No announcement or confirmation from Night School Studio regarding GOG, Steam, the Playstation Store, or the Nintendo eShop as of yet. My guess is they would give a decent warning announcement if it were to leave those outlets as well, but regardless I did download my copy from GOG to my backup drive just in case.
No reason has actually been given as to why. Most likely, this is coming from Netflix, who actually acquired Night School Studio back in 2021. Probably as they’re trying to pull in more people to play games under their umbrella directly on Netflix.
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I have a strong feeling they’ll be working on Deadlock given their experience with third person hero shooters with crazy items that change your build.
Which is a shame because Deadlock is destined for the land of toxicity most other MOBAs exist in unless they do something meaningful to change the game’s design.
30/40min games where you’re unable to concede when loss is clear early on (causing other team mates to become stressed and rude). Games can sometimes be decided in 5 minutes yet there can potentially another half hour to go before you have a chance to requeue with different team mates.
One team mate’s mistake early on can lead to the opposing team snowballing and the rest of the team becomes toxic due to the first point.
The respawn timer increasing in length penalises the team further for being behind the enemy team, and the downtime as someone is waiting to spawn gives them time to type and be toxic. By mid-game, I’ve seen some players spend as much time waiting to respawn than they did playing.
Losing begets losing.
Macro and Meta
The volume of items leads there to be objectively better builds (and meta after each patch as items stats are changed) leads expectations on all team mates to follow that meta and know which build to play otherwise they get raged on.
Map awareness is more important that aiming and it takes the whole team to remain aware of the map for success.
The lack of transparency as to why a person is losing to another (item selection, ability upgrades etc) irritates players into feeling cheated.
Competitive
As a competitive game, players are trying to prove themselves yet, as a team game, individual performance can’t make up for a weak team thus rage. Competition drives emotion.
Note: I played Deadlock for about 15 to 20 matches but all the typical MOBA issues emerged within a couple of games, I’ve already bounced off of it.
I haven’t enjoyed any other mobas, but I’ve put ~100 hours in to this one. The comeback mechanics seem fine enough, I’ve had a few games that have come back from a ~30k soul difference/
Same, I haven’t even slightly enjoyed any other MOBA I’ve played except for Smite, but I’ve fallen in with Deadlock like it’s an old friend. And we’ve come back and won from a couple really depressing looking matches. Just the other day I was at 0/12 running Bebop with a 25k team soul deficit and once I actually got my head in the game, and got a little lane assist, we came back and won it and I finished with a 10/14 K/d.
The comeback isn’t easy, and it shouldn’t be, but it’s doable. Especially so if your opponents get cocky. I’ve been on the other side of that coin as well, going 10/0 with Vindicta and fly out to snipe without a care in the world, to discover that every enemy is suddenly paying attention to where I am.
I think we oughta wait for the game to at least leave the alpha, where huge changes happen from night to day, before concluding how toxic the game and mechanics will be
Totally, my comment is with regards to the current state of the game and so far they’ve fallen into the same pitfalls as other MOBAs.
Personally, allowing the team to vote to concede and to get rid of increasing respawn timers would help a lot in getting rid of the biggest causes of frustration noted so far however these were comments about DOTA2 and sadly Valve never implemented them there either.
I don’t think we should assume this right away. TF2 isn’t really all that toxic (that I am aware of). Valve tends to attract less toxic people in general. OW2 however, hoo boy… that game is agonizing to play. People will not hesitate to insult you.
TF2 isn’t designed to be as competitive as deadlock. It’s a goofy game that’s mostly just designed for fun. (Competitive TF2 does exist and I am a fan of it but it’s not really officially supported in any meaningful way.)
Deadlock on the other hand is designed to be a very competitive MOBA where individual decisions will greatly change a games outcomes. I would look at DOTA as a better comparison than TF2.
I play both overwatch and counter strike. While overwatch does a great job of making sure I don’t see slurs most of the time, the community is toxic af. I can’t go a single game without someone saying “tank diff, DPS diff, support diff” and whatever else directed insult they got.
Counterstrike on the other hand, surprisingly wholesome. Many games players will say good try after you fail and be pretty supportive. Sometimes you get assholes who just say slurs cause they can of course but that’s like, once or twice a month. Overwatch is literally every god damn match minus the slur part.
My experience playing it so far has been pretty overwhelmingly positive. No one really cares who wins, it’s more fun to just make cool plays and do well individually.
That’s just new competitive games in general though. The best time to play a pvp game is the first month when there isn’t a clear meta yet and everyone’s having a good time.
It also helps that there isn’t a competitive mode yet. Until recently it didn’t even track your stats in a visible way. Also, people can only get in by being invited, so you have to have had at least one person who has vouched for you in some way, which probably selects against the most toxic personalities.
I felt the same way about the finals. The beta was amazing and i played it every day. It was just good fun. When the game released it was all meta builds and abusing every mechanic known to mankind.
While there’s nothing wrong with a game being declared complete and stopping updates, the way this went down doesn’t sit right. Evil Empire (the studio that split off from Motion Twin specifically to maintain Dead Cells) had longer-term plans and the resources to make them happen, but Motion Twin then ordered Evil Empire to stop development because they thought an actively developed Dead Cells would be a competitor to Windblown that they could preemptively kill off.
I get what you mean, but Dead Cells was already a completed roguelike on launch. The DLC’s add variety and additional story, but you can still get the full gameplay experience with just the base game.
It’s like saying you won’t support the Elden Ring because it has DLC.
Also, the Castlevania DLC is just fucking cool. The soundtrack for those levels alone are just -chef’s kiss-, and probably the closest we’ll get to a new 2D Castlevania 🥲
Yeah, it does, but what are you missing exactly? Can you not get to the final boss without the DLC? No, you can get to the boss no problem, and in fact going to DLC biomes sometimes means you can’t get to the final biome/boss. Is your playtime reduced to less chambers/run? Nope, the number of chambers and biome-bosses remain the same. Is the gameplay altered? Nope, all runes and weapons that you need to finish the game is there in the base game and unlockable.
I know, because I played the base game only until the Dead Cells Castlevania PS5 collection came out.
You’re being disingenuous in making it seem like they purposefully cut content and then added it back for $$$, when Evil Empire has been adding a lot of free updates to the base game since 2019.
I would doubt you'd hit a progression dead end in that game. you'd have to be god cracked at it and enjoy it enough to play that much and milk what's already there, and at that point you'd probably want to buy the DLC to extend the variety and experience, because it's that good to begin with.
I started playing this game before there was DLC. You know what? It was fucking fun.
Doors don't control my enjoyment. I played it at times without DLC installed. I can handle some inaccessible doors being around without letting it control my enjoyment.
Definitely not trying to do that. To speak on the idea of visible, inaccessible DLC in a game, it is bad, full stop. I think it's certainly cynical of the developers to put the doors there and not completely remove them unless you have the DLC installed.
Seeing those seams is something you can't help but notice, and it absolutely does impact your perception of the game to have them there. What I am saying is that Dead Cells is so thoroughly well made and considered that I was able to tell myself "these doors are locked until I beat the game on a certain boss cell and feel justified to pay for an 'expansion' and access new content".
I can live with that specifically because the doors are not necessary, you just can't enter them and take a different path, similar to other locked zone doors that are instead locked because of boss cell requirements. The maps are also consistently laid out in terms of direction to get to a certain zone entrance, so once I know it's there I can avoid that path in the future until I decide to stop playing or buy more content.
If Dead Cells were a lesser game I would be much less forgiving about it, and to be clear, again, the fact that you can see DLC doors for DLC you don't have is bad design, full stop. It's just that the game is so good overall, I think it'd be sad for someone to pass it up for that reason, or to think that they're not getting enough because of it. It's a shame, but the game's still awesome.
I don't think you're wrong to feel the way you do, but try not to sleep on the game because of it. Even without the paid DLC the base game and free updates have a lot of mileage.
You’re wrong, some of those doors were always there, the giant was there from the start, the big door he smashes was there since before the DLC released. You just didn’t knew that was a DLC because it hadn’t come out yet.
Dead cells is still a complete game, the DLCs just give you more of the same thing, you can still get hundreds of hours from the base game alone. By your standards no DLC could ever be made.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. SC2 is still one of my favorite RTS in terms of mechanics, I’d definitely play something that’s similar. Torchlight was basically Diablo as well, but still a very fun game in its own right.
I’m not a game dev, so I am asking naively this: why is networking code for games not standardized?
It’s crazy to me that so many companies develop their own netcode instead of pooling resources to create a library once and for all for netcode.
It is a non-trivial thing to develop, so everyone would gain from having a framework and library ready to use that works well and can be implemented into any game.
In the end, the information exchange is done between the client and the server and the application layer can have any packets it needs.
There are just a ton of ways to skin that cat. You can do things like object replication, where the server is authoritative and sends updates states to every player, but even then, you might want to have something like aiming in a 3D game done locally so that it feels responsive and then update it with the server’s understanding of what’s possible just in case things get out of whack. In the fighting game space, there’s rollback, where each player has a complete up to date simulation of what the game is doing, and they only send inputs back and forth; then if something is out of date, it resimulates the last couple of frames, invisibly, until it’s done catching up, all within the span of 1 frame. However, this approach tends to be less graceful when it comes to people coming and going, because you need to synchronize the game state before you start sharing information back and forth. The network infrastructure for something like Dark Souls, where you’re dynamically pulling in players, messages, and recordings of players’ ghosts, will be different still. I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all solution, but the most common ones do tend to be available in one-size-fits-most.
There are prebuilt solutions in some common engines, and companies like Multiplay that will help with development and hosting, but ultimately it depends on the specific needs of each game.
What works well for one project might be overkill for another, so studios have to spend a lot of time figuring out their needs and building something bespoke for it.
Nice, i wonder if that also means that we won’t have to download the installers or can just download all of the game files directly. Should make installing big games a lot faster and also help with limited disk space.
What this means is that now you can play GOG games that previously required the (non-Linux native) GOG Galaxy client!
…for multiplayer.
And I’m not sure why these developers forgot how to add LAN and direct IP connections to their games, but it sure does muddy the experience of buying “DRM-free” games.
While I agree it can be painful to do anything multiplayer without dedicated network support in the game itself, it’s a nontrivial thing for devs to add. Expecting every dev studio to be network experts as well as having the infrastructure for the cloud peer connections is why Steam finally added a way for games to simulate couch co-op between remote players. I try to buy games on GOG as my first choice but there are definitely factors (including price) where I’ll consider Steam instead.
It’s a nontrivial thing to make a good product for your customers, but it should still be done. If only GOG had the market muscle to require this without shooting themselves in the foot, like when Apple pretty much universally made digital music purchases DRM-free.
EDIT: Wait, what does this mean?
as well as having the infrastructure for the cloud peer connections
What infrastructure? You need some port forwarding know-how, but other than that, you type in an address and go.
Doing things with a direct connection to friends is something no one does anymore. Port forwarding for a game? Yeah it’s fine for people who are technically minded like I’m sure anyone in the community is, but walking a friend through it on their router just to play with them is a nonstarter. No, the cloud connection is how this is handled now. I haven’t seen a game in a decade do it via a direct connection from player to player.
The unanimous game of the year did it just last year. No one uses seat belts or air bags until you have to either. LAN, direct IP connections, private servers, etc. are essential for when services like GOG’s or Steam’s are no longer functional or available. Without them, some part of the game will effectively always have DRM.
That’s news to me, but looked it up and confirmed you’re absolutely right. That blows my mind, because in many circumstances it can be impossible for players to connect, especially in a double NAT situation or you’re playing on a network you have no control over (e.g. university network).
But comparing a safety feature to a technical requirement is a bit misleading here, no? This is more about making sure gamers can just play rather than having to reconfigure network equipment, which they may or may not have access to.
Honestly if Steam is down at this point, I’ve got bigger things to worry about personally. Does it happen? Do I curse the name of GabeN? Sure, but it’s such a rare instance and happens maybe once a year for a matter of an hour or so typically.
But let’s not confuse using a client app as being DRM. On GOG Galaxy, it’s not doing anything DRM related other than providing you access to download the game itself. All the client is doing is providing a “friends network” that everyone is connecting to and creating a cloud bridged connection. This solves any double NAT problems, obfuscates your IP, removes any need to make network config changes, and no one has to think about it.
It’s convenient for players, who don’t need to know anything about networking to play, which is why we all use it despite its downsides. But it always has downsides. Steam networking goes down for regular weekly maintenance and kills your multiplayer session in a lot of cases. If you and a couple of friends are on a train or in a rural area with terrible internet, you can still play with LAN.
But these online connections are in fact DRM. If you need to connect to your store’s servers to play multiplayer, I imagine that reduces piracy compared to being able to copy paste the executable a few times and send it to a few friends that can all play together. Still, I want the guarantee that what I’m buying is built to last, which means no DRM, which means requiring that connection to my store’s servers is not it.
I completely agree with you that Steam itself is DRM and that we use it for convenience.
But I do disagree with the same statement about GOG Galaxy because it doesn’t provide the same digital decrypting functionality that all DRM provides. They don’t do it because they don’t have to, proven by the ability to download the EXE and BIN files directly even in Galaxy. I liken the Galaxy app to using a VPN or other network tool like Hibachi people have used when a game only had couch co-op support.
Either way, your point is made, but I don’t see an issue with running a client app that provides so much. I don’t inherently trust Valve or GOG, but they haven’t done anything that I know of to betray me as a gamer or consumer. I do NOT however see a point in running a client app that also has additional launchers required afterwards like all Ubi games. DRM on top of DRM is anti gamer imo.
Steam itself can be DRM but isn’t always. I would use GOG Galaxy if I could, but they don’t let me. What bums me out is that it’s required for multiplayer functionality in some cases, and I can no longer just assume that the entire library of GOG fits my values the way that it used to. A lot of this information I’m looking for is often not clearly communicated on store pages and requires lots of extra research.
I don’t know of an instance where it’s not used as DRM. Maybe on F2P games since there’s no license management? Would be interested in knowing where you’ve found it isn’t used. And yes, more clarity on what is happening under the hood would always be welcomed by me. I do feel I have a decent grasp of things just because of my IT background and work with cyber security, but closed source software will always have its secrets.
Also, definitely like the play on words with your username lol. I have a domain that is a pun on my last name, so I always like seeing creative ways people use their own names.
It’s not exactly an advertised feature when a game is DRM free on Steam, so this list may not be comprehensive or accurate for every game. DRM is optional on Steam. You can copy these game directories out of Steam and run them on a totally separate computer with Steam not even installed, and they’ll still work.
And I’d have just made my username &rew if they let me, but this is the one I use when that one is taken or they have limitations on special characters. With the special character, it has the benefit of fitting in old-school four character clan tags as well as Smash Melee names (and I don’t like going by Drew).
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