If Warren Spector is actually involved I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt but I’m not thrilled about the competitive multiplayer aspect and the trailer presentation made me think “hero shooter” more than Deus Ex/Thief spiritual successor. Also Spector’s track record over the 20 post-Eidos years isn’t exactly glowing.
Extremely lazy and scammy way to get your customers to make the content for you for free (and as a result what little content there is is absolute garbage).
Just an excuse to implement always-online DRM.
Either subscription based or ridden with pay to win microtransactions, or both. In any case, evidently not worth a fraction of what you end up paying for it, and therefore a scam.
Extremely hostile and unenjoyable experience.
Nothing wrong with being a masochist, but I ain’t one.
I play games to get away from people, not to get an overdose of the damn fuckers. If I for some self destructive reason wanted that I could just go outside.
And, in this particular case, means the game is being sold as a successor to something it’s the opposite of, making it extremely offensive and even more of a scam than most multiplayer games.
Alright, I accept this is your opinion but the overall aversion to multiplayer on Lemmy surprises me. Games have historically been multiplayer experiences since human existence. Go back thousands of years to ancient mesopotamia and people will play games with each other. And even in videogames, they play a huge part. I’ve had countless fun hours in games like Super Smash Bros., Minecraft multiplayer or Team Fortress 2 and I’m always looking forward to multiplayer experiences that look interesting. I’m not sure what you mean by
get your customers to make the content for you for free
in this particular case. Do the devs have a bad track record when it comes to this? Because it’s not something exclusive to online games by any means.
Anyway I understand the title rubs people the wrong way because it’s nonsene of course, but I don’t get the hate. It’s almost like people want the same old stuff wrapped in a new shell over an over again when they criticize studios solely for going into a new direction instead of making yet another sequel.
get your customers to make the content for you for free
I mean that (besides always-online DRM, and scamming your victims with subscriptions and microtransactions) the main reason for perpetrating an online multiplayer computer game is that you can get away with not writing a story, or lore, or quests, or puzzles, or NPCs, or AI, or any actual gameplay, or anything even remotely resembling a proper game through the magic of scamming your customers (or rather victims) into paying you for the privilege of filling in the gaps and acting as NPCs, and gameplay, and whatnot.
You get away with selling the rotting carcass of what could have been a game, and scamming your customers into believing it’s still alive just because it’s (temporarily) crawling with maggots.
I can get any old single player game and, provided I can replicate its environment, play it and enjoy it just as much as I could have when it came out, or even more.
Even if it was possible to enjoy an online game, on the other hand, it will have been stillborn to start with, a mere shell of a game, an insult to real games, a sad parody only resembling a game as long as there’s enough victims trapped in the scam; the second they start leaving (supposing the scammers don’t turn the servers off before that, to drive their victims to their latest shiny defecation) it’ll go back to being the empty unplayable shell it’s always been, utterly devoid of enjoyability or replayability.
The very concept is insulting, revolting, and a clear intentional predatory attack on computer game players and the very concept of computer games.
Online computer games are not games. They’re a cheap (as long as you can afford the initial investment), fast, and easy way of extracting as much wealth as possible from their customers using the least effort.
The companies making them don’t care about computer games, or about whatever setting they’re raping and tearing apart in order to promote their crap, or about their customers. They just care about extracting as much wealth as possible from them, and moving on to their next scam.
And if left unchecked they’ll destroy the very concept of computer games as an art form, or even as an industry, and they won’t care, because they’ll have already extracted everything they could.
None of the downsides you’ve mentioned are exclusive to online games, though. Publishers put these mechanics in single player games as often as they do it in online games so you criticism doesn’t make much sense here, to be honest. There are also countless online games that don’t have any of those things.
Only online “games” this maybe wouldn’t apply to would have to be peer to peer, serverless, and probably open source to be safe… and, even then, you’d have to provide a sufficient amount of players to replay them a decade on, as, lacking any actual game, they’re useless without other players.
As for offline games, sure, publishers might attempt to use them in the same way, but it’s much more expensive since a minimum amount of game must actually exist in order for players to fall for it, and they can’t fake it using other players. Asset flips are obviously a thing, but easily detected and avoided. And, most importantly, even those will remain equally playable or unplayable in a few decades, while an online “game” will be unplayable the instant it doesn’t have enough players.
I think what he means is multi-player games are typically cheaper than single-player because the devs make 6 maps or whatever and let the players loose.
A full campaign requires a lot more work to keep it interesting for more than a few minutes.
That couldn’t be further from the truth. Mutliplayer games are a huge undertaking because you have no choice but to develop and test for any possible individuality and keep pushing new patches so the game can keep running smoothly. Not to speak of server costs and complex match making systems that typically come with it. No, multiplayer games are hard to make and they’re rarely ever finished.
Well… saying something is a spiritual successor to deus ex and then saying it is a multilayer title is doing what exactly? Clickbait? In what way is it a spiritual successor then? I dont mind mp, I mind being misled.
Yep, hard pass. I’ll occasionally play a co-op game here and there with friends, but as soon as you add pvp, especially if required, I’m out without regret and nothing will bring me back.
I got excited until I found out this was a multiplayer title. This is a great team making a game that I couldn’t possibly care about, makes me sad to say their effort is dead to me.
Huh. Thief 1&2, System Shock 1&2 and Deus Ex make up half of my top 10 games list. But multiplayer? I donno, maybe if there is also a good single player campaign I’ll be interested. I’d be happy with a modern Thief 1&2 remaster. NewDark and TheDarkMod are great, but I’d love to have full raytracing in Thief.
Valve pulled support for Steam at the start of January 2024 for Windows 7/8. I thought that was the end, but apparently it actually just meant “Steam may still run but we don’t support it in any way”. Which surprised me when I booted up the old Windows 7 PC a few months ago and discovered that Steam still ran and seemed to work.
Apparently this update is actually incompatible and now Steam won’t run at all.
TBF an online Windows 7 copy is just asking to be Hacked given Microsoft support ended in 2020 and security updates after that required a paid subscription which ended in 2023.
The title of that article is kind of weird. It’s just wrong to claim they are dead for gaming because of a lack of steam.
Anyone can just get Witcher 3, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Stardew Valley, or Anno 2070 from GoG and for each of them you can game for another 50 hours without needing steam. Or get Minecraft from their page directly and play for 100 hours. This is all without going to any retro titles.
I’ve tinkered plenty even when using Windows haha. I even have a Windows 98 and Windows XP virtual machine for some old things, but everything I care about seems to have a modern HD release, a userpatch or can be hooked with dxwnd, so I don’t use them anymore at the moment.
But yeah probably the long term solution is Linux. Personally I wouldn’t run Windows 7 anymore. The unfixed CVE list has become quite long. I just went checking for the above titles out of principle, because I don’t like this conflation of PC gaming with only Steam.
I still haven’t made the jump to gaming on Linux, unfortunately. Although I’ve been running a dual boot for the last 8 years or so, because I used Linux for my studies, use it for my work, and for hosting my game servers on a second computer, so I would be in a prime position… but so far I have just gone the way of least resistance, which is still Windows 10 at the moment.
But I have a deadline now: October 2025. Just need to figure out the best distro, I don’t think I’ll use my existing Fedora KDE install for this. Maybe Arch, or one of these new immutable distros, that might be neat for when different games require different versions of libraries.
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