's always on. It's much better when you can hold a grip button to toggle it. Then you can use the right track pad or analog stick for big movements and the gyro for fine tuned precision while holding a grip button.
That sounds like exactly what my issue was with learning: it always being on, any teeny hand movement ever would fuck with the camera, the steam controller sounds much closer to what my mind expected from gyro
With that in mind I just might have to try it out, though now I’m scared of getting good with it and needing to hack gyro into games to play, much like getting good with MKB killed me playing FPS on controller lol
I'll tell you that my friend sat me in front of Returnal on PS5, and that game felt unplayable without either M+KB or gyro, even though plenty of people managed just fine. There's even a gryo feature in the PS5 pad! They just didn't enable it for the game. On PC, you can use it on Steam controller whether the dev enabled it or not.
Hell yeah. I didn’t put this in my post because I didn’t want it to turn into a debate about the validity and viability of gyro controls (it is, if you don’t think so, you’re just wrong). So thanks for putting it.
One of my favorite steam deck features is being able to use gyro controls for any game. It’s not always as smooth as the Switch, but it works pretty well to add a bit of additional fine-grained control to the course-grained control of the R-stick.
Doom on the switch was amazing for this. I tried to play Doom eternal on the ps4, afterwards, and it was just such a disappointment because it didn’t have gyro.
My problem with analog sticks in FPSes isn’t fine-grained control – most games have zoom, and auto-aim has done a lot to mitigate lack of acuracy. My problem is coarse-grained control – that is, it takes ages in an FPS to turn around at maximum turn speed, whereas a mouse player can rapidly snap around if they are, say, attacked from the side or behind.
I’ve seen some people talk about hacking together some mechanism to try to deal with this using the Steam Controller and Steam Input – I think that it might have been something like a double-tap-to-rapidly-turn, but my impression is that whatever was going on there was more-elaborate than just the combination of an analog stick and a gyro for fine movement.
Might be a controversial statement, but I love Persona 5’s music and art design way more than I like the actual game, if I’m being honest. The anime tropiness isn’t really my thing and I’m not a huge fan of the writing, but the vibes of that game are immaculate.
So this is my own post, but I’m still gonna comment on it because I have something else.
AI Bots support for multiplayer games.
It’s become quite a rarity but it used to be… I wouldn’t say standard, but common in older games and I really miss it.
Sometimes I really enjoy the gameplay loop of a multiplayer game but I just don’t want to play it in multiplayer. There is too much pressure. Counter-Strike is a good example of that. I like the gameplay loop. I like the game but I spent a ton of my time playing it offline against bots on custom maps.
It’s not exactly the same as playing with real players. I know they don’t behave the same. But speaking of not behaving the same, at least I don’t have to be worried of being insulted or anything if I make a mistake. There is much less pressure to succeed in games like this which I find fun. It’s often hard to play online because it’s all pressure and no fun for me.
Programming decent AI bots is complicated I know that which is why it’s probably as rare as it is nowadays but I still miss it there has been too many games that I loved that simply died and I can’t play anymore because there is no bot supports on it. I would love to be able to play my favorite game like for example, a Battlefield 1 game with 63 other bots that can pilot vehicles and do all of the things that real players would do.
That’s why I love Ravenfield. But yeah, how many games have died and how many gameplay loop do we miss and can never play again because it would require actual players and there was never any proper bot support implemented?
I can think of a few and actually one of them is Star Wars Battlefront 2015 which had some sort of AI bot implemented but it used a very different kind of AI. They don’t move like actual players. They have completely different animations and behaviors and what’s worse is that they have a really nasty tendency to focus on the player. Which means that on some maps and some difficulty you come out of a hallway, out on the outside part of the map, and all of a sudden every bottom of the map, every starship is firing at you. Because you’re the priority target.
Battlefront 2 2017 eventually implemented instant action and did it much better. Sadly I prefer the gameplay loop of the 2015 game by a lot. Oh well.
If you like me, buy Ravenfield on Steam. It’s not a game that happens to have bot support. It’s actually a game that is completely built around this. It’s not just a feature, it’s the point of the game, and I love it for it.
Mine are Subnautica, I’ve put myself in danger in that game just for the music. Honorable mentions include horizon (zero dawn specifically, but I am currently playing through forbidden West for the first time, so I still might prefer it), Halo(CE), and Skyrim for me as well.
City on the mesa is my personal favorite! Also, looking at the album again, something needs to be said about how big that soundtrack is. It contains eighty songs.
I wonder how many people reviewing the game even played the first one.
Also, seeing comments in reviews about how it’s ‘a good start’ make me sad about the state of the game industry, and how people are so willing to accept it.
Idk, having delivered on what the game purported to be in the trailer is nice imo. Due to the ambition and relatively short window between announcement and release, delaying it to resolve performance issues on PCs would have heightened expectations further than what would have been developed for it.
Performance issues I know are game breaking for many gamers and I can respect that. To me, it’s one negative within many positives. My 50k cities in CS:1 are a lagfest anyway.
Dual subtitles, aka polyglot mode. Doubt that it’d ever happen, probably I’m the only one who wants it. Sometimes I’d just merge 2 subtitles with python script and upload it to my Plex.
Fast forward and save states especially for classic remaster. Some have this, some don’t
I don’t think I count as a polyglot (Native English, Spanish proficient, learning Japanese and German) but what is that even useful for? I feel like it’d be really confusing to have two subtitles for the same dialogue.
I just watch, in whatever language I want to practice.
I think the term came from polyglot books, i.e. books that are written in 2 languages on each side.
Often times for me, the spoken foreign language can be quite fast or filled with colloquials, so I prefer to have subtitles in that language, and also English subtitles. Or in some cases, such as for Japanese voiced games, I’d prefer to have a Japanese subtitles to help me recognize the Kanjis, and additional English subs for translation.
I tried this method on Plex, uploaded dual subtitles for some movies, and it helped me a lot in acquiring new vocabularies. I think Netflix allows users to do the same thing too.
I could see it being a lot more useful for Japanese or other no Latin alphabet languages. Especially for the kanji. I’m too early in Japanese to watch content.
I love a game with a good large settings menu that lets me change as much as possible. If you don’t lock me out of changing all the keybindings then you’re already ahead of the game. I hate when a game has a really badly implemented feature and no way to change it or disable it.
They’re releasing this game as an early access. The Day One Game Pass release evidenced this, they wanted as many people as possible running this game to beta test this game.
Why not just release the game as an early access you say? If you release the game as early access there would be much less people buying and installing the game compared to a “full release” and we need the line going up for the Q4 so that our corporate overlords can buy another ranch at New Zealand my friend.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne