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.
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.
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.
Big reason why I just never understood why Meta bet the farm on VR/metaverse. Such a stupid move, literally everyone knew that VR wasn’t ready for mainstream. The only people willing to get it were tech nerds and some gamers, and really that had nothing to do with the metaverse, it was because they could play games in it.
Until it gets stable and doesn’t feel like I’m strapping a brick onto my face, it’s not going to happen mainstream. It also can’t just connect to a PC, average people don’t want to be strapped down to something. And I know, that’s a lot to ask, but if you want to base your entire company on VR, those are the hard realities. People want something like sunglasses, not something that feels like duct taping a laptop in front of their face
It didn't even occur to me that this was a result of the patch, but I did notice it start happening recently. When the patch rolled out, I was in a spot in the game where all of my things were taken from me anyway, so I guess I didn't notice it initially when it first started.
I disagree. I definitely feel like I’m there with everything scaled up to real size. Like I never really considered how absolutely massive Radroaches from Fallout were until playing Fallout 4 VR.
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.
Big range. My main issue is just convenience. I have a PSVR2, and it’s just a pain to use. Like, you really have to dedicate yourself to using it. It has never felt like something you just do spur of the moment. You can’t just sit back and relax.
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.
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