Dedicated servers ran by the community with a server browser to find games/servers.
Really the golden age of multiplayer.
Found a nice server that runs well, chill and well moderated? add it to your favorites.
No lobbies, well… technically the whole server was the lobby, kinda.
No progression unlocks bullshit.
No ranking. No waiting on matchmaking. Just play.
No AI spying on every thing you say or do.
Maybe a “SIR this is a Christian server, so swearing will not be tolerated” or other warning of some kind now and then, even on games like Counterstrike.
Eventually, you’d get to know people, kinda like how you might start recognizing names here on lemmy.
You’d make friends, rivals, etc.
I miss those times.
I got into Titanfall 2 pretty late (like last month) and waiting 10 minutes to even get into a lobby is just annoying.
As opposed to joining a server and playing non stop on there.
It’s even less costs to the publisher than to host and scale on their own because the community is running your servers.
But then they can’t pull the plug to force people on a new release.
They can’t spy on as much shit.
They can’t sell as much private data.
It’s probably easier to sell microtransactions this way too.
Yeah but there were admins spying what you did and banning you. Quite frankly i have much greater trust in AI admins than human admins. Not that some human admins aren’t great, but why risk it? Same as self driven cars, as soon as they’re ready im ready to never drive again.
Sure, but the mistakes aren’t the main issue, it’s that AI is just a tool that by extention can be abused by the humans in control. You have no idea what rules they give it and what false positives result from it.
My primary concern here is that it’s Blizzard, whom love to gargle honey for China and is all for banning players that speak against them, is in charge of this AI.
Blizzard’s previously talked about using AI to verify reports of disruptive voice chat, which is now running in most regions, though not globally. The developer says it has seen this technology “correct negative behavior immediately, with many players improving their disruptive behavior after their first warning.”
Great, they can auto-ban players like Ng Wai Chung, I guess. For whatever they subjectively deem ‘harmful’. There’s also the looming idea that a friend can wander in my room, say something dumb, and now I’m closer to a ban because of an unrelated choice I made outside the game.
And we definitely trust Blizard to be good with all the audio data they get to harvest. That won’t be abused later, right?
I mean that’s a general argument against technology. Yes, more technology means more ruthlessly efficient abuse, but ultimately you think technology is better in the long run or not. Either way it is inevitable. Maybe in the EU they will ban those abuses, in China they won’t, and US will find some weird compromise between the two.
You trust a billion dollar company with no morals with your data? Isn’t that the whole point we are on this site? Community servers are like lemmy instances.
Sure, and they can have AI moderators in lemmy instances. Whatever problems are concerning about corporate AI admins also apply to corporate human admins.
They already have your data without the AI. Most games have had wide rangeing telemetry sent to the dev for over a decade now. This includes the text chat logs.
Unrelated to the topic, but wasn’t Titanfall 2 plagued by this one hacker that basically filled every lobby with bots to make the servers crash? I think I very recently heard about them resolving the issue and the player count surpassed the numbers at launch even.
Active moderation isn’t spying but using an AI is? The only reason those self-hosted community servers didn’t have problems was because they (usually) had active admins to see bad behavior and take action. This is merely automating that so a real human being doesn’t have to be there watching.
This is automating something based on blizzard rules not community rules. What if people want even stricter rules or looser or none at all or completely different rules? Also how many times have billion dollar companies been caught selling customers private info? Too many to count.
First game to just have constant crashes on my seven year old RX480, which is great since otherwise the game runs completely fine. Support doesn’t seem to want my crash reports either, I guess in Todds world, I should just throw the thing in the trash for a game that does literally nothing special in the tech department.
If a game uses smooth locomotion, instead of teleportation based movement, I cannot play it without air blowing into my face, or sometimes been at all. Otherwise I have no issues at all
I do support live service games though. I prefer them and that’s pretty much all I ever play.
What they’ve done with handling this game in delisting it is quite frankly fantastic - get rid of all micro transactions and bundle every single one with the game and basically give the game away for free at its end of life. Now anyone what wants to play it like a regular single player offline game can for a few bucks, and I believe are least in pc it uses steam for online play so it will still be playable multiplayer. Everyone wins.
I have played several, and the vast majority have been Microtransaction Hell, and many games that are not live service are still consistently updated.
The fact that there are one or two games that do live service without intrusive and annoying microtransactions that are frequently barriers to progression or end up being pay to win doesn't make the description invalid. They are the exceptions that prove the rule.
The vast majority of Live Service games have zero pay to win microtransactions or barriers to progression. They’re almost all purely cosmetic microtransactions because that’s been proven to be what people want.
There was a bit of a learning curve for devs to see what people would put up with and what they wouldn’t, and stuff you describe was left on the cutting room floor years ago. Even games like COD now give you all actual content for free and just sell you cosmetics, and it’s wildly profitable for them. Selling map pack dlc got abandoned because it split the player base, whereas cosmetics don’t.
Isn't that literally what they are though? Fortnite, WoW, Runescape, Warframe or Hearthstone are all vastly different genres of games but they are still live-service games at the end. What else could the term mean besides "constantly updated", they are a living, evolving long-term service?
What are you basing this definition on? A rudimentary google search for a definition gives more than one answer and yet none of them have "always online" as a requirement for something to be live-service.
Hitman 3 for example is an example of a singleplayer live-service game, Paradox games like Stellaris are basically that as well, and Minecraft and NMS are often used as examples too. Nobody claimed that a game needs to be online to be updated, that's ridiculous, so not sure who was that clarification meant for.
"In the video game industry, games as a service (GaaS) represents providing video games or game content on a continuing revenue model, similar to software as a service.
[...]
Games released under the GaaS model typically receive a long or indefinite stream of monetized new content over time to encourage players to continue paying to support the game. This often leads to games that work under a GaaS model to be called "living games", "live games", or "live service games" since they continually change with these updates."
GaaS monetization can't be achieved without a central online service. Even with Hitman 3 a lot of content is locked behind the online requirement.
You can bend the definition as much as you want but this is what most people mean by" live service games".
Because literally every live service game ever made goes out of their way to constantly dictate your engagement with it in a way that is exclusively designed for the sole purpose of taking money from you.
There are no exceptions. There is no game that has ever done live service in a way that is in any way forgivable.
That’s strange because I’ve spent about $15 all up on micro transaction since they became a thing yet I have tens of thousands of hours in live service games and I’ve had a ball.
The fact that you can "play them" without spending money doesn't change the fact that every single element of every single feature is designed to make you want to spend money, and every interaction with every menu has ads shoved down your face.
There is exactly one design conceit for live service games, and it's "rob every player you can blind". It's the exact business model of every single one. There are zero exceptions.
Every single element of these games isn’t designed to make you want to spend money 😂. Going by your hate for them along with that terrible comment shows that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Almost every single live service game now just has optional cosmetics as the microtransactions. That’s the opposite of what you’re saying.
Just because some games have certain content on disk doesn’t mean others would. At some stage a game has to be cut for release and is “content complete” for printing. With live service games they continue creating content to sell in-game. With non live service games they don’t.
If you’re going to bring mods into it then that’s a completely different conversation.
Just because there are many games that do it badly doesn't mean the genre label means something different. I'm playing GW2 and Warframe which are very much live service games and I rarely, if ever, feel exploited or manipulated into giving money to them - if anything it's the opposite and the only occassion when I do spend extra on them is when I'm happy with content or updates and want to support them.
There are no exceptions. There is no game that has ever done live service in a way that is in any way forgivable.
This is subjective and I believe this might be the case for you, but it is demonstratively absolutely not true for everyone. You framing it like some absolute authority on the subject is just shortsighted and inaccurate.
I’ve been playing Old School Runescape and I must say it’s fantastic. Selling drops os enough to pay for my subscription and there’s no microtransactions.
I’ve been playing Dota more than a decade, the game that technically introduce Battle Pass. I don’t even feel pressured to buy microtransaction, the community even disappointed when Valva stop selling the yearly battle pass
The argument against live service games is that you are dependent on the servers hosted by the developer/publisher (afaik).
In normal circumstances, they are able to stop you from playing or alter the terms at any time however they like.
This is a dominant/subordinate relationship which is quite risky. Especially for young people who are still learning what a healthy relationship looks like.
The alternative is a equality relationship where you decide if you buy something based on the price.
One argument against that would be that you can „rent“ an apartment as well. But legislature has shown that states will intervene on a vendor (landlord) redefining the terms of the contract. Not so much with gaming.
Now you are arguing that the game is taken off live service and you will be able to play it offline. I don’t know if that is the case but if so then buying it now would actually send the message that doing the right thing after all boosts sales.
TL;DR: Live service games are badly legislated imo but truly making such a game offline playable with all dlc would be a good thing in my book.
Sorry you got downvoted by this Lemmy circlejerk. There's a certain toxcicity in these parts; basically anything not Linux and offline with the slightest hint of privacy issues is downright hated here.
Which is funny since the fediverse by its core principles has 0 consideration towards privacy.
It is really astonishing how reddit-like the hivemind here has become already, people don't care about even objectively discussing the terminology if they can circlejerk about "GaaS is bad ehmahgerd" instead, just going straight for extreme viewpoints and seeing it black and white. Really thought I got away from that when I joined here...
Live service games represent lazy, copy and paste style game mechanics. They’re insulting to the gaming consumer’s intelligence, and they’re basically just jobs. Daily inconsequential tasking that eventually allows you to do an inconsequential raid, where you have a 1 in 1000 chance of dropping a rare item. All so you can stand around in the game world’s hub and show off your meaningless cosmetic item that isn’t really all that useful because you’ve accomplished all of your mundane, copy and paste goals. Oh, and the casino mechanics that psychologically incentivize buying microtransactions.
The game being “constantly updated” isn’t the issue. The issue is that the “constant updates” are basically nothingburger, repetitive tasks that you’ve already done a thousand times.
Do I care enough to go on a crusade and slap boxes out of people’s hands? Fuck no. But they are a stain on gaming
I don’t know about that. The game has now removed all of the live service elements, so I would say it’s showing that there is interest in this type of game without the live service.
I played it on a dated PC (980ti) a few days after release, maybe a week. I didn’t understand the problem either. The gaming community is extremely fickle and loves to hive mind dump on things.
Sony did that bacuse they’ve skirted laws about refunds in some parts of the world for years and CDPR inadvertently highlighted that. MS, Valve and GOG left the game up and issued refunds when requested as that should be a normal part of doing business.
Or… your experience was different from that of others. I had some weird glitches in a boss fight early on which made it difficult or impossible to progress. The person you responded to said it was a mess for them, yet it wasn’t for you. We all saw different things.
And yet, any Bethseda game has the same or worse kind of “game breaking” bugs, and gets away with it from a community backlash perspective.
I never had a bug in CP77 that broke progression. I had one boss get stuck in an elevator that made him trivial to kill.
In skyrim, I had to search up console commands to reset main quest lines that were otherwise completely broken, and commands to restore companions forever lost. And those were common experiences.
My point is that the community reaction was completely overblown when compared to other, very comparable, open world games. CP77 certainly had bugs and areas of improvement. But listening to the community, you’d think the whole thing was a dumpster fire, which it simply wasn’t. And my response was to someone who didn’t play it at release, saying that their opinion of the game being a dumsterfire was “correct”, without any frame of reference besides the community backlash.
the issue was that they marketed it like a RPG (where the source material comes from), which it simply isn't - it's GTA with a skill system and limited choices. I admit that i was disappointed, but the game itself is good and got a lot better with this patch.
I played it on Seriex X at launch and it was fine. Few graphical or animation issues here and there you expect in a big open world game but perfectky playable.
The issue was that there were multiple huge problems with the game spread across various platforms that created a big shit storm of negativity.
It was straight up broken for many console players.
Some PC players had performance issues.
For those who had no issues actually running it (like me), the game still had floaty controls and weightless guns. NPCs and vehicles that popped in and out at odd times. Dialog that clipped or played over each other. Completely broken police/wanted system. Confusing and largely ineffectual skill tree.
Once you got beyond those issues with game polish, then you were dealing with it not really being the deep scifi RPG they promised, but more of a shooter with RPG elements.
So you’ve got potential issues from multiple angles, and it just all compounded on itself. For me, I just got bored of dealing with it after like 10 hours. It was janky and that combined with it being nothing like what they hyped it up as just sorta killed it for me even though it ran with no issues.
With that said, I played for an hour or two after the update and my first impressions are a ton better and it seems like they have really fixed a lot of things. I’m excited to come back to it.
Very nice summary, thanks. I just recently started CP77, about 30 hours in now. I will stick with 1.63 for this playthrough.
My notes: The story and writing seems mostly excellent and unique (but not near the magic and masterpiece of Witcher 3.) Feeling that development was chaotic (pieces cut, rearranged, “montage” with Jackie was jarring.). World seems quite empty, few “layers” (soulless, unpolished). Car controls are not great, very “floaty” and strange. Literally zero encounters with NCPD yet (lol?). Reminds of Deus Ex, but leaning more action FPS. Bugs still apparent (floating cars, missing items), but nothing game-breaking. Graphics underwhelming (city environment especially, characters better, mostly “very high” settings, but admittedly no HDR or ray-tracing).
Would rate 4 out of 5 for now, but a 3 is possible (hopefully not).
That’s an interesting comparison to Deus Ex. I hadn’t thought of that but I agree. It’s definitely got that feel, it’s just much more shallow. Good call.
Right? It’s not like it’s even the type of game you need to play on release. If you can live without always needing the new shiny thing, you have a better experience for half the price or less.
Of course, it does rely on the people who need the new shiny thing to fund the game and beta test all the bugs, but still…
LMFAO, a lot of you guys sound so fucking bitter and I don’t understand. I used a Vive years ago and it was so much fun, zero nausea the very first time I played it and I played it for hours. The tech has only gotten better and better. Stay mad. 😂
Edit: Accidentally said Rift when I actually meant the HTC Vive. It was awesome.
Would be nice if the author had done a bit of research on the specific things that had been done in VR since he tried his DK2 to prevent nausea:
An Oculus DK2, a PC that couldn’t quite run a rollercoaster demo at a high-enough framerate, and a slightly-too-hot office full of people watching me as I put on the headset. Before I’d completed the second loop-de-loop, it was clear that VR and I were not going to be good friends.
For one, non-persistent displays have become the norm. These only show (strobe) the image for a fraction of the frame time and go black in between. Valve discovered that the full 1/90th of a second an image is displayed is enough to induce nausea if the head is moving during that time. So the Vive (and the Oculus Rift) had non-persistent displays.
The stobing effect is so fast you don’t notice it.
Elimination of artificial movement is another. The reason Valve focused on games with teleport movement and made a big deal of “room scale” early on was to eliminate the nausea triggers you encounter in other types of experiences.
Valve had an early version of Half Life 2 VR during the days of the DK2, but they removed it as the artificial motion made people sick (myself included).
For many, sims work as long as there is a frame in their field of vision to let their brains lock into that non-moving frame of reference (ex car A-pillars, roof line, dash board, outline of view screen on a ship interior, etc). Note the frame still moves when you move your head, so it’s not a static element in your field of view.
Also it helps if your PC can render frames under the critical 11.1ms frame time (for 90Hz displays). Coincidentally, 90Hz is the minimum Valve determined is needed to experience “presence”. Many folks don’t want to turn down graphic options to get to this. It’s doable in most games even if it won’t be as detailed as it would on a flat screen. Shadows is a big offender here.
Resolution isn’t as big of a factor in frametimes as detailed shadows and other effects. I have run games at well over 4k x 2.5k resolution per eye and been able to keep 11.1ms frame times.
Lastly, it has been noted that any movement or vibration to the inner ear can for many stave off nausea. This includes jogging in place while having the game world move forward. For many years we’ve had a free solution that integrates into Steam VR:
Jog in place to make your character move forward in the direction you’re facing. Walk normally to experience 1-to-1 roomscale.
I’ve use the above to play Skyrim VR without any nausea. Good workout too!
For car, flight, spaceflight simulators, a tactile transducer on your chair (looks like a speaker magnet without the cone - or basically a subwoofer without the cone) can transfer the games sound vibrations directly to you and therefore your inner ear and prevent nausea.
I’ve literally played over 1,000 hours of Elite:Dangerous this way as well as Battlezone VR and Vector 36. All games that involve tons of fast artificial movement.
The main issue is too many people tried out VR cardboard or old DK2 demos with low and laggy framerate, persistent displays, and poorly designed VR experiences and simply write off all VR as bad and nausea inducing.
Edit: added links and trailers to the games mentioned so folks can see the motion involved. The “study” wasn’t a proper study. It was a quote from a scientist. No data was given about what headsets or which experiences caused nausea.
Some researchers did a study several years ago and found that adding a virtual nose decreased motion sickness significantly. However, I don’t think I’ve seen any developers try this. I wonder if it’d help.
Have they discovered a link between people with big noses and less motion sickness? Imo these are the more important questions that will drive humanity forward
Yes although I’m hypothesising large nose peoples brains will be doing this with a larger area hence the greater effects against motion sickness. It could lead to novel treatments for motion sickness like wearing a big nose while riding on a bus.
When I had my rig I got a boxing game and it fucking zoomed in and put totally unexpectedly and nearly made me lose my shit. I could only do an hour before my eyes would start to feel like they were going to melt.
Does anybody know if it’s the same cause as when on a car? Like I have yet to get into buying VR but I never get nausea on a car looking at phone inside/outside doesn’t matter. Just trying to see if I might be affected.
It's been a damn good summer for fighting games too, and arguably the best year for all of video games. I've still got probably 10 hours to go in Baldur's Gate 3, haven't touched Starfield or Phantom Liberty yet, and I'm also looking forward to Broken Roads. There's not enough time to get to all this good stuff, and there's still Wargroove 2 coming in a week and a half.
2010 is my favorite. the beatles rock band and rock band 3 came out the same year. one being a nearly perfect game and the other being my most played game ever by far (unofficially, 360 does not track days played)
1998 was such a monster year because it spawned so many big franchises, including two that were arguably the genesis of e-sports. It’ll be a while before we know how 2023 measures up in that regard, although there’s not much new stuff this year that might have legs. Hi-Fi Rush and Starfield, maybe?
I’ve been thinking for a while that this is probably already the best year since 1998 though.
VR was fine for me until I landed on a planet in Elite: Dangerous. The rover pitching back and forth was way too much. Never again will I put a headset on.
There is, and it absolutely failed to be a comfort when I tried it after I got sick the first time. The comfort mode functioned, but my brain was done with VR. I could not even use Google Earth VR without getting queasy.
I didn’t see a source for the statistic in the article which is a bit disappointing as I’m really interested to learn more about it. It seems pretty high but also there’s quite a lot of uncertainty built into it.
From my experience with VR I found I got sick after a long enough time but was able to get my ‘vr legs’ and have much longer sessions even on more intense games like Windlands where you swing around like Spiderman (super fun if you have the stomach for it).
The other thing to note is that for me at least it’s a spectrum. It’s not just ‘VR makes me sick’ but it depends a lot of the game or activity and there are a bunch of ways for games to try and reduce it. It does take time to get used to some of them though.
Hopefully things become better with time and more folks get to enjoy it because it’s a lot of fun in my experience.
Yea, some games I can play for hours.
Others make me feel weird after a few minutes.
I can spend a ton of time in Alyx, or doing barrel rolls and corkscrews in Star Wars Squadrons.
I have a hard time finishing a level in After the Fall.
I have had a lot of friends over and try it and since they are making up their statics I will do a statistic purely based of my experience. About 5% of VR triers experience nausea when the frame rate isn’t smooth in a moment of movement.
Jet Island was the game for me that grew my VR legs, Windlands sounds similar except you also have Ironman thrusters and a skate board. After that I could then spend hours in dirt rally 2.0 which poetically would’ve gave me a bad headache before.
I don’t think VR is going to work for us. My SO and I get carsick really easily, and my SO gets sick playing or watching FPS games on a normal screen. It’s mitigated somewhat by adjusting FOV and higher refresh, but it still causes issues within an hour (usually like 30 min).
I wonder how much of this statistics are from people like us, for whom even “tame” things like being a passenger in a car can cause motion sickness.
I can’t believe people are still on the VR gimmick train. 99% of what they want from VR is interactivity which can be done with a standard computer screen and the Wiimote-like controllers. Looking around with your head is neat-ish but is really the primary cause of the motion sickness and essentially cuts you off from the real world which can be incredibly dangerous as well.
Companies have tried to make VR a thing for decades now, and now that graphics and hardware technology have advanced, they’re doing a major push trying to make it an acceptable, “it’s everywhere now, so many people are using it” thing when it’s really not. It’s a niche device with a market share less than Linux (Linux itself, not Valve’s “fake Windows Linux device that just runs Windows games without paying Microsoft money – how is this not a violation of Windows TOS”) or MacOS and yet they say those are too niche and insignificant to care about while praising VR. It’s time to give it up and accept that VR is a worthless gimmick, and if you want interactivity, find better ways to do so without making people sick and cutting them off from the world around them.
Valve’s “fake Windows Linux device that just runs Windows games without paying Microsoft money – how is this not a violation of Windows TOS”
Valve uses a build of WINE called Proton, not Windows. Microsoft's TOS terms apply to Windows. They don't have anything to do with software that's simply able to run the same binaries.
EDIT: Ah, I looked at your comment history, and it appears to just be trolling, so I assume that this wasn't a serious question.
Trolling? No. What part of my history makes you think that?
Wine (and by extension, Proton) is simulating a Windows install with no Microsoft license. How is this not a clear violation of Microsoft’s TOS? I can see if you are just using it personally how it can be a grey area, but VALVE IS USING IT PROFESSIONALLY, INCLUDED WITH THEIR INSTALL, FOR PROFIT. Microsoft should sue the fuck out of them.
If you think that’s a troll, you have issues with reality. You can’t just create your own version of Windows (even one like Wine) without repercussions. Get over yourself.
Putting a bunch of APIs together in such a way as to create an entire copyrighted OS inside of another one 100% should be. You want to make DirectX itself for Linux, fine. But don’t tell me you think putting it and a ton of other Windows libraries together – even ones made “clean” – to run an OS very closely to its target OS (and this isn’t emulation, it’s making your own version of an OS) is not a problem.
Like I said, making Wine and using it casually for a single person isn’t the real issue here. It’s concerning, yes, but when a single user is using it for their own purposes, I think there’s nothing huge to be concerned with. When a major gaming corporation is using it as part of their own software running under a piece of their own hardware for financial gain – really? You don’t see the issue? How has Microsoft not seriously put an end to this already? If Microsoft is giving their blessing to this, they are opening up all sorts of copyright infringement across the board for software of all kinds.
Maybe if your mind is tainted by “Free software is holy and can never be wrong”, you have this idea that it’s fine. Free software is fine on its own as long as it follows a set of ethical and legal rules. Wine is definitely not doing this by allowing Valve to take their fork and making it part of their Switch-like hardware. Valve is specifically going full on Linux to avoid paying Microsoft for the rights to Windows on their machine, and using Wine/Proton to do this is simply wrong, no matter how you look at it.
I cannot believe anyone sees me as in the wrong on this issue. Valve should have pushed harder for native Linux gaming, but they failed, so they should have given up. Instead, they decided to do the wrong thing with something that should have been stopped from day one.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne