It has happened more often than that. The one in 2011 was the biggest outage, but PSN also got DDOSed by lizard squad a couple years after the 2011 outage
Right??? Grab your NES cartridge, and make sure to grab the one that you borrowed from your friend last week. Throw them in your bookbag, and pedal your bike while your mom has no real way of knowing where you are. Sure you SAY you’re going to Jimmys house, but it’s not like you have a GPS tracker. And even if you did, how would your mom follow that that tracker? Go to the FBI and use their super computers??? Maybe you’d like her to ask for the nuke launch codes while she’s there. Just be back home before the street lights come on, or dad’s beating your ass!
Ah, the 80s. What a magical time. A magical time of AIDS epidemics, wars on drugs causes by and fought by the government, toxic toys not being recalled, and everybody being too dumb to care.
Nowadays, kids don’t even HAVE bikes! You throw your kids into a strangers car, call it uber, and use technology the 1980s government would have dreamed of having to make sure your kid goes to that little shit Jimmys house.
Everytime I remember the world I grew up in, and then look around at the world I’m in, I feel like I’m missing a big piece of what happened. These two worlds don’t line up. Like when I see old photos of my dad, from the 60s, I say “Yep, that sure looks like what my dad would look like if he were young”. But when I look at the 80s, I think “that sure seems like a totally unrelated society. One in which absolutely did NOT age into this world…”
Looks like PlayStation’s Auth servers are down among everything else. Even if multiplayer was free, I don’t see how modern games would function without that service running. Who am I playing against? What’s their name? How did I get my account progress?
Just about everything multiplayer nowadays relies on account / Auth services. Especially on console.
You used to be able to type in an IP address whether or not the official server is running. Sometimes you still can, but seeing as Baldur’s Gate 3 has LAN and direct IP connection on PC but not on PlayStation, it sure seems like Sony is asking them to specifically remove the feature if they wanted it in the first place.
Then beyond that, you’ve got a mismatch behind what your money is actually for. It used to be for paying for their servers, but you often don’t even connect to Sony’s servers anymore. Plenty of games behind that same paywall have their own servers, like Call of Duty for instance, but Call of Duty’s multiplayer is behind the same paywall as Helldivers 2, which is running servers on Sony’s dime. And beyond that…the reason multiplayer is free on PC is because your purchases are funding them. The majority of game sales on consoles are now digital, just like Steam, and that is a trend that’s accelerating. Meanwhile, the subscription fee compared to free online on PC is probably one of a multitude of reasons that people are leaving consoles for PC.
Being able to type in an IP address is a late 90s and early 2000s thing within the AAA space, much as I hate to say that. I do know of at least one unpopular, indie PS4 game that had IP address entry so it wasn’t outright banned then.
I’m pretty sure PlayStation requires games with certain types of multiplayer to authenticate with them as part of the agreement to publish on the platform so that’s restrictive.
However, Sony does provide services that cost something to run, both directly for the studio, and indirectly for players who consume that studio’s game. Not the least of which includes account authentication which is one aspect of ensuring piracy isn’t happening on that platform. Friends services and the ability to join friends helps people jump back into your game. I’m sure there’s more.
I’m pretty sure PlayStation requires games with certain types of multiplayer to authenticate with them as part of the agreement to publish on the platform so that’s restrictive.
It sounds like that requirement is just a bad deal for the consumer. And they charge you for it. And they can’t guarantee uptime.
From the consumer’s perspective, at its cheapest, it’s $10/month to play with your friends on PlayStation, be able to claim new games monthly which are good for as long as you are paying the subscription, and have cloud saves (among a few other minor benefits).
No service can guarantee uptime, that’s just the reality of it. This is the largest PSN outage in 14 years. Most outages have not been this long or widespread.
Napkin math shows their uptime to be ~99.5% in the 18 years it’s been operational. Not that good nowadays, but not something you can’t sell to people.
Cloud saves that are free on PC, and they don’t block your access to transfer saves without it like consoles do. Playing online on PC is free, and we know exactly how to make it free on consoles, but they’re not interested in doing so. No one can guarantee 100% uptime, which is why it’s a bad deal to make the subscription for that stuff mandatory instead of allowing things like direct IP connections.
You apparently can transfer saves on PS4/5 offline. For PS4 they can be copied to a USB drive, but more to your point here, the only way to copy PS5 saves around (besides PS+) are to do console backup and restore processes and then during that process say you want to take save games wholesale (and then restore them wholesale). That’s definitely greedy bullshit.
I don’t know what more to say, consoles are walled gardens that consumers pay to be in. Within those walled gardens, the company dictates the rules. There’s plenty of good arguments for using a more open platform like PC. Not the least of which is that PlayStation has had an abysmal console cycle for trying to prove their console is worth purchasing - what with it having basically no exclusives that won’t eventually come to PC, first-party or otherwise.
consoles are walled gardens that consumers pay to be in
Less and less as time goes on, is my point, for the reasons we’ve discussed. Maybe any one or two of those reasons aren’t doing it on their own, but in the aggregate, it appears consumers are slowly deciding not to put up with the downsides anymore.
It also helps that consoles are becoming more and more PC-esque and expensive. Consoles were a good alternative because they were cheaper, had exclusive titles, and had the ability to couch game, and usually were just “pop disc in and play”. They were also pretty stand-alone devices. My biggest issue with PC gaming prior to really this generation was I cannot stand M+KB, I like sitting back in a chair with a controller. But now, peripherals are more able to operate on multiple platforms, games do cross-platform releases, cross play is more prolific (and cross-saves as of late), and it’s easier to switch now and not “lose” your friends. Plus, the cost of consoles anymore are much closer to equivalent PCs now.
Console positives are dwindling, or at least becoming neutral to PC.
No, but I didn’t want the headache of multiple peripherals, and when you’re 15, it’s hard to convince a parent to spring for more expensive options out of convenience lol. There were options, but even still, some games didn’t come with native controller support (I built my 1st PC in college in…2013? for ESO, and the controller support was through a mod, and it barely worked at the best of times).
Theyve just gotten so similar in their function, it’s increasingly hard to justify a console anymore. Microsoft basically forgoing exclusives now only strengthens it
You’re mixing stuff up, the direct connect for multiplayer where you put the IP has nothing to do with authentication that he’s talking about. Whenever you open up a multiplayer game it will authenticate yourself with PSN using the account you have on the playstation, then if your authentication succeeded it will authenticate with the game service-servers which will reply with stuff like your progression in the game, whether someone has sent you a message or a friend request, etc. Modern games are a platform in and of themselves, essentially they have an entire Discord on steroids internally which you’re using before, during and after playing online matches. If the PSN is down you can’t authenticate with those servers… I mean, they could allow you to login using username and password, but that’s: 1 not needed since the PSN is almost never down and 2 probably against some TOS from Sony for you to release games on their platform. So if the PSN is down you would not be able to get into the main screen for multiplayer anyways, so there’s no place where you could input the IP for the game-server you want to connect to.
I’m not defending the system, but it is what it is, games have organically evolved to have all of these social features which people do use and like, it makes sense that Sony won’t allow you to go over them and authenticate directly with the game specific service-servers and it makes sense that if you’re relying on all of that for login you also rely on it for matchmaking (which is where the IP would come in place). Could it be better? Sure, but there’s no incentive for it to be, PSN is rarely down and games (at least large ones) take forever to be sunset, and by that time there are almost no people playing them anyways.
I’m not mixing anything up. If they allowed for things like direct IP connections, you could still play Baldur’s Gate 3, online, regardless of this downtime. It wasn’t organically that we arrived here. It’s objectively worse.
This is the relevant bit of what you’re replying to:
I don’t see how modern games would function without that service running. Who am I playing against? What’s their name? How did I get my account progress?
None of that comes from the game-server but rather from the service-server. Even if social games that have those features allowed you to connect to a server directly, you would still need to connect to their servers for all of that stuff.
Direct IP connection has nothing to do with authentication and social flows (e.g. names and progress like the comment you’re replying to mentioned) and would not help in the slightest with it.
It would help people who wanted to have a functioning video game. Then you could ask your friend (or someone on Discord) what their IP address is and play with them.
You’re again mixing the point, your friends IP doesn’t have authentication, progress, chat, etc, etc, etc. You’re talking about a different kind of server.
The thing I’m criticizing is that they make this other kind of server impossible, even though it would be exactly the kind of backup plan you’d want for a situation like this one.
But that is an apples to oranges comparison, just because you personally don’t care about those features doesn’t mean others don’t care either. For games without those features mentioned in the original comment (like Baldur’s Gate 3) not having join by IP is ridiculous we agree there. But for games that do it’s just not feasible, there’s too much of what makes the game the game in those features. Don’t get me wrong, I personally think that companies should not just kill the game and should provide ways to make their game playable offline after closing the servers, but it’s not as simple as allowing you to join by IP for the games being discussed here. What level would your character be? What load out would it have set? Which items would be unblocked? Etc, etc, etc, the servers that control all of that are too engrained into the fabric of the game, and that’s something that happened organically because people liked those features and wanted cross-progression, security, etc. Can all of that be removed? Sure but then you’re left with a shell of what the game is/was, still I believe companies should make such a release before closing the servers, but again this has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with direct join by IP.
Nobody’s gonna dispute the necessity of some sort of server somewhere in the mix. But does it need to be something like PSN? A central 3rd party service that most games only use because they’re forced to?
Walled gardens and all. That’s the cost of doing business on PlayStation. Perhaps we’ll see some pushback from developers to PlayStation that might carve a path for sidestepping PSN services if the developer wants to.
It’s important to note, though, that PSN (and Xbox Live, and Steam) does provide useful services to developers in exchange for that cost of doing business.
Free your mind! There is another way. Video game servers should be open-source, and the games should permit you to choose a custom server. This way, games can survive the bankruptcy of their creators’ companies.
I don’t disagree completely, but it’s not as easy as you think. We’re not talking about server in the sense of a headless game client that will coordinate a match, we’re talking about a whole infrastructure of micro services and a web of communications and APIs just to get a basic authentication working. Not to mention possibly encrypted hard coded addresses to contact. That being said I 100% agree that before a game is abandoned a plan should be put in place to allow people to keep playing it, even if it’s complicated and cumbersome to setup, or even if it’s as crude as removing authentication entirely.
This would basically be my reply as well. Companies are in the game to make money, and setting up all this infrastructure, not to mention maintaining it, is NOT cheap.
To be clear, that was not a thing. Just the PSN account doesn’t require payment. The subscription is for playing in MP and (I think) access to online media like yt.
Been a minute (this was a nice reminder that I hadn’t even booted up my PS5 in almost a year…), but I want to say it depends on if you have your console set as your primary console or not. Primary doesn’t need to go online to authenticate. Secondary does.
Most people just have a single console so it is auto-primary. But people who bought a ps5 pro or who do super convoluted account sharing shenanigans always have trouble when auth servers are down.
Also, I think the PS+ IGC requires network to make sure you still have PS+?
I only have the one ps5. I did have a ps4 if that matters. Tried to play like 5 games this afternoon. All of them had a lock on the icon and when I tried to play it complained about PSN.
Greatest arpg of all time. Runs better than PoE1 lmao. (No, for real, it’s waaaaaay better optimized)
It needs balancing for sure but the core is pretty good, with some balancing tweaks it’s gonna be incredible.
Mild criticism that the article doesn’t seem to mention, probably because they are not a PoE1 player: the endgame is pretty fucking boring. Not because it lacks content, but because decoupling the entrance key (waystone/map) from the zone/layout doesn’t really make it “infinite” as they say. If you think about it, on PoE1 you also have an infinite endgame since each map has a fixed tileset and in both poe1 and poe2 you search for zones with good layouts. All this map of tilesets does is force you to do undesirable layouts and since you only need A tier X map, map sustain becomes trivial.
The endgame quests really need some thinking, it’s not okay that the core gameplay loop incentivizes you to clear zones around tower heavy areas to optimize your use of empowering tablets, but the endgame quests incentivise you to ignore all that empowered content and to run in a single direction, to find the special endgame zones. I do like to put some tablets and clear all boss maps that were boosted in an area, but it feels bad to do when you have those quests objectives telling you to find the fortresses.
I totally get that it’s EA and they created the endgame in a single month just for the EA, but this needs to be said so that when they start refining it there’s a history of feedback around the mechanics.
In any case, I have very good hopes that the endgame will be excellent on release with the amount of feedback they are receiving, and as long as they keep increasing the customization of the map generation, the amount of extra content and the amount of layouts (don’t worry, they will), it’s gonna easily beat PoE1.
Because the wealthy need to remind us how much free time they really have because they don’t actually fucking work or contribute anything at all of value to the world.
The first thing I wanted to comment was “Was this written by Elon Musk’s ghostwritergamer?”
Real answer: Because the games industry is bigger than the film industry, in terms of total valuation.
I can’t wrap my head around this comment. You think playing video games is a wealthy people hobby? Or are you saying the author of the article is a wealthy person who doesn’t work? And he has to remind us that becuase that’s apparently something rich people do all the time that I missed? Or is it that only wealthy people have time to read these articles? Did I miss elon musk promoting path of exile or something what does he have anything to do with this?
The real answer doesn’t make sense neither, the article makes no mention of how much money the game has made, it’s just a surface level review.
As for the real the answer: I’m assuming what they mean is, since gaming is such a popular medium (which can be seen from how much money the industry makes) it makes sense otherwise unrelated outlets would have articles about it.
Forbes, for many years, has been mostly written by freelance bloggers. Some is very high quality (some is not) but it’s not like an editor in a newsroom is asking for these stories.
They have journalists on staff still but they write a minority of what Forbes publishes online.
This update added a lot of new stuff to the game not counting the new really big island. Human bosses, an “arrogant pal tamer” that wants to see specific pals, a NPC that asks you to do specific emotes and one hidden npc that gave me a book that increases 1 work thingy by 1 (got one for handywork, the game crashed, then got one for planting, so there’s possibly one for each work)
My biggest gripe at the moment is with predator pals, which don’t always spawn where they’re supposed to (fixed locations, unmarked on the map) but drop predator cores, which are needed for the inventory expansion, as well as giant pal souls.
It also added some high QoL chests: one that lets you check ALL the chests in the base and the Guild Chest, which acts as a shared base chest. Another super useful building is the skill fruit farm: plant one, get 3 of the same skill.
The new island starts with several anti-air missile places, but at least it seems you only need to disable them once. Whether the missiles will go through walls or rocks and kill your flyer seems to be random chance, but it at least tries to be physical projectiles.
At first I get annoyed at people confusing the two, but I remember there’s a lot of non native English speakers. And it’s words like this that make it such a hard language to figure out.
Even if they win the lawsuit the message has been sent. Any double A or triple A company can make a descent quality ripoff and get lots of money. Bonus points if they’re somewhere safe from Big N’s lawyers
The only way there is emulation. Sure, you won’t get to use the cool features of their hardware, and you might get to play a buggy game a year after release, but you are not supporting a shifty company - and that counts.
What “cool features” does Nintendo do anymore? The big draw of the switch was that it’s portable, and there’s dozens of handheld PC’s to compete there. Then there’s the motion control, which wasn’t great in the long run and can also be done by emulators with a variety of controllers supporting it
Especially detachable controllers and their games supporting them. You can have two per player in a 4 player game, or 8 where each holds one. I quite liked the feature and found it novel. I am not sure if you can do the same using emulators - or at least do it as seamlessly.
Heey, I have been doing the same. Sick of all of the manufacurers to be fair. I mostly buy the games seocnd hand too because publishers suck, last ones I supported were IOI and if they push always on internet connection in the 007 game I will pirate it.
I wish critics wouldn’t even bring up the preachy-ness of it. I’m finding other tangibles really fucking annoying like the cringe dialogue itself “Who doesn’t like talking about dragons?” or how fucked the companion and enemy AI is. We haven’t seen AI this bad since Colonial Marines, but nobody’s really talking about it because of the flashy combat animations for the main character acting as a curtain covering how dogshit the rest of the gameplay is.
My character can slam the ground and make a shit ton of visual effects, which is acting as a red herring to my companions that don’t do shit the vast majority of the time at enemies barely smart enough to navigate the terrain to run at me. This is like Doom 1993 AI.
Irritating jokes less amusing than the most formulaic of trashy sitcoms, and they don’t address that either. I think people irked by this article are really put off by the way it adds fuel to the fire of criticisms toward progressivism. It’s well written and does bring out the irony of it, but it seems more of an attempt to undermine the progressive messaging and justify the audience polarity. In reality, there’s no need for the division, people who positively react to the game are wearing rose colored glasses to a game with serious issues that don’t get fixed on the technical backend.
On the technical front, if you ignore the absolute garbage AI and look at the rendering engine’s performance, this is the best release of the year by far.
I have so many mixed feelings on the game. This shit going back and forth over the wokeness just gives everyone a red herring to defend or attack.
I mean despite how I feel the linked article’s author uses a type of language that makes me wary of them, I kinda agree. The utterly Marvel way the game talks about things combined with the inane inability to ever have any conflict, negatives or issues combines to essentially make a mockery of very real issues.
And I’m sorry, it’s one thing to want to use art to showcase real issues and poke at them and shine a spotlight onto them. That’s good, personally I want art to do that. But when you essentially use it as a joke piece due to the inherently non-serious nature of all your scenes, it just becomes even worse than not doing it. 😔 Please don’t shine a light onto serious topics if the only thing you use the light for is to point and laugh and mock.
Whether it has terrible dialogue, too many bugs, lacking in technical prowess, cost way too much to make or is simply too preachy. It all boils down to a single problem: corporate suits sucking the soul out of the project, devoiding it of any passion one could possibly have. It looks, feels and smells like an empty shell of a game because that is exactly what it is. Nothing stands out because every decision was calculated with the goal to moderately please everyone in the room, resulting in compromises stacked on compromises all the way down.
The often sloppily implemented progressiveness in these products quickly starts to look like an afterthought. Perhaps to shield themselves from criticism after they realized what they’ve created or maybe they slapped it on when they realized their story has literally nothing to say about anything and is a hollow shell of a product.
Whatever the case, soulless slob does more harm than good to anything their creators associate it with, so I totally get why someone wouldn’t even want to read about that aspect of the game in a review. It’s just one more of several symptomps of a bad product.
In my piece, I noted that—so far at least—I hadn’t encountered anything overtly preachy or that one might describe as garishly political or “overly woke”.
Aaand done with the article! Good, that didn’t take too long.
What’s wrong with acknowledging a term a lot of people use? It’s also implying it as it’s only acknowledging the word and not endorsing it, the “…” for that I think.
And the article is well written, explains what’s lacking, gives an alternative way of doing it better.
It’s a term lot of kids use and it’s a real IP now whether you like it or not. The author did not use it unironially, it’s very clearly ironic. I would also remind you that you are doing what those “anti-woke” people do, making a firm assumption over a term/word without looking at the material/substance.
This article stinks of ignorance and bellendness. Complaining about “modern” or “new” terms is always a huge red flag to me, so now I have to wonder, for example, whether the The Bright Sword character referenced does in fact use she/her. Oh noes, the setting wouldn’t have this one word! It does, of course, have the entirety of any English dictionary other than that word, though. Just the one is icky, like all of those pronouns the woke crowd keep _shoving down our throats! But the woke crowd don’t exist in that world! The whole damn world is drastically different but this one conveniently common language is almost identical! Couldn’t have been that they say “are with” instead of “have,” noooo, it’s one coincidentally “political” word that’s gotta go. That’s the one critical difference in “a fantasy setting divorced entirely from the real world” where they’d suddenly not say things the same way we would!
Does this person give a damn at all and have a crappy take, or just feel like spewing another “omfg woke newspeak agenda” wall of whinge onto… er, Forbes. Not the place I’d look first for sensible discussion of social matters. I guess a click is a click.
“Aqun-athlok” means one who was born one gender and is now living as another. So yeah that means trans. But there’s also a conversation in the trans community about if Non-Binary is technically trans. I would argue it is but some disagree and others say that while Non-binary is trans it is not a “normal” type of trans. That Non-Binary is not either gender. Sometimes Non-Binary is literally no gender. Non-Binary is it’s own umbrella term. So it’s not necessarily living as “another” gender, it can be living in between genders, without gender, or as both genders.
So i would say that “Aqun-athlok” is probably more applicable as binary trans as it was used to refer to krem who was a trans man. Now they could have just thought up a new word for Non-binary trans but Non-Binary is just kinda the perfect word for it. I’m Non-Binary and I actually think saying this is immersion breaking is just kinda bs. Plenty of words in our world also exist in Dragon Age. Not everything has to have a different word. For instance, Dwarves are a thing in our world. Sure they’re not the same, it’s a medical term, but they still exist. But the Dwarves in Dragon Age are still called Dwarves. Why are they not a different name? It’s a fantasy world, shouldn’t they have made up a new word instead of using a word from our world to describe these people? No, because Dwarves is just the word that fits best. Non-Binary here is the same.
Now whether or not it is written well is a better approach to this discussion but also, every trans person has experienced the exact thing that this writer describes, except it’s not always pushups. I’ve had people feel incredibly guilty over misgendering me and done some stupid stuff. When I hear this being described I don’t think it’s awkwardly written, I think it’s an accurate representation of what it can be like being trans and how some people will just be like that when they misgender you.
I also think calling it “preachy” is 100% playing into the narrative it’s Woke because people don’t call CoD preachy even though it’s filled with pro military propaganda. Why is this preachy just because it accurately shows an experience that trans people have all experienced in our own lives?
I haven’t gotten to this place yet in the game and I might end up finding it awkward, but I more likely expect to actually relate to Taash more because of it.
Anyway, just my thoughts from a trans dragon age fan.
interesting points, especially about the evolution in language / perceptions re: dwarves. I’ve heard dragon age being described as ‘fantasy, but more mature’; I played the first game and it didn’t click.
forbes.com
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