That guy legitimately made his hobby into his job.
There’s 0 reasons for him to still keep updating the game with as much content as he’s doing except for his own satisfaction. Truly the best developer a game can have
Man the negativity. I’m so sick of gamers negativity. It’s not even a new game, it’s a remaster. you knew what the product was going to be. It’s oblivion. We all knew it was oblivion. If you don’t like oblivion, why did you buy it?!
I swear to God if they changed it too much I’d be commenting here on a post about how they had no respect for the original. Then we wonder why “they never listen to gamers”. Because we bitch and moan about everything.
Just musing on the fact that Bethesda doesn’t care about making games and instead just cashes in on nostalgia. I also think their finance bros realized their upcoming big IP drop is going to be an objective POS and wanted to prime people’s expectations by re-releasing a 20 year old game with some lipstick on it.
It would be neat if they hired some people who actually had innovative ideas about gameplay, visuals and stories to maybe make a neat new game within an existing or new IP, but they haven’t done that in literal decades so I think its pretty reasonable to not be incredibly excited about anything they are putting out or planning to put out in the future.
As someone with no kids and a work/life balance that allows me to enjoy video games, I wonder how much of this vitriol comes from bitter millennials who are mad at the world because they don’t have time to play games anymore.
As a long time Bethesda game fan I agree with you on almost everything you’ve said about Bethesda… But the remaster is a terrible example of your points.
The remaster does exactly what it says on the tin and they’ve been very upfront about how it was made and why it was made in the launch video.
It’s hard to criticise them for cashing in on nostalgia when they’ve shown time and time again with Skyrim re-releases that do a fraction of what the Oblivion remaster does still sell like hot cakes.
Nostalgia is at the core of their business model. That’s why they march Skyrim’s corpse out every two years like clockwork; that’s why they picked Fallout for a new franchise after ES; that’s, frankly, likely why Starfield sucks so much.
It’s not even much of a remaster. They just slapped a coat of paint on it.
The Gamebryo/Creation Engine is still there running the game, it just uses Unreal 5 for the graphical elements. And they updated some of the levelling to work more like Skyrim, because the Oblivion system sucked in comparison.
It’s still the same 20 year old Oblivion under the hood.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but calling it a remaster is a bit disingenuous.
More than a coat of paint. They didn’t actually port the game to Unreal 5, they just used it to make the graphics look better. The modding community could have done this years ago if that’s all they wanted to do. Skyblivion is more of a remaster than this official one.
With all of the resources of the original development and sources, I expect more than the modding community is capable of.
Emm, no. If you build something from the ground up it’s called remake.(Demon Souls, the Resident Evil series) Remastered is taking the old game and put on a fresh paint of coat and give it some modern QOL so it’s much more accessible today.
Skyblivion is closer to remake than remaster.
Also i feels like you misunderstand why people like this game.
If you’re fine paying $50-60 for what amounts to a community graphical overhaul mod that’s fine. I expect more from an actual developer with access to the source code.
A remaster should be releasing Oblivion with an updated engine and graphics, and bringing in some gameplay enhancements from newer games. Technically this meets those requirements, but only by the bare minimum and all of those can be achieved with community mods for free.
A remake would be completely abandoning the decrepit Gamebryo/Creation Engine that’s clearly dragging all of their games down now, and has been for over a decade, and actually giving us something that doesn’t feel like it came out 20+ years ago.
I love the Elder Scrolls, Oblivion is one of my favorite games of all time, and the only one I ever bothered to get every achievement for back on the 360. But I won’t accept a half assed remaster for nearly full price just because it’s what Bethesda wants to distract everyone from the fact that Elder Scrolls 6 isn’t coming out anytime soon and they couldn’t just release Skyrim for the 12th time.
Don’t accept paying for mediocre products just because you’re desperate for content.
They literally had a hour long stream explaining what they did, and then you could have watched any of the thousands of twitch streams showing it. There was zero reason that you should have bought this if you thought this. I knew exactly what I was buying, seems like pretty much everyone did.
You are describing a remake. A remaster is a fresh coat of paint. Todd Howard said verbatim “This is not a remake” and then talked about his reasons why. You’re going on like they lied to you when they literally said everything you just complained about, and then you still bought it.
And they updated some of the levelling to work more like Skyrim, because the Oblivion system sucked in comparison
Updated how exactly? Oblivion and Skyrim both have pretty serious flaws. I believe there are popular mods to fix the Oblivion system in a way that still feels like Oblivion, though it’s been a long time since I’ve read in to any of it.
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.
Were all Take Two games automatically updated in secret and now hijack your machine with root access to spy on everything you do? ❌
Do Take Two games contain code to report telemetry and user information(including application/system activity) to a home server? ✅
Is this EULA change extraordinary and particularly egregious in comparison to others that most people have probably already agreed to? ❌(IMO)
Are people riled up because e a YouTube video went a little viral and now they’re all playing telephone to the point where it’s now gotten to the point of random dumdums are review booming a 13 year old game claiming it’s turned into literal spyware? ✅(again, IMO)
Should you be surprised by any of this if you’ve been even remotely paying attention for any period of the last 30-40 years? ❌
Do we need more than just angry idiots in the battle against corpatocracy? ✅
We should be done coddling the late comers at this point. Yes welcome them and accept them, but at a certain point your level of ignorance became a detriment to your community and you should be made aware of that fact.
A bit more than what, not really sure what your point here is? All of those bullet points are similar if not identical to terms in other EULAs half the people in this thread have already clicked thru.
I’ll say it again, if you think this is anything new you haven’t been paying attention. I’m all for calling this fuckery out and pushing for something better. But like where yall been?
Still no actual answers from anyone on how this is ‘more’ than what I described in my op. Sure it’s a more detailed list, but it’s really not the “gotcha” everyone seems to think it is. That is, if youve been paying attention.
Let’s ride the wave. Turn this into a huge controversy known industry-wide. Then, next game that comes out with EULA like this, we say “THIS GAME HAS A BORDERLANDS-STYLE EULA”. Pretend it’s new to exploit the shock value and get the gamers riled up. Then, the industry gets better.
Tell the frog that the pot wasn’t always this hot.
What point are you trying to make? You say you’re “all for calling this kind of fuckery out” but then you’re criticizing people for calling it out? And who cares what other EULAs might say? The point is that the license agreement for this game and others owned by this company didn’t say this shit before, and now they do. The company is actively making their user agreement more hostile to the users which is what people are pissed about.
That it takes more critical thinking to accomplish the organized action needed for real change than leaving a bunch of negative reviews.
I never once said ‘other company’s do it so just deal with it.’ Fuckawhataboutism. I said “if you think this is new, you haven’t been paying attention.” What I shouldn’t have left unsaid was ‘the review is a nice start and show of intention. but we need a lot more dedicated, well organized action, to actually accomplish any change.’
But people read into things what they want to hear.
Some people will always find an excuse to change nothing.
It doesn’t matter how many similar EULA’s people have already accepted. The best moment to not eat it anymore would have been the first time it happened, the second best time is right now.
Also, retroactively amending an EULA is a different quality, since people have already paid for the game and would be locked out after the fact if they didn’t accept.
I’m sad you read this as an admission of defeat and an attempt to deter others from fighting. Was hoping for more of a ‘you’re late, you have a bunch of homework to catch up on’ vibe but I’m not great at communicating all the time.
It seems like you’re giving of a “victim” vibe with this by stating you wished for only a particular type of “positive response” when you’ve posted a misleading comment and doubled-down with “EULAs half the people in this thread have already clicked thru” which you have no way of knowing.
Were all Take Two games automatically updated in secret and now hijack your machine with root access to spy on everything you do? ❌
10.2. Updates, Modifications, and Sunset. We may provide patches, updates, or upgrades to the Services, Virtual Items, Content, or your Account that may be required for you to continue using the Services, including automatic or “in the background” updates without notice to you.
“Was hoping for more of a ‘you’re late, you have a bunch of homework to catch up on’” You’re expecting others to hold your hand and inform you of every event or action taken by every company. I guess I’ll do my part since I have been trying to let other people know for a while now,
Steam Discussion deleted after questioning the “EULA” of Stormgate, another post by me after I tried to inform others and was suppressed, meaning the reviews is the only course of action that most have at their disposal. Even posting on their official subreddit did no good with the exact same type of response you’ve presented here,
They didn’t collect such information (they technically couldn’t), they are giving examples of such types of personally identifiable information.
Yeah, it’s excessive, they don’t need half of this. However, writing it this way makes it near impossible for them to screw up by accident. If you play games, you probably agreed to a handful of ELUA’s like that by now.
This keeps getting brought up in every controversial game these days and the answer is always the same: They aren’t.
Most of this is not out of the ordinary.
Imagine thinking all of this information about you isn’t already owned by several corporations lol.
Some of these stuffs are required in X countries not yours, stop thinking the entire world is all about you buddy.
You’ve officially become part of the problem and an ally to the very same reason why we can’t “accomplish the organized action needed for real change (than leaving a bunch of negative reviews.)”
I get that and agree, this is just a crappy and kinda dumb stick to be wasting the energy on because it makes the side opposing the injustice look like petulant children instead of enabling effective action.
I see this kind of comment before and I will never understand it - “other companies do it so just bend over and let us do it to you too!”
People say this all the time about Denuvo too: “Other games already have Denuvo, why are you crying about it here when you’re playing other games?”
And see, that’s the problem - we aren’t playing those other Denuvo games. And same thing applies here, guess what, a lot of us aren’t buying games from gross companies like EA with these shit terms. So when a company we are doing business with suddenly changes their terms to be shit, that’s a valid complaint. Some of us have already been boycotting bad business practices in the industry, so the idea of company changing terms towards the boycott after we’ve already invested in the game feels like a betrayal because it is.
So maybe stop focusing on what you assume the rest of audience is doing and instead go back to focusing on what the people at the goddamn podium are trying to pull?
Why does everyone insist on adding the ‘so just bend over and take’ part whenever someone points out another source of wrongdoing? Like what do yall always take it to mean that the speaker is implying a whataboutism argument? And not maybe as ‘oh shit this has been going on longer than just this maybe we should learn about that too and we might figure out why it hasn’t been stopped yet.’
If “everyone” keeps reading a sentiment you did not intend out of your message, perhaps it is time to consider that you are doing a poor job of communicating your point.
Or you’re being disingenuous and just don’t like being calling on your hissy fit.
Not a lot. Even when it isn’t a flatpak windows software running on linux won’t be able to interact with the system anywhere near as much as on windows.
How locked down a flatpak is depends entirely on the developer and what permissions they request. By default, they can’t really see much. For example, they can’t even see the processes running on your host or your user and system files.
Flatpak does not do anything about network access though, it can only do no access or full access, no in between. The data they can collect on Linux in a Flatpak is very limited but it does not prevent them from calling home.
So…if Steam is running in a Flatpak, and Borderlands is launched from Steam, how much can they even see…really?
Without using exploits to escape the container, not much. A very empty Windows environment with a single game installed, your network interfaces and any directories that the Flatpak has access to (usually just the SteamLibrary directories).
The TOS (www.take2games.com/legal/en-US/) changes are mostly related to data that they collect via their interfacing with Steam and through their website. This idea that they’re requiring you to agree to a root level access or installing a spyware rootkit is just nonsense.
A youtuber named Hellfire has been on a spree, basically discovering how fucked up EULAs have been in games for the past 20ish years… well this is all brand new news to him and and his Zoomer / Gen A followers.
There is, as of right now, literally zero evidence that Borderlands 2 has been updated with a rootkit, with kernel level anti cheat, anything like that.
The last update to its game files was 2 years ago.
This is almost certainly them updating the EULA everywhere, the precise timing of this being for some specific arcane legal and business reasons… TakeTwo runs a whole bunch more games than juat Borderlands… namely GTA V…
…
Is this EULA bad? Yes.
Is it much worse than it was before, or what other large gaming companies EULAs have, and have had for… a decade+?
Maybe by a bit, but not really, no.
…
Is Randy Pitchford a dumb idiot asshole?
Oh absolutely yes, but that shouldn’t give people the liscense to make completely unevidenced claims about other things.
…
The game does not have a kernel level AC or some kind of rootkit DRM, as many, many people are currently saying it does.
I guess gamer attention span can really hold onto a few keywords and phrases at a time.
… I say this all as person who is vehemently against kernel level AC, who has been pointing out for 4 years, that almost all existing anti cheat systems currently have at least one game that implements their AC, on linux, without using kernel level anything… it is entirely possible to do AC without kernel level shit, even on linux, and has been for at least 4 years. EAC and BattleEye have supported linux for 4 years, but nearly no game that uses them has actually used this feature/available and offered support.
I am glad that this level of hate is finally being directed at shitty EULAs, but lets at least get our facts straight, or actually provide some hitherto unseen evidence that Borderlands has had some kind of sleeper malware in it for at least the past two years, just waiting to be activated by a TOS update to every single Take Two game.
I can buy a new toaster from the shop, why can’t I buy a woman too? Does this mean Gamers are pro sex-work? Or pro indentured servitude for women more likely…
my inner engineer wants to challenge this: I know there’s a dildo company that does tours, and at least copies penises and vulvae of customers as a souveneir, im sure there are things that copy at least he surface of the vaginal canal if you want to be completionist. maybe with the right kind of 3d printer it could be done? not sure, haven’t really worked with nylon materials.
Nylon? I would think this would be a ‘print the moulds we use to pour in silicone’ situation, if we’re going for usability. formlabs.com/blog/casting-silicone-guide/ On an engineering note I’m also sure I’ve seen this exact thing before, but I wonder what would improve it. Self-heating? DIY solution could be a hidden pocket for reusable handwarmers lol
Gamers tend to think of things as quests. A box to check off. A completionist. Getting married and having kids is part of life’s quests for many people. It’s not seen as collaboration in many ways.
How does romance work in most video games? Select the correct dialogue options, memorize the correct answer to questions, give them the same gift every day?
The other main way a lot of young men “interact” with women is through porn, which is always made with a mind to what a woman would enjoy during sex…/s
because you think of “I never get laid” as a normal human need to connect with another person, which is what it is but they’re too deep in misogyny to realize it. instead to them getting laid is a quest to complete and it involves a quest item known as a woman, not a character. so I never get laid has less of an undertone of “why can’t I connect with a woman” and more of “when will we get our government mandated sex slaves”
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.
I'm in my 40s and I've been playing counterstrike since I was in my 20s. I play other games briefly but anytime i'm bored I still hop on CS. It's a habit like checking your locks 3 times or taking your clothes off to poop
They’re just referring to normal habits we all do like checking your oven for the family of mice you let live there before leaving for work or brushing your teeth one tooth at a time while watching the Flintstones in a language you don’t understand. We all do it.
Yea like moving all the food on the top shelf of your fridge to the bottom and moving everything up shelf by shelf every morning or making sure you vacuum your walls properly. Standard stuff.
I don’t know about every time, but I’ve had an intestinal blockage. Everything came off. I was sweating and crying for what felt like hours. Pooping was the best feeling I’ve ever had at that moment.
While I don’t fully disrobe, the freedom of pulling one leg out of my pants is amazing. You can get a nice spread going for those times you need to bear down a bit.
The older I get, the less I want to learn new competitive games because I just don’t have time anymore. It’s just nice to go back to something familiar every now and then.
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.
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 :)
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.
Fuck PEGI, their ratings always sucked and weren’t useful at all. Full blown swearing? 13+. One cigar through 500 hours of gameplay? Adults only. Never cared, never will.
exclusivity deals, forcing them to drop from steam even after they first announced release on there. They also target crowdfunded games like phoenixpoint.
Even if they have fixed that specific issue, why would you believe they have fixed anything else?
first comment on the reddit thread>thlm 5mo ago Epic Games Launcher Incorrect Default Permissions Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability CVSS SCORE 7.8 This vulnerability allows local attackers to escalate privileges on affected installations of Epic Games Launcher. An attacker must first obtain the ability to execute low-privileged code on the target system in order to exploit this vulnerability. The specific flaw exists within the product installer. The product applies incorrect default permissions to a sensitive folder. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to escalate privileges and execute arbitrary code in the context of SYSTEM. DISCLOSURE TIMELINE 2024-07-16 - Vulnerability reported to vendor 2024-12-04 - Coordinated public release of advisory 2024-12-06 - Advisory Updated That timeline is disgusting
So in essence, its not bad because it trys to compete with steam. Its bad because they really dont try to compete and just do anti-user things. And people dont care because “yay free games I’m never going to look at again”.
If you want to see what actual competition looks like at the moment, take a look at GOG.
I don’t hate times exclusives that much because that’s done extra cashflow for the dev to be able to either finish their game or polish it further. I still don’t think we’d have gotten Alan Wake 2 at least the version we got without that epic deal. I also don’t know if square would’ve bothered even entertaining the idea of porting all of the kingdoms hearts games either.
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