They will turn off the live service and make it work offline?
I don’t understand. Industry bootlickers told me it was impossible and would cost billions to implement, hurting small indie studios the most. Yet, Nintendo does it voluntarily with seemingly no difficulties.
I would argue Nintendo does do a lot of pro-consumer stuff. Like making actually good games. It’s just their anti-consumer stuff is either so bad or just plain weird that we just scratch our heads and think Nintendo is going off the deep end. Still trying to avoid buying much Nintendo going forward.
Making a good game is the minimum expectation. Making an open platform to force competition to also endorse open platforms would be going above and beyond to be pro consumer.
You really have no idea how intellectual property works do you? The reason they’ve gone after emulation and rom hosting sites is pretty obvious, they have to protect their IP.
Why they’ve waited so long only to do it now? I honestly don’t have an answer for you on that one, but if I were to guess it’s because retro gaming has been going through somewhat of a renaissance as of late due to shitty AAA games and indie devs gaining so much popularity.
The bottom line is Nintendo lost the emulation battle once, and they don’t want to lose a second time. They’re more experienced and understand the risks of letting emulation replace services like Nintendo switch online, and so do publishers that own intellectual property from retro consoles. It sucks, but that’s corporate life, and you can’t really get around it without jumping through hoops or doing something illegal.
Your comment is very out of place as a response to mine, but since you brought all this up:
I don’t begrudge Nintendo for getting ROM sites shut down. I begrudge them for shutting them down without also making their games legally available for purchase where their customers want to play them. Those old games aren’t even legally available for purchase at all, because they want to just rent them to you forever, which is an enormous dick move. Then they further that with the dick move of trying to remove the place where we get those games the way we’d like to enjoy them, and getting them that way is a better experience than using their official solution.
So assuming you didn’t get lost and you actually meant to respond to my comment, I can’t consider them pro consumer when they’re not doing what’s in the consumer’s best interests.
Nintendo might be seeing the writing on the wall and looking to see how much profit they can make with this. If it goes well, we might see more of it. Corporations hate regulation and sometimes try and head it off long before it is coming.
Hi, industry bootlicker here! Nintendo is listening to their consumers. I was told corporations are evil and won’t listen to consumers and must be forced to do things by law. I much prefer consumers remain vocal about their wants because corporations do indeed listen. No government intervention required. I worry government rules could cause unintended problems that don’t benefit anybody.
Oh no! Not Microsoft Bingo! That’s a list of D list games nobody has ever heard of that all shutdown years ago. I don’t think the world would be a better place if the devs of Radical Heights, a free to play arena shooter that was launched and shutdown a month later in 2018 were forced to give their game out to everyone for free after.
Of course not every game is a certified banger, but there’s more than enough notable games on that list that made an impact on the industry and should’ve been preserved for that fact alone.
You didn’t create those games. Games are products people work to produce. Radical Heights was a free to play game that was shutdown in a month. What would you force them to do? Release their server code for free so anybody can run a Radical Heights server that people can connect to and play? So a whole bunch of people who never gave the developers a cent have the right to demand the game be given to them simply because it existed for 1 month?
If a game asks for money in any kind of way: Yes. That should be the cost of (trying to do) business.
Alternatively, a full refund for everyone involved, even Kickstarter backers, would also be acceptable.
That’s just blatantly false. People bought the founders pack were never refunded for example. Those people being entitled to the server software or a refund is anything but greedy, even if that only applies to a single person.
If they can play against bots, which already exist in the game, or band enough people together with access to the game to play on a server one player is able to host, then yes. That’s what I’d expect at a minimum.
If they want to keep some form of DRM then that’s not my job to figure out. This wasn’t a problem back in the day when server software being distributed was the norm, so it shouldn’t be a problem now.
Though personally I’d be in favor of abolishing online DRM entirely, but that’s another story.
So you want people to follow a law without knowing how it should be followed? You signed a petition and now it’s someone else’s problem if they get in legal trouble or not? This makes the world a better place because it protects theoretical people?
At least try to make an effort to understand what I write.
I said it’s their job to figure out how to do DRM -if- they want DRM. If they can’t figure out how to do that then the answer shouldn’t need to be spelled out explicitly: No DRM. Simple as that.
If you’d rather see games you spent money on being taken away from you based on the whims of corporations, just to make sure others who might not have payed for it also can’t play it, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Control of the server is the DRM. Radical Heights sold hats for $15. How do they ensure only players who paid for hats get them and that non-paying players couldn’t just mod them in? They control that information on the server. Which accounts have cosmetics is controlled by the server. That’s the DRM. If they had to release the server when shutting down then they’d have no way to ensure only paying customers play the game since the person who runs the sever can modify it however they want. Everyone could get the $15 hats for free! Or maybe they charge $2 for the hats. There’s no DRM that could prevent this because control of the server is itself the DRM.
So a dev is being required by law to give out their game without any DRM meaning anyone can play it for free and even give themselves the cosmetics the original devs were using to pay the salaries of the dev team. I worry very much that this would cause companies to stop producing free to play games or charge a subscription for these types of games instead (since subscription based games would be exempt). I wonder why people would risk this to “save” games like Radical Heights which, in all likelihood, would have no community. A game doesn’t shutdown after 1 month because it has a thriving community
Yes, you’re just explaining regular piracy here. I do not care. It’s a thing that’s already been possible for almost every single-player game in existence, and yet, there’s a constant stream of new single-player games releasing every day. Weird, right?
I have no authority over anything, so yes, they can. What I’d like to see is an option to buy an offline copy of the game and any add-ons I bought, but no one does that. What Stop Killing Games is looking for is for the server to be made available after the game’s end of life so that you can continue to use anything you paid for.
Looks like some of those are games that were cancelled, some were online multiplayer games that had the servers shutdown, some were simply removed from the Microsoft Store and some were single player games with always online DRM for which they shut the servers down. So it’s not all super scummy nonsense
If it’s a game like an MMO (which several on that list are) they’d have to publish the server software in order to avoid fully killing the game. And to publish the server software that was only ever expected to run in their own datacenters they’d then have to publish documentation, dependencies, etc. and this is all assuming that it can be contained in a single installer for a single machine without relying on additional services they host, and assuming it has reasonable system requirements for average users to self host.
That’s also assuming playing an MMO alone/with only 1-2 people doesn’t suck. Play some 2009scape single player without adventure bots. It feels lonely as all heck
Plus there’s all of the legal and PR hurdles to ensure you’re not exposing yourself to undue risk.
Basically a million reasons for a company to not spend a thousand work hours ensuring their crappy MMO (I’ve tried out a couple of the listed MMOs, they were unsuccessful for a reason) can continue to be played after they’ve divested from it
Licenses and middleware can be chosen more proactively to preserve and distribute the server if they know during development that it’s a requirement. There are tons of people who functionally play MMOs single player already, when the server is already running. And I play a 12 year old fighting game that’s easily able to coordinate 20-100 people to play it multiple times per week with nothing but Discord; there’s no doubt in my mind you’d be able to get 40 people together for a raid on a private server.
The other answer from @ampseandrew already covers most points, so I’ll just a few things:
Most game servers out there are already built in a way to allow for easy deployment. After all, devs have to have way to test changes, so being able to run a small server locally for debugging purposes is hugely beneficial to development.
I also can’t imagine that there’s any game server out there that shouldn’t be able to run on a single system. The heaviest one game I can imagine is Minecraft, due to the whole open world terrain generation, world streaming and physics calculations, and even that can be run off a Raspberry Pi for a small number of players.
I’ve had this exact thought in my head the past few days, including the idea that having 3 or 4 different types would actually fulfill the goal of avoiding “Male/Female” choices - something that only Saint’s Row has done, AFAIK.
The issue is that they only changed the label and Body Type A and B are still clearly Male and Female, but for some reason people praise it as not being gender locked because…?
Its even more ridiculous in games like Monster Hunter Rise for example, where you get the Type A and Type B body options…and then you still get gendered outfits where one is fully covered and the other is baring their midriff and wearing dresses! Wow, I wonder which is supposed to be which!? /sarcasm
I’ve heard that for Monster Hunter Rise “Type A/Type B” was decided upon by the localization and that in Japan (the country of origin for MHR) they just use Male/Female. Meaning it’s not the dev being lazy, it’s localization earning themselves a “You Tried” ribbon.
I recall Nintendo claiming they wanted to move away from mobile again a while ago but I didn‘t really believe it back then and I‘m still skeptical now. They‘ve received more criticism for their predatory mobile games lately so maybe that got something to do with it or it‘s simply not making enough money anymore to bother with it and they‘d rather get the devs working on something else.
That was the most logical answer I came up too. Its just crazy to do the right thing and make if work offline instead of just binning it like so many other live service games.
I mean, I never paid for it but I did the math many years ago, to explain predatory microtransactions, and found out that for a chance - a perfect rolled no dupes chance - it’d be cheaper to buy a 2DS and a physical copy of new leaf.
Like, there’s only so many times they can release a set or do a palette swap for a ‘new’ collection.
I think I remember reading a while ago that apps need to be updated occasionally to comply with .apk guidelines.
This is presumably dependant on which permissions the .apk requests. So a simple calculator app wouldn’t need to be updated, but the calculator plus app, which tracks my blood pressure, how many glasses of water I’ve drank, and my semen count, would need to be updated occasionally to comply with Google’s privacy policies.
But I’m not an app developer, so don’t trust me on a whim.
What if you’re a dummy thicc femboy with boyboobs?
You might think this identity is just a meme, but it’s not. And while some percentage of that is queer people secure in their identities, some of it is also questioning trans girls who aren’t comfortable selecting “female” yet but will try out exploring femininity through the “femboy” meme.
As an enby, I’ll pick body B most of the time, but I don’t like being called female. I’ll put up with it in an old game, but if a studio decides to not misgender me, I’m nothing but happy. I agree 100% that more options would be nice. But assuming that game companies aren’t going to spend money on artists to make diverse bodies, why yuck the yum I experience when a game at least tries to not misgender me?
Oh wow, I could never put to words why I didn’t like the body type system either, but you nailed it. Yeah, I also wish that games could just give you sliders and/or more presets or something to have actual variety. If a game will only support curvy girls and buff dudes, but won’t also let people make, for instance, cute androgynous cat boys, or anything else a person might fancy, then what’s the point of it?
As someone is very much not cisgender, I look at it and go “Well, isn’t every FTM going to pick Body Type A with male pronouns while MTFs like myself go with Body Type B with female pronouns? Who outside of a Far Right Troll trying and failing to be funny is gonna pick the buff bearded dude and select the she/her pronouns?”
Me! What do you have against bearded, manly ladies? They’re awesome!
It is kinda lazy to have “full masculine” and “full feminine” as your only choices while pretending they aren’t just “male” or “female”, but at the same time, I think it’s a step in the right direction. Today the options might be “not-man” and “not-woman”, but the future might have “not-man”, “not-woman”, “man-woman” and “woman-man”!
I’d highly recommend Stolen Realms. Pretty cheap too
It’s a hex grid turn based game. You can have up to 6 characters (difficulty scales per character) and can each control as many in the party as you want. Turns are taken as enemy, and players with the players able to act at the same time so you aren’t waiting too long if you are communicating about what you want to do.
It has multiple “classes” with skill tiers that require you to take a few from that “class” but you can spec however you want.
The roguelike mode is very fun for quick sessions and will reward you with a choice of random skills and armors after every fight, but it also saves if you need to go and play later.
Games that do this aren’t being progressive or inclusive, they’re changing the color of the cup that my drink comes in and pretending it’s an entirely new beverage.
The thing is… if you use “dude” and “chick” in the body type descriptions you’re implying gender identity. There may be better options that “Type A” and “Type B” but dude and chick ain’t it because it simply means male and female.
In a very flexible system, you could use more granular options like “wide shoulders”, “wide hips”, “boobage”, etc, to freely mix+match everything. It’s also expensive to develop and even more expensive to create clothing for and a gazillion times more expensive to make really good-looking clothing for (fabric folds and flow aren’t easy). From a developer’s perspective, looking at the work involved really makes you want to say “We’ll just tell the player they’re now Geralt of Rivia and that’s it”.
I think for most games the appropriate choice would be to have an early radio button, saying “male/female/it’s complicated”, the first two options hiding every enby option including pronoun selection. That’s right-out trivial to do and just good UX. And yes the body types should be called male and female, you already selected “it’s complicated” so it’s clear that when you’re selecting a body, you’re selecting a body, not identity.
As to laziness: Eh. Noone’s going to start a research programme on how to do things in an optimal way for a re-release. Someone had a look at the code and assets and thought “hey we can support separate pronouns and bodies without doing anything more than providing an option” and that’s exactly what they did, using the extent of knowledge and consideration that was already in-house. Yep, it very well can happen that if you take your foot out of one thing, you put it right into another.
As to “primary/secondary”: One of the options has to be to the left, or on top, of the other. Ain’t no way around that. I mean you could put option B on the left of option A to cancel things out but now you’re being confusing. More importantly you can make it so that none is selected by default.
Am I onto something or is this all crazy talk?
Yes and no you’re being quite personal, and I include your perspective shift into the POV of others in that, about things that will never make 100% of the people 100% happy because technical reasons. The perfect is the enemy of the good and all.
If they were labeled something like masculine or feminine, buff or curvy, or anything that doesn’t imply a hierarchy that would have been an improvement.
“Dude and Chick” aren’t terms I’m saying they should use instead, I’m saying Body Type A and B come across as disingenuous and better terminology could be used. “Masculine” and “Feminine” would work, as you can be masculine without being male. I’m a short-haired tomboy who strongly prefers she/her pronouns, I’d be considered “Masculine, but not male” even if I was cis!
Heck I myself am in a relationship with a cisgender male who presents feminine with many of his behaviors, but that doesn’t make him less of a man aynmore than being masculine makes me less of a woman. We’re all adults here we know that pink can be for boys and blue can be for girls, this isn’t kindgergarten in the 80’s anymore.
In fact let’s take a look at how Old School Runescape handles it. This image is… not great…
Why is the term “Body Type A” and “Body Type B” present at all when there are clear pictures of the two options that speak for themselves? It feels like just going out of the way to include “the corporate approved buzzwords intended for maximum synergy with the brand!”
That’s not the only problem with the UI as we’re still seeing rigid reinforcement of the gender binary.
The example picture of the more masculine build has a beard and the example picture of the more feminine build has a skirt, as if to reinforce gendered stereotypes while trying to avoid using the word gender, which is a mixed message at best… And to really draw the point, she/her is located just under the feminine option, and he/him is under the masculine option as if to imply these are the “correct” options.
The message this gives off is “Look, we call these A and B, but you and I know what’s really going on here eh fellow cisheteronormative? Gotta check off that box for corporate”
When the message they should be giving off is “He, she, they… whatever, it’s all good. All we have is that you have fun playing our game and try not to let anyone else tell you who you’re supposed to be!”
I agree we should be more inclusive, but we should do so in a way that feels less insulting and backhanded.
Why is the term “Body Type A” and “Body Type B” present at all when there are clear pictures of the two options that speak for themselves? It feels like just going out of the way to include “the corporate approved buzzwords intended for maximum synergy with the brand!”
“Type A” and “Type B”, I assure you, are not things corporate or marketing came up with. This is programmer speak for “I don’t want to name it but can’t call it foo and bar either because normies will be seeing it”.
As said: This is a re-release. The game and its assets was originally never designed to support anything but a strict binary, but the pronoun vs. body type thing was trivial to do, so they did it. And then for some reason avoided “male” and “female” because face it that sounds like a good idea especially if you’re not overthinking it and the labels were left in because probably also easier to do. Or just didn’t consider the alternative.
That is: You’re assuming intent when there’s simply economy of action. You might call it laziness, but then the people who did that release had 10000 other things to do besides that.
Its a dialect. But i assure you if a Sardinian, a Pugliese, a Siciliano and a Valdostano all speaks their dialect only, there won’t be any communication going
My point is that gaming could abandon “A/B” in favor of something more like an actual spectrum of Height, Weight, and Gender Presentation instead of just awkwardly renaming the binary? I wouldn’t get so up in arms about gender replacing body type.
Okay, but an in-depth character creation system that lets you pick and adjust individual features is a lot more work than just manually creating two models and asking the player to pick one. Adding that means something else gets cut.
Putting in half a dozen body types and a boob slider shouldn’t be a ton of work, but devs who only offer two player models to choose from in the first place probably aren’t putting that much thought into character creation.
Putting in half a dozen body types and a boob slider shouldn’t be a ton of work
Body types no but you also need armour and clothing for everything. You quickly get a combinatorial explosion which you can then reign in with shape keys (“sliders”) which make all assets harder to develop.
You can’t automate generation of shape keys. An artist needs to go over every single asset and make it work for every single extreme point on every slider, then make sure that the automatically derived in between points look good and fix those if required, in all slider combinations.
And it’s probably still going to clip during some animations because going over absolutely everything is just prohibitively expensive.
In the context of Runescape this is just a hellish mess, because its ultimately a codebase from the late 90s with graphics created everywhere from the early 00s to the mid 20s. Oh and as an MMORPG anyone who was a player but stops playing is a lost sale so no pressure at all
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