How is that awful? The deep dive videos are all we need to understand generally what the new things are, and why we should be looking forward to it. Isn’t that all marketing can do?
I mean what were you expecting a month from release besides like maybe one additional trailer? The original trailer exists and I’m sure they’re paying to run that somewhere. And once someone sees it they can go watch the dev videos.
If they cared about peaking hype they wouldn’t have told us about the performance problems. But frankly they don’t need to hype CS2 or even sell big at release and they’re well aware of it. Games like the latest annual COD have to sell as much as possible at release because they need players to fill the servers, they need to have an established player base to sell the battle passes to after a month, and the game has a maximum shelf life of a year, before it’s abandoned for the next game. But CS on the other hand doesn’t need to do any of that. It has virtually zero competition so it has a captive audience of everyone who likes modern city builder games, and it doesn’t matter when you buy it, because they aren’t making another one for 5-8 years. They know exactly how much money they’re going to make from this game and they’ll get yours too, whether it’s at release or a year from now.
To put it in perspective, COD games are made fast, and have to sell fast. Since CS1 released, there have been TEN Call of Duty games. In that same timespan were about to get ONE new Cities game.
It sucks, on one hand I’d prefer a delay so they can release what they’re happy with - but on the other this is a developer that I know and trust to continue working to make things better for a long time. For many other games this would leave a bitter taste, but for this one it’s a bit of a shrug for me.
I’m kind of used to devs releasing apologies for their games after a bad release and the following review bombing. It’s almost guaranteed to happen for any modern AAA game, it’s the sorry state of the industry. But now, we’ve reached a point where devs apologize for their games before they’re even released. This shit is hilarious.
What’s next? “We’re going to release a game four years from now. You should temper your expectations, it’s probably going to suck.”
I mean, kudos to them for warning the potential customers, instead of lying to them or luring them in with nice trailers and trying to silence journalists by prohibiting them from showing game footage (I think I remember someone doing that…). Although I’m not sure how I should thank them. Should I buy the game because they were honest? Or should I not buy it, because, well, they were honest? I’m confused.
I mean, I think it just demonstrates that the problem is not on a development level, but rather on a project management and (particularly) an executive level.
Crunch and unreasonable deadlines in the gaming industry are the norm, and there’s too much pressure from higher up to deliver a product as soon as possible, even if it isn’t 100% ready.
Unfortunately, there’s no real good answer for this as a consumer… If the game does well, the execs who set the deadlines pocket the profits. If it does poorly, the developers who worked on it bear the brunt of it by either getting insufficient raises, an even higher level of pressure on the next game, or at worst, get laid off.
The real answer would be widespread industry unionization. Efforts to do this are ever-so-slowly being made, but it’s not even remotely close to being a reality. I’d say that if the game appeals to you and you don’t mind performance issues at launch, buy it, but if not, then don’t.
problem is not on a development level, but rather on a project management and (particularly) an executive level.
In any industry as time progresses the production becomes more and more capital intensive and that needs more and bigger investors and all that capital means that there is a bigger risk and that is mitigated by the investors by requiring “their guys” to staff the management and these people are unusually really bad for the technical and actual value side of the business on the long run, because they are usually people with financial or marketing backgrounds. They fundamentally work by the logic of profit maximization and there are always easier and more surefire ways toi achieve that than with supplying a good product. It’s even worse when the end product is something that could be considered “art”. In AAA it all eventually leads into pushing bland installments under rushed deadlines for the same once successful franchise out one after another, just because that is where the risks are lowest and money is still being made.
You're failing to take Paradox's lifecycles into account. Even though they're only the publisher, keep in mind that they're used to supporting games for 8-10 years after launch. Cities: Skylines came out in 2015 and has seen continual development ever since. Its performance was also abysmal at a point, but people kept playing and the devs kept improving it to the point where nobody even fully remembers why we cared about SimCity going to shit when Cities: Skylines was right there.
Given that Paradox has near decade-long lifecycles for their games the launch window is utterly meaningless. Hell, Europa Universalis IV had an expansion released earlier this year and it was released in 2013.
That game had the unfortunate timing of being released when everyone knew CK3 was around the corner. It ended up being seen as a stopgap release and that just got worse when CK3 came out. It got a couple of DLCs but the players just weren't there anymore. It has some good ideas.
Of singleplayer games, it may be Quake. This one was created before the recent remaster and compatible with different engines.
In honor of Quake’s 20th anniversary, MachineGames, an internal development studio of ZeniMax Media, who are the current owners of the Quake IP, released online a new expansion pack for free, called Episode 5: Dimension of the Past.
Episode 6: Dimension of the Machine was released in 2021. Quake was released in 1996, making it 25 years.
I have a feeling there's probably some obscure-ass Nethack clone that's been getting regular updates since the creator first programmed it on a PDP/11 but outside of that I can't think of any actual commercial products that have received expansions that long after.
Yeah, guess, Doom and Quake are the earliest non-arcade games that are still accessible to current generations of players making it somehow relevant. I feel like only Sega could do something, like releasing one of their classics updated with some new content, but it won’t be the same as original cartridge releases and obviously incompatible with them.
Sure. But if you know your product is going to be trash, why not jump ahead of the curve and victimize yourself to start with? It’s not difficult to do these days, and why wouldn’t you do it? Altruism? At this point, not assuming this happens is just naive.
the game will be optimized eventually. if you want to wait until then, do so. me, I just want to play this. I don’t care I’ve been waiting a long time for this game, and I have a very powerful desktop PC so I don’t really care.
I am upset they do not have a native Linux build this time around, however. And I don’t care that proton has gotten good, a game like this needs to run natively to get the full experience. The first one did and Unity makes it trivially simple to export builds to other operating systems.
people really enjoy the boot of anti-cheat on their necks.
maybe these companies could move their cheat detection to the server where they control the code. maybe don't just send all player positions so wall-hacks become impossible. maybe use some machine learning to look at input patterns and detect when a player is sending things that don't look human.
the list of things companies could do to actually fix cheating in pvp games is long and all they want to do is pay for ridiculous anti-cheat that impacts normal users.
maybe these companies could move their cheat detection to the server where they control the code. maybe don’t just send all player positions so wall-hacks become impossible.
That’s not how video games work. If you want interpolation of positions then you have to send the positions of the players that you can’t see but are heading towards a place you can see. You could take a bunch of difficult math to do and filter out who to send the data to or not. It would create a lot of bugs. So you could just send just the people who are within X distance of you and call it good. Most, if not all game engines do it this way.
You have to have interpolation on the client side, it’s the only way you can play the game on the internet. It’s what Doom did to get multiplayer working and we’ve never been able to find anything better.
maybe use some machine learning to look at input patterns and detect when a player is sending things that don’t look human.
They already do that. It’s called heuristics.
the list of things companies could do to actually fix cheating in pvp games is long and all they want to do is pay for ridiculous anti-cheat that impacts normal users.
Yes.. honestly, imho, any game that's competitive should either embrace "cheating" and design its gameplay to be as transparent as chess (ie.. make it ok to be tool-assisted) or be designed around controlled environments that forbid using tools like that.
Anyone who doesn't want to surrender to a controlled environment (whether it's in the form of some kernel-level control or VPN / Stadia-like platform) should just look for coop games.
It's sad that FPS have evolved towards the competitive landscape... to me, the best experience in the original classic Doom was coop mode. Yet Doom Eternal, at most, only supports some wacky asymmetric team deathmatch.
One thing I realized actually is that I meant Quake which first used network interpolation. I think classic doom didn’t have networking but I am not sure, to be honest. Either way, it’s before my time.
That said I think it’s a bummer that even casual non-ranked experiences have had a large problem with cheating. Even co-op games have lots of cheating but the nature of the game means the cheating affects people who don’t want to cheat less. They aren’t directly subjected to it, it’s still a problem though, the cheating still affects things like the game economy and player perception of the game.
That said everything has gone towards the competitive because even casual versus experiences are competitive now. Super Smash Bros. was just supposed to be the silly, not-serious fighting game that now has large tournament play. Every game, no matter how casual, has gotten competitive. Our culture is so ingrained with competing that we might as well have spitting tournaments… Wait let me google. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_pit_spitting They totally have spitting tournaments. Honestly, human culture is that of competition. I don’t see a way we work around that at our evolutionary core we are competitive but I don’t see it as a good thing.
Doom did have networking, using IPX. You had to start the game with a parameter from the DOS commandline. Like Quake, the maps had special player spawn points & items for deathmatch too. The term "deathmatch" was coined by the Doom game mode.
However, there was no frame interpolation in the original Doom, instead, there might be a latency in the inputs. The game state only advances when all players have sent an update for that "tic" (1/35 of a second), so the game might be laggy for everyone if the connection from one of the players is slow.
But multiplayer back then was mostly for LAN parties. At least in my area. I didn't even have an internet connection at that time, personally. In fact, even during the Quake age, I was only able to play on LAN... and I still liked coop better.
Even co-op games have lots of cheating but the nature of the game means the cheating affects people who don’t want to cheat less. They aren’t directly subjected to it, it’s still a problem though, the cheating still affects things like the game economy and player perception of the game.
Yes, what I meant is that cheating becomes irrelevant in coop, not that it doesn't exist.
If a game has an economy that makes some players richer than others (like say.. in many MMOs), and you actually care a lot about being rich in that universe, then it'd starts being more of a competitive thing and less about coop... a game can be competitive and be PvE.
Even singleplayer games can be competitive if you make it about beating your friend's "score" or speed.. almost anything is susceptible to speedrunning.
I guess the question on coop vs competitive is more about what are the goals of the players. If people play games to have a fun time, or if it's because they want to have some way to prove themselves they are good at something :P
Absolutely, the goal of the player is mutable, and thus really anything, even co-op games, becomes competitive with the right player mindset. I feel like even with co-op that mindset can affect almost any game.
I wrote a snarky response because of the final insulting comment in yours but then thought better of it, going to try to address a couple of your points legitimately even after the unnecessary personal attack.
It's a lot cheaper to make your server dumb. It costs you less in programmers with deep multiplayer programming experience, it costs you less in ongoing hosting because of reduced CPU usage, and it makes the problem less "yours" as a developer.
I'm saying that's shitty that the developers will try to save money that way rather than investing in actual effective, privacy-respecting cheat prevention.
Your argument seems to be that a quake-style predictive algorithm is the only solution possible for online games. I doubt that is the case, but even if it were, using some raycasts on the server for some basic sanity checks on what data to send to players is an example of where lots of developers just can't be bothered.
If you want to dismiss machine learning as heuristics, I'm sorta ok with that, as I think they are just glorified heuristics, but even the most basic analysis isn't done by most developers. Instead, they rely on the sales pitches of various anti-cheat software and don't implement anything beyond it, even when there might be some low hanging fruit.
I am not saying developers are lazy, there's tons of stuff to work on. I am mad that this problem gets repeatedly pushed onto the users rather than the developers, though, and I think it's reasonable for me to offer some pushback when both my CPU cycles and my privacy are being abused.
I wrote a snarky response because of the final insulting comment in yours but then thought better of it, going to try to address a couple of your points legitimately even after the unnecessary personal attack.
Sorry, It’s not meant as an attack. I am simply calling it as I see it because I get a lot of gamers who think they’ve arm-chaired thought far more about my job as a networked gameplay engineer than I have. I’ve been doing this for a very long time and I know where developers cut costs. Anti-cheat isn’t just a slap-it-on and call it a good solution. There are a lot of reasons you want to trust the client and it makes the gameplay feel far better.
It’s a lot cheaper to make your server dumb. It costs you less in programmers with deep multiplayer programming experience, it costs you less in ongoing hosting because of reduced CPU usage, and it makes the problem less “yours” as a developer.
Typically, the server, especially in counter-strike’s case, isn’t dumb. In all games, the server still handles the dealing of damage which typically includes validations of that damage. In counter-strike’s case, very little data is calculated on the client. Most of it is raw data sent from input to the server.
Your argument seems to be that a quake-style predictive algorithm is the only solution possible for online games. I doubt that is the case, but even if it were, using some raycasts on the server for some basic sanity checks on what data to send to players is an example of where lots of developers just can’t be bothered.
Lots of game engines including source include and utilize ways to ensure the player is reporting sane inputs. Also, interpolation is different than extrapolation. Lastly, you don’t need to do raycasts to double-check this data. A lot of the time the raycasts are done on the server itself. In counter-strike’s case this is also true. Raycasts are done on the client typically for cosmetics only. You can see this with 3kliksphilip’s videos on sub-tick.
If you want to dismiss machine learning as heuristics, I’m sorta ok with that, as I think they are just glorified heuristics, but even the most basic analysis isn’t done by most developers. Instead, they rely on the sales pitches of various anti-cheat software and don’t implement anything beyond it, even when there might be some low hanging fruit.
Heuristics haven’t been done by developers in a long time. A lot of that is actually done in Valve’s case by Overwatch. Also, Valve makes it’s own anti-cheat called VAC. They aren’t getting sales pitches.
I am not saying developers are lazy, there’s tons of stuff to work on. I am mad that this problem gets repeatedly pushed onto the users rather than the developers, though, and I think it’s reasonable for me to offer some pushback when both my CPU cycles and my privacy are being abused.
Frankly, I feel like it’s wrong for you to say that the problem is pushed onto users when you don’t understand the code and effort the developers are writing to solve this issue specifically with counter-strike. VAC is probably the anti-cheat with the least amount of client code. It rests almost entirely on the server. One thing VAC does do is lock down the client on Windows to prevent modifications. One thing you can easily do is replace assets for walls with transparent textures to see through walls. That’s why things like the code and assets can’t be tampered with. Most game engines only send updates to the positions of actors in a network bubble. Maybe Counter-Strike’s network bubble is too large at the time but that’s not an argument you made.
Frankly, I feel like it’s wrong for you to say that the problem is pushed onto users when you don’t understand the code and effort the developers are writing to solve this issue specifically with counter-strike
You are the one who continues to make assumptions about what I do and do not understand about the code that makes this work in various games.
I don't really feel like getting into the nitty gritty here in comments, but if your experience is what you say, I'm very surprised at some of your unqualified statements.
Your comments are enough to see where your knowledge of what a networked gameplay engineer does at Valve lies. Especially since you make assumptions that the developers aren’t doing things when very clearly there are proof and industry standards that say they do those things. If you are Andrew Burke who works at Valve as an Animator, I would recommend talking to the engineers there.
Edit: Who I am shouldn't matter to you. Addressing the idea that you can shift some or all anti-cheat to the server is something you should try to engage with directly rather than appealing to authority. For what it's worth, I've spent time as a programmer in the game industry in a handful of different roles and your search will eventually find me if you keep going down that road. My experience isn't what I am arguing here, though.
It’s not really an assumption if I say “if”. I can agree with you that shifting as much data as possible on the server is best. Valve already does that pretty well for counter-strike. Far more than other competitive FPSs. They still keep shot registration on the server whereas most competitive shooters now have that on the client to have the correct gameplay feel. The big balance between keeping stuff on the server and putting some authority on the client is the gameplay feel. Counter-Strike has been and still is notorious for getting shot around a corner when you don’t see who shot you. This is because of server authority rather than client authority.
Erroneous bans, they intend to reverse them once AMD implements a fix:
AMD's latest driver has made their "Anti-Lag/+" feature available for CS2, which is implemented by detouring engine dll functions.
If you are an AMD customer and play CS2, DO NOT ENABLE ANTI-LAG/+; any tampering with CS code will result in a VAC ban.
Once AMD ships an update we can do the work of identifying affected users and reversing their ban. @AMD
The Anti-Lag software from AMD seems to get flagged as some sort of cheating from the Anti Cheat software by Valve, as it tempers the Counter Strike code. In other words, its not compatible. AMD should have tested and worked together with Valve, before shipping the update. It's not to blame Valve, because the Anti Cheat software works as intended, but AMD, because they did not work with Valve before launching their software.
Anti-lag has been in the amd drivers for a long time. This seems more to be caused by Valve rushing CS2 out the door so the drivers couldn't be thoroughly tested.
On the one hand, happy to get the opportunity… on the other hand, this kind of just increases the testing overhead needed to finalise the preview version and ship the final version to more devices. Win some, lose some.
I’m not really looking for spoilers so I only took a quick glance, but it looks neat. I heard the main quest line wasn’t that long so I’ve been avoiding it; however, if there are that many powers to unlock, it can’t be too short. I’ll probably resume those quests tonight.
They become semi-side quests once you reach a certain point in the main quest line. Technically, I think you only have to collect just one to three of them to finish the story. I’m not 100% sure though, I too have been too distracted by non-mainline quest thingies.
I just did my first one after about 50 hours and I really hope there’s not many of them… I didn’t know what I was doing or if I was doing it right untill I passed it.
My experience with starfield is “ughh this is annoying, ughh this part sucks, oooh thats kinda cool” and then I check my save file and have over 130 hours. So basically my typical Bethesda experience. 10/10 would do again.
This also shocked me when playing Starfield, I basically just completed one of the faction quests and basically just spent time building and stealing ships and my playtime is more than 100 hours. WTF.
Second: Some people find the game enjoyable enough. Not every part will be though. If I turn off the startup logo shit, am I wasting my money? That’s part of the vanilla experience that I’m now missing, right? How is this different if not?
I’ve got better stuff to do with my time then those temples and that more important than any “value” I lose not engaging in it. However, how is it valuable to do? If it isn’t enjoyable, it wastes time, and I don’t get anything for it, isn’t that the reverse of value? Isn’t the smart thing to do removing it? Wtf is wrong with you where you’d want to engage with something you don’t enjoy?
Dude, read. I didn’t pay for it. Damn, you’re annoying. I’m done. I’m not sure why I responded so many times when you’re clearly a troll, or at least as good as one.
Obviously Im referring to the game when I say paid, not the mod that would be even funnier, well if being intentionally obtuse helps u cope like when youre equating logo to gameplay, so be it
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