For me, it’s games in the immersive sim genre. The Dishonored series and Prey, both made by Arkane studios, I can replay over and over, enjoying every moment of them, exploring alternate paths I haven’t tried yet. Deus Ex is another one that fits, especially Deus Ex Human Revolution. These games often go well below $10 during sales - here are their historical lows:
Dishonored: $2
Dishonored 2: $3
Dishonored DOTO: $6
Prey: $3
DXHR: $3
I also loved every second of The Witness - the puzzles are ingenious, hidden things are super enjoyable, and the community made a randomizer that generates new, harder puzzles to add more content to it. The Witness is at $9.99 now, its historical low.
I know a few people who love factory-building games, optimizing the production and even creating spreadsheets to calculate the perfect production rate. But the two major games in this category don’t fit your price criteria (Satisfactory is $15 right now, and Factorio $35 and won’t get any lower).
I have Dishonored 1 and 2. Will look at Death of the Outsider. I’ve started playing Thief series (not the remake) which I want to play a fair bit before playing Dishonored. Prey and Deus Ex Human Revolution weren’t ever in my consideration before so I’ll check those.
What are good starting points for the Deus ex series? I’ve got the original on Steam, but haven’t really gotten into it yet, feels very intimidating every time I start. Should I just push through or are there other entry points?
Btw, I loved dishonored 1 but somehow stopped playing, thanks for reminding me to get back to it :).
I completely understand that! It throws you into a mission right from the start, with no easing in. And from the very beginning you can see that the game allows you to choose - do you kill? Do you sneak around? Do you shoot the leader? Do you let him go? What are the consequences of your actions? It’s not all clear from the start.
I played the original Deus Ex around 10 years ago. Once you accept the aged visual side of it, the world, characters and plot can easily immerse you till the end. I’d say play the original (maybe with some modern visual mods), then skip to Human Revolution, then Mankind Divided.
I didn’t bother with Invisible War and The Fall. I tried them for a moment, but the bugs and clunkiness put me off.
There’s also Deus Ex Go, a mobile game that’s actually a really good puzzle with fantastic music.
I bought Hollow Knight for €7,50 long while ago and it was such an amazing game. Loved every second of it. The characters, story, world-building, it’s all immensely well done and you can notice it’s done with their hearts-content.
Another game that I bought on sale, that was below the €10 were the Ori games. The story was incredibly good (especially of the first game), got me teared up at the end lol. and liked the platforming too. Preferred the combat of the second game though.
Quantum Break is another one I bought on sale below €10; The story was decent but got me thinking ‘‘imagine people found an actual way to do this’’.
I’ve managed to get a few deals over the years that sort of fit the bill.
Hollow Knight when it was on sale, for example. But I abandoned at 98% (it goes to 113%, right?). There are a decent number of other Metroidvania-style games that are frequently discounted and are wholly enjoyable (the Shantae series, Iconoclasts, etc.).
Stardew Valley I found new, in box, for PS4 with audio CD for €8.50 and bought it based on the description without any knowledge of what it was.
Many shmups are meant to be overplayed and remain enjoyable. Radiant Silvergun comes to mind, and there is a bit of a story to that one as well.
I have a lot of games which were enjoyable 100% of the time, but none which I played for over 100 hours. I’d be absolutely exhausted if I was in “oh neat haha wow!” mode for that long, personally, my dopamine receptors would be fucking fried.
Good luck with your search, and below I have some which fit your criteria outside of the 100 hour requirement.
ListA Short Hike Beacon Pines Heart of the Woods Citizen Sleeper
I would also add the following to your list (also outside the 100 hour req, but still 100% enjoyable):
Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip
Outer Wilds
Outer Wilds may be obvious to anyone who has played it, but it would be a shame to leave it unmentioned as it is my favorite game of all time and seemingly universally loved. And Tiny Terry’s Turbo Trip is just stupidly entertaining - impossible to stop once you start playing.
I didn’t receive notifications for these—thank you for the suggestions. There have been complaints about the newer edition of Outer Worlds. Which version is fine to just get and start playing, if I decide to get it?
Of course! And it’s actually Outer Wilds I’m referring to; I haven’t played Outer Worlds yet so I can’t comment on it. They have very similar names unfortunately so it’s easy to mix them up.
To go the 100% enjoyable route, I need to know more things which naturally put people in this state. I do such things by experiencing them myself, and once they get there I know this is something which would fit in such a work.
Regarding this point, I think one of the most safe and efficient tricks to do this is to keep introducing novelty. If you have a game that has a fairly limited number of distinctive unique things that are introduced quickly and afterwards are simply repeated in different combinations it will less likely have such effect. For example a sandbox that introduces everything in 10h and then 90h you just play around with it will probably not have this effect, it can even become a chore. But a story-driven game which constantly introduces novelty on plot level but also sometimes introduces some new mechanics and content, have big chances to have this effect. In reality it’s more complicated, and there are many dimensions to this like challenge/frustration for example. There are games that use frustration as a tool to some extent to make winning certain fights feel exceptionally rewarding (soulslikes is the most popular example). But if you make it too challenging/frustrating there is a risk that player gives up and leaves in state of frustration which makes it a big failure. This particular thing is high-risk/reward type stuff.
I like this detailed answer. Firstly frustration and risk/reward is the opposite of what I’m looking for, the nature is a bit different from what I’m looking to experience. The things I need are not achievement but completeness of concept. To that end even relatively tough action games with the quality of life features to reduce frustration might fit the requirement, as long as the gameplay concepts are “fully thought out”—not only is enough thought given to what you’ve put in, but the nature of each addition and how it relates to the persons playing them, what it makes them feel… along with the relation with other mechanics to make sure how they go together. Games which use frustration also use this to some extent—but frustration is the opposite of what I’m looking into. The stuff I work it makes the user feel as comfortable as possible—with thought put in to remove all frustration, while simultaneously delivering depth of concept. These two are not incompatible, but requires a lot of thought and effort to deliver. Eventually it goes into the psychological of what people like, why people like them, and what specific feeling causes you to like such a thing. Eventually you go into questions like is such a thing natural—is it something people will like without having a particular mindset, political stance, education… or will it only be enjoyable with any or some of these things and are looking for aligned art.
Then, after understanding these, it comes to making something that anyone can enjoy, as long as they’re not coming into it expecting affirmation for the things they believe in. That latter part is up to the user and it is not up to the maker to determine whether a person should like it or not—the emphasis of the maker is on not messing up the process itself, and then to let people react naturally to your work. Of course, the world has an element of malice for the sake of it, but dealing with it in an adequate manner and not be aggressive in general, especially against people who merely want to use your work and know more about it, is important. That is a place many modern makers are failing in. But that is not related to the process of making something itself.
The most important element in this process is making something which isn’t malicious—cause harm to anyone for any sort of gain, even to affirm your own thoughts—while, at the same time, pushing the levels of depth in your work till it reaches a natural state of full enjoyment. This is part of the learning process which must be completed before work is started on anything. This last part is what I’m finishing up on. At the moment, usually the deeper you go into art, the more you see things which are inclined with enjoying instances of cruelty—or so it seems many times, but it is not always the case. Understanding to the end the reasons of many things, the things I’m trying to experience, is key to delivering an even deeper work which is not embarrassed of anything, but does not take pleasure in cruelty. The reason for this is not to attract mainstream crowds—which is always going to be hit or miss—but to ensure anyone… mainstream, those who aren’t what is called ‘normal’ (I personally fit into the latter) enjoy the work completely while not feeling the slightest bit unpleasant. The showing of villainy can still be delivered while doing so, by placing importance on structure—whether you show the cruelty for most of the time, and show its resolution for a short amount… or whether you describe what the situation is and then allocate a lot of time to the detailed described resolution of a problem and how it affects the people around.
All these things are, again, to be learnt before starting anything. Understanding the things that people enjoy is most important when structuring your work well—even when you already have made a fully developed idea for a story. These are the things I’m focusing on. I cannot really explain it in detail other than saying pride and achievement are on the opposite side of these things and, as elements, do not really go into the work I want to do. I’m intimately aware of the natures of pride and achievement—mostly the negative aspect, which I’m not going to get into here because I do not consider it my problem to worry how people think, and these explanations are likely to cause debate, no matter how well intentioned either or both sides are. On the other hand, my understanding in the basic nature of enjoyment of a bit limited, and that is what I’m trying to implement when I start my work so I’m trying to change my limited understanding at the moment. Such a thing is possible by experiencing oneself—from any place, such as books, movies, games, people taking action… from anywhere.
I see. I’ve recently even seen screenshots of Zwei: An Arges Adventure when a steam user posted them. Emotional rollercoasters are not what I’m looking for but I could check omori regardless, to see for myself.
An Arges Adventure didn’t age well though. Great game but the controls are terrible. The Ilvard Insurrection is at least modern and there is a little connection between these two, so you don’t need to play the first game before this.
I enjoy stuff like pressing key combination 6–C–3–2–(A to E)–(1 to 4) to cast a spell to travel to specific areas in overworld, and combinations like C—7—4 to cast, say, a protection spell while in combat on the sorcerer’s turn, in an old school western RPG. The only things I really dislike are slow animations and needless actions which do not affect anything. With this in mind, do you think I’m likely to be troubled by the first one or not?
I can find myself as well by watching some gameplay if you cannot determine it. If you are certain though, it will make things easier—even if I decide to check myself later.
Well, it’s not exactly like that. While the second game is perfect with a controller, the first game cannot be playable with one. At least the PC version. It has some weird mixture of keyboard + mouse controls which is pretty weird for an action RPG game. Definitely not comfortable to play, but it’s playable. I think it’s the best if you try it for yourself, if you already have the game.
It should be said that I’m not against games detecting cheaters and banning them from online play. It’s very specifically kernel-level anticheats that I can’t stand on principle.
I’m against them being able to ban you from playing online in its entirety, which is something they can do because most online games don’t let you run the servers yourself anymore. Sure, if someone cheats on official servers, ban them from the official servers. They should still be able to play, cheating or not, on the server they run themselves, but that’s not an option we even have most of the time.
This one is such an overlooked part of this whole dilemma. The problem is NOT THAT the official servers not allowing clients without kernel level anti cheat. It’s just we don’t have an option to host our own servers anymore and we’re confined to following the rules.
Nobody wants to play with all the cheaters and the people who got banned because they couldn’t stop talking about how much they love CSAM in the lobbies.
I mean, look at twitter. After the recent mass exodus to bluesky there is anger because they are realizing their quarantine zone is REAL shitty.
I do wish more games would provide player run servers as an option. but I am under no illusion that that is going to be good for anything other than “Hey, remember when we all played Chivalry 2 for a few years? What say we play that on Friday night and then ignore it for another decade?”
That is a perfectly valid use case for a video game that I paid for though. I do exactly that with games like 007: Agent Under Fire (in split-screen), and I played games like Rainbow Six 3 long after the official servers weren’t there anymore. Agent Under Fire in particular is a lot of fun with all of the modifiers on, like moon gravity, and I wouldn’t mind playing some multiplayer games with friends with cheats like that one on; things that you wouldn’t want on in a ranked queue, but things that I should 100% be able to do with the product that I paid for.
That’s a strawman argument. First of all, plenty of people would be happy to self-host a game for their friends, if they were still allowed the option. Second, even people who want to run a public server would still be free to ban people (for whatever reason they wanted). We’re not talking about being forced to tolerate antisocial fuckwads.
As something nice to have? I fully agree (and said as much)
As an alternative to anti-cheat solutions/“solutions” as was being presented?
No, it is not an answer. Because it would indeed be forcing people to tolerate “antisocial fuckwads” or forcing people ti find private servers to play with each other like in the good old days.
First of all, plenty of people would be happy to self-host a game for their friends, if they were still allowed the option.
Exactly! Me and my friends often play on modded Factorio servers that one of us hosts. This is only possible because the developer doesn’t lock things down to only the first-party (official) servers.
We don’t play with cheaters either (you aren’t getting invited to our server if you are). We play with our friends because it is fun, in a way no official server could hope to work.
In my experience with TF2, many popular community servers have common-sense rules like no slurs, cheats, etc. The great thing about a player-run server is that, if you want, it can be stricter than official guidelines, as Valve for example is pretty hands-off beyond the obvious in-game cheats. It allows pockets of the community to shape the experience they want to have more adeptly than official servers ever could.
Back in the day, I LOVED Unreal Tournament (… I still do actually). And a lot of that is because I found servers with people who became friends I still chat with (hell, one of them is even in the same Warframe clan as I am).
But that is INCREDIBLY unapproachable and I know plenty of people who never “got int” UT or Quake or TF2 because they never found those communities and instead got stuck with random pubs full of assholes.
That said: That is not about anti-cheat. That is about matchmaking versus player run servers. Which is a very different discussion with nuances in all directions.
Yes, that’s part of the StopKillingGames agenda as well. Allow us to control our own servers! For fuck’s sake, it’s CHEAPER for them, because WE’RE paying for hosting. A dedicated server costs money! And it keeps people buying into the ecosystem after the initial sales high because you form communities and then tell people IRL how awesome the game is. Assuming you have time for real life friends of course.
I’m not against the existence of a matchmaking system, or even against it being the default. Just give us a tiny menu item “Dedicated Servers” somewhere and keep that one around forever, even when the publisher is long bankrupt because the CEO blew all their profit on sculptures of oddly shaped penises or something.
They see it as a threat to their business model. Without any other option, you have to be on the latest version, seeing the latest skins, and you’re unable to bypass their store and mod them in yourself. If I can help it, not giving me the option to run the server myself will be a threat to their business model.
“Butbutbutbut server side anticheat is haaaaaaard and requires us to actually think about what values are actually valid and understand our own internal game states. Kernel level anticheat lets us be lazy costs us less and requires less development time!”
Unless they deviate substantially from how they build games in genres like shooters, server side anti-cheat isn’t going to catch everything that kernel level anti cheat does. However, kernel level anti cheat doesn’t catch hardware cheating anyway, so if cheating is always going to be imperfect, we ought to stop short of the kernel.
That’s the thing, you’re never going to catch everything. But anything important can be sanity checked by the server when the client checks in, all without opening a vulnerability in your customers’ systems.
So much kernel level anticheat is about offloading the processing power to the customer, and unreasonable desires for control over the systems involved and overall game environment (and probably a decent amount of data mining).
A lot of cheats send completely legitimate information back to the server, and that’s what they’re seeking to stop with the client side implementation; I don’t think it has anything to do with costs. I haven’t heard of any data mining happening, and surely someone would have caught it with wire shark by now, but there are enough things that we know for sure about kernel level anti cheats to make it offensive.
I think the way to go about detecting cheats server-side would be primarily driven by statistics. For example, to counter wallhacks one might track how often a player is already targeting an enemy before they become visible. Or to counter aimbots one could check for humanly impossible amounts of changes in the direction of mouse movement, somewhat similar to how the community found out a bunch of cheaters using slowmo in Trackmania.
Add in a reputation system that actually requires a good amount of playtime to be put into the highest tier of trust for matchmaking and I think one could have a pretty solid system that wouldn’t have to rely on client-side anticheat at all.
That’s the thing, you’re never going to catch everything
The problem is that the things that aren’t caught? People don’t say “Ugh. Easy Anti-Cheat suck”. they say “Ugh, fucking Battlefield is un fucking playable. BOYCOTT IT!!!”
There are alternative methods that may be even more effective (I personally think this is a genuinely great use case for “AI” to detect things like tracking players through walls and head snapping). They also have drawbacks (training and inference would get real expensive real fast since it needs to be fairly game specific).
Whereas kernel level bullshit? It clearly works well enough that the people who have the data (devs and publishers) are willing to pay for it.
And if it reduces the risk of a particularly bad exploit hurting the reputation of the game and tanking it harder than Concord?
Which is why “fighting back” is so difficult. We, as players, are asking for the devs/publishers to trust us. But we have also demonstrated, at every fucking step, that we won’t extend even an iota of trust back and will instead watch thousands of hours of video essays on why this game sucks because of a bad beta.
Was it Delta Force that made everyone lose their shit because it “accidentally” warned people would be banned for usb thumb drives?
Because… that is coming. No, not the thumbdrive. But scanning your various devices to detect hardware based cheats. Which… is likely also going to be pushed by logitech and razer to get ahead of the crowd that are sick and tired of needing their bullshit software to properly use mice and are looking toward alternatives.
Look if companies could implement successful anticheat without kernel access they sure as hell would, regardless of cost or effort. There is a TON of money to be made in competitive fps games alone, and they’re pretty much all overrun by hackers
Here, step into this 200GB repo with about 50 third party plugins and someone else’s game engine and find all the states that aren’t exactly like they are on the design docs, and do it at scale, across a cluster of servers that all have to interact.
20 years ago, i’d be right there with you.
It’s actually hard for a big game to do those things. The people making the cheats are as good as the developers and only need to find one nick it the armor every time.
FWIW, I’m against kernel-level anticheat, and I didn’t downvote you :)
With you on this, regardless of the method used, no app has any business running or snooping outside of the container that it was set up in. And this doesn’t just apply to desktop operating systems, mobile and entertainment consoles too.
I’d even take it a step further, that nonsense shouldn’t be on my machine in the first place.
Want to run anticheat stuff? Run it on your own crappy servers at your own cost and processing power. Live detect it through packets that are sent to you and are being processed, be it voice or input.
Whatever happens on my machine is none of your business.
I think it should also be noted that the games industry is not audited for security to the same degree as a lot of other industries. So vulnerabilities may not be found until years after launch and then go unpatched indefinitely because the company has already moved on to the next thing.
Hell, one of the older CoD games had an RCE vulnerability that as far as I’m aware is still not patched.
Plus, major publishers like EA are now pushing to create their own kernel-level anticheat in-house. Why should anyone trust them to create a secure piece of software that runs with the highest permissions possible when they can’t even be trusted to create stable, functional games?
Someone discovered Dark Souls games had a RCE but they never responded to the person that kept emailing them about it for months. The security guy then started invading streamers and crashing the game while doing fun stuff like showing text on the screen. Only then did Fromsoft take down the servers and patch things up - which took a few months.
Yes, game companies really don’t take security seriously.
This issue would be solved / non existent if matchmaking was not the only option for playing online game, which wouldn’t be an issue if publishers stopped being so greedy and predatory when it comes to player retention, which wouldn’t be an issue if the economic system we live in didn’t promote this toxic behaviour.
So yeah, kernel based anticheats are mostly just a symptom of a larger problem, the rotten video games industry
This issue would be solved / non existent if matchmaking was not the only option for playing online game
This is incredibly false.
Back in the day? Counterstrike 1.6 was SO good that we played through it with rampant hackers everywhere. Finding the rare server where people weren’t using aimbots and wallhacks was a bigger find than a hyper attractive alien asking you to teach it what love is. Same with UT and Quake.
Now that Stop Killing Games is actually being taken seriously
It is? They're still at 39%. Let's not call victory before reaching the start of the race. Getting to 100% will just be the beginning.
Also, kernel level anti-cheat seems like an easy thing to fix: don't buy the game. Be a little bit more principled and selective in your purchasing choices.
It’s a very recent development, but the consumer actually does have enough information just from the store page these days to know that a game uses kernel level software. The thing that still sucks is that it can be retroactive. In those cases, I suppose we just ask for a refund.
“Don’t buy a game that ships with malware” is a perfectly correct decision, but it doesn’t address the fact that games are shipping with fucking malware.
Let me assure you, if you’re not actually an EU citizen, signing would be a decidedly bad idea. All that would accomplish is pumped numbers that will be disregarded in the end, so it can only serve to hurt the campaign.
I’ve seen the Government in America ignore more than one petition they claimed was tampered with and I wouldn’t want that to be the result here (The EU seems to be more on the up and up than the US government, but still).
It is going to be hard to potentially have to make GTA 6 the first one I skip entirely (minus II and London I guess, I never got around to playing those. Or the stories).
I had 2000 hours in SA:MP in the ~one year I actively used xFire. I am an absolute GTA nerd.
I’ll survive it, maybe borrow the console version off a friend who ends up buying it or something. But I know for sure I’ll hate myself for having principles. Or I’ll cave in and hate myself for having principles and caving in.
I plan on waiting until they just make it free 12 times like they did GTA 5,I haven’t enjoyed GTA 5 anyway, they scrapped what made single player good and had a super buggy multiplayer if you had a slower internet, the amount of times it froze and hot stuck in the multiplayer tutorial at my parents because they had a 5/5 so it struggled internet side was insane for something that was already on the system and was still SP
Totally agree. Went all-in on Linux earlier this year and it was all working pretty good but there is really no solution when all your buddies are playing fortnite.
The multiple “game streaming” services our there wasn’t really cutting it either. I recall reading that Microsoft was going to be more strict with allowing kernel level anticheat but I don’t remember exactly where in saw that and I’m too lazy to Google. I hope with all the new PC handhelds coming out (steam deck, etc), that major companies start pushing for this or figuring out a workaround.
In the wake of Crowdstrike, Microsoft was going to allow for additional avenues for hooks into the OS that don’t reach as deep into the kernel level, but they never said they were removing the hooks that Crowdstrike or anti-cheat use, as far as I can tell. One solution for PC handhelds is to run whatever modified version of Windows that Microsoft is cooking up, so that you get the console-like interface without compromising on the anti-cheat compatibility. The solution Valve is seemingly hoping for is that, by disclosing kernel-level anti-cheat on the store page, such a solution becomes poison in the marketplace and developers choose a different one.
Steam is a good platform, but if this strategy works and it kills off kernel level anticheat and gets more Linux support, those would be next level contributions to gaming.
The solution Valve is seemingly hoping for is that, by disclosing kernel-level anti-cheat on the store page, such a solution becomes poison in the marketplace and developers choose a different one.
Honestly, I wish they were more aggressive with it. Make the warning banners about kernel-level anti-cheat bright red and put it right above the purchase button like the “needs VR headset” warning.
Previously, my Apex Legends account with hundreds of hours and unlocks got banned for no reason, but I made a new account and played on. Then they banned Linux and I’ve never looked back.
Now I’m looking forward to not being able to play 2XKO as well.
I’m not a target for these hacks (I mostly play like commandos 1.5, Red alert and Diablo II) but I have my main PC on Linux and then a sort of franken-PC on windows where I don’t share sensitive data, or anything meaningful except game-related data I guess.
I have been an avid gamer since Atari 2600 and IBM PCjr, I have played RPG, shoot-em ups, arcades, stories and FPS.
I had no idea what it was and how to play it, but I opened up my, on sale, US$7.50, new game from a small developer I'd read about named Concerned Ape. Stardew Valley. I have only been playing for 2 years and have 6 different setups i keep going back to for tweaking, and have just started a 7th. The gameplay is straightforward, and oddly addictive. I just added up the hours played on all the games, comes to 1200 hours. Don't know if this fits your bill, but I have been surprised that it is my go to even with the AAA games like Zelda taking a back seat.
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