It’s there due to the technical certification requirements of XBox. All games are required to become interactive after a set number of seconds. When you have a complex game with long loading times, that might be difficult. The load start screen works around that, it’s simple enough to load quickly and it is interactive, i.e. “Press any key to continue”. It’s not useful, but it fulfills the certification requirements, all loading time that follows or might happen in the background while that screen is shown, doesn’t count.
It the same reason why you see so many games have the same “You’ll lose all your unsaved progress if you exit the game” screen, even in games that save so often to be a non-issue. It’s a certification requirement too. There is a whole bunch of stuff like this in games (and movies) that is not there because anybody wants it, but because some contract somewhere says it has to be there or you aren’t allowed to publish your game (see also the way names in movie posters never line up with the people on that poster).
PS: This has been around since at least the Xbox360s, don’t know what Sony requires or how Microsoft might have updated their requirements since then.
If you have a particularly slow PC, this screen would be good feedback that it hasn't crashed while booting the game. It also keeps the game consistent across platforms.
Yeah, they're not gonna do all that stuff for cert and then go "now let's remake our whole intro sequence to be more convenient!", I don't think devs typically have that much free time
The problem is that the majority of games do not tell you what you are actually losing or how to prevent it. Do you lose the last five seconds or do you go right back to the beginning of the game? How far away is the next save point? Games don’t tell you. You have to try to find out. There are a few smart games that will tell you “2min since your last save”, but they are pretty rare.
And of course in modern times that screen is rather unnecessary to begin with: Just save the damn game and let me continue were I left of. Xbox has QuickResume, but a lot of other platforms still have nothing like it.
IMO it’s a good feature and it’s a good thing it’s required. I remember the days when I would boot up a game and never be sure if my system crashed or not.
This requires the game to start giving you feedback before you start wondering if you should do a power cycle.
I mean, better loading feedback would be better than an arbitrary “interactive within 1 second” blanket rule, leading to this whole “press button to continue” workaround.
That’s like a generator needing an earth rod, and the engineer putting an earth rod into a plant pot. Sure, the earth rod is there, and sunk to regulated depth in dirt… but it’s a plant pot.
Just make an accurate loading screen with accurate feedback.
Imo that’s still not enough. Plenty of crashes or failures happen in a way where loading screen animations still keep playing. Having a cursor you can move around to validate that the process is still responsive is important feedback.
I also remember lots of games that did exactly what you are saying and there was no way to tell if it had hung during loading or not because you couldn’t check if it was accepting feedback.
Neither of these things can be true, because they’ve been around since long before Microsoft got into the console game. I’m pretty sure Atari 2600 games had that prompt. I know NES games did.
Games must enter an interactive state that accepts player input within 20 seconds after the initial start-up sequence. If an animation or cinematic shown during the start-up sequence runs longer than 20 seconds, it must be skippable using the START button.
What earlier games were doing was very similar, but was done for different reasons. Arcade games had an attract mode that would show gameplay or intro cutscenes in a loop when the device wasn’t in active use and had an “Insert Coin” flashing to attract players. The normal game would only started once coin got inserted into the arcade machine. Early console games had that attract mode too, just “insert coin” replaced with a “press start”.
What makes the modern start screen different is that there is often no cutscene to skip, no gameplay to watch, it’s just a pointless screen before you go to the main menu.
Yes, but you’d have to get there in 20sec first, which in case of very elaborate main menus, might not always be the case. The start screen provides a safety buffer so that you never fail at this certification criteria, as all the loading time after the start screen doesn’t count.
I had to stop playing Half Life Alyx when it got to the dark flashlight bit with zombies jumping out at you. Nearly gave me a heart attack. Definitely couldn’t handle it IRL. edit: autocorrect
Yeah I definitely took breaks and actually just never went back after a certain point. Not because it was too intense directly, but one of my breaks, I just never went back.
But it only works as long as the replacement for Gabe Newell has the exact same ethos about the business. Changing hands always risks changing how things function at a company. Unless Newell has been practically grooming a successor for years, it’s very likely that a replacement will want to “shake things up.”
When Newell retires/passes, things will change. Time will tell if it will be for the better or the worse.
Well he’s 61, and the average life expectancy for males in the US is 73ish. He is well-to-do, so he likely has better access to healthcare than most, meaning he will be one of those who lives past 73. I’d suspect we have twenty years at best, but more likely about 10 years if he retires at a “reasonable” age.
Unfortunately gabe is also overweight and hence has the health risks associated with being overweight. So him only living till the average age has a higher possibility.
Not exactly. Of course Gabe could be replaced by some idiot who fucks everything up, but if Valve doesn’t become publicly traded it will continue to be in the best interest of whoever ends up owning it to continue doing things this way. Gabe doesn’t do good things just because. He does it because happy customers means more money in the long run.
Publicly traded companies on the other hand need to extract as much money as quickly as possible and have no regards to what will happen to it a few months later. So even if Gabe dies, all Valve needs is a leader interested in what’s best for itself.
Dear God. Because Nepotism has worked out so well so many times in the past. /s
Just shut down the company now, Gabe.
From an interview with his son:
“If it’s one thing I’d like to see Valve do, it’s push it with more their ideas,” he said. "The people there are the smartest I’ve ever met, the hardest working, the most inspiring. The culture at Valve is a very good one but they’ve kind of found this point where they’re a working machine. And that’s good, but I think they should reach out and do something scary. Do something that they don’t know what the outcome is going to be.
“They make incredibly smart decisions, but sometimes you have to do something stupid. Sometimes you have to have a stupid crazy idea and say ‘fuck it’, go with it. Valve has a mindbogglingly enormous amount of resources at their back, and I hope they find the courage to throw it at something new. I want to see them push the envelope again.”
Yeah this chucklefuck is going to break shit day one, guaranteed.
Eh, it sounds more like he wants then to go back to the roots and developer a groundbreaking game, like Portal, or HL2, again. Which doesn’t sound like a bad thing. To do something groundbreaking it probably helps if you dare to do something that is scary.
They literally already did that with the SteamDeck, it’s absolutely groundbreaking. They created a whole new product category, but it took years of planning and patience and watching the market. It happened with prototypes like the Steam Controller, the Steam Link, and the original vision for Steam Boxes, as well as the nearly decade of work they’ve done on Proton to get Windows games to run well in Linux. It didn’t happen with a “stupid crazy idea” that they said “fuck it, go with it.” It started with a smart idea, well executed, over a long period of time, with many bumps in the road on the way to success.
Steam Boxes were originally announced in 2012, this is the result of a full decade of work.
And one hell of a lot of work, too! Reimplementing the Windows APIs that Wine didn't already have, and then optimizing those implementations enough to be not only sufficient for some of the most performance-sensitive software under the sun but faster than actual Windows, is no small feat.
I wonder how much of Newell’s past at Microsoft helped with that? He helped produce the first three versions of Windows.
While Windows works wildly differently these days and the last one he worked on was Windows 3.0 (maybe 3.1?) and a massive amount of stuff has changed in how Operating Systems work since then.
However, I do wonder if his familiarity with the old systems helped at all.
Yeah, you are correct, and that’s why I think he was talking about games specifically. That’s a grade A assumption from me though (and a bit of hopium?)
So SteamDeck, Valve Index and pushing back against the short-term money maker that was NFTs until half a year or so, among other things, aren’t scary enough projects when you’re “just” a game developer and distributor?
I love their approach to Hardware and Linux but have we collectively forgotten that Valve had a huge part in pushing loot boxes and underage gambling? Far from being the least evil company, but still a net win for consumers and I appreciate that they exist.
Does this include cloud streamed games? I for one am still waiting for a streaming exclusive game in the vein of Elden Ring or BotW. Bonus if it’s an MMO. Imagine how much more mysterious a world could be if no one is able to datamine the binary. The only way to discover things would be players actually discovering them.
Eh. I would say that they are still mysterious and interesting if you don’t look at the information on a website saying what’s in the game or not. So yeah, I don’t really like what cloud gaming is doing. If you want to keep the mystery of a universe, have some self-control.
I’m not saying “for each player, they are able to experience a sense of wonder in a game when played in isolation”, that’s old hat. I’m saying “for all players, everyone experiences a shared sense of wonder and discovery in an artificial world they live in together”.
I’ve never played Elden Ring, yet I couldn’t help but see the community make new discoveries together. The first couple of days every post was about Margit, then a few people found the fake wall that hides an entire zone, and a month later someone has reverse engineered the levels and found a wall that takes over 1000 hits to get rid of.
When the binary is entirely hidden from the users, and the only thing the users have have access to is a window peering into the world as you want them to see it, you get to create an entire set of physical laws that is hidden from the players. Players have to work together to conduct experiments, peer review each other, compete with each other, and become experts in very narrow fields of research within your simulation. Imagine spending months as a community raising in-game funding and developing the technology to sail/fly/launch to a New World for the first time, and when you finally arrive you know you are the first set of players to ever see it, specifically as a result of your efforts.
What you’re describing is a neat little one-off escape room experience. What I’m describing is an actual world. We currently cannot do this.
While this is a cool concept, I don’t think there is a single organization with the money needed to pull it off that wouldn’t also ruin the concept with monetization features. Maybe some kind of community made game could accomplish it, similar to what the Thrive devs are doing, but the amount of consistent resources needed would be a lot.
Yeah, that’s why I think we’re in an MMO slump right now. The only companies who can afford the scale “need” it to be a cash cow. So they need really predictable methods of generating income, which means not doing anything too interesting. I’m hoping one day we’ll get past that. I think we have the technology right now for indie devs to roll out a semi-affordable MMO of decent quality, but I also don’t want the market to be flooded with garbage MMOs. We already have too many of those.
Final Profit: A Shop RPG is an RPG about a deposed elf queen who opens a humble shop and slowly advances through the ranks of the Bureau of Business with the eventual goal of defeating Capitalism from within. It’s unique. It has some incremental game like mechanics, and can get a little repetitive in the mid-game, but it has a surprisingly compelling story and a lot of unfolding mechanics that keep it interesting all the way through.
Roughly a 30 hour playthrough with many endings, NG+ and some optional challenge modes that remove or change some of the most obvious strategies for advancement, so if you finish it and still want more, you can play through again with a somewhat different experience.
Man this made me feel guilty downvoting. Great game, a real surprise packet for me, think I got it in a Humble Bundle and tried on a whim and had a great time.
Think it’s an Aussie dev (single person?) too, and still getting pretty frequent large content updates
The dev is also very responsive! I left a (positive) review with some critical feedback and they commented on it very quickly and had a bit of a dialog with me about the comments I’d made; they ended up revising the Steam page based on review feedback (mine and others), too, which made me want to support them even more!
It’s unfortunate that RPGMaker games have such a consistent and distinct aesthetic, it’s really obvious when a game was made with the engine, and a lot of the reviews mention it, too.
That said, this is definitely one of the best RPGMaker games I’ve played. They really stretch what’s possible with it. Can’t get away from that look, though.
The worst part is, there are certain ways a top down spritework game can look unique, and even put some personality on the characters. But the classic NES RPG look just seems so arcadey and wrong to me.
I tried to recover my Mojang account and migrate it three times. Each attempt gets a stock response asking for certain info (receipt, email, username). When I provide this, I get a response from a different support user asking for the same thing I just provided. After three to five back and forths (with the same questions and the same answers) I get busy, frustrated, and leave it for a few weeks.
Once I have time, I start over and the exact same thing repeats again.
I wrote it off as a loss last year with an asterisk of “another reason to fucking hate Microsoft”
Yeah, I bought it during beta testing and my account was attached to an old email. Gave up trying to migrate years ago. I’m actually surprised they still haven’t deleted it already.
System scanning: EGS is known to automatically scan your system and send your data back to them. While this seems to be the same type of analytics Steam does occasionally, in Steam’s case, it’s opt-in, and done with full, informed consent.
Paid exclusives: Epic has been known to pay publishers to make their games artificially exclusive to their own store. They regularly claim this money is to support the development of the games in question, but this is easily disproven, as they’ve been seen buying games known to be complete more than once. Additionally, this has resulted in bait-and-switch-like situations, where users would prepurchase Steam copies of games, only to be informed that they wouldn’t be getting them.
Publisher-centric behavior: Another user here claimed that EGS is pro-developer and anti-consumer, but this is only half true. This only rings true in the case of self-published games. There have been cases of developers getting unwarranted backlash after aforementioned bait-and-switches, when they were just as surprised to learn about all the “development support” they received as anyone.
Tim Sweeney: Tim Weeney, the CEO of Epic, is an asshole. A giant, narcissistic, hateful shitbag. Just look at his Twitter, the dudes a giant POS.
Additionally, this has resulted in bait-and-switch-like situations, where users would prepurchase Steam copies of games, only to be informed that they wouldn’t be getting them.
I didn’t know about this.
It happened to Metro Exodus (great game btw) but iirc all pre orders were honoured and the game was just delisted.
Terraria, for something crafty-buildy with combat and very cartoony/2d blood and gore. 1-8 players.
Don’t Starve Together, survival crafting in a hand-drawn Tim Burton-esque style. 2-6 players.
Awesomenauts, 3v3 fast paced competitive game in the style of Saturday morning cartoons. 3-6 players.
Deep Rock Galactic, coop shooter where you play space dwarves and shoot bugs while doing missions together. Gore may be a bit strong for your liking, but it’s very stylized and only against bugs and robots. 1-4 players.
Risk of Rain 2, shooter where you try and escape a planet together with lots of different ways to play. 1-4 players.
Age of Empires 2, old school fast-paced medieval strategy game modernized with new graphics and such. 1-8 players.
Valheim, viking survival crafty buildy game in which you explore and conquer a dangerous world together. 1-10 players.
Cassette Beasts, technically not multi-player yet but they’re adding it as a free update January. It’s a Pokémon-esque game where you’ll all be trainers in the same overworld together capturing beasts and taking down challenges together. 1-8 players when it comes out.
All of these games are rated T for teen, but it sounds more like you’re opposed to M rated violence and language than T levels. They’re all also insular in that this friend group doesn’t need to involve other people to play together and can either play with or against each other or the computer.
I just want to avoid the porn games on steam, and any super-gory shit like dead space. I thought Diablo would be fun for him but it is a bit too much right now. It was different when super pixelated back in the D2 days.
Overcooked can make for some fun chaos, though it tops at 4 players. Team Fortress 2 could work, but it does have graphic violence and I dunno if it’s available for the newer xboxes. On PC, it has loads of mods and custom maps that offer similar experiences to what you can find in Roblox
The OP said that the friend group has Xboxes, and I assume that you can’t mod the games. I may be wrong though, I haven’t used an Xbox since the 360 and mostly game with the pc myself.
You don’t have to like games just because they are popular. It’s clearly not for you and that’s really all there is to it, and that is ok. Go try something else that actually piques your interest.
My understanding is that it is a complete game with no microtransactions to shove along with it. After that I believe it is because it is really really good and not a common genre to get the spot light. Mainly the first part.
There’s also the reaction from other developers claiming that the game “sets an unrealistic standard for what to expect out of a game” despite it being exactly what people want from a triple A studio. Just a complete, well made, functional game with no microtransactions
I hate all online competitive games. Yup, all of em. I can’t relax! I can’t learn at my own pace! I can’t explore! The challenge is unknown! I don’t want to get better than strangers, i don’t care about them!
i like beating systems not people. Watching my BIL play CoD and that car soccer game, I’ve seen and heard some nasty shit. I guess it’s not unusual that people get competitive (ive seen people lose their composure over drunken kickball, i get its not just online) but considering how toxic people can be i just don’t get why people would invite that into their house.
Maybe im just not competitive. Yo, any ranked or generally competitive players, what makes you come back?
I miss server browsers and community servers. Just people playing casually and the teams could shuffle every round. It was competitive, but not sweaty plam bs and being too toxic would get you banned.
thats what turns me off them. you simply can’t play online games without being a tryhard sweat anymore. i just want to smoke a joint and chill in my off hours, not get demolished every match if i dont bring in my friends and tryhard at it.
and no commumity servers because that dont make them money
Ok first of all, online gaming communities especially around the most popular “serious” competitive gaming scenes are usually awful, terribly toxic places dominated by toxic masculinity.
It is a major problem in my opinion, both from the toxic people it breeds but also from the gatekeeping that keeps out a more diverse player base than just insecure men who hurl around insults and call shit “gay” when they don’t like it.
That being said, I do really like competitive multiplayer games like apex, battlebit, rocket league (car soccer game), halo infinite etc. I am not an especially competitive person though, I don’t HAVE to win and I don’t get super angry when I lose.
I enjoy competitive games because of the rich experience of playing a game against another human who is focused and motivated to win. I especially like playing with a team of humans against another team of humans. Humans are just so much more interesting and dynamic to compete against and generally a blast to cooperate with, singleplayer games often feel stale and like they are trying to forcefully induce a fabricated experience in me in comparison. Why do I want to play a singleplayer call of duty campaign that tries to make me “feel” like I am in a big battle when I can just play battlebit and actually be in a virtual battle with 200 other humans?
Another human competing against you for fun brings a great gift to the table from the perspective of game design and it takes an immense amount of effort to create a singleplayer experience anywhere near as engaging and dynamic. Likewise goes for a human teammate vs an AI one. Drive around in a gun truck in a singleplayer game and get an AI to gun for you and you have a slightly interesting experience where the AI just dumbly shoots at targets when you drive up to them… get a HUMAN to gun for you and all of a sudden you and that person are in an action movie together where your collective survival depends on how efficiently you work together and help each other out. Maybe you never talk to your gunner over a mic, it doesn’t matter really, the connection is still there. It never gets old to me because everything I do impacts other humans who then react and adapt which causes me to have to do the same.
Singleplayer games have to do a massive amount of work to make me fee like I am in a living breathing world that responds to me. Multiplayer games “just” have to setup an arena and let players loose. The experience of trying to outsmart another human who wants to win as bad as I do is perennially rewarding. Every moment I play a competitive multiplayer game I am working on integrating knowledge, skill, and emotional regulation and always learning and adapting. It makes my brain feel alive and stimulated in a way most single player games don’t (don’t get me wrong, I love good singleplayer games too).
I hate the toxicity and I always report it when I see it though.
I feel similarly. Playing with/against npc’s just doesn’t do it for me, and I don’t even use the mic in multiplayer games unless I’m playing with friends. Additionally though, I find video games a really tedious way to get a narrative. They’re long, there’s often a lot of grinding, and if I get stuck behind a boss I won’t figure out what happens next. So I don’t even bother with single player games unless they’re famously good and short, like I really enjoyed the portal games and when I find the time I’m going to play outer wilds. But most of the video games I play are closer to sports than narratives, it’s all about figuring out the little tricks and strategies to improve myself, and the occasional wild situations that can only happen with real people
I agree with you to an extent, in my opinion the gunplay and general movement/action parts of Red Dead Redemption 2 just isn’t fun or deep. Rockstar sucks at gunplay for the most part. I respect that the game is hugely admired and people love the story and open world but I just can’t engage with it for very long because the basic gameplay loop is too unsatisfying.
On the other hand I think really well made point and clicks like Strange Horticulture, the Blackwell Series, Machinarium and others and “interactive fiction” esque games like Roadwarden are awesome ways to tell stories. Other ways are cool too like Firewatch, Oxenfree or Papers Please. If the gameplay is fun I like games with good stories, but I don’t enjoy story focused games with mediocre but prominent mechanics.
I like competitive games where I feel like I outplayed my opponent, the feeling I get from winning against an actual human is so much superior to winning against a system that was designed to not be too hard. Here I know I had to surpass myself to win
Plus having ratings and that kind of stuff is always a nice reward for winning. I play a lot of competitive tetris, Trackmania, CS2, The Finals and recently started learning Tekken 8 for this specific reason
Om the other hand, I don’t like souls like because they’re just a single goal I need to spend hours to beat with no progression afterwards. I want my solo games to be challenging sure but not requiring me to learn like my multiplayer games can get
I’m just competitive. Nothing beats absolutely decimating an opponent to the point they quit.
I also get 0 satisfaction from beating a computer. I do that every day as a software developer, so I’d much rather play against other people.
Also competitive games are great because you can play hundreds or thousands of hours and almost always get new experiences. Some team is going to throw something at you that you haven’t seen before, and it keeps the gameplay interesting and dynamic.
I only like competitive games that are just as much cooperative as they are competitive. Team-based shooters like Overwatch or R6 Siege, for example, are always fun with a group of friends.
Shit like CoD or Fortnite though? Nah, I could never get into them. I don’t really hate them or anything, but I always get bored of them very quickly so I don’t bother buying them.
So, like you I don’t enjoy most competitive games. I like to dabble occasionally and enjoy an FPS here or there(I enjoyed the Finals for a bit, and occasionally a CoD, last one was Modern Warfare), but mostly play single player or co-op games because I find them far more enjoyable.
There is one genre that is an exception, fighting games. I fucking love them. I used to enjoy them as a kid, then had a long hiatus, dabbled when Street Fighter 4 launched, but didn’t “git gud”. Then Dragonball Fighter Z and the Arcade Edition for Street Fighter 5 launched and I think they were the gateway drug for me. Street Fighter 5 was tough, I couldn’t find a character I liked, so kinda bounced off it, but DBFZ kept me in. It wasn’t until Blanka in SF5 came out that it all clicked for me.
The genre starts of like a little puddle, you don’t really need to know a lot going in, but you definitely need to want to improve. And the more you improve the more you realise how deep the puddle is, cause it is actually an ocean. When you play against another human, at the lower ranks it is quite random and spammy. But as you get past them, you get to where you can condition people, you can learn their habits and combo choices. Then you take that knowledge and adjust your gameplay and see if they can counter it, and it can be come a big back and forth of trying to get the other person to make a mistake and exploiting their habits.
It is also a genre where nothing else really transfers across. All that time in FPS or RTS games isn’t going to help, so learning to do the technical inputs can be rewarding, or labbing out a combo and how to implement it in your gameplay.
I also really enjoy the ranking climb in most fighting games. SF6 has kinda perfected it, you play 10 games and it gives you a placement from Rookie upto Diamond 1, then you match against someone typically within ±1 rank(Gold 1 would be matched with Silver 5, Gold 1 or Gold 2)and rack up points. At the top of the ranking you hit Master, then it turns into Elo points and a proper distribution of skill, cause the difference between a professional and good player that just hit Master is massive. And for SF6 it is done on a per character basis, which allows you to sink time into every character and be playing with people your skill level.
I am 417 hours into SF6, 3 characters at master rank and a few in diamond/platinum. I still feel like I am bad, and I am definitely not using all the systems effectively in the game. But I sure as hell am excited to sink another several thousand hours into this game over the life of it.
Tekken 8 also just came out, which also seems incredible, but 3D fighters are basically an entire new genre to learn.
i grew up playing street fighter ii turbo and mortal kombat with my friends from the neighborhood. Whenever we get together these days one of us will have a copy ready in case we want to throw down like when we were kids. Getting a big group talking shit and passing the controller around will never not be fun for me, but i know i dont have what it takes to handle people online.
I have read about all that goes into competitive ranked fighting games and it looks (as you say) as deep as the ocean. there is sooooo much to learn and practice that i don’t think i would ever have fun online, but i can still hold out with my favorite characters with my old pals. I agree with you, fighting games are quite fun.
I am going to respectfully disagree, I think if you have a desire to learn and participate everyone can have fun online in fighting games. Don’t get baited by thinking that you need to learn all these combos and moves and be 100% perfect at doing it all the time. Cause you dont.
The difference between someone just starting and a pro is vast, and will seem daunting and like you need to know a bunch of stuff. But honestly competitve starts out similar to you and a bunch of pals just having fun together.
You are playing the other person, getting reliable damage from a combo is more important to begin with than doing optimal damage. For street fighter(it is what I have the most experience with), you need to know how to anti air to stop people from jumping(this is usually a crouching Heavy Punch, but can be different for some characters). Then throw in a simple combo, can be an easy target combo(or using the modern inputs in SF6) or something as simple as HP > Fireball/Tatsu. And then making sure you know basics like blocking and throws, drive impact and drive parry for street fighter 6.
That seems like a lot, but it is less than the mechanics of most single player games that get thrown out in tutorials, and the rest of the knowledge will come with time and practice. Say you come across someone who just cleanly wipes the floor with you, you can look at the replay and see if there is a gap, or learn the timings, or if it is unsafe if you just kept blocking. But that won’t be something you have to worry about for a while. You will spend a lot of time figuring out how to handle people randomly throwing out DP or Drive Impact or who just won’t stop jumping.
I don’t play competitive games unless the community is generally decent or I have the option to just turn off voice and text chat for people I don’t know.
Hunt Showdown is the one arguably competitive game (in that its PvP) that I still play … the community there is generally great. There is the occasional trash talk but mostly it’s just people having fun.
Sometimes people on enemy teams will be willing to negotiate and you both walk away from the fight.
Sometimes they’ll just have fun with it and make sound effects. One guy just the other night I was in a shoot out with was making sound effects “agghhh my leg!!! You got me you got me, it’s over!!” Only to come back a few seconds later with a bomb thrown at me and my buddies.
Occasionally there are toxic people but it’s really fun when you shoot them, take their stuff, and burn their characters bodies … then report them. Taking the extra time to be inflammatory or make noise to trash talk on an extraction shooter can easily get you killed and make you lose a fair amount of stuff.
If being a toxic egomaniac is your jam, extraction shooters are a bad fit.
Screw client side anti-cheat, fix your goddamn server code.
I’m reminded of a case in Apex Legends where cheaters started dual wielding pistols, despite dual wielding not actually being a game mechanic. That should be something you can easily detect on your server and block.
Client side anticheat is just smoke and mirrors and lets developers think they can get away with not doing their job of writing secure code.
I’m honestly surprised that with all this concern about privacy against Google, Microsoft, Epic, and so on, gamers are willing to just let these games have unrestricted and unchecked access to all your internet, microphone and camera data.
Likewise, despite how much gamers call games “broken glitchy messes”, they are perfectly willing to give them enough hardware access to literally destroy your computer.
Server side anti cheat can’t distinguish good players from aimbots.
I’ve been thinking about this, and I wonder how accurate this is. I think overuse of all this modern AI nonsense is a problem, but wonder if this might be a good use case for it.
A big game will probably have huge amounts of training data for both cheaters and non cheaters. An AI could probably pick up on small things like favouring the exact centre of the head or tracking through walls.
If a user has a few reports of aimbotting, just have this AI follow them for a bit and make a judgement.
It’ll get it wrong sometimes, but that’s why you also implement a whole appeals process with actual humans. Besides, client side anticheat systems also have a nasty habit of mistakenly banning people for having specific hardware/software configs.
However, I would like games to come with servers again so you can play games on your own terms
Please! Not just for anticheat reasons, but also for mods and keeping the game playable when the publishers decide it isn’t profitable.
However, I would like games to come with servers again so you can play games on your own terms
Please! Not just for anticheat reasons, but also for mods and keeping the game playable when the publishers decide it isn’t profitable.
The problem is that having an essential component of the game run on servers that only the publisher has access to is also a pretty effective way to do DRM, so they’ve got a pretty strong incentive not to do that. It’s a lot easier to ensure that someone paid for an account on publisher-run servers than that someone paid for a copy of the server and client binaries that they are in possession of.
I’m a Linux gamer, every few weeks there’s a story in the news about how some random update to anti-cheat ending up banning Linux/Steam Deck users, it’s not a problem unique to AI. AI finding false positives will happen, but that’s where the “human in the loop” appeals process happens.
Some games do employ new tactics. For example, when the game suspects you’re cheating, it’ll spawn fake opponents only you can see and check if you try to interact with them. This will defeat most wallhacks and maybe even a few aimbots.
This is the kind of cool things that they should be doing! Try new and interesting things instead of trying to brute force anti-cheat by putting restrictions on what people can do with their computers and forcing a narrative where cheaters only exist because you weren’t strict enough.
In case of CS2, it doesn’t even ban people who teleport behind you at the first second of the round. Or killing everyone through the whole map like here (Reddit): link
Server side anti cheat can’t distinguish good players from aimbots.
Neither can a rootkit, which should be unconditionally illegal and send CEOs to jail for putting in their product. There are no exceptions and no scenarios where it can possibly be acceptable for a video game to access any operating system anywhere near that level. Every individual case should constitute felony hacking, with no possibility of "user consent" being a defense even if they do actually clearly and explicitly ask for "permission".
If you want that, I kind of feel like the obligation should be placed on the OS (or maybe Steam or similar distribution platforms) to do sandboxing. Generally-speaking, in the computer security world, you’re better off just not letting software do something objectionable than trying to track down everyone who does it and have the judicial side handle things.
Mobile OSes and game console OSes already sandbox games that way.
PCs could have the ability to do that, but they don’t do that today.
I do think that they’re heading in that direction, though, at least relative to where they were, say, 30 years ago; at that point in time, permission tended to be really at a user level, and if you ran software on your computer, it pretty much had access to anything that the user did. Web browser are generally available and act as a sandbox for some lightweight sandbox. On Linux, Wayland’s a move towards handling isolation of apps at the desktop level – for a long time, desktop APIs really didn’t permit for isolation of one graphical program from another. Also on Linux, Flatpak and the like are aimed at distributing isolated graphical applications.
If you don't physically control the hardware, it is not secure.
The only valid approach to preventing cheating that matters is to have authoritative servers. Nothing else works, nothing else theoretically can work, and nothing else can possibly be described as anything but malware. There is literally no possible scenario where any entertainment company knowing anything about what else is happening on your computer can be justified.
I’m not smart enough to see a world where Linux and effective client side anti-cheat can cohabitate. Nothing can ever stop someone running a custom linux kernel that hides any nefarious code from the games they’re targeting. PC gaming can only head that direction to the degree that they take kernel-level control away from the user.
When it comes to windows, the devs working on kernel-level anti-cheat systems are working closely with microsoft on the implementation. To the point that, if you were to try to reverse engineer it on your own machine, in all likelihood msft could convince a court that you are hacking their system, not the other way around.
I made an anti-cheat for vanilla minecraft once, it’s REALLY easy to tell if someone is cheating it’s just developers are grotesquely incompetent when it comes to detecting that sort of thing or (more often) just don’t give a shit. They’ll just create a naïve solution then never test it. For example: minecraft’s god awful anti-fly and anti-speedhack which is just “is the player in the air for 5 seconds” or “did the player go too fast” which is notorious for false positives and doesn’t even stop people trying to cheat, just punishes players for its own fuck-ups.
It really is as simple as creating a model of what the player should be able to do, and then nudging clients towards that expected play. Normal players will not even notice (or will be pleased when it fixs a desync) but cheaters will get ENRAGED and try to cheat harder before eventually giving up. The point of a good anticheat is not to punish players for cheating, but to make it easier and more fun to play within the rules.
It’s like piracy: We had years of systems built on punishment and all they do is create resentment and people trying to break your system, but you build a system on rehabilitation and you become one of the biggest platforms for PC gaming with people willingly downloading it.
Yeah, I agree with that. Installing freaking rootkits on people’s personal device, with the express purpose of identifying them and knowing what their machine contains, is not OK. A multiplayer client should be as lightweight as possible and shouldn’t be able to fuck with a game.
Even if they agree not using your data for anything else, the next security breach on their servers will make that promise useless.
And I am not sure why one would trust big publishers to have any kind of ethics anyway. Do you remember Activision’s patent to manipulate matchmaking? That would specifically match players to reward those who buy microtransactions and create pressure on those who don’t?
Yeah, totally trusting those manipulative snakes with my private data with a big “do not watch” sticker on it.
Installing freaking rootkits on people’s personal devices
If Valve is gonna do anything, I’d rather have them sandbox games from screwing with the environment, not the opposite. I’d like to be able to install random mods from Steam Workshop without worrying about whether some random modder might have malware attached to their mod that can compromise the whole system. I don’t care if a malicious mod dicks up the save games for a particular game, but I’d rather know that it cannot go beyond that.
That doesn’t solve the cheating problem, of course, but it’s a case where anti-cheating efforts and security concerns are kind of at odds.
I mean AI sounds like a legit idea. In the past e.g. battle.net from Blizzard was also just looking for “patterns”. And AI could be much better at that. The question is, how do you get the required information without having any clientside info? To distinguish between a good player and a bot would be very very time consuming to train an AI on that level.
All you really need is where the character is looking, their location and the terrain map, all of which are things the server has authority over or can check easily.
Distinguishing between a good player and a bot probably won’t be that hard. A simple aimbot would probably fire exactly at a target’s (0, 0) coordinate, while a good player may be a frame or two early or late. Someone with wallhacks will behave differently if they know someone is around a corner. There’s almost certainly going to be small “tricks” like that that an AI can pick up on.
We went through this in RuneScape with auto miners. You just randomise locations and times slightly and it’s almost impossible to tell the difference.
Depends on whether people working on cheats can see the anti-cheat detection code. It’s hard to ensure that one data set is statistically-identical to another data set.
Recently, Russia had a vote in which there was vote fraud, where some statisticians highlighted it in a really clear way – you had visible lines in the data in voting districts at 5% increments, because voting districts had been required to have a certain level of votes for a given party, and had stuffed ballot boxes to that level.
If I can see the cheat-detection code, then, yeah, it’s not going to be hard to come up with some mechanism that defeats it. But if I can’t – and especially if that cheat-detection code delays or randomly doesn’t fire – it may be very hard for me to come up with data that passes its tests.
Distinguishing between a good player and a bot probably won’t be that hard. A simple aimbot would probably fire exactly at a target’s (0, 0) coordinate,
bots are way more elaborate than that, even 20 years ago there were randomization patterns.
Unless the aimbot is using its own AI learning system, it’ll not behave as a human would. For example, it might fire at a random point in a circle, where a human might have better aim along the horizontal axis or something.
People with wallhacks will deliberately move their crosshairs over people that they see through walls. Or, if they know the server is watching for that, they’ll make a subconscious effort to never have their crosshairs over someone through walls.
Inexhaustive of things that kernel mode code can do that unprivileged (without “root”) user mode cannot:
Update and install drivers.
Run programs (like cryptominers) without them appearing in the task list.
Make network requests ignoring all firewalls and monitoring tools, even when seemingly in airplane mode.
Monitor your webcam and microphone, possibly without turning on that little light next to it.
Escape any sandbox you put it in.
Replace the OS with one containing malicious code.
Replace the efi firmware with one that replaces any future OS install with the aforementioned malicious OS.
Permanently brick your graphics card.
Take advantage of buggy hardware to burn your house down.
And so on. The question you should be asking isn’t “are they going to do this?” but instead “why are they even asking for this permission in the first place?”.
A game where you run around pretending to be a space marine doesn’t need low level access to your hardware.
I’d argue that any software that is adversarial towards the user/computer owner, and takes actions specifically to hinder an action by them, on their own machine, is malicious.
We’d be absolutely apoplectic if the government demanded we install a surveillance tool on our laptops in order to e.g. access the DMV website or file our taxes, but when someone tells us to in order to play a game, it’s okay? Nah.
I don’t. Anything on the client can be tampered with. It’s the server’s job to make sure anything they receive is both valid and consistent with how a human would act.
how do you stop it on client side? I’m not sure if it has been deployed into the wild but these days computer vision is good enough to just work off the images. Capture image signal, fake usb mouse outputting movements calculated from image data. If this isn’t already available it’s only held back by the need for extra hardware.
I just started apex two month ago and i think i haven't encountered more than one cheater, but i wasn't really sure. I watched a video on cheaters on apex yesterday and ooof, it's really bad. In other games i played they would use aimbot and or walls. But not speedhacking, dual wielding, aimbot and quickshielding and what not. And apparently nothing really ever happens to them.
Quick disclaimer, I’ve been involved with FOSS shooters for something like 20 years now. I mention that to establish where I come from: in a FOSS game anybody can modify the game client all they want, so all the bullshit is out of the way from the start. You can’t hide behind make-believe notions such as “they can’t modify the client” – which is one of the major lies and fallacies of commercial close-source games. If there’s something you don’t want the client to know or do, you make it so on the server.
There is a lot of things that the server can do that can severely limit cheater shenanigans. If you don’t want them to see through walls then don’t tell them what’s behind walls. If you don’t want them to know what’s behind them then don’t tell them what’s outside their cone of view. If you don’t want them to teleport look where they were a moment ago and where they claim to be now and figure out if it should be possible. You get the idea.
Aimbots can be detected because at the core it’s a simple issue of the client’s aim snapping from one place to the target too fast. What’s “too fast” and the pattern of the movement can be up for debate but it can definitely be detected and analysed and reviewed in many ways – regular code, AI, and human replay.
If this kind of analysis is too much for your server to perform in real time (it was too much, 20 years ago) then you can store it and analyse it offline or replay it for human reviewers. You can fast-parse game data for telltale signs, analyse specific episodes in detail, and decide to ban players. Yes it happens after the game was ruined but at least it happens.
There are a couple of types of cheating that you can’t detect server side:
Modifications to the client HUD that help the player grok information faster and better. This is a large category that can include things like colorblindness overlays, font changes, UI changes, movement tracking on display etc. As far as I’m concerned that falls under HUD modding and should be welcome in any healthy game. Again, if you don’t want clients to have a piece of information don’t give it to them, and design your game in a way that such mods are mostly irrelevant.
Automating input. Again a large category that includes macros that speed up complex chains of operations. Can be slowed down by imposing server-side delays but you can hurt legit fast players this way too. Same as above, if this is what makes or breaks your shooter then perhaps you should rethink it.
Some of the most fun games I’ve seen did not care about HUD mods and macros and on the contrary embraced them. You want to write a macro that will auto-purchase the best gear based on your available coin after respawn? Knock yourself out, because what constitutes “best” gear changes depending of the circumstances, and a veteran with a pistol can smoke your ass anyway if you don’t know how to properly use that fancy plasma gun.
I’ve mentioned human review above which brings up an interesting feature that I don’t see implemented in enough games: saving and replaying game metadata. It’s stupidly simple to store everything that happened during a match on the server side and it doesn’t take much space. You can offer that recording to seasoned players to replay on their PC which allows them to see the match from any player’s point of view. An experienced veteran can notice all kinds of shenanigans this way – and it’s also an excellent e-sport and machinima feature that enables commentary, editing, tutorials and so on.
Edit: Oh, forgot one thing. You may be wondering, then why don’t the big game companies do all this? Simple, cost. Why should they pay for server juice and staff to review games properly when they can slap a rootkit on your computer and use your resources?
in a FOSS game anybody can modify the game client all they want, so all the bullshit is out of the way from the start. You can’t hide behind make-believe notions such as “they can’t modify the client” – which is one of the major lies and fallacies of commercial close-source games.
Sometimes, just for practical performance reasons, with realtime games, the client is gonna need access to data that would permit one to cheat. You can’t do some game genres very well while keeping things on the server.
Consoles solve this by not letting you modify your computer. I think that if someone is set on playing a competitive game, that’s probably the best route, as unenthusiastic as I am about closed systems. The console is just better-aimed at providing a level playing field. Same hardware, same performance, same input devices, can’t modify the environment.
'Course, with single player games, all that goes out the window. If I want to modify the game however I want, I should be able to do so, as it doesn’t hurt anyone else. I should be able to have macros or run an FPS in wireframe mode or whatever.
For PC competitive multiplayer, in theory, you could have some kind of trusted component for PCs (a “gaming card” or something) that has some memory and compute capability and stores the stuff that the host can’t see. The host could put information that the untrusted code running on the host can’t see on the card. It also lets anti-cheat code run on the card in a trusted environment with high-bandwidth and low-latency access to the host, so you can get, for example, mouse motion data at the host sampling rate for analysis. That’d be a partial solution.
Sure, it’d be a solution for five minutes until someone delids the secure enclave on the gaming card, extracts the keys, and builds their own open source hw alternative.
High-performance FPGAs are actually relatively cheap if you take apart broken elgato/bmd capture cards, just a pain in the butt to reball and solder them. But possibly the cheapest way to be able to emulate any chip you could want.
someone delids the secure enclave on the gaming card, extracts the keys
Not a problem. You can potentially go for an attack on hardware, maybe recover a key, but you have a unique key tied to it. Now the attacker has a key for a single trusted computer. He can’t distribute it with an open-source FPGA design and have other users use that key, or it’ll be obvious to the server that many users have the key. They blacklist the key.
It’s because hardware is a pain to attack that consoles don’t have the cheating issues that PCs do.
I’m just a little bit late to the Baldurs Gate 3 party,
Late? As a patient gamer I would say you got in early. :)
I played most of the mainstream CRPG, including multiple Larian Studios titles and I have no doubt that I will play BG3 as well… But probably in a year or two after the game gets some polish and, hopefully, a discount.
BTW, thanks for posting and generating content in Lemmy.
There’s also no statute of limitations with Baldur’s Gate games. When there are people still getting into the previous games in the series for the first time 20 years after they were released, you have a little more of a grace period before considering yourself “late to the game.”
Oh, totally fair. Theres bugs. But not on the level of AAA fames that get churned out. This game sits in a completely different category to other games in terms of development and quality etc.
The point veing you dont need to wait for it to be polished as its been in that process for longer than any other AAA game at release.
I cannot help you with BG3 as I have not bought it yet.
Having said that, and knowing other games from the same developer, I guess BG3 is probably friendly enough to new players to CRPG. Just be warned that it is probably also overwhelming (I played the last two games and they took me more than 100 hours each).
If you played any d&d game (videogame or paper) is easier. If you played previous BG, it helps in some lore, but overall I think its quite easy to get in some more classic classes, like warrior, cleric, wizard or rogue
I posted about this in another thread, but Epic also bought exclusivity for games that were crowd-funded then had the option to have the game on Steam removed or you’d get the Steam key after the exclusivity period expired. This pissed off a lot of people.
Yeah, this caused A LOT of controversy back then. As far as I know, Epic has stopped doing this and has pivoted a bit more into funding game development (i.e. Alan Wake 2.) That being said, that gave Epic a terrible reputation when they initially launched EGS.
I meant with crowd funded games. I’m aware that they still buy exclusivity. Though from what I know they pay indies less compared to what they used to pay.
I don’t actually know all the games that did this, but the most famous examples are Phoenix Point and Shenmue 3. I already read that Outer Wilds was another one that took the exclusivity deal.
Disco Elysium is a fantastic one. There are an insane amount of choices that shape how you go about the investigation of the hanged man and ultimately what happens beyond that investigation. Choices of who to side with, how to side (openly or playing multiple sides, etc.), choices that ultimately define what kind of detective you are (by-the-book boring, superstar douchebag, violent tough guy, Sherlock Holmes-esque genius, etc., including my favorite: Twin Peaks Lynchian detective that bases their decisions off of dreams, intuition and imaginary conversations with the dead body), and even how failing or succeeding at something can lead to progress in very different ways. If you fail to hit that person you tried to punch, or miss that shot with your gun, or utterly fail to convince someone to help you, you progress through in very different ways so that failing your way to the truth is just as satisfying and entertaining as succeeding your checks to get there.
And of course Fallout: New Vegas. Whether you choose to support the New California Republic, Caesar’s Legion, Mr. House, or a truly independent New Vegas, none of them are perfect. Each succeeds in an ideal society in some ways but completely fails at others, leaving you to decide which imperfect system you feel is the right one for the world instead of shoving an obvious answer in your face.
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