Aspyr has a history of laziness and incompetence, unfortunately. I really want to like the company because they were one of the few companies bringing my favorite games to Linux (KotOR and the Civ series) before Steam and Proton got so damn good. But their Civ ports were always plagued with weird bugs not in the original games, not to mention they didn’t have cross-platform multiplayer, preventing me from playing online with my Windows-using friends unless I dual-booted or tried to fight Wine. And somehow their Civ save file format is different, so you couldn’t even switch between Windows and Linux and continue the same game. It was baffling.
Can the lawyers on the receiving end of a DMCA takedown take the other party to court for a frivolous suit? I thought one of the problems was that there is no recourse for those on the receiving end of a bad DMCA takedown?
What I think would happen is the modders send a DMCA takedown, and EA either does take it down, or they file a “we’re not violating copyright, promise” form and then that’s the end of the DMCA. If they file the “we’re not violating copyright” form, then from there the modders can file a normal copyright violation suit if they choose.
Right, EA would file a counter-notice. Then the modder would have to get lawyers involved and file an actual legal complaint, and EA would respond with their lawyers.
But once they file the counter-notice, you could just stop there. They could sue you for filing in bad faith, but I’ve never heard of that happening.
Nothing. Modders suddenly feeling they should be paid is really entitled and kind of crazy. Hey I made some fan art of a marvel character, should marvel pay me?
Modding isn’t a job, and you can’t make money off of someone else’s game
It’s not work . I’m currently modding a game, it’s a hobby. And I’d be entitled as hell to think I should be paid for it.
This “pay the modders” thing will just lead to more micro transactions. You want to download that created wrestler in the new game? It was made by so and so, you now owe. $9.99. fuck that
It’s not about pay the modders so much as if the developer of the game took your mod, put it in the game proper, claimed it was their work, and charged people for it.
I found several definitions where this meets the definition of “work”, but I’m interested to hear your argument about how “time and effort spent doing a task” is not work.
This is the wrong comparison. If you painted a modified version of an existing painting, the original painter can’t take your work and sell it against your will.
No it’s not. The modder didn’t sell anything. Wanting to be compensated if somebody else makes a profit from your work that you put out for free is not the same thing as selling it.
No, because they weren’t even offering it for sale. But they also weren’t offering it to be taken to be sold by somebody else for a profit. Which is what the studio did anyway. So now, after the fact, they can either pay a compensation and credit the modder, or they can remove their stuff from the game.
They’re still taking something they didn’t make and selling it as though they did. I have every right to write and film a Batman movie, spend as much time I want making it professional, and then show it to people, as long as I don’t charge them for it. That doesn’t give Fox or whoever the right to take my movie and charge for it instead. Even if I did break the law by making people pay for it, the actual owners would only be entitled to that money, not to go make mroe money off of it themselves. It’s still my work even if it uses concepts invented by someone else.
There’s a reason every franchise under the sun has mountains of fanart and fanfic without the companies that own them trying to take control of it: it’s blatantly illegal.
But the rub is, under fair use you can’t profit from it though, so as soon as you accept payment, now they can sue you. So in the end, they win and get it for free regardless.
If the rights holders enter into a contract and pay you for your work, I don’t think they can turn around and sue you for making a profit off of it. I’m no lawyer, but I don’t think the law is that far gone.
But how can they make a contract? Signing it would violate fair use exemption before that could be argued.
Corps are abusing a conflict within the laws, it’s not even a loophole, it’s just the unfortunate way the laws that protect each person/industry don’t agree.
Contracting someone to use an artwork they made of your character would implicitly grant a license for them to make commercial profit off of that transaction.
That isn’t what a DMCA is for. Someone being compensated for the work they’ve done is unrelated to suing a company for using your art/code/work without permission or reference. Weirdly aggressive to modders though.
Edit: for your edit, you can’t monetise a mod for someone’s else’s game directly but you can absolutely make money modding. And even if their EULA enables them to do so, taking a modders code without at least a reference is pretty dogshit. Literally a million dollar studio ripping off people who did it out of passion knowing full well they wouldn’t get compensated. I’m surprised a EULA can protect them legally for doing it tbh.
Okay, I should have looked a little more I was just looking at the years. It sounded like the original release years. That’s what I get for half assidly googling while I work lol.
So it’s like when Rockstar turned the GTA remasters over to the phone people and we ended up with a clusterfuck.
Aspyr’s KotOR port was considered pretty good, I believe. I was disappointed in their Civilization series ports for Linux because their netcode was incompatible with the Windows versions, which is baffling to me, considering Linux users are already siloed so much in other ways. But the games ran okay, so it wasn’t all bad.
But yeah, I haven’t really heard any good updates or news come out of Aspyr for a while. If I recall correctly, they were the original devs for the KotOR remake, which was going to be their first game from the ground up from a technical perspective. But they had that taken away from them after working on it for a year or two, which is crazy. It must’ve truly been awful.
Man this is a shame. Slightly related… How’s the switch port? I have a friend who’s obsessed with Star wars and just got her first switch and I was going to tell her to get that
KotOR’s console controls can be a bit awkward at times. I haven’t played it on Switch, but I originally played it when it released on the OG Xbox. I assume the control scheme is similar. And the graphics are going to be dated, but that’s a given for a game from '03. But other than that, I’m sure it’ll be a fantastic experience, especially for a die-hard Star Wars fan. It’s still my top game of all time, and if you can play it on PC with some graphical enhancement mods, it still holds up really well nowadays.
The original was not EA. It was Pandemic Studios, who released Battlefront 1 and 2 both before they were acquired by Electronic Arts between 2007- 2009.
Ah, thanks for correcting me there. I knew that EA were involved at some level and I didn’t think to research that part of the post I was replying to, so I stand corrected, but I think the main point I was making is still valid, that the team that initially developed the game weren’t behind this re-release.
Embracer, actually, and while I do suspect that the blame for a lot of these problems lies with them (especially the lack of servers, which was almost certainly down to Embracer cheaping out), it’s hard to blame this particular failure on anyone but Aspyr. While Embracer almost certainly created the conditions by not giving them enough time and resources to deliver good work, it’s still on Aspyr that they used someone’s work without permission. There’s no real justification for that, even if you’re in a bind.
I mean, it is pretty amazing. It’s funny if they’re ironic upvotes and it’s wild if they’re upvotes of agreement because it is complete misinformation.
Yeah EA has lots of bad rep and yeah they made a couple of games in the series. But the game the article is about, as well as the original game it is remaking were nothing to do with EA.
It’s really easy to have people join your game, or for you to join others. Also, it’s not terrible playing solo either. I’m really enjoying it both ways. Feel free to add me on steam (same name) if you’re on PC, or if on PS5 DM me and I can send you a friend invite if you want to team up and spread some democracy.
That’s about what I figured. I’m not that great with strangers, and English is my second language. I’ve tried other squad based games that rely on voice comms to be enjoyable, and I only really enjoy them when playing with a group of people I’m comfortable with.
You would be surprised how much you can communicate by just pinging stuff. I’ve had many missions with randos where a single word wasn’t spoken, but we were all actively pinging high priority targets and putting markers on the map for our intentions.
I think it’s one of those games it’s absolutely designed for an HDR display and I just don’t have one so it kind of looks murky. It’s a good game but I wouldn’t say the graphics are particularly phenomenal, although the explosions look good.
You can disable camera shaking and some post process features such as motion blur, then it’s no different from any other shooter game in terms of motion patterns.
I suppose they wrote battlefield in the headline since it’s an EA franchise, but I totally see where you’re coming from. At least they mention halo directly after.
I may honestly check it out. Watched some gameplay vids last night and it looked like a blast. I’m especially intrigued by friendly fire always being on, as that was such fun gameplay addition but this is entirely baked into the experience
I was about to throw orbital strike buoy and my teammate accidentally melee striked me causing me to drop it. Was confused since I didn’t even know that was a thing and as we were figuring out the orbital strike blew us to hell. And that’s how I got the AAAAaaah! achievement.
Y’know, I distinctly remember the friendly fire being the thing I didn’t like about the first one. It was initially very “Oh haha you killed me!” but then something kept you from getting to play again for a long time, and so it was hard to just shrug it off. I’m assuming it’s something somewhat different now.
From the vids I saw, a lot of it is early hijinks at first. Then when shit starts hitting the fan constant communication necessary so you don’t accidentally merc your homies
It’s not as bad as the first one. Some weapons and stratagems are more prone to it (looking at you airburst radius that always seems too big) but since there’s more of a height component you aren’t constantly getting shot by teammates. and because you aren’t confined to the same small area there’s less of a chance of stratagem strikes and hellbombs killing everyone.
There is a bit of a learning curve in terms of knowing the radius of certain stratagems and backblasts and arc range of some of the weapons, but once you get past that friendly fire incidents are much lower. That being said, if you run into someone else’s line of fire you are partially to blame as well.
The only real complaint I have with helldivers is the controls are a little muggy. They put out a polished product with good options that isn’t so paywalled as to be difficult to make progress with but still gives them a revenue stream to keep the live service, which actually adds value beyond “play the game”, running.
It's possible people could interpret the way that the reticle follows the actual barrel position of the gun as "muggy" because it can be quite unwieldy if you're not being careful about it, but it's a very deliberate choice and makes the chaos more chaotic and really accentuates how controlled you need to be even when shit gets wild
I didn’t realize it was happening until I used machine gun where it’s slow. I actually like it but if you didn’t realize I could see it being confusing.
Also the key binds aren’t super. There’s a lot of overlap and weird finger positioning for some stuff. The stratagems especially. I’m running, holding L1 and using my right hand to dial in the d pad like I’m hacking the matrix. It’s kinda fun and stressful but I could see complaints about it.
I play on PC so it's hard to say how that stuff feels comparatively. Can you move and use stratagems at the same time?! For me, WASD is both my movement and the stratagems, so if I press CTRL to pull up the menu I can't walk anymore.
And yeah, different guns have different aim speeds to balance them. That's where you may find the machine gun too unwieldy and want to try the stalwart LMG instead
Edit: by default on PC stratagems are done with WASD like the first game, and I just stuck with that. If I rebind to arrow keys then I can move and input stratagems at the same time, but I'll have to relearn all my Helldivers 1 muscle memory haha
The rebinding options are amazing, though. Being able to choose between tap, double tap, press, long press and hold for every input is fantastic. Two seconds after discovering this, press ctrl was crouch while double tap was prone and hold shift was dash while double tap was dive, and it feels so good.
Idk about controller, but keyboard support is amazing.
Personally there are a few UX issues with the controls. Like getting stuck after diving into prone (I believe it’s because you have to press run after you land to get back up, there’s no action queueing), climbing over stuff you didn’t want to climb over because of auto-climb, and a few other similar things. Both of the above have resulted in me and friends dying during intense moments, and because it’s caused by the game not listening to what you want to do, it doesn’t feel good to die that way.
Also not being able to jump over things you think you should be able to jump over because it’s a few pixels too tall. So you just run up against it and stop.
Also the trees are rigid so if you run into a tree it’s like a brick wall it doesn’t brush out of the way or snap like it obviously should when you’re charging at it.
The cross platform friend requests bugs mean I still havent been able to play with the friends who convinced me to buy the game in the first place. But yeah, otherwise quite fun.
Its 100x better of a starship troopers game than the actual starship troopers game that came out last year
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