this is starting to be horseshit. Every windows computer has a version of fucking solitare on it , there are other card based games that don’t get this treatment, and the lootboxes are actual gambling.
I thought at the start it was a type of beurocratical problem, but it’s been too long.
Not entirely sure about the European PEGI, but the American ESRB is funded by the same companies that it regulates. It was created after the outcry about violent games and was the industry self-regulating to avoid the government getting more involved.
It is a lobby group for the industry, for better and in this case very much for worse.
PEGI and many other groups are private groups. They’re not an authority of any form. They’re not associated with government, public regulation, or public election. They’re a group of people that create their own standards outside of the ISO or any actual regulation representing the public.
Some countries do have actual public systems, but many just have these private groups that know best.
In Austria PEGI is “enforced” in Vienna while USK is “enforced” in Salzburg (and Germany, the reason why they buy all their games here). And PEGI might be shit, but USK is a million times worse.
German Authorities (technically not USK but USK affiliated completely banned Wolfenstein, Dying Light, etc. Not 18+ or whatever it’s straight up illegal to promote or openly sell them in Germany.
Yeah, it’s always stupid what ends up there and what doesn’t. And because of Germany’s stupid laws the German version often ends up worse than other versions (often even removing the English language option) (And people are surprised that we hate our northern neighbors…)
Here’s a (non-exclusive) list of banned games in Germany (it’s in German but the game titles should make it accessible to people that can only speak English): de.wikipedia.org/…/Kategorie:Indiziertes_Computer…
Oh yeah, Half-Life was indexed in Germany until 2017 (coincidentally when they switched from Elke Monssen-Engberding to someone less grumpy (half of the stupid decisions coming from Germany just stem from some grumpy old person who’s entrenched in a Department))
I honestly think it would be easier to just list games that they allow. I suppose Germans are really into Tetris or something since that’s apparently the only acceptable game.
It really has gotten better over the last couple years but for two decades they pretty much banned everything with the slightest hint of being adult. They are I believe also the reason for why Contra is Probotector in Europe
This is all well and true, but it’s important to note that these organizations exist as a sidestep to regulation, they are formed by industry insiders as a promise to the regulators that they will be honest about how they rate games (or movies or music) so that the government doesn’t actually get involved and do it’s job.
It’s a form of regulatory capture that allows the industry itself to decide what is harmful to us.
It’s basically the definition of conflict of interest.
i got curious and looks like PEGI is somewhat similar at least. The ISFE is a self-regulating/co-regulating (w/e that means) body. There seem to be some kinda independent audits but… Looks like they don’t audit so good, if this article is evidence
but… Looks like they don’t audit so good, if this article is evidence
That’s the whole issue with it being a lobby group. It makes them a ton of money, so they are incentivised against making a rating for it because that would draw more attention/limit sales.
And that’s where the whole government lobbying part comes in.
I largely agree, but the interests have gotten misaligned. Back then it was the threat of regulation which changed things up, I think the governments should do a little more of that.
Eeeeh, at least then there would theoretically be public accountability. The FCC has limited censorship power that they’re generally unobjectionable with.
I’m honestly more concerned with the censorship from private enterprises than with government consorship currently. Less accountability and less recourse.
It also really only becomes censorship if the rating system is used to prohibit speech. If we instead made it more like the nutritional guidelines on food it could instead give more of a content breakdown than setting an arbitrary age.
That would be the point, yes. Balatro has cards and chips, but chips are just there for keeping points. If Balatro is 18+ for gambling imagery, then so should Solitaire. That would be stupid, so Balatro shouldn’t get it, either.
I think the important note is it’s not just the cards in Balatro. Is it right? Not in my opinion. You have to admit tho, that it uses waaaaay more gambling imagery (you make antes for fuck’s sake)
But it has to be for something. And in Balatro, there simply isn’t any gambling. You never wager anything to win anything based on that wager. All you have are points, and you can neither wager them, nor lose them in any way, chance-based or otherwise.
“Antes” are what Balatro calls its levels. Each level consists of 3 stages, which the game calls “blinds” (small/big/boss).
In poker, you don’t “beat” an ante, it’s part of what you bet. You also don’t “reach” blinds, nor is there such a thing as a “boss blind” in poker. And the word “bet” or any synonym should be pretty conspicuous by its absence in Balatro’s description. There is no gambling without betting/wagering, after all.
So yes, if you’re familiar with poker, that description should make it obvious that the words have different meanings in the game than they do in poker.
The only actual ‘mechanic’ that’s actually the same in Balatro as in poker is what comprises the different hands, and their relative value. And even then, there are also hands in Balatro that don’t exist in poker at all (five of a kind, flush house, etc.).
It’s exactly as long as it needed to be to explain everything it explained, and it is a completely dry comment with no real tone at all, the “rudeness” is of your own invention.
Ironically, “Firstly you could read user names before going off” is far ruder than anything I wrote. Also, you’re assuming I’m the one who downvoted you–have you considered that maybe your tone earned that from someone else, maybe?
Lol. “How dare you give me a comprehensive explanation of specifically what I asked about! Rude!” What is rude is being so shitty to someone that went out of their way to try and help you understand something, acting like it was a personal insult. How selfish and demanding of you.
The game is literally made up of gambling imagery. From cards to chips to terms, the whole fuckin 9 yards. MY POINT IS ITS NOT GAMBLING, ITS GAMBLING IMAGERY.
I prefaced the whole fuckin statement I started with with saying it’s bullshit. DESPITE THAT BULLSHIT THE LABEL IS NOT INCORRECT. I hope you can stop being fucking obtuse and see my point after I’ve rephrased it multiple times.
The term Ante in the game is used instead of “round” or “level”. It’s a measure of how far you’ve gotten. Each “ante” is made up of three “stakes”, point totals you need to beat in a set number of hands played and cards discarded.
There’s no aspect of choosing how much you risk, of “ante-ing up”, or how much you stake. You either beat the points goal (called “chips”) or you lose. There’s no playing of your hand against other hands, bluffing about how good your hand may be to convince others to fold, etc. It’s just you against the score goal. If you beat it faster than the amount of hands you’re given to work with you get extra rewards.
The game has no elements where you stake chips for rewards or anything like that. It borrows basic elements of scoring mechanics from poker, and uses a lot of poker terms for other purposes, but the closest part to gambling is the ability to buy random card packs between rounds (to customize your deck instead of just having the standard 52 card deck).
In between rounds you have access to buy various things to add further modifiers to your scoring, and to adjust the composition of your deck in order to make getting specific combinations more likely.
You can learn most of this in about 5 minutes with the demo, or by taking some time to watch someone else play on youtube.
Minor correction, the three stages in an “ante” are the “blinds”. The game instead uses “stake” to describe its ‘ascension’ system (a common mechanic in roguelixe games, where going to a higher ascension/“stake” adds difficulty modifiers to the game, for those who don’t know what I mean by that).
It’s near the line, I agree, I see your point, but it’s just the terminology and no gambling mechanics. You don’t set the ante, you just play. They could change the name ante to level and it would be the same. It’s not like you look at your stuff and decide how much you’re willing to risk. (You could argue skipping blinds is this sort of risk analysis like gambling but that’s hardly unique to Balatro.) There is no benefit from stopping earlier because if you lose on ante one or lose on ante seven it’s the same outcome. Also, if you choose to restart one ante one or ante seven it’s the same outcome. Because it’s just a score keeping mechanism. Nothing more.
I haven't read the new TOS but if this review is correct it looks like a GDPR nightmare for them. Good luck to them explaining why they need to collect all that personal data.
I just read the german version and compared them a little. (www.take2games.com/privacy/de/) Its about the same. But ist also reads fairly normal like any other privacy policy. I also think its in line with EU law. The collected data always relates to whatever TakeTwo service you use and whatever data you provide voluntarily or technically by using it. Thats fine by EU law.
Hm… Ok. Thats crazy. Someone wants to create a new branch of income it seems.
Thats a fucking shame. Now I need to reconsider my plans to buy Borderlands4.
But how will they do it? Which information is gathered from which source? Most of my accounts only hold as little informations as possible. Also my Os knows nothing about me. My MS account neither.
On the other hand my steam 2FA need some mobile information.
Checkout Jump Ship? It’s some weird borderlands, Star citizen, (insert other generic shooter) type game. Pretty neat, was recommended to me by a shooter fanatic friend of mine. I trust his shooting game opinion
oh cool, I can see that it’s similar Borderlands by the screenshots, and I can see that it’s like Star Citizen because it’s not actually released yet and they’re taking money for early access.
Unless you use Linux, your OS knows a ton about you. On top of that, with root access to your computer they can do whatever they want and if their system gets hacked you become a member of a bot farm or crypto mine.
Well I use Linux, but not on my gaming pc. I would switch to it because its all amd, but I don’t want to because it lacks the driver suite for my gpu (adrenaline) and I don’t want to install a bunch of small applications to gain a small fraction of options it offers.
It’s a pitty. Because I realy want to ditch windows since its newest iteration.
Companies would still be cutting flour with chalk if they had their way. “It’s limiting blah blah blah” that’s the point you corpos, consumer rights are about the consumer not the bottom line
Not to mention that studios like Larian have proven that it’s entirely possible to make a blockbuster game without teams of 400 heads, changing direction and leadership every few years and laying off the people who made the product in the first place. They really seethed at that one, so many salty comments lol.
Larian has close to 500 employees across studios in seven different countries. They’re definitely the good guys (at least for now), but they are not an example of a small indie studio.
Totally agree but the person they’re responding to implied they were some scrappy indie production. Ex33 (there are caveats/asterisks here but still) is a much better example. I think at its peak the whole team was like 40 people with hired hands.
Not to mention that studios like Larian have proven that it's entirely possible to make a blockbuster game without teams of 400 heads, changing direction and leadership every few years and laying off the people who made the product in the first place. They really seethed at that one, so many salty comments lol.
Show me on the doll where that comment said Larian is an indie developer. Saying that they lack corporate interference does not equal claiming that they’re an indie team.
There’s this neat thing between indie devs and AAA corporate studios called AA. Big enough to fund larger projects than indie devs while being small enough to usually still be private companies that aren’t beholden to investors and therefore can take larger risks than the AAA devs are allowed, letting them make the games that they would want to play. CD Projekt RED and FromSoft both fit into this category as well, though all 3 companies are getting big enough to potentially start being considered AAA studios.
Totally agree but the person they’re responding to implied they were some scrappy indie production. Ex33 (there are caveats/asterisks here but still) is a much better example. I think at its peak the whole team was like 40 people with hired hands.
Jesus you white knights need to calm down and let them respond for themselves.
And I and the other guy just said that you misunderstood the original comment. You’re the one who doubled down after the first guy.
Me making a sarcastic comment because you doubled down on the first guy by just posting a quote of the original comment isn’t white knighting. It’s just a conversation. If that’s white knighting, then 95% of all internet communication is some form of white knighting. And I can think of much better words to describe the YouTube comments section (and I bet you can, too).
Anyways, hope your Monday wasn’t as hot, humid, and disappointing as mine and I think everybody in this thread can agree that Larian isn’t Ubisoft or Activision, the world is a better place because of that, and the “live service industry” can go suck a big one and keep shaking in their boots.
So did many of the other big AAA devs, then they changed. You’re not making any point at all. And don’t get me wrong, what Larian has done is amazing, and the response from the rest of the AAA game studios is both hilarious and depressing, but sadly not surprising. Most AAA studios got big by doing good, they wouldn’t have gotten that big otherwise. But then either new people came in an fucked them up or the ones already there got greedy and lost touch with reality, it’s the same with many other things.
Only semi-related: Why do they always show pictures of Gates when he hasn’t been involved in MS in a long time? Why never Satya Nadella?
EDIT: Also, yes, related to the actual question already living Linux full time and when October rolls around probably gonna back up everything from the Windows side of my dual-boot and wipe the 1TB NVMe Windows is on to use as storage.
I couldn’t name another Microsoft employee if a gun was to my head. but I can still vividly remember myself in 4th grade reading about Bill Gate’s mega mansion in Popular Mechanics for Kids
I’m somewhat in the same boat but I remember Mister “Developers Developers Developers” Steve Ballmer who was also immortalized by the “Ballmer Peak” XKCD. xkcd.com/323/
It’s weird how MS’s putting developers first became a joke. Back in the 80’s, companies like HP and IBM had open warehouses with coders at desks lined up like factory workers. MS was the first big company to give a private office to every programmer.
I’m here, so I’m more likely to know who that is or what he looks like. But I don’t. I do now because you mentioned him and I looked up how he looks like. Your average Joe is gonna be even less likely to know who that is or what he looks like. So I’m guessing that’s why. Some CEOs just avoid the spotlight. Or maybe I’ve just been avoiding MS news, dunno
Because he set the general, evil directions for MS. Like keeping users uninformed and locked in, smearing the competition, sabotaging open standards, taking your control over your hardware and data away from users, etc. All happened during evil Bill’s reign.
Not to mention the many deals with hardware manufacturers in order to avoid competing OSs to have any chance. They managed to kill BeOS and dominate the Japanese market in the 90s
Although Kerbal space program 2 had major issues from the dev team, only for the publisher to pull the plug because of how bad the progress was, and leave the game in permanent early access.
Uh, its more like a new publisher bought the IP, functionally fired almost all of the original dev team, and then hired a bunch of other people who had no idea how their insanely modified version of Unity worked…
And then the idiot in charge just started spamming out extremely grand and difficult to implement new core functionalities… with a team of mostly newbies who had no idea how anything worked.
So, basically, they started out where KSP started out… and would very obviously thus need years and years and years to get it out of Early Access / Alpha state… but it needed to make money NOW, and it didn’t, so everyone got laid off (other than the idiot in charge), and the game was functionally abandoned, but not totally abandoned, because MY IP MINE NO YOU CANT HAVE IT!!!
Or… maybe not? With regard to the IP rights?
Nobody seems to know who actually owns the KSP IP at this point.
Name recognition sells stuff. Somebody who loved KSP 1 will probably give KSP 3 a go, at least to a greater probability than an unrelated game in the same genre.
They were basically given the KSP1 codebase and told to rewrite it to be better. However, KSP1 was still being developed, and they didn’t want to demotivate the KSP1 team. Therefore they were banned from even telling them it existed, let alone ask for help or advice with the existing codebase.
One of the original goals for KSP2 was the use of a new engine to get rid of the technical debt from the first game that caused issues like the Kraken…but then the publisher forced them to use the KSP engine because “it would speed up development.”
Having worked in software dev and db management professionally, and having been modding (as in making mods) all kinds of games for even longer… yep, I knew it was completely fucked almost immedeately, as soon as it was:
Throw out most of the old dev team
We are gonna rebuild the engine/game from the ground up
Add in vastly complex features and capabilities at the same time
On a horrendously unrealistic timeframe.
…
Normally, any two of those is extreme danger zone.
Coffee Stain’s another good example on the bigger end.
It does seem like there’s a danger zone behind a certain size threshold. It makes me worry for Warhorse (the KCD2 dev), which plans to expand beyond 250.
I dunno, dwarf fortress seems to be doing alright for itself so far. Tarn and Zach really needed some more help and some graphic design backup. I don’t agree with the total abandonment of the keybindings system in favor of mouse clicks, but I understand that it was necessary to make the game’s learning curve less precipitous.
Didn’t sell out to a company or publisher with shareholder profit motives. Truly independent (not “indie” as slang for low budget) development teams don’t follow this pattern unless they sell their IP and studio outright.
Makes sense, wasn’t untrue and I wasn’t criticizing, just wanted to make sure everyone remembers that the problem goes up the chain due to capitalism.
Various companies/games were mentioned in the comments, but I think a good example is Hello Games. Clearly fumbled their game launch and were over ambitious with No Man’s Sky.
But it’s gotten an incredible amount of things that were promised, and many things that weren’t, all as free updates. Sure, they’re still making money, that’s the point, but instead of Micro-transactions, overpriced DLC, fucking over the devs, shutting things down, they just keep rolling. I’m sure they’ve gotten offers of acquisition that were probably very lucrative, but they didn’t take them, and have continued their slow roll of making gamers happy.
I think Croteam has been able to have moderate success over the years, but being based in Eastern Europe might make them insulated from issues. Devolver only recently bought them, but they seem to be one of the few good publishers. I at least didn’t see their name on the Video Games Europe member list that’s opposed to SKGs.
It would make sense for it to be canon in the subnautica universe. I think they were pretty much the epitome of authors with an anvil with the references to economics and governing.
This is just pure fabricated bullshit. They themselves started limiting options. Remember the old days where you could host your own server with basically any game? They took that away, not us. So they themselves are 100% responsible for this ‘uprising’. Besides they could just provide/open-source the backend and disable drm. Hardly any work at all.
But of course it’s not about that. They just try to hide behind this ‘limits options’ argument. But they simply don’t want you to be able to play their old games. They want you to buy their latest CoD 42.
Let’s be real, open sourcing it isn’t “hardly any work”. All the code has to be reviewed to make sure they can legally release it, no third-party proprietary stuff.
Oh but with the new rules they could do that before making their code work that way. The idea is not for the new laws to apply retroactively but for new games.
I think your response is coming off as kinda “oh just do it different”. But that still means an entire industry of people are going to have to change how they make things. (And still spend time and money evaluating things at the end, just to be sure nothing slipped through.) I’m in favor of this at least being looked at and honest conversations happening, (which will not happen without this.) But there will certainly be an adjustment period where people on ground level learn and develop new “best practices”. And invariably someone will screw up. The companies are obviously only worried about money. They’ll get over it, is my opinion. But I think it’s worth communicating that we all understand new government regulation is likely going to be a pain in the ass. We just think it’s worth the pain/money. And that’s open sourcing or just creating a new mode for offline play in everything.
But that still means an entire industry of people are going to have to change how they make things.
Companies do that all the time in response to government regulation. You like seat belts and backup cameras in your car? No sawdust in your food? Transparent pricing when buying internet access? Government regulation. None of those companies went out of business.
But I think it’s worth communicating that we all understand new government regulation is likely going to be a pain in the ass. We just think it’s worth the pain/money.
When starting a new game, don’t include that stuff. Not including proprietary stuff without meeting the licensing requirements is already a step in the process.
“That stuff” is often core to the game. Any anti-cheat library, for example. On the client site, libraries like physx, bink video, and others are all proprietary and must be replaced and tested before it can be released in a working state. Few companies would release a non-functional game and let reviewers drag them through the mud for it.
So you’re telling me that this could disrupt the anti-cheat industry, which is currently responsible for a lot of the Windows platform lock in the gaming industry and is tied to a lot of potential security vulnerabilities because it goes to a much higher level of privilege than a reasonable user would expect a game to need? I already wish I was in the right geographic area to sign, you don’t need to sell me on it twice!
Anti-cheat is a necessary evil for competitive online games. No one wants to play a game against cheaters since they typically have an unfair advantage. If you can’t combat cheating then you might as well not make the game since no one will want to play it. Fine by me since I don’t care for such games but I could imagine people who like playing them might prefer to play against as few cheaters as possible. What are the alternatives?
EvE Online doesn’t use root access anticheat software. I know it doesn’t because it runs on Linux just fine. That particular player base is the worst hive of scum and villainy that you’ll find outside of government. Clearly the anticheat software isn’t as essential as game studios would have you believe. The only major cheating I’m aware of in EvE was the BoB scandal, and that involved Devs cheating because they were Devs.
Anti-cheat is a necessary evil for competitive online games
Client-side anti-cheat is useless. It’s not a necessary evil, it’s just evil. The minute the cheater/hacker has direct access to the system, you’ve already lost.
Much like every form of security measure, the intention is not to completely eliminate the possibility of an attack (which is impossible in most cases). Instead, the intention is to increase the amount of effort that’s required to make an attack.
What you’re referring to is deterrence, and it doesn’t apply to online gaming the way it does to theft of property. One cheater doesn’t ruin the game for one other person, they ruin the game for dozens or hundreds of other players.
And the efficacy being so bad is the reason why client-side anti-cheat keeps getting more and more invasive to the point of being literally, by definition, a type of malware and system rootkit. And yet it’s still not enough to defeat cheaters, because the cheaters have full access to the system itself.
And the guys writing the cheat software just have to put in the effort once to defeat the anti-cheat and then they sell it to people who install it like any other software. The cheaters who use the cheats have it easy.
What you’re referring to is deterrence, and it doesn’t apply to online gaming the way it does to theft of property. One cheater doesn’t ruin the game for one other person, they ruin the game for dozens or hundreds of other players.
Why are you comparing theft to game hacking out of nowhere? Did you accidentally reply to the wrong person?
And the efficacy being so bad…
Source?
full access to the system itself.
What do you mean by system in “full access to the system”? Too vague to even say anything about.
And the guys writing the cheat software just have to put in the effort once to defeat the anti-cheat and then they sell it to people who install it like any other software. The cheaters who use the cheats have it easy.
The potential guys that can write the cheat software and how quickly it can be developed is the part that matters. Much like when it’s easy to use an exploit once it’s already discovered. Someone still has to discover the exploit.
Why are you comparing theft to game hacking out of nowhere?
You made the comparison: “Much like every security system”
Source?
It’s out there, my dude. It’s a constant complaint in literally every competitive online game. If people are complaining about it, then it’s not working well enough. This isn’t an esoteric thought either. You ask anyone if cheating is a big issue in online gaming and anyone with knowledge about it will tell you it’s a constant problem that’s getting worse.
What do you mean by system in “full access to the system”?
If you own the hardware and have admin/root access to the OS. Then it’s yours and you have “full access” to everything. And I do mean everything. You can modify the OS. You can read the values of protected parts of memory. And so on.
If you don’t understand what I mean by “full access to the system” in the context of anti-cheat running on your own hardware, then there’s nothing I can say in a short comment to get you up to speed.
Someone still has to discover the exploit.
The cheat and anti-cheat battle is a constant cat and mouse game. The advantage is always with the cheaters because they outnumber the developers 100:1 at the least. Plus they have the will and determination to find ways around anti-cheats. In fact, building security against exploits is by far way harder than finding exploits.
The reality is that client-side anti-cheat is a losing battle.
Battlefield and cod have cheaters running rampant in their official servers despite using anti cheats. They could employ a team to monitor cheating reported by players. But clearly they just don’t want to expend resources to combat that.
None of those things will be affected because this isn’t about making games open source. It is about making games that have a design that allows them to potentially function indefinitely instead of allowing the companies to design them with planned obsolescence like tying single player games to server verification.
This is why code should be written to be library-agnostic. Or, rather, libraries should be written to a particular open source interface standard to make library agnosticism easier.
When the law passes, the owners of proprietary functionality will adapt their licensing to meet the requirrments or go out of business when everyone stops using them.
Look I get it. The planet is dying, income inequality, it seems everything is unfair and going to shit. People yearn at an opportunity to help make things better. But yelling for simple solutions is the opposite of helpful. Because there are no simple solutions.
Saying to “just open source it” does not make sense.
What do you do about:
proprietary codecs
proprietary software that just does not exist as open source
the fact you need a copy of the game engine to actually build the game from sources
assets that have been bought on asset stores. Do the people who make those for a living not have a right to continue to make a living?
Making single player games without always online DRM: yes totally doable
Running game servers of online games forever: not really doable, as soon as all the libraries etc. they depend on are unsupported they will shut down one way or another. You need staff basically forever. Not even mentioning the maintenance headache that every legacy system always turns into.
Letting people run their own dedicated servers: sometimes doable, depends on the game though. Some games do not have “a server” but a whole infrastructure of stuff, look at foxhole. Some “servers” are a house of cards barely held together by duct tape.
This initiative all comes down to the definition of “reasonable”. What is reasonable, actually? Running an infrastructure at a loss until bankruptcy? Or just keeping it online until it starts making a loss.
Their licensing will change so that it doesn’t restrict keeping the game alive after servers go down or their license can’t be used to kill an otherwise functional game. That’s it.
Games will be designed to include the ability to do private servers after the company servers go down. It will be a cost of development just like anything else they are required to do. If they don’t want to include that, then they can choose not to make an online game.
Just saying, if my highschool programming classes are any indicator, there’s a ton of released binaries out there that use copywritten and otherwise plaigarized code
It will be hardly any work once a law passes, because they’ll make sure it is. Everyone knows where the proprietary code is. It doesn’t just get merged in “by accident” unless you are a really shit developer (and to be fair some are).
Besides, no one is saying they have to open source it. To be honest, the outcome from this petition that I would most like to see is simply a blanket indemnity to the community attempting to revive, continue and improve the software from that point forward. If the law says that it’s legal once a software is shut down, for the community to figure out a way to make it work again and make it their own, and puts no further responsibilities on the “rights holder” at all, I think that honestly solves the problem in 99% of cases. It would be nice if they gave the community a hand, released what they could, and tried not to be shit about it, (and I know some of them will be shit about it, but we’re pretty resourceful), as long as they’re not trying to sue every attempt into oblivion I think we’ll make a lot of progress on game preservation and make the gaming world a much better place.
Everyone knows where the proprietary code is. It doesn’t just get merged in “by accident” unless you are a really shit developer (and to be fair some are).
Heh. You are still overestimating the average developer. Random code gets copy-pasted into files without attribution all the time. One guy might know, but if he gets moved to a different team, the new guy has no idea. That can be a ticking legal time-bomb.
Again, if you know going in that is an absolute requirement, processes can be put in place to ensure things like that doesn’t happen. (at least not as often) vs what you’re thinking of trying to do it after the game is already shipped.
honestly with online only games i’d be “okay” (not that it’d be great but okay) with them just releasing a bunch of internal docs around the spec. you’re right that open sourcing commercial code is actually non-trivial (though perhaps if they went in knowing this would have to be the outcome then maybe they’d plan better for it), but giving the community the resources to recreate the experience i think is a valid direction
I’m speaking from ignorance but isn’t the server backend often licensed and they couldn’t release it if they wanted, even as binaries? Granted, going forward they’d have to make those considerations before they accept restrictive licenses in core parts of their game. And the market for those licenses will change accordingly. So there core of your argument is correct.
lots of licensed or bought code in development in general, but knowing that you’ll have to provide code to the public eventually, means that you’ll have to take this into consideration when starting a project.
codifying in law that your customers must be able to run a server for your game, when you stop running them has the consequence, that you’ll have to buy licenses that allow you to give binaries or code for those things to your customers. every middleware or library that does not allow that won’t be a viable product anymore. It’s not more dev work, it will change how licensing in game development for middleware and such will be done.
It doesn’t, that’s why companies rarely open-source their code. If you want to publish it you have to make sure you have all the rights to do so, you have to code in a way that’s readable for outside users, you have to make sure people can reproduce your build process, and ideally you provide support.
On the other hand, if you’re not developing the source for publication, you can leave undocumented dirty hacks, only have to make sure it builds on your machine, and include third-party proprietary code wherever you want. That’s faster and cheaper, so naturally companies will prefer it.
There’s no requirement that the open source code released after EoL has to be pretty or maintained, just functional to meet legal requirements. Using other 3rd party code would be a hurdle to get over I suppose. It would definitely take a different approach to design, but after the initial shock of changing, it wouldn’t be more difficult to do long term.
Because you can buy other people’s code for cheaper than developing it yourself, as long as you use it within the restrictions of the license you paid for.
Maybe so, but that’s a decision they make. Surely I as customer shouldn’t be taken away what i paid for because of that? And if so they should have mentioned clearly upon sale that they would take away my product after 3-4 years (though maybe that’s the case in those dense ToS?) . Everything else should be considered illegal and fraudulent if they planned/knew it from the start. Which is the case if it’s a licensing issue
Besides, I’m pretty sure after those 4 years the code is outdated and they could renegotiate the license to be more open to release a binary.
I remember the “old days”. That was when dialup internet was still popular and running a server usually meant it was on your 10Mb LAN. When we got DSL it was better and you could serve outside your LAN. This was also the time when games had dark red code booklets, required having a physical CD inserted or weirdly formatted floppies (sometimes a combination of these). You could get around these things and many groups of people worked hard at providing these workarounds. Today, many of these games are only playable and only still exist because of the thankless work these groups did. As it was and as it is has not changed. Many groups of people are still keeping games playable despite the “war” that corporations wage on them (and by proxy on us). Ironically, now that there is such a thing as “classic games” and people are nostalgic for what brought them joy in the past, business has leapt at this as a marketing opportunity. What makes that ironic? These business are re-selling the versions of games with the circumvention patches that the community made to make their games playable so long ago. The patches that publishers had such a big problem with and sought to eradicate. This is because the original code no longer exists and the un-patched games will not run at all on modern hardware and the copy-protections will not tolerate a virtual machine. Nothing has changed.
We can even go back as far as when people first started making books or maps that had deliberate errors so that they could track when their work was redistributed. Do the people referencing these books or maps benefit from these errors?
Why do some of us feel compelled to limit knowledge even at the cost of corrupting that knowledge for those we intend it for (and for those long after who wish to learn from historical knowledge)?
A stock would never drop to zero because the company would be liquidated before that happened. If the stock actually dropped to zero they would have no money they need to call bankruptcy before that point.
Are you being paid by someone to be especially stupid today, or is this your normal level of comprehension? I hope so because right now you seem like this the sort of person that would find stairs confusing.
Jesus fuck no, it’s a valid graph. It shows the relative trend over time and the sudden change. It may show less of a change if it was zero based, but a drastic change that is well off the normal trend is important to visualize. Also like, all exchanges have a toggle to flip to the zero based.
Look at this thread and realize that it’s just a lie. You can show the exact same information with a starting at zero graph, but won’t be able to push the “stock is tanking!” panic point. Publishers and marketers do this on purpose to manipulate headlines. This is why the stock market is mostly just high stakes gambling. No one involved is making rational decisions, just moving from panic to mania like psychotic patients.
You can see right there at the top of the graph it’s down 20% in the given timeframe. There are ways to make graphs misleading, but there’s nothing misleading at all about zooming in on the data in this chart
Percentages are also misleading. The timeframe will always stretch the percentage. Sure, a 20% drop on the same day is significant, but it still says absolutely nothing about the overall situation, nor why it happened. It is a significantly smaller drop when compared to their year long performance, and a significantly larger loss if only the last month is taken into account. There’s research on this, observing day to day changes on stock prices to describe a company is just as effective as describing people’s personalities through astrology. It’s bullshit.
Yes, and that’s literally all this post is trying to convey. This post is not a news report or a economist’s dissertation, this is a screenshot of the pre-bell stock price posted to Lemmy
It’s already being called the lowest price in a decade. Technically true, but honestly disingenuous since the massive price bump to over €100 was an anomaly caused by the pandemic that swept the entire industry, not just this one publisher. Also drivel to generate engagement. Just like this post, here we are discussing it, despite the fact that it is misleading and poor characterization of the entire picture.
It being at its lowest price in a decade is literally true. I don’t have a clue why you’re bringing the pandemic into this since this stock reached its peak in 2018. Ubisoft stock has been on a precipitous decline for 4 straight years now, wtf are you even trying to convey here?
If you are not in for the dividents or the voting privileges stocks are always a game of “I hope someone is dumb enough to pay more than me for these shares”.
The stock is tanking. 20% is a huge drop for any massive company. Do you know how much money disappeared overnight because of this? From my very rough calculations, Ubisoft just lost about 300 million dollars because of this drop. That’s more than any fine they’ve had.
The worst day in Stock Market history was Black Thursday, the beginning of the Great Recession. The market only dropped 11% that day. (Somebody call me out if I got those numbers slightly wrong, that’s from Wikipedia). These are massive numbers, that I don’t think you fully appreciate or understand. The stock market usually deals in single digit or more likely fractional amounts of change. Double digit changes are a huge deal.
Do you know how much money disappeared overnight because of this?
I do know, none. Not a single cent disappeared. Because stocks aren’t liquidity. That money was never there in the first place. Some paid some money to get those stocks, that money was real and it entered the company’s liquidity. Then they spent it on something. Those stocks are but the promise of paying some dividends, some time in the future or giving some power inside the company. Their virtual fluctuations of price over time are nothing but smoke and mirrors, people exchanging virtual titles over those rights like little kids trading collectible cards. Some people cashed out for a low price (that was already grossly overinflated from the pandemic days, so they probably still made bank) and it pushed an already correcting stock to accelerate for today. That money didn’t come from the company, it was exchanged entirely by third parties, public traders. Ubisoft didn’t participate at all in whatever pushed the price drop. No matter how much I want it to, Ubisoft is not in any more danger today than it was in yesterday. They are still filthy rich, if anything the biggest danger for this is that it gives them lee way to layoff another group of underpaid developers or gut another studio to appease the stockholders. Who are already in a frenzy for blood because Outlaws didn’t make all the money.
If you were to compare Ubisoft today to Ubisoft 2 years ago, you would see they dropped nearly 93%. Dear golly, how is this poor boutique family company in business after such a massive loss? /s
Ubisoft just lost about 300 million dollars because of this drop.
So they have 300 million dollars less to spend? They’re going to fire 300 million dollars worth of talent? Their bank account changed by 300 million dollars?
I’d argue it doesn’t accurately show the relative value at a cursory glance. The chart shows the area under the curve having decreased over 90%, but when looking at the y-axis, you can see that initial assessment was misled.
In a speculative industry like finance, shouldn’t we try our best to make charts less… alarmist?
If you are trying to show year-over-year profit and you have $100 million give or take a few thousand, then starting your y-axis at zero is going to be a pretty worthless graph
There is no point of starting the chart to 0 since it doesn’t give any information other than the share price, which is already communicated by the Y axis anyways.
Yeah, but I like paying people to make things, and it’s not their fault. This will ultimately mean less of these things get made. For incest games, that’s no great loss, but I hate the precedent.
Because many "players" are refunding after a fap, which is logged and reviewed. Also, suspicious or new transactions are often flagged and reviewed. So a lot of such side content is being pushed in front of the banks and payment processors by horny clients who unwittingly expose their kinks.
Seem like an easy solution would be to have certain transactions be nonrefundable.
I say easy, but I guess it would involve quite a bit of software changes, and then you’d also have to deal with angry customers who ignored numerous warnings that a purchase would be final.
That’s even less consumer friendly. If you purchase a game and it turns out to be shovelware that barely works and has a bunch of gamed reviews on the store page? Oh too bad sap, you got conned this is non-refundable.
Consumers had to fight for games that do refundable, I don’t think we should be quick to consider loopholes.
I can’t imagine buying a porn game on Steam. And even if I did, incest holds no interest to me.
Even so, I absolutely fucking hate this crap. Payment processors are killing off content despite the producers and consumers of the content being completely fine with it. This should be a Net Neutrality issue. But I’m not seeing anywhere near the same outrage over it that there was over ISPs doing the exact same thing.
I remember someone had a reply on something that touched on incest porn and they where like. I see it all the time but when you put in blond big boobed blowjob and the title is mom son its like who cares or such. So much porn seems to just get relabeled when it comes to incest porn. This is now a brother and sister or mom/son or father/daughter. It is wierd how that seemed to just blow up in popularity. I mean I think its been that way for a few years but I swear I did not see so much like pre covid.
I think it has blown up in popularity because many more people nowadays have divorced parents and grew up in a blended family. I bet many guys have fantasized about fucking their step mom or older step sister and I bet even dads have fantasized about fucking the oldest step daughter who was already an adult when he married her mother.
You do realize that step family aren’t blood relatives right? A horny teenager who met his older step sister for the first time when he was 15 end she 17 doesn’t have a familial bond with her, it’s just another hot girl for him. So nothing Alabama about that.
One theory I heard is that during Covid, the outside world became scary and strangers unattainable. So the only accessible women are the ones that live with you. In many scenarios, people are step-siblings just to explain away why does a shut-in guy have a hot girl in his home.
My theory is that it’s because people who are into it must be really into it, but people who aren’t into it are very good at ignoring the fact that it’s titled like that or that there might be one or two throwaway lines implying it (especially when it’s “step”). So there’s an incentive for uploaders to title things like that and for creators to add a little nod in the video towards it (without adding too much incest roleplay) because it draws in a large audience and actively turns away very few.
Kind of cuts both ways though, doesn’t it? The reverse of this argument is saying that the payment processors must work with Valve no matter what they host. Agree it disagree with them, but don’t the payment processors get a say in what they do or do not want to process?
No, they should have zero say because they have weaseled themselves into a position that is the equivalent of a utility or whatever ISP are classified as. Their only involvement is whether they complete transactions between parties in a legal way.
I mean, when your service is fundamental enough to the economy, and centralized enough to make just going to an alternative a major hassle, if an alternative without a similar policy even exists, then why should they get that say? The power to effectively ban the sale of certain types of thing, or force media platforms to censor certain types of content, is the sort of power we generally reserve for governments, not private entities that can do whatever they want. Honestly they’re important enough these days that they should basically be treated like some sort of public utility in my view.
Well as long as they are independent businesses, why shouldn’t they?
If your argument seems to be “they are too crucial to be independent businesses,” I don’t think we’d disagree too much, but the fact is that they are right now.
I don’t think that businesses, not being individuals, should actually have the same rights as individuals I guess. I don’t really agree with the idea that a corporation should be able to do whatever it likes by default, simply because I think corporations in general have too much power to be trusted with such.
It was more like hyperbole on my part, I was using as a catch all for whatever kinds of things a business could abuse it’s position by doing. I didn’t want to just say “be able to do businesses or not do business with whoever they want”, because I wanted to say something more broad than just applying to payment processors, even if choosing not to do business with someone and thereby shutting them out of much of the economy is the way a payment processor would do this .
Sure, but there are so few payment processors that even a single one refusing to do business with you can be a real problem for a business. Even Valve, a big and influential company, has little choice but to capitulate to PayPal. Visa and Mastercard have even more power.
There are too many problems with crypto for it to be a viable alternative, but there’s no good way for me to pay a business (when cash isn’t an option) that doesn’t require the involvement of a third party. Limited competition means those third parties have too much power. I don’t know what it is, but there has to be a solution for that.
Agree it disagree with them, but don’t the payment processors get a say in what they do or do not want to process?
Absolutely not. Power companies don’t get a say in what the power they supply their users with is used for, same for water companies and even ISPs. If they really, really want to enforce rules on what they will and will not process payments for, they can accept legal responsibility when they process a payment on a gun someone uses to shoot up a school or what have you. But they cant have it both ways.
Power and water are public utilities (as is internet, in some parts of the world but not all). Payment processing is not. If you want to argue that it should be, we’d likely agree.
They may not be de jure be public utilities but they are de facto public utilities. It is essentially impossible to live in society without them, and outside their collusionist cabal there are no real alternatives.
In the US at least, they actually do, in many cases. If you are in a drought region, your water utilities can be shut off if you’re wasting it all on watering a lawn or filling a swimming pool, for example. ISPs cut people off all the time for torrenting, sometimes even if it’s not pirated content (though it was ruled not long ago that ISPs aren’t utilities anyways).
They’re saying that is the reverse argument, not the state of things today. As in, the only solution to the above would be to force payment processors to do business with anyone and everyone.
This doesn’t directly affect me, either, but does anyone know if it applies to all of the Interactive Sex - Futanari Incest DLC, too!? For Episodes 1-4!? Like, if any of my friends have large amounts of FutaCoinz from years of Season Passes, I wonder if they’ll still be able to spend them…?
Nah, definition 1 right there isn’t inherently negative. It’s certainly more involved than otherwise necessary and seems somewhat driven by emotion, so while it skips the negative connotation I think this counts plenty well.
You expect Nazis and their sympathizers to have a brain and form coherent sentences, huh?
I fear, there are at least some who do and those are even more dangerous than the typical braindead Nazi.
The type of ‘anger management’ described in the OP is unhealthy and doesn’t even help you feel better, short or long term. ‘Blowing off steam’/venting literally does the opposite of what most people believe it does.
I don’t think they are trying to decrease/cool down their anger. I think they are trying to engage in it.
I’ll be honest, as long as people are not acting awful towards their fellow human beings (like taking out anger on a person who has nothing to do with it, punching someone over cutting in line at the bank) I do not particularly mind if people are increasing their anger and aggression instead of decreasing it. Jogging it out and getting angrier is still far better than punching it out at a person, especially since you probably still reap the health benefit of jogging.
Thanks for the link though, fun read! I guess we should go to bed angry ;) Clicking one of the links in the article you linked was pretty interesting…
Genuinely? I think there are always a couple trolls downvoting anything and everything, or people who can’t resist being contrarian for the sake of it. I see downvotes applied to on-topic, factually correct, and completely uncontroversial posts and comments all the time. For example, go to any cute animal community. You’ll find various inoffensive pictures of the animals, with zero incorrect assertions because it is literally just a picture, and at least a few of these pictures of critters the entire community is about (so it’s on-topic) will have a few downvotes anyways. Same principle could apply here. If there are lots of upvotes I almost expect to see a few downvotes as “noise” from trolls.
Also because Lemmy has Local and All, maybe there are people who, not caring that the community is Games, see this in their Local/All feed and do not like video games or Wolfenstein so they just hit downvote for “dislike” and move on.
Sometimes I fat-finger my phone and downvote something I didn’t mean to. I always take it back, but I imagine not everyone would undo their accidental downvote. Especially if the sequence is downvote -> crash -> reopen tabs -> wait where was I, whatever I don’t care enough to undo one downvote online
I’ve also downvoted things on accident before. Not yet on Lemmy because I have to more deliberately choose through Voyager. But it’s only a matter of time.
Does it not stop you from signing multiple times? The UK one tells you you’ve already signed it when you try again. I tried it again recently in case i was misremembering signing the second petition after the first one was misunderstood completely by the uk government.
I’m not surprised it got a bad answer though. The government was completely dysfunctional by that point (and had been well over a year), I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just some random civil servant who was just told to weave a fig leaf at it.
Oddly, the EU one just has a checkbox that you need to check to confirm that you haven’t signed before. I’m guessing removal of duplicates happens only after closing, along with other data validation.
I thought this strange at first too, but I think it’s because of the disparate identification methods in different countries. If everyone had a digital ID card instant checking would be doable, but note it probably isn’t.
For the UK one it’s just tied to your email address to prevent duplicates, and you just input your name and physical address which will be used to confirm you’re actually a citizen.
You should have received an email with a receipt if you did sign. In doubt, sign again; signing twice will invalidate the second signature but not the first (confirmed by EU staff).
They will turn off the live service and make it work offline?
I don’t understand. Industry bootlickers told me it was impossible and would cost billions to implement, hurting small indie studios the most. Yet, Nintendo does it voluntarily with seemingly no difficulties.
I would argue Nintendo does do a lot of pro-consumer stuff. Like making actually good games. It’s just their anti-consumer stuff is either so bad or just plain weird that we just scratch our heads and think Nintendo is going off the deep end. Still trying to avoid buying much Nintendo going forward.
Making a good game is the minimum expectation. Making an open platform to force competition to also endorse open platforms would be going above and beyond to be pro consumer.
You really have no idea how intellectual property works do you? The reason they’ve gone after emulation and rom hosting sites is pretty obvious, they have to protect their IP.
Why they’ve waited so long only to do it now? I honestly don’t have an answer for you on that one, but if I were to guess it’s because retro gaming has been going through somewhat of a renaissance as of late due to shitty AAA games and indie devs gaining so much popularity.
The bottom line is Nintendo lost the emulation battle once, and they don’t want to lose a second time. They’re more experienced and understand the risks of letting emulation replace services like Nintendo switch online, and so do publishers that own intellectual property from retro consoles. It sucks, but that’s corporate life, and you can’t really get around it without jumping through hoops or doing something illegal.
Your comment is very out of place as a response to mine, but since you brought all this up:
I don’t begrudge Nintendo for getting ROM sites shut down. I begrudge them for shutting them down without also making their games legally available for purchase where their customers want to play them. Those old games aren’t even legally available for purchase at all, because they want to just rent them to you forever, which is an enormous dick move. Then they further that with the dick move of trying to remove the place where we get those games the way we’d like to enjoy them, and getting them that way is a better experience than using their official solution.
So assuming you didn’t get lost and you actually meant to respond to my comment, I can’t consider them pro consumer when they’re not doing what’s in the consumer’s best interests.
Nintendo might be seeing the writing on the wall and looking to see how much profit they can make with this. If it goes well, we might see more of it. Corporations hate regulation and sometimes try and head it off long before it is coming.
Hi, industry bootlicker here! Nintendo is listening to their consumers. I was told corporations are evil and won’t listen to consumers and must be forced to do things by law. I much prefer consumers remain vocal about their wants because corporations do indeed listen. No government intervention required. I worry government rules could cause unintended problems that don’t benefit anybody.
Oh no! Not Microsoft Bingo! That’s a list of D list games nobody has ever heard of that all shutdown years ago. I don’t think the world would be a better place if the devs of Radical Heights, a free to play arena shooter that was launched and shutdown a month later in 2018 were forced to give their game out to everyone for free after.
Of course not every game is a certified banger, but there’s more than enough notable games on that list that made an impact on the industry and should’ve been preserved for that fact alone.
You didn’t create those games. Games are products people work to produce. Radical Heights was a free to play game that was shutdown in a month. What would you force them to do? Release their server code for free so anybody can run a Radical Heights server that people can connect to and play? So a whole bunch of people who never gave the developers a cent have the right to demand the game be given to them simply because it existed for 1 month?
If a game asks for money in any kind of way: Yes. That should be the cost of (trying to do) business.
Alternatively, a full refund for everyone involved, even Kickstarter backers, would also be acceptable.
That’s just blatantly false. People bought the founders pack were never refunded for example. Those people being entitled to the server software or a refund is anything but greedy, even if that only applies to a single person.
If they can play against bots, which already exist in the game, or band enough people together with access to the game to play on a server one player is able to host, then yes. That’s what I’d expect at a minimum.
If they want to keep some form of DRM then that’s not my job to figure out. This wasn’t a problem back in the day when server software being distributed was the norm, so it shouldn’t be a problem now.
Though personally I’d be in favor of abolishing online DRM entirely, but that’s another story.
So you want people to follow a law without knowing how it should be followed? You signed a petition and now it’s someone else’s problem if they get in legal trouble or not? This makes the world a better place because it protects theoretical people?
At least try to make an effort to understand what I write.
I said it’s their job to figure out how to do DRM -if- they want DRM. If they can’t figure out how to do that then the answer shouldn’t need to be spelled out explicitly: No DRM. Simple as that.
If you’d rather see games you spent money on being taken away from you based on the whims of corporations, just to make sure others who might not have payed for it also can’t play it, then I don’t know what to tell you.
Control of the server is the DRM. Radical Heights sold hats for $15. How do they ensure only players who paid for hats get them and that non-paying players couldn’t just mod them in? They control that information on the server. Which accounts have cosmetics is controlled by the server. That’s the DRM. If they had to release the server when shutting down then they’d have no way to ensure only paying customers play the game since the person who runs the sever can modify it however they want. Everyone could get the $15 hats for free! Or maybe they charge $2 for the hats. There’s no DRM that could prevent this because control of the server is itself the DRM.
So a dev is being required by law to give out their game without any DRM meaning anyone can play it for free and even give themselves the cosmetics the original devs were using to pay the salaries of the dev team. I worry very much that this would cause companies to stop producing free to play games or charge a subscription for these types of games instead (since subscription based games would be exempt). I wonder why people would risk this to “save” games like Radical Heights which, in all likelihood, would have no community. A game doesn’t shutdown after 1 month because it has a thriving community
Yes, you’re just explaining regular piracy here. I do not care. It’s a thing that’s already been possible for almost every single-player game in existence, and yet, there’s a constant stream of new single-player games releasing every day. Weird, right?
I have no authority over anything, so yes, they can. What I’d like to see is an option to buy an offline copy of the game and any add-ons I bought, but no one does that. What Stop Killing Games is looking for is for the server to be made available after the game’s end of life so that you can continue to use anything you paid for.
Looks like some of those are games that were cancelled, some were online multiplayer games that had the servers shutdown, some were simply removed from the Microsoft Store and some were single player games with always online DRM for which they shut the servers down. So it’s not all super scummy nonsense
If it’s a game like an MMO (which several on that list are) they’d have to publish the server software in order to avoid fully killing the game. And to publish the server software that was only ever expected to run in their own datacenters they’d then have to publish documentation, dependencies, etc. and this is all assuming that it can be contained in a single installer for a single machine without relying on additional services they host, and assuming it has reasonable system requirements for average users to self host.
That’s also assuming playing an MMO alone/with only 1-2 people doesn’t suck. Play some 2009scape single player without adventure bots. It feels lonely as all heck
Plus there’s all of the legal and PR hurdles to ensure you’re not exposing yourself to undue risk.
Basically a million reasons for a company to not spend a thousand work hours ensuring their crappy MMO (I’ve tried out a couple of the listed MMOs, they were unsuccessful for a reason) can continue to be played after they’ve divested from it
Licenses and middleware can be chosen more proactively to preserve and distribute the server if they know during development that it’s a requirement. There are tons of people who functionally play MMOs single player already, when the server is already running. And I play a 12 year old fighting game that’s easily able to coordinate 20-100 people to play it multiple times per week with nothing but Discord; there’s no doubt in my mind you’d be able to get 40 people together for a raid on a private server.
The other answer from @ampseandrew already covers most points, so I’ll just a few things:
Most game servers out there are already built in a way to allow for easy deployment. After all, devs have to have way to test changes, so being able to run a small server locally for debugging purposes is hugely beneficial to development.
I also can’t imagine that there’s any game server out there that shouldn’t be able to run on a single system. The heaviest one game I can imagine is Minecraft, due to the whole open world terrain generation, world streaming and physics calculations, and even that can be run off a Raspberry Pi for a small number of players.
Meh cringe can be effective as a descriptor, but it’s cringe to call people cringe as a personal attack. I’ve described situations as very “cringe-inducing.”
Cringe is a thing, but it's way too common that people use their own self-consciousness as an excuse to try to shame people who are just enjoying themselves on their own corner.
NPC’s is worse to be honest. It’s generally used to attack people’s social/political values and call them “sheeple” without using the term. Normie is gross but it’s mainly just dismissive and having too high an opinion of one’s own taste/interests.
NPCs is ten times worse because it is used to dehumanize people you don’t agree with, further alienates you away from normal society and pushes you deeper into cult like thinking.
“We can do better” or worse “X do better” is more cringe.
It’s just everyone judging everyone like they are worthless. Maybe people want to be part of the group maybe they have an identity with hardcore gamers. They don’t need to do better that’s their right.
it’s definitely a weird term but in more than a few contexts (mostly very online contexts) i’ve found it to be the only suitable terminology because there’s just nothing else which most of the people i talk to will “get” otherwise–it’d be nice to have something a little bit less embarrassing to work with, to be honest lol
“average person” i’m afraid lacks a certain it factor–probably the ironic steeping in terminally online culture implied by even speaking it–that’s implied by using normie. i find in many of these circumstances it just seems out of place also. in a semantic sense i’m not sure “average person” maps to “normal person” either, which is another thing
Yeah I’m not sure “average person” works the same… maybe “median person”? 🤣
The 10% nerdiest people hold 90% of the nerdiness?
But yeah I don’t think “average person” works, because it’s not a wide enough range and doesn’t include the opposite extreme end
“non-normies” is a very small group, in this context non-normies would be the most extreme gamers. The “average people” would not include a somewhat invested gamer, and it also wouldn’t include someone who is heavily opposed to gaming, both of which would be included in “normies”.
I don’t think someone heavily opposed to gaming would be considered a normie, they would be in their own separate extremist camp also apart from the average person.
As someone alternative that been active in local gothic scenes I also use “normie” to refeer to people that do not engage with subcultures. I didn’t even know it was considered pejorative until this post
I just think of “normie” as the new “vanilla” - every group that uses it, uses it uses it to refer to people who are not a part of that particular group, so its meaning depends on the context but should be self-explanatory and not (necessarily) derogatory.
As a software guy I like the word for its simplicity and ease of use.
I think Bethesda has definitely fallen off in recent years, but I am a bit confused by the point this post is getting at. We learned at launch that Oblivion is a remaster, not a remake, and it’s just the original game running under the hood with a new coat of paint and some minor tweaks. And it’s a pretty high-effort remaster at that.
I just think it’s a bad example to use of how the company isn’t getting better, when the point of the remaster was to change as little of the core game as possible. It’s as good now as it was back then but it’s still a 19-year-old game.
Starfield is what should be killing everyone’s expectations of Elder Scrolls 6.
I think Kojima gets it. For a lot of players, esp. on the more cinematic games, the story is the main driver and the action is how it progresses. The games I’ve played that were ordeals are often the ones I’ve given up on. It’s the ones you can start on story mode with, enjoy the narrative and then re-play at the harder levels that I’ve stuck with.
I’ll keep saying it: I already have a job. I want to play a game to unwind.
Implementing a wide gamut of difficulty settings is also an accessibility feature, and allows people with certain physical or mental challenges the opportunity to enjoy your game firsthand. Why would you want to deny your audience this opportunity?
Is poor the word you’d use for art that fails to be amusing and charming? Because a lot of art is not trying to be amusing and charming.
Edit: I don’t care if people disagree, but at least have an answer. Not liking art because it wasn’t intended to be delightful and pleasing is not how to do art criticism.
Ah, I think there's a bit of a disagreement here between what types of art are respectable and what types aren't. For context, I subscribe to the definition of art that says "everything made with intent" is some form or other of art.
Suppose you go to a gallery. Would you consider handicap-hostile architecture, which is part of the exhibit itself, to be worth respecting as a art enthusiast? (Stairs required to be used in order to see a painting, specifically because the artist wants you tired from walking, not pushing a wheelchair, which they don't like, when you look at it, for example.)
I could see it both ways, but I fall more on the side of accessibility. If an artist requires someone to use stairs to see their art, they are an asshole, regardless of how good their paintings actually are.
This is exactly the kind of conversation that I’d rather be having. Thank you! I’ll try to disagree at least interestingly.
I subscribe to the idea that art is the study of choice, and that’s fairly close to your definition of art, but the difference is that I’m not saying I can draw a circle around what is and isn’t art. Gun to my head, I’d probably define it as something like “anything done with aesthetic intent”, to exclude the act of intentionally kicking a puppy as performance art. We intend many things in life, many of which are also intentionally artless.
I think I see what you’re driving at with the bit about ramps. To hew to the heart of the matter as the metaphor applies to video games, I would still call that exhibit art - it would simply be limited in how successfully it achieved what it was attempting, which is a severe flaw. I would want to talk about how it could have better achieved its aims. The aim of such an art installation could have merit, if it was more intelligently done.
The reason I do not place the accessibility question from the metaphor on the same level as difficulty in video games is that completion of a game is, I would submit, something that the creator should only endeavour to guarantee if they believe completion of the game is part of the intended experience. I would caution against taking this as a maxim.
When media is highly interactive, as with games, it is a mistake to take it as an implicit assumption that that this media must be completable by a broad majority of participants. Booksellers do not make such guarantees, and books are far less interactive.
If we all raise our voices on behalf of accessibility proponents with the idea that games that are not as easily completed are of lesser value, or if we even become so strident that we say they are not even art, we are limiting the space of an art form that is still in its nascence. We are very permissive with other, older art forms (and they have all taken their lumps with highly prescriptive and proscriptive schools of thought, over the years). It would be like saying music with too many notes isn’t music, or that music isn’t good if I can’t personally dance to it. Those are preferences, not art critiques. We should be asking how the choices of a game developer serve or betray their creative aims. We won’t always get what we want out of every game, but at least we’ll have better conversations.
I like games that take a generous view of accessibility, and I respect that vision. Celeste is a masterpiece. I like games that take a stern view of difficulty also, when it serves their aesthetic vision in a meaningful way.
That last bit is easy to get wrong, and I respect people who struggle with the subject of difficulty in how it interacts with creative ideas, but I have less time for people who hate the music just because they can’t dance to it. That’s not always the point.
it is. but if the reason that you think something is poor is because you were not the target audience, you can come across as entitled and clueless. it is not like their games pretend to be easy games, it is clear from the start that that the challenge is part of the design
It’s like making music and experimenting with discordant harmonies and unusual rhythms. Art can be challenging, it can require engagement and time and study to fully experience. It can make people uncomfortable and it can appeal to only a small audience and still be good.
It’s like with any other art. Some of it is a simple pleasure, and some of it wants you to struggle. Some people read Gwenpool, some people read Cerebus.
You’ll have to do a little more legwork to make that connect back to the idea it’s being used to support, which correct me if I’m mistaken is that every game needs to make all of its content easily received or it’s not valid art/less valuable/somehow problematic.
You don’t demand a guarantee that you’ll finish every book you’ll buy and you don’t hate every song you can’t dance to, why are games different? They’re different because you think of games as purely entertainment, and you don’t respect it as art. If you did, you would not be arguing that creators should conform to your personal preferences.
I’m not arguing that every game must cater to my casual needs. What I’m expanding upon the op is that art is art only in the eye of someone experiencing it. Artists like game devs are free to make the kind of games they want, but it is a balance between making the game attractive and marketable and making something only the most purist will like. Concessions are to be made for the game to be accessible, as you will have to sell it to make a profit. All the examples are from commercial games that need a consumer base to buy it.
Some will criticize Elden ring for being a bit more easy and approachable (than previous DS), because they are used to the elitist view that games must be difficult to play. But on the other hand, all gamers that had fun playing their own way are valid. Some will like having a hard time, some will like having an easier path to progress.
In the end, if you make art you want for others to see it. If your game doesn’t sell because only hardcore players can progress, it could be seen as a failure for your art to be spread. It’s also certainly a business failure as well.
So as I said, it’s a balance and there is no right or wrong way to do it. People can still discuss what their preferences are, be it hard games or story mode for easy gameplay.
I’m not 12 anymore so I don’t have time to learn, memorize and train for some of the newer games. I can appreciate games that include an easy path for me, allowing me to experience their art. Unlike eg. the Dark Souls universe where I’ll never truly experience it because it’s too hard for me.
Devs are then free to take this feedback into consideration for their next game.
art is art only in the eye of someone experiencing it
That flies in the face of one of my core values so I’m glad you underlined it for me. My view is ars gratia ars. That is an entire body of thought that stands against the idea that art needs to serve some purpose or agenda in order to be valid. Art is complete in itself no matter who gets to receive it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is some brand of authoritarian sooner or later. I’m ride or die with the bohemians on this one.
As for Elden Ring, I am fully onboard with their design choice with regard to difficulty. I enjoyed the time I spent with it, and the only reason I didn’t finish it is because I approached it while burnt out in other areas of my life. I finished all but one Dark Souls game, and I found them harder for sure. The creative vision with Elden Ring is a few steps toward the accessibility crowd, and you seem to notice how it’s still not enough. It never will be, and it’s folly to try. Once they’re running the show, you get to do a lot less.
Again, I am not talking about preferences, I am arguing that we should treat games as art and do art critique about it. We should not be treating games as mere commercial products that must amuse us at all costs, that is a long road that goes nowhere. Difficulty in games has a meaning, it is a design choice, and we can talk all day about what that choice meant - whether it served the creator’s aims - whether that difficulty achieved what it was trying to achieve - but if we are only here to bicker about whose preferences are more important, leave me out of it.
I’ll check out your link later, but holy shi, this went from 0 to 100 really quick. I’m authoritarian because I think you can’t appreciate art if you don’t see it? Like I can tell you I made a super cool game, but I’m the only one allowed to see it. Is it art? To me yes but how can you know if you never even saw it or know what it’s about?
For me, art is inherently human. If it’s not seen by anyone, it may as well not exist for anyone.
The art someone makes is not always meant for everybody, you can make art for yourself or a specific group, but you always make it for someone.
Once again I’m not advocating for removing all difficulty. But in the case of Elden ring, they probably went like “DS is too hard, let’s make some adjustments so more casual players can also enjoy the game”. And it seems to be not at the detriment of the experience for others.
I’m not here to bicker about preferences. I’d like to criticize games as pure art but we both know it’s not the reality. Big games only get made because lots of money is invested and they must make some back unless they want to lose their jobs. I’m not suggesting that Elden ring must be made easier, but they evidently saw that there is value (art and/or monetary) in making adjustments to make it more accessible.
For these games where the difficulty is core to the game it’s difficult to do it without compromise. Other games allow a choice and aren’t so tight about how difficult the gameplay must be. I think more games could see the value in having it more accessible. They already provide so much accessibility when it doesn’t impact the artistic vision: localisation, subtitles, key binding, color blindness, etc.
Like you said, it’s a design choice. Some games make the choice to be overly difficult and some like that, cool. Not all games are like that, and having options to allow more casual gamers to enjoy the game is a free win.
It’s possible to implement without compromise for the core users, and it will expand the reach your art has.
Edit: as a final point, in TTRP the golden rule is to have fun. If a rule in the book is not fun, the DM has the ability to change it so it’s fun to play. Why can’t I play a game and be like “this is way too hard for me, I’ll do X to have it easy there to advance”. Must I be frustrated to be able to enjoy the game? For ER/DS the idea seems to be yes, the game is for masochist. For other games why would it be?
Some games even allow custom rules to be set. BG3 and others have options where you change the rules so you can have fun your way. (Again not all games need this, but it doesn’t detract from the art of those games).
The conversation was at 0 yesterday. If you look around you, a lot of ink has been spilled since then, and the people who are really at 100 with it are not getting responses from me anymore! To be clear I am not calling you anything, I’m talking generally about philosophies of art and art history, some of which you will read is mixed up in Maoism and stuff - I apologise for not being clearer, and I do appreciate that there are still sane people who think I’m worth talking to about these things.
I still disagree that art has to be for somebody. If I do some art and then delete it because I wasn’t satisfied with the attempt, I still did the art. It still existed for its own sake, and it was art while it existed. When we treat art as a means to an end, I feel it is diminished. Video games are almost always a means to an end, just as with almost all commercial art products. That doesn’t mean we should treat it purely as a commercial product.
“Pure art” might be that which we do for no reason other than we want to do it. You’re putting your finger on that in your middle paragraphs there, and my view is just this: treat the commercial aspect of art as nothing more than a regrettable circumstance, sort of like the fact that Harvey Weinstein was involved in so many great movies. It’s just a fact of life, but that doesn’t mean you discard all that art - you just keep it in mind. Babies, bathwater, etc.
Elden Ring kept to the “single difficulty mode” while easing up the overall challenge, likely out of commercial interest (in order to have wider appeal) and that was commercially successful, but they managed to do so in a way that maintains the fact that they have set the challenge at the same level for all players, so that challenge still has the sense of impact in the intended play that melds with the themes of the game so well. I would call that a commercial and artistic success story.
TTRPGs are games also and they are definitely an art form, but the situation is subtly different. If you get that many people together to play in realtime, the impetus has to be geared towards maximum fun. I would consider it a practical limitation of the artistic medium of TTRPG design, rather than some deeper truth known only to Brennan Lee Mulligan and his ilk - video games need not attempt to be fun at all times, because not all art is trying to be pleasurable. Games are free to have any intended experience, any not all of it is going to be for all people. This is a feature, not a bug - but the commercial interests will always side with the accessibility interests. If I spent a little more time writing, I might even connect the dots between capitalism and fascism somewhere along the way, but I should probably be decreasing the temperature in the room.
Agree to disagree then :) (even though I don’t mean it has to have a target audience) For me, in your example of art you made then deleted, the art is still art. But you did experience it yourself. It wasn’t to your liking so you trashed it, but you did evaluate it through your psyche. For me every art made has at least one person as the recipient: the creator. You make something because you want to see it in the world, or maybe just to practice, or for any other reason. We humans don’t do things randomly (or at least not truly) and imo the creator gains something by creating the art (tangible or not).
Art for the sake of art seems to imply we create stuff just because it’s art, without any expectations. For me that seems a bit reducing, as what’s seen as “objectively pure art” is cultural. Poetry structure in the west is not the same as in the east, so even if you write some for the sake of it, you are implicitly making it western style for a western audience (unless you go out of your way to try eastern style, but then it has a meaning to you).
Sure I don’t want to discard everything and the baby with it, but even then I don’t know (which is logical) any game that was made and finished but never published/distributed to anyone. Every game dev I see at least has some goals for it to be played by someone. Even the games I made in game jams were intended for me to play, or others at the event to test.
There is a ton of research done on UX (not just UI, but also level design) so that the game can be enjoyed by others.
Anyway, my point with Elden ring is that it is possible to do it, so I can understand some people asking for the same treatment for other hard games. It is possible to make the game more accessible without interfering with the artistic vision. So why not?
For TTRPG as well as video games in general, fun can be different things for different people. Some like hard psychosocial thrillers, some like dumb dungeon fights, others like to discuss with every npc. It is up to the DM or game dev to decide which they’ll put forth. For DM it’s easier to change course if needed, but for games it’s less personal. So having options to turn the difficulty up or down is imo not that big of a compromise.
Regarding your first paragraph, after reading the Wikipedia page (English and French, since the EN one is quite short).
Seems like it’s mostly as a reaction of moralism and sentimentalism.
While I agree that art is art in itself, it still has to be experienced by someone else to exist.
and appeal to the artistic sense of eye or ear.
To me it seems to imply that art must be experienced for it to be, even if just by its creator.
Art is purely human, made by humans and experienced by humans. The concept wouldn’t exist without us. That’s also why AI gen is not art most of the time.
On the other hand, I disagree that art can be “pure” without any moral or political stance. Everything we do and express, we do through the lenses of our mind, which inherently lives in a world surrounded by morals and politics.
Also the Wikipedia article suggests that this view is completely eurocentric and does not represent other cultures around the world. So I would take it with a grain of salt.
That’s fair enough - the hill I’m trying to die on is the idea that nobody should be allowed to tell artists what they can or can’t do, whether it’s for politics, ideology, morals, or money. Let art simply be, and let us talk about whether and how it succeeds. Enough art has been prescribed or prohibited for long enough.
Yes that I totally agree with you. Nobody should force artists to do stuff. However we are still in a capitalist system, so most probably they will have to adapt to sell to an audience.
This isn’t a very honest argument. If the only saving grace of the game was its difficulty, nobody would mind not being able to finish it.
Something is lost and gained with every substantive choice in game design. That’s what makes the choices interesting, and worth discussion.
Let’s play with that idea. Take one of my favourite games of all time, Morrowind. It’s hard to get through, maybe. Weird UI, weird bad combat. Those are flaws. But it also has a big fat 0 to 100 difficulty slider. Is that a flaw? I would argue no, because in that game the intended struggle is to engage with the world and the story on your own terms. The combat is all window dressing for the real struggle, which is with the story’s frustrating ambiguities.
In the case of Morrowind, some of the difficulty fails to serve the intended experience and some of it supports that vision wonderfully. It’s not a flawless game, but importantly I am discussing how the difficulty helped or hindered the creative vision. That is art criticism, and it’s a more interesting conversation than arguing over personal preferences.
You don’t have to play difficult games. Not everything has to cater to a wide audience. Most of today’s re-boots and sequals were from stories that catered to a niche audience only to lose its appeal by going too mainstream…
It would also seem like bad business to leave it out of your niche game, unless the niche is specifically about the difficulty level. Why would you want to eliminate whole chunks of your already limited number of potential customers by only offering a very challenging difficulty?
[CITATION NEEDED]
It seems pretty clear you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about from a game development standpoint. Difficulty is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay and you can’t just add multiple versions of that trivially. Even Bethesda’s classic “bump up the health” stuff isn’t a trivial thing to implement. Just come on with this.
Let’s take Elden Ring as an example: how do you scale poise? Is the player harder to stagger? Are enemies easier to stagger? How about status effects? Can you trigger hemorrhage with less hits on low difficulty? Dodge frames? Parry timing?
That’s just off the top head, there’s tons more mechanics I’ve never even touched in there.
Combat systems (which is 95% of what difficulty affects) can get so much more complicated than just HP/Armor. And that makes scaling more them just percentages of damage in/damage out.
I’m not saying it can’t be done. But it’s a gross injustice to blame lazy devs for not implementating a system that probably takes weeks if not months to create and balance.
Sure, a complex difficulty system that the user can tweak is nicer to have. But making the player take more hits to kill is pretty simple and could be argued as an accessibility feature.
How exactly is that an accessibility feature…? No seriously I sound like I’m being shitty (and that’s because in a small way I am, this conversation is deeply personally insulting) but I’m really curious why this is being considered accessibility when what we’re doing, the actual push for accessibility in gaming, is all things like allowing people to access the games not coddling people to where they have to have their own special extra-easy game modes.
Things like support for 3rd party controllers, key rebinding, compatibility with external sound processing equipment, video setting adjustment (remove particle effects or other visual noise, colorblind modes, onscreen hilighting) are all the things we’re actually fighting for broad inclusion into videogames. Mandatory godmode isn’t, and it’s so dumb that it sounds like some kind of philosophical false-flag dreamed up by the conservatives to discredit the concept of disability accommodation in general…
You have to test each difficulty setting multiplicating testing time and therefore costs. It is a financial balancing act on how more money to spend in development and how much more money with additional sales.
Cost of development of easy mode is direct, ready to calculate and high, but to calculate how many more sales thanks to easy mode were done is very hard
Game design is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay. Difficulty just plays around with the variables that you already have made for said game design.
Do you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?
Game design is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay.
Been a while since I’ve seen a good old fashioned tautology. Stop trying to be disingenuous, ‘difficulty’ (or if you prefer, ‘challenge’) is the #1 factor in game design. You either should know this, because it’s patently obvious, or you should just stop talking about this subject like you have any idea what you’re talking about.
Do you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?
Strawman me harder, zaddy!
No, they don’t redesign a game for every difficulty - that’s absurd. But it does have a huge impact on every aspect of gameplay, and like I said, it’s far far from trivial to alter the abstract concept which defines things like the core gameplay loop.
Sir you must be a very niche or inexperienced game developer because there is more than tuning variables to impact difficulty especially from genre to genre and game to game. Level design alone for platformer’s can introduce degrees of difficulties. Puzzle games’ difficulties revolve entirely around the puzzle design. You can’t adjust a variable and tune that. These are just two of countless examples.
I see you have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you think it’s a simple as reducing a health bar? Because games that do difficulty scaling like that are not fun at all and I would consider that lazy.
How can you be niche without a “gatekeeping” to some degree? Again, not every game or piece of media need to cater to everybody.
I designed games myself. It is very easy. Just switch around some variables.
Every game does it like that, whether it is HP, damage, enemy spawns, probability to take a specific action, … it is all just playing around with variables.
It is neither lazy nor not fun.
Did you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?
It is you that has no idea what you’re talking about.
“All game design is just changing numbers” sure, and all programming is just manipulating two values over and over and over. But the difficult part isn’t changing the numbers, the difficult part is the mechanisms that define how those numbers interact with other numbers. “Magic Numbers” have a place in game design yes, but they are not by any stretch how those systems are defined. If your game was created like that, it cannot have been very good…
I mean, presumably because it'd compromise their vision for the game or some such? Some games use gameplay as part of the storytelling, so nontrivial difficulty swttings would compromise the story being told (for example if the game wants you to experience a gruelling trek through a hostile area). Now that doesn't mean a story mode or similar is bad, but there are reasons to consider for a game dev to consider such settings incompatible with their game. Also in a game with more complex mechanics difficulty would be more complicated than player and enemy stats, and a dev might simply consider implementing satisfactory difficulty settings not a good use of their time.
I meant that the story/easy mode wouldn't conform with their vision. To expand on my example, if your game is portraying a grueling trek through a swamp where enemies abound and rest is scarce, the struggle would be an inalienable part of the experience; removing the struggle would fundamentally alter the story being told through the game. It's not about their vision being intact or not; it's about not wanting to intentionally make an inferior version of their art.
Then they label the intended difficulty with “recommended” and say that will give the best experience and that if you choose a difficulty higher or lower you might impede the intention of it.
I really don’t see the problem with having options.
Like I love the Kingdom Hearts series and was able to play it and fall in love with them as a kid on normal and sometimes beginner difficulty. As an adult I play critical because it makes me engage with all of the mechanics of the game. But I would have unlikely got to the point of being able to play at that level if I couldn’t work my way up through Normal > Proud > Critical.
The same admiration you have to grinding on a single playthrough to overcome an intended challenge can still be obtained through multiple playthroughs of increasing difficulty.
Then they label the intended difficulty with "recommended" and say that will give the best experience and that if you choose a difficulty higher or lower you might impede the intention of it.
You're missing the point, which is weird because I explicitly stated it. To repeat, an artist might not want to create an inferior version of their art, irrespective of the utility of doing so. Art is an egotistical affair.
I really don't see the problem with having options.
Options can make sense in some games but not in others; a developer deciding not to include them has likely either figured they wouldn't work with the game's structure, wouldn't be a good use of their time or both. Difficulty options are simply not a one size fits all solution, for the same reason it wouldn't make sense to demand all painters make colorblind-friendly versions of their paintings.
One of the big inspirations for Dark Souls was the manga Berserk. A man in an impossibly difficult position fighting against demi gods and the many monsters in that universe. You don’t see how a “normal” difficulty would destroy that vision?
Difficulty is not simply one aspect of a game that can be adjusted with a slider. Difficulty is the confluence of many different gameplay aspects coming together. Sometimes, those systems allow for easy and discrete adjustment like with the old Doom games where settings can simply vary the enemies that spawn, the damage dealt, or the health and ammo from pickups.
The deliberate decisions and balance that make Dark Souls good also make it difficult, it’s not good simply because it is difficult. Take Blighttown for example, one of the most notoriously difficult areas of the game. It’s difficult because the architecture is hostile and confusing, and encounters place immense pressure on the player through application of Toxic and confined or deliberately open spaces that allow you to dodge yourself off a cliff. How do you make that “easier”? There really isn’t an abundance of enemy placement throughout most of the game, it’s very deliberate. Equipment attribute numbers are all low to maintain a tight balance and even things like parry windows are affected by the specific shield you have equipped. Adding in additional difficulty options is a retuning of the entire game, which also retunes the formula. Look, I’m sorry if it sounds snobby but there’s just no other way to say that if you start making substitutions to a dish at a restaurant it’s not the same dish!
This insistence that all games MUST be for all people is what leads to the bland homogeneity of modern game design. Dark Souls comes from the rich legacy of dungeon crawlers like King’s Field before it and those games are notoriously oppressive and difficult, it’s why people like myself love them. Everyone attributes poison swamps to Miyazaki but go back to Eternal Ring or Shadow Tower: Abyss in the early 00’s before his involvement and you’ll find mandatory poison damage areas there as well. It’s a staple of the genre. Heck, play Megami Tensei (no, not Shin Megami Tensei, MEGAMI TENSEI from the NES) and there’s a whole section of mandatory fire damage that you can’t negate until you’re already 4/5 of the way through it.
I also find the accessibility angle disingenuous and a little insulting even. All props to devs that add difficulty to their game as a means of accessibility when they are able to or want to, but it should not be necessary. This also diminishes real accessibility options like colorblind modes, reading assistance modes, keybinding modes, etc. I do not appreciate that.
Everyone thinks they’re a critic because they don’t like a game or certain things about a game and that it would be better if it catered to them, but difficulty is already highly subjective to begin with and insisting that devs find ways to foresee and cater to all possible permutations is untenable.
If you don’t like the game: fine. If you want to levy valid criticisms about the game in your opinion: fine. But this insistence that the developers are being foolish for creating a game to their vision and not yours is the actual thing cheapening it as art.
Honestly don’t care. Because see the thing is, I get to enjoy these games while you gotta come online and whine about them. I wrote my post out of passion because I see something there worth valuing. You wrote your post to whine and tear something down you didn’t understand.
And insisting games can only be for “you” is just as - if not more problematic.
Again, no one has insisted this. The game is for those that enjoy it.
Running out of breath here.
Developer: I have made the game exactly as I intended. The Intended Audience: Wow, this is for us, we love it exactly as intended! You: I hate this game, I do not like it or the decisions you’ve made. You should change it for me so that I might like it.
???
Again, you all keep trying to paint us as the selfish ones as if we’re gatekeeping this game from you, but there’s nothing stopping you from picking up and engaging with the game exactly as it is, as we’ve all done, other than that you do not like it. The notion that ALL games MUST be for EVERYONE seems much more selfish and unhinged in my opinion.
Expecting every developer to cater to every possibility of everyone’s subjective opinion of what is good and bad difficulty is impossible.
I’ll keep saying it: I already have a job. I want to play a game to unwind.
This is not a universal response. Some people like difficult games for many reasons. Overcoming a challenge can give me a taste of triumph absent from my day job.
Implementing a wide gamut of difficulty settings is also an accessibility feature, and allows people with certain physical or mental challenges the opportunity to enjoy your game firsthand. Why would you want to deny your audience this opportunity?
Sure, maybe, but the devil is in the details.
I suppose it’s not the game maker’s responsibility to stop people from ruining their own experiences. I’m pretty confident that some people would just easy-mode through dark souls and have a vastly diminished experience. “I don’t see the big deal. It’s just an action game”, they might say, because easy mode gave unlimited healing and no monster respawn. The difficulty (which is vastly overstated) is part of what makes it work. People remember Blight Town and Sen’s Fortress because of the ordeal. I can’t remember a single dungeon from Skyrim.
Furthermore, meta game options found in menus is not the only way to do difficulty options. Elden Ring, for example, is very generous with spirit summons.
No one is asking devs to remove hard mode. They are asking them to include an easy mode for people who can’t deal with hard mode. People with physical or mental barriers, people who don’t have time, or really any reason.
This is no different than inclusivity.
YOU might not remember anything that wasn’t challenging but that doesn’t mean it’s like that for others. I remember everything from Skyrim. I love Skyrim. I had fun with it so I remember it.
I don’t remember much from Elden ring cus I never made it. I struggled at it and couldn’t her anywhere.
I can back years later and cheated on a bit more health and more health potions. It was challenging still but I could at least experience the rest of the game.
I really don’t think that’s a productive use of “gatekeeping”.
Do you apply this to other mediums? There are books and movies that are difficult to follow, but no one demands that authors and publishers release a simpler edition. Video games seem to be an exception.
Accessibility like “let me remap the controls” or “give me subtitles” is a whole different beast from “let me be invulnerable”. Treating those as the same is strange to me.
I’m not particularly against difficulty options. I didn’t have the patience to finish Nine Sols without turning the difficulty down. I wouldnt have felt “gate kept” if I just had to put the game down without finishing it.
You’re saying some people shouldn’t get to play a game where difficulty options are an easy solution.
A book or a movie isn’t an equivalent comparison. Not too mention there ARE simplified versions of popular books or abridged versions and movie guides and so on anyway.
Almost all the time this is brought up it’s for single player games. Why do you care if I need a bit more health to get through it? How does that take anyone away from you? I assure you nothing will be lost by allowing people to play it with double the health, or without a arbitrary grinding mechanic that inflates the games length, or whatever really.
No one is asking for the subject matter to be dumbed down, or for the story to be shallow or transparent.
Why should someone not get to play through a game because they insisted their hand and can’t dodge anymore?
You’re saying some people shouldn’t get to play a game where difficulty options are an easy solution.
They can play it (assuming they have the money to buy the software and hardware, but that’s a whole other accessibility problem). There’s no guarantee they’ll be able to 100% it. I don’t think it’s axiomatic that everyone should be able to 100% every game.
You’re right that it doesn’t really matter in single player games. I did once have an argument on this topic where the other person said they should be able to change the rules in multiplayer to suit their desires. They wanted more forgiving dodge windows, just for them, unilaterally. That can fuck off.
A book or a movie isn’t an equivalent comparison.
Why not?
Not too mention there ARE simplified versions of popular books or abridged versions and movie guides and so on anyway.
There are let’s plays and wikis for games.
No one is asking for the subject matter to be dumbed down, or for the story to be shallow or transparent.
In some cases, they are. It’s cliché now, but part of the story of dark souls is often cited repeatedly struggling against an uncaring, dying, world until you persevere. If you rip that out and make all the creatures docile, I don’t know if I would call it “dumbed down” but it would certainly be a substantial change. Sometimes the medium is the message. But, often, you are correct that it is not really the case.
Why should someone not get to play through a game because they insisted their hand and can’t dodge anymore?
No one’s arguing against accessibility for controls. I’m not even against well done difficulty options. (The Bethesda style “we just give the enemies more health and damage” is a poorly done difficulty slider, in my view). I just think “I cannot hear so I need subtitles” and “I just want to win on the first try” don’t belong together.
Though, introspecting a little, I think what’s going on is maybe ableism or something like it. I don’t actually believe some of the people who say “this game is too hard. I want an easy mode” are disabled. I read them as just half-assing it. Like someone who wants to play pro soccer but doesn’t want to actually get in shape so run, so they want a smaller field. And, as you say, it doesn’t really matter what someone does in a single player game on their own time, but for some reason it irritates me when someone’s like “I’m just as disabled as that blind guy” when they’re perfectly capable, they just haven’t practiced. Something about “I’ve spent an hour on this task and I haven’t mastered it, I’m disabled” sits wrong with me.
One of your problems is thinking people wanna play “pro football” when they just wanna play ‘football with the boys’ and you are basically saying “you can’t play here” when they show up to the field.
Elden ring opened the gate so wide that we got newcomers trashing on some gameplay features which have been a staples of those games since from software started making them. At some point gatekeeping ensure that you don’t alienate the players who played all your games and played a big part on your success. Cause the wider you want to open the gate and the more you have to move away from your vision. Imo not all games are meant for everyone and that’s fine.
I can back years later and cheated on a bit more health and more health potions. It was challenging still but I could at least experience the rest of the game.
See, here’s the thing about Elden Ring (especially compared to older FromSoft games imo), you can do this right in the game. A boss kicking your ass? Walk away, go somewhere else and come back when you’ve leveled up more, maybe gotten some extra flasks for healing or upgraded your armor and weapons. Does Elden Ring do it well enough? That’s up for debate and I have some complaints in that department myself (the final boss of the DLC before the nerf is the only time that I’ve ever put down the controller and decided that beating a FromSoft boss simply wasn’t worth the effort - especially after looking at the wiki and seeing one attack that needs a frame perfect dodge to avoid being hit and another where they straight up said “we don’t know how you’re supposed to dodge this attack”), but it is built right into the game.
But after at a certain point, accessibility comes at compromising design integrity. Every piece of media doesn’t have to cater to everyone. I don’t see people complaining about Andy Warhol gatekeeping because colorblind people can’t see all his paintings. Or that Ozzy Osbourne didn’t make enough country music songs. But with games, it’s a different story. People complain constantly about games not catering to everybody. Bennett Foddy made an entire game to talk about this. It’s called Getting Over It, and it’s considered one of the hardest games of all time. If you’ve never seen it, I highly suggest reading his monologue at least, as I think it’s very relevant to any conversation about game difficulty, especially Souls games which are the most frequent subject of this discussion.
This game is an homage to a free game that came out in 2002, titled ‘Sexy Hiking.’ The author of the game was Jazzuo, a mysterious Czech designer who was known at the time as the father of B-games. B-games are rough assemblages of found objects. Designers slap them together very quickly and freely, and they’re often too rough and unfriendly to gain much of a following. They’re built more for the joy of building them than as polished products.
In a certain way, Sexy Hiking is the perfect embodiment of a B-game. It’s built almost entirely out of found and recycled parts, and it’s one of the most unusual and unfriendly games of its time. In it, your task is simply to drag yourself up a mountain with a hammer. The act of climbing, in the digital world or in real life, has certain essential properties that give the game it’s flavor. No amount of forward progress is guaranteed; some cliffs are too sheer, or too slippery. And the player is constantly, unremittingly, in danger of falling and losing everything.
Anyway, when you start Sexy Hiking, you’re standing next to a dead tree, which blocks the way to the entire rest of the game. It might take you an hour to get over that tree. A lot of people never got past it. You prod and poke at it, exploring the limits of your reach and strength, trying to find a way up. And there’s a sense of truth in that lack of compromise. Most obstacles in videogames are fake; you can be completely confident in your ability to get through them, once you have the correct method or the correct equipment, or just by spending enough time. In that sense, every pixelated obstacle in Sexy Hiking is real.
The obstacles in Sexy Hiking are unyielding, and that makes the game uniquely frustrating. But I’m not sure Jazzuo intended to make a frustrating game - the frustration is just essential to the act of climbing, and it’s authentic to the process of building a game about climbing. A funny thing happened to me as I was building this mountain: I’d have an idea for a new obstacle, and I’d build it, test it, and it would usually turn out to be unreasonably hard. But I couldn’t bring myself to make it easier. It already felt like my inability to get past the new obstacle was my fault, as a player, rather than as the builder. Imaginary mountains build themselves from our efforts to climb them, and it’s our repeated attempts to reach the summit that turns those mountains into something real.
When you’re building a video game world, you’re building with ideas, and that can be like working with quick-set cement. You mold your ideas into a certain shape that can be played with, and in the process of playing with them, they begin to harden and set until they are immutable, like rock. At that point, you can’t change the world. Not without breaking it into pieces and starting fresh with new ideas.
One of the things people love about Souls games is the challenge of it - not difficulty, as difficulty for the sake of difficulty is bad design (see my complaints above), but the challenge of learning how a boss moves like you’d learn the rhythm to a dance or a song. You’ll get pushback because Souls games cater to a specific audience who crave that kind of struggle. The story, music, and world of FromSoft games are great, but these gamers feel that without the obstacles to overcome, the games would be missing a core component of what makes them great, and that by removing it you would cheapen the experience for yourself. Like wanting to play a city builder but you don’t want to have to place any roads. At that point, why not just watch a playthrough on YouTube?
For years now, people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of prefabricated objects, bought in a store and assembled into a world. And for the most part that hasn’t happened, because the objects in the store are trash. I don’t mean that they look bad or that they’re badly made, although a lot of them are - I mean that they’re trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in a sink. Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and once the moment is gone, they transform into garbage. In the context of technology, those moments pass by in seconds.
Over time, we’ve poured more and more refuse into this vast digital landfill that we call the internet. It now vastly outnumbers and outweighs the things that are fresh, untainted and unused. When everything around us is cultural trash, trash becomes the new medium, the lingua France of tue digital age. You could build culture out of trash, but only trash culture. B-games, B-movies, B-music, B-philosophy.
Maybe this is what digital culture is. A monstrous mountain of trash, the ash heap of creativity’s fountain. A landfill of everything we’ve ever thought of in it, grand, infinite, and unsorted.
…
Everything’s fresh for about six seconds, until some newer thing beckons and we hit refresh. And there’s years of persevering disappearing into the pile, out of style, out of sight.
In this context, it’s tempting to make friendly content that’s gentle, that lets you churn through it but not earn it. Why make something demanding, if it’s just gonna get piled up in the landfill, filed with the bland things?
When games were new, they wanted a lot from you. Daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone’s turned off by that. They want to burn through it quickly, a quick fix for the fickle, some tricks for the clicks of the feckless. But that’s not you, you’re an acrobat. You could swallow a baseball bat.
Now I know, most likely you are watching this on YouTube or Twitch while some dude with 10 million views does it for you. Like a baby bird being fed chewed up food. And that’s culture too.
But on the off chance that you are playing this, what I’m saying is trash is disposable, but it doesn’t have to be approachable. What’s the feeling like? Are you stressed? I guess you don’t hate it if you got this far. Feeling frustrated, it’s underrated.
An orange, a sweet juicy fruit locked inside a bitter peel. That’s not how I feel about a challenge. I only want the bitterness. Its coffee, its grapefruit, its licorice.
It feels like we’re closer now. Composer and climber, designer and user. You could have refused but you didn’t. There was something hidden in you that chose to continue.
It means a lot to me that you’ve come this far, endured this much, every wisecrack, every insensitivity, every setback you’ve forgiven me is a kingly gift that you’ve given me.
Have you ever thought about who you are in this? Are you the man in the pot, Diogenes? Are you his hand? Are you the top of his hammer? I think not - where your hand moves, the hammer may not follow, nor the man, nor the man’s hand. In this, you are his WILL. His intent. His embodied resolve in his uphill ascent.
Now, you’ve conquered the ice cliffs, the platforms, the church, the rectory, the living room, the factory, the playground, and the construction site, the granite rocks, and the lakeside. You’ve learned to hike. There’s no way left to go but up, and in a moment, I’ll shut up, but let me say, I’m glad you came.
I dedicate this game to you, the one who came this far, I give it to you with all my love.
“If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them” –Andrei Tarkovsky
Difficulty options still allow you to play them at their intended difficulty. Letting someone else play the game easier doesn’t stop you from playing it at a higher difficulty. In fact with options you could make it even harder for yourself than you would’ve done otherwise and feel even more rewarded when overcoming it.
A lot of hobbies like gardening, sports, chess require effort, why is it necessary for video games to be easy?
Forcing some challenge gets you to engage with more things rather than taking the easy way out. It’s like bungee jumping (I’d assume), sometimes a push is necessary to experience something new.
Some of my favourite moments were trying Fire Emblem Ironmans, which initially made me go “this is stupid, I’ll regret this, I should reload”, only to change to “this is peak”
If the main difficulty is intentional, then it’s not an artifical barrier, the easy mode is an artificial easener. How easy is easy enough? Some people can’t beat Clair Obscur on the story mode (presumably by not doing side content) In case of gardening, it’d be getting someone to garden for you, and just chilling with the results.
Let’s plays/walkthroughs exists, and only lock you out of interactivity. And interactivity doesn’t mean much if every option beats the game.
Case in point, if I see some post-game superboss with lore behind it, I just look up the thing online.
I’m not sure there’s an agreed upon definition of “artificial difficulty”. The whole game is artificial so I’m not sure what “natural difficulty” would be.
A list of every single game with difficulty settings? Or just one example, such as Death Stranding, which was explicitly referenced in the original post?
Sports are games and have some degree of artificial difficulty. The size of the goal and ball, for example, is arbitrary (within the bounds of practicality. No moon sized basketballs, for example)
But that doesn’t really address what I was trying to get it. I feel like sometimes people online complain about “artificial difficulty” in video games, and it’s unclear what they actually want. I’ve seen it applied to everything from “The enemies hide around corners” to “you can’t quicksave”. I think it’s a kind of duckspeak thing that people say to just mean “i don’t like it” while making it sound less subjective.
Options don’t stop you from having those moments in fact they make it more possible for you to find the difficulty for those moments. For you and everyone else.
I think it’s an age gap 9f when you started gaming. If you were a gamer back in the 80’s and early 90’s, you played because it was a challenge to overcome and that’s what you enjoyed.
You didn’t want to “play” a game. You wanted to “beat” a game. No one played Mike Tysons Punch Out for the story. It was a challenge that took many hours worth of attempts, trial and error, and skill to beat. You liked it and remembered it because it was hard.
Part of the reason they were hard back then was due to file size and lack of saving and such, so hard games took longer to be bored of and sold better, but those were the games that we got hooked on. The challenge. New gamers are hooked on the stories and the entertainment, which is all well and good. Just a different type of crack.
I started gaming in 1983. (with Pac-Man!) I played games then because I enjoyed the gameplay and only suffered through the difficulty of the NES era because was either that or you didn’t play at all. I prefer easier games now.
That said, I think the hardest thing I’ve done in the modern era is this level in Rayman Legends. I still can’t believe I actually had the patience to do it over and over until I beat it.
Straight up answer which yes, will sound confrontational, but it is made in a blustery manner to drive home the point: People who want games tuned to what they need in terms of difficulty are the same kind that go to a Vietnamese restaurant and complain that spaghetti or chicken nuggies aren’t on the menu. “Why would you deprive a paying customer food they’re willing to pay for??”
That’s what it comes down to. The game wasn’t made for you to unwind. It was made with intentional choices made for other people to play and feel the experience of surmounting challenge.
If anything there is spicy then yes, definitely more difficult for some people to eat, and obviously they have spicy shit it’s a vietnamese restaurant. Restaurants don’t pay you to eat their food, but they also don’t take requests beyond relatively minor variations on their pre-selected menu. Quit expecting the world to revolve around you, put some effort into finding the developers that are doing what you want and patronize them instead of complaining about the existence of games that are not made for you.
And if you order something spicy then you get something spicy, yes, and if you complain that the restaurant serves things that are spicier than you enjoy you will be politely asked to leave. If you don’t like Dark Souls then don’t purchase and consume goddamned Dark Souls, simple as.
With difficulty options you will still get that, in fact you may get it better. Maybe for a specific game the difficulty needs to be lower or even higher for you to find that sweet spot.
If difficulty is just hit points, higher difficulties are not really enjoyable. Adjusting hit points, items, weapon damage, etc. together to achieve good flow on every difficulty is not an easy task.
They don’t have to go all out. Shitty easier/harder difficulties that just multiply or divide values in a basic manner is better than nothing at all.
Devs should absolutely just focus on the difficulty specific experience they planned but nothing is stopping them from doing the bare minimum. And if you have good coding practices, it’s easy as fuck to implement with the difficulty menu itself likely to be the hardest part to implement after the fact.
This just is not true for souls like games. The difficulty is a core part of the experience, and lowering it would literally compromise the artistic vision
Why are you pushing to deprive people of challenging games where they know everyone playing it is playing on the same level field? Even if it’s single player, a lot of games are a social experience.
Your point seems to be like not making an easy mode is being evil, yet you denounce players that specifically want games like that. It boggles my mind, there’s plenty games with all the freaking sliders you want, let us have our games.
Why would you want to denounce your audience this opportunity?
Yeah, that exactly, people who dislike hard games are not the audience of hard games and it’s weird for you to take issue with that. Full disclosure, I tend to cheese the fuck out of hard games with the tools they give me, I like to find the way to make the game “easy as fuck” via tools in the game instead of a slider, it creates the illusion that I’m smart and I like that.
I enjoyed expedition 33 and cyberpunk but they are a different experience than dark souls, no rest for the wicked, path of exile, last epoch… Sorry for the long post.
How does someone beating a game on “story” mode reduce your enjoyment of beating it on “nightmare”? I don’t get it. We can have both in the same game; isn’t that just better?
(Assuming we’re talking about single player, obv.)
We can have both in the same game; isn’t that just better?
This is the crux of the problem right here: it assumes that adding in difficulty adjustments is zero cost for the dev and can be done without affecting the overall game feel and I insist that that is a wildly incorrect assumption. This isn’t about other people playing the game on “easy mode” reducing my enjoyment of the game, it’s about adjusting the perfect balance and vision of the game reducing the enjoyment for everyone overall.
Difficulty can be, but is not always a discrete series of elements that can just be adjusted on sliders. Difficulty is a derivative attribute of other gameplay elements that give rise to it. Adjusting the difficulty as a derivative element can negatively flow backwards into poor adjustments to the game design if not done properly. Adjustments to the game design that allow for easier control and flow into the derivative attribute of difficulty may undermine the overall vision? Does that make sense?
Given an old school game like Ninja Gaiden on the NES it’s easy to think of how difficulty modes could be implemented by simply adjusting damage values, hit point values, life count, etc. But something like Dark Souls derives its difficulty from item balance, level architecture, encounter design, world puzzles. Rebalancing all of that for one or several difficulty modes is non-trivial! Furthermore, anyone who has played any of the Soulslikes can tell you that no playthrough is the same. One build may breeze through an area because they have specific strengths while other builds may struggle. How do you balance around all builds on multiple axes of gameplay elements?
A lot of people agree that Dark Souls is perfect (or near so) as it is and exactly the kind of thing we want while another group of people says, “I hate this thing and it’s not to my liking but by changing it I could maybe hate it a little less.” Think of it like the audio of a song being too loud and rather than properly adjust the overall range to preserve the entire tune you simply clip the highs and lows. It’s not a good song anymore … for anyone.
Gamers have a hard time properly articulating their critiques and I absolutely abhor the “git gud” mentality, but taken in the most positive light I can, I believe what most of them really mean isn’t just simply practice or skill up. It’s to learn to meet the game where it’s at. And if you still don’t like it, it’s not a game for you.
and I insist that that is a wildly incorrect assumption.
Based on nothing but your gatekeeping feelings.
Gamers have a hard time properly articulating their critiques and I absolutely abhor the “git gud” mentality,
No you don’t, thats literally just one of the excuses you use here for your gatekeeping.
. And if you still don’t like it, it’s not a game for you.
They are absolutely allowed to criticize a game that you believe isnt for them. They’re allowed to review it poorly if they’ve bought it, and they’re allowed to shit on it for not being to their liking just as you’re allowed to praise it.
Based on the detailed arguments of the entire post you just replied to without responding to any of those points.
No you don’t, thats literally just one of the excuses you use here for your gatekeeping.
This is not gatekeeping. It is explaining why I like the game as it is and implore others to experience and enjoy the game where it wants you to be.
They are absolutely allowed to criticize a game that you believe isnt for them.
For fuck’s sake, yes! Everyone is allowed to criticize but everyone in this thread is trying to “fix” the game and demand the developers do things to cater to them that they have directly stated they do not or have no intention of doing and somehow we’re the selfish ones here?!
Look, I can review a Barbie game, but I’m going to hate it because I’m am must in no way the intended audience. Should the developer cater to my sensibilities until it becomes a game I want to play? The intended audience of any specific Souslike game or other difficult game is a lot blurrier because it could be anyone from any demographic.
If you think the game is bad, say the game is BAD. Say YOU hate it! Don’t make arguments about how the game should be when other people love it the way it is. Sit with your opinion and recognize it for what it is. Your opinion.
Based on the detailed arguments of the entire post you just replied to without responding to any of those points.
They were not detailed arguments at all. You just “feel” like game difficulty has to be this magic thing that can’t possibly have settings without compromising your dream experience. You have no evidence for this. You just want it to be true to justify the gatekeeping.
This is not gatekeeping. It is explaining why I like the game as it is and implore others to experience and enjoy the game where it wants you to be.
Using fancy verbal diarrhea to say exactly the same thing is not convincing.
You are absolutely gatekeeping as you want games not to have options because you think people should play the game how you want to play games.
For fuck’s sake, yes! Everyone is allowed to criticize but everyone in this thread is trying to “fix” the game and demand the developers do things to cater to them that they have directly stated they do not or have no intention of doing and somehow we’re the selfish ones here?!
You absolutely are the selfish ones here. I mean look at that ridiculously bad faith summary of the comments here.
People are 100% reasonable and right to complain about games doing things they don’t like here, on a forum for discussing games.
They aren’t at all unreasonable for doing so. This specific excerpt from you is such nonsensical double speak, where you start by saying yes people can criticize, but finish by calling people selfish for not liking aspects you like.
Im sure youll try to weasel around that being what you’ve done, but thats what it is.
Look, I can review a Barbie game, but I’m going to hate it because I’m am must in no way the intended audience.
This is a bs weasel though, because many of the people are the intended audiences. These arent crazy mismatches, these are developers being stubborn and stuck up in bougie, high artsy, self important ways that a great deal of their playerbases don’t appreciate.
From what you’re suggesting, you basically think all the games you like should get about half the sales numbers they are getting because anyone who doesn’t like any noteworthy aspect of the game clearly just isnt the intended audience and shouldn’t have bought it.
Its a silly, childish black and white view solely there so you can continue to be angry at people for being critical about the aspects of a game you gatekeep around.
Don’t make arguments about how the game should be when other people love it the way it is.
Why? This is you pretending to be for open conversation but not at all being… This is the gatekeepy bullshit I am talking about.
Adding difficulty options does not cheapen the game, it widens its appeal and makes games far more fun for a larger amount of people without subtracting from the experience for others.
For instance, lets say you have a game that has painful backtracking that a large number of people complain about. Who does it harm to have a setting to skip the painful backtracking? Fucking nobody.
You can’t argue even for a second that this ruins the experience for those that say they do like the painful backtracking as this by no means would take away from their experiences, yet you would argue that people shouldn’t complain or ask that developers include that because you want to gatekeep experiences.
Sit with your opinion and recognize it for what it is. Your opinion.
This is a bullshit way of you insisting your (shitty) opinion is objective (where you think people shouldn’t complain about things you like) while pretending people stating their opinions are somehow doing exactly what you’re actually doing.
Oh dude … I don’t know how to tell you this but at this point you’re just wrong. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.
They were not detailed arguments at all. You just “feel” like game difficulty has to be this magic thing that can’t possibly have settings without compromising your dream experience.
I’ve broken it down several times in this topic already, but sure, let’s do it once more. Difficulty is a complex equation that is the result of various components like level architecture, encounter design, world puzzles, and complex stat curves across enemies, equipment, and player characters in addition to intricate boss fight routines with varied movesets. There’s no “slider” here. Everyone keeps mentioning these mythical sliders and THAT is the magical thinking here. That there is a simple way to adjust the game to Easy that adjusts all those other variables.
In addition to this if you were to implement sliders for each one of those features separately (neverminding how you’d do something like level architecture) what you end up takes both additional developer time and may not be as good. The fine tunings don’t fit together as nicely; it’s the difference between a model kit you buy and assembly yourself vs. one that comes premade form the manufacturer. There are different tolerances here and I think you need to get some dev perspective on this at this point.
People are 100% reasonable and right to complain about games doing things they don’t like here, on a forum for discussing games.
Here is criticism: “I do not like this game because I find it too difficult.” Here is not criticism: “This is a bad game because the developer did not make more effort to cater to the wide range of entirely subjective opinions on what difficulty is.”
I hate to rely on arguments from popularity but when the dev of the game itself says “naw” and the game is so popular it literally spawns its own subgenre with millions of adoring fans and you’re trying to armchair unnecessary solutions to things people don’t think are problems, I ask again who is being selfish. This game ain’t for you, dawg.
From what you’re suggesting, you basically think all the games you like should get about half the sales numbers they are getting because anyone who doesn’t like any noteworthy aspect of the game clearly just isnt the intended audience and shouldn’t have bought it.
Miss me with that sales speak. Disgusting. We’re talking art here. Gross.
This is the gatekeepy bullshit I am talking about.
I think you need to look up what gatekeeping is. At this point looking at your other responses in this topic I think you’re kind of a troll? But I mean I don’t care, I have fun talking about and critiquing the finer points of games online and then actually playing them. I think I’m gonna go beat Dark Souls again while you mald.
FINAL EDIT: Cheat. Just cheat. We’ve already established elsewhere in this topic that I and many others DON’T actually care about the “sanctity” of the game, that’s a talking point people like you made up to throw around, mostly. Nobody cares. Get a cheat engine and double soul drops. Crank your stats. Enable one hit kills. Cheat. Don’t care, cheat.
Oh dude … I don’t know how to tell you this but at this point you’re just wrong. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.
What riveting, useful commentary.
I’ve broken it down several times in this topic already, but sure, let’s do it once more. Difficulty is a complex equation that is the result of various components like level architecture, encounter design, world puzzles, and complex stat curves across enemies, equipment, and player characters in addition to intricate boss fight routines with varied movesets. There’s no “slider” here. Everyone keeps mentioning these mythical sliders and THAT is the magical thinking here. That there is a simple way to adjust the game to Easy that adjusts all those other variables.
Just because you state something repeatedly doesn’t mean you’ve made a logical argument or a good point.
The easy rebuttal to this nonsense, is the question, for a game that is already made, where you are already happy, lets say they keep everything as it is right now, like they literally have the games they already have and add some difficulty options like less annoying backtracking. How does this “ruin” your experience?
There has yet to be a legitimate answer to this question.
The truth therefore, is that the only answer is gatekeeping, because you don’t want other people to be able to experience the game in a way they enjoy.
More than that, the idea that difficulty is just a series of sliders is something entirely constructed in your mind.
Atomfall for instance has things like live hints vs you figuring it out your self. Stamina, vs infinite running, etc etc. There is so much more that can be done with difficulty than your simplistic view that its about sliders.
Basically your whole point is nonsensical.
Here is criticism: “I do not like this game because I find it too difficult.” Here is not criticism: “This is a bad game because the developer did not make more effort to cater to the wide range of entirely subjective opinions on what difficulty is.”
Just because you make a hyperbolized version of opinions you disagree doesnt mean they arent criticism. Also, its 100% legitimate to criticize something for being too focused in certain areas.
You are here literally gatekeeping criticism. Is gatekeeping all you do?
I hate to rely on arguments from popularity but
Then don’t. This should be a sign to you that your point is weak.
and the game is so popular it literally
Just because something is successful does not mean every single element of it is what made it so, or is good.
I think you need to look up what gatekeeping is. At this point looking at your other responses in this topic I think you’re kind of a troll?
Least obvious attempt to troll possible by you here. When you don’t have an argument you just imply the other person must be trolling for not agreeing with your bad take.
But I mean I don’t care, I have fun talking about and critiquing the finer points of games online
Evidently not judging by this conversation.
Cheat. Just cheat.
Modding games is extra effort and not immediately available, especially for consoles. This isn’t a solution and you know that.
For some games, where hardship and strife is a genuine core element of the creative vision, a single level of difficulty doesn’t just create a striking apprehension of the genuineness of that hardship, it also allows the developer to tune that difficulty with great care, further pushing that choice to serve the intended experience.
The game is only “just better” with difficulty options if you have implicitly accepted the idea that you should be able to complete any game you buy. If you don’t feel that way about, say, books you purchase, please investigate that feeling.
For some games, where hardship and strife is a genuine core element of the creative vision, a single level of difficulty doesn’t just create a striking apprehension of the genuineness of that hardship, it also allows the developer to tune that difficulty with great care, further pushing that choice to serve the intended experience.
This is all a very flimsy excuse for annoying gate keeping.
Pretending that difficulty tuning has to suffer if there is more than one difficulty is absurdly nonsensical.
Of all the parts of a game that take significant effort, this is not one.
Studios literally already tune their games for a specific difficulty firstly usually, and tune up or down from there.
You are just imagining that magically one difficulty means higher quality difficulty.
The game is only “just better” with difficulty options if you have implicitly accepted the idea that you should be able to complete any game you buy. If you don’t feel that way about, say, books you purchase, please investigate that feeling.
This is such an absurd prick opinion that makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
Who in the fuck buys any media they don’t intend on being able to finish. What???
You think people are buying books they think they’ll want to stop reading half way? Movies they’ll want to walk out of?
How did you get so deluded you even thought you were making a cogent argument here.
Even if the game is single player, some games are a social experience. You discuss in forums, with friends, about your experience, and when I want that kind of experience difficulty levels cheapen the social aspect of the single player game.
This is not new either, I remember talking to friends about how I beat the water temple in ocarina of time as a kid. Everyone who beta it had to go through beating it and it gave them something to talk about. It just wouldn’t be the same if there was an easy mode, it’s not the same shared experience.
I guess my answer is that no game is truly single player because humans are social creatures. And again, there are games catered to your interests so it’s not like either of us is suffering from a shortage of enjoyment.
It just wouldn’t be the same if there was an easy mode
What’s the difference between saying, “I beat that level” for a game with only one difficulty setting and saying, “I beat that level on hard mode” for a game with multiple difficulty settings?
Multiple difficulty settings never stopped people from talking or bragging about accomplishments in Doom.
It doesn’t feel the same. I enjoy knowing that when someone on the internet or on forums complains about X that my experience matches theirs without having to look for the difficulty they played on. It’s not really bragging rights, but knowing that everyone in the community is having the same shared experience, no need of tags or anything. It’s a social thing for me more than anything.
Then there’s the matter of Devs being able to fine tune things better if they don’t need to care about multiple patterns, progression levels, etc. I won’t get to those because while important, the point I wanted to make is that single difficulty games allows for a shared experience between players which facilitates more community. You can have it with different difficulties but that breeds elitism and fuck that, everyone on the same field and that’s it.
I mean it both ways btw, some games are easier and that’s how you are supposed to experience them, ex: Slimer Rancher
Every time there’s a multiple diff game I always search for the one devs “intended” originally because it’s the most fine-tuned and the expected experience (usually the one before the hardest diff), but I prefer not having to make that choice.
It’s basically just a digital age version of the wanna be thugs acting like they grew up in a broken home on the mean streets when in reality mommy and daddy still wipe their ass in a suburban home.
Easy games are fine. It can be a nice way to just plow through a good story. However, I’m absolute trash at games and beating Dark Souls was one of the best and most memorable gaming experiences I’ve ever had. (it took me well over 200 hrs because I am a garbage-person) Had the game been easier I don’t think it would have hit the same way.
That’s not to say every game has to be like that but it’s great when it works
Oh, can totaly relate to winning that final battle or overcoming that boss in a fight.
My best favorite was in Horizon: Zero Dawn when I worked out how to take down a Thunderjaw with just the bow and arrow. I’m too easily visually overwhelmed by fast motion and end up just mashing buttons in melee fights, so the long, tactical takedowns are the cat’s pyjamas for me.
(I’ve been told that I would love Skyrm based on my play style. Will have to check that out at some point.)
Right now I’m on an ultra hard playthrough using just the Banuk Powershot Adept bow, (which is a mean weapon) and if done in the right order, you can disassemble the machines you’re hunting, get all the parts off, kill it then make fat bank picking up the pieces.
Doing Fire Emblem soft Ironmans (not reloading when a unit permadies) made me love the series even more, it went from “ughhhh do I really have to move on without this guy? This sucks, what if I’m underpowered later” to “I lost 40 people and died for the first time at the penultimate map, this is a beautiful, sorrowful story”.
I now let a unit or two die even when playing for the first time, because it basically adds your own personal death scenes to the story. I will always pay respects to wolf boy who died to make that one final push happen, or respect the axe bro who went through his Kratos arc with a dead wife, kid and second dead wife.
Playing Final Fantasy Tactics as a kid basically made me refuse to allow any units to ever permadie because it took so much goddamn time to level them up and develop the jobs, and the thought of having to hire a new unit at level 1 to replace them is enough to drive a child insane.
Some of the newer FE games suck at that too, Three Houses in particular apparently.
Older games give you very good prepromotes in the midgame, and the 3DS games have the child recruits (it makes sense I swear) scale up to current story progress and scale off stats/skills of parents.
Celeste is the perfect embodiment of that philosophy IMO. The whole story is an explicit metaphor for overcoming a great personal challenge. And the gameplay’s difficulty is what drives that point home and makes the game an all-time great.
I’ve seen a couple streamers with G4m3r Skillz breeze through Celeste, and the game didn’t leave them much of an impression. But it touches very deeply those who struggled through it because the struggle is the bond that ties the player to Madeline.
Other games it doesn’t really matter. Portal 2 is a great game even if the puzzles are quite easy, because the greatness lies in its writing, atmosphere and worldbuilding. There’s an Aperture miniseries just begging to be made - but a Dark Souls or Celeste cinematographic adaptation would miss the entire point.
With mods it’s an option and it definitely wouldn’t have hit the same way. The whole point of souls games is overcoming challenges with practice. Too many people avoid challenging themselves and it’s a real problem I’ve seen in many people. That’s why you see people who waste away at the same job and same level for years instead of taking chances and risks and pushing themselves to try something new. I’ve known people with budding talent in things like music that gave up because they weren’t instantly the best at it. Not everything in life will be easy, or instant, or convenient. Too many people either forget that or don’t realize it. Some things take hard work and practice and they are extremely rewarding when you put in the work.
Would you complain that a rubiks cube is too hard or a crossword puzzle or anything else that’s designed to challenge you?
The Souls games are easy. They’re just easy in a way that makes you a part of the game/world. You don’t just click a button in the menu. You earn it by paying attention. The point is, every player comes out satisfied of having accomplished something. Either they directly defeated a challenge through brute force or they looked around and founds it’s weakness, or got stronger to overcome it. It makes it earned.
Sure, story games the story is maintained with an easier difficulty and that’s fine. However, games where the act of playing forms the story are made worse by this. I’m all for difficulty modes in games where it makes sense, but a lot of people would turn down the difficulty in a Souls game and end up with a boring experience, because they didn’t actually try to meet it at its level.
Just like paintings, there’s a place for slop that just looks pretty and things that engage you. If you go into a museum and complain that an artist challenged you, that’s on you, not them.
They’re specifically designed to have easy options for almost every fight. There are very few bosses where you actually need skill, and they’re mostly optional. If you’re paying attention, it’s normally pretty easy to find a pretty easy option to defeat most bosses. Sometimes the game tells you this, like jumping down on the head of the demon at the start of DS1. Usually it doesn’t directly, but there will be hints if you’re reading everything and looking at your environment.
You don’t have to just “git gud” and dodge everything while fighting. That’s an option, but not the only one. Most people hear “Souls games are hard” and they think this is the only option, and they don’t look for more. If this is you, then you were mislead. The community has ruined the game for so many people by acting like there’s a huge skill barrier that you need to overcome, instead of the reality where the game just wants you to pay attention to the world/lore.
What devices do you have? It’s available on PC, and it looks like PS4 and Xbox One.
I do agree though, it’s probably the easiest to get into. The Shenobi tools are more explicit counters to certain enemy types, and exploration is fast and easy. It potentially has the highest skill level of any of the games, but that’s far from required, even for the optional bosses —only to show off or challenge runs.
It seems like it should be playable on your MacBook. I don’t know how well it handles something like WINE/Proton/whatever is available on Mac. You could install Linux on it though and it should work if you’re willing to do that.
You certainly can make them easy if you know enemy positions, boss attack patterns, strategies and you tailor your skills and items for it. And before you say “I don’t have time to learn all that!” There are guides, and if you don’t have time for that either, do you even want to play the game? It doesn’t have much of a story, if you skip learning, fighting skills, optimizing, what are you even enjoying?
You certainly can make them easy if you know enemy positions, boss attack patterns, strategies and you tailor your skills and items for it.
Do you hear yourself? Like, actually hear yourself? Those things are not easy to do. It’s great that you enjoy the game and want more people to try it if they’ve gotten discouraged but don’t call it easy when the caveat is doing all of that. Needing to do all of that is precisely why it’s difficult.
I do hear myself. It is easy to know that stuff, it might be annoying for some, but it’s certainly easy. I can get all that info in 30 seconds tops. You don’t need to do all of this but knowledge lowers the skill barrier by an absurd amount; I know that because I’m bad as fuck and beat the games because I search (in-game) for cheese strats, but if something annoys me a 30s google search usually gets me an optimised cheese strat. I enjoy playing like this.
I don’t really want more people to play it or whatever, if you don’t enjoy it don’t force yourself please, games are for entertainment in the end.
whatever part of your brain that’s supposed to make you feel satisfied or accomplished when you beat a hard game isn’t present for me, the only thing I got out of finishing dark souls was relief that that annoying game was over and I could finally get my friend to shut the fuck up and stop telling me I just didn’t like it because I hadn’t finished it.
I think he’s entirely right for the kind of game he usually makes.
I also think not having difficulty settings is the right approach for souls games, it would destroy the vision.
Different people are looking for different things. Sometimes, the same person is looking for different things. I play story games on difficulties I don’t struggle on, more gameplay-focused games I like making hard and struggling with them.
Personally I don’t like replaying games, so this wouldn’t work for me. Generally, story-driven games are easy, so it’s rarely an issue.
If you don’t enjoy a game, there are countless others to play. Not saying this as a ‘fuck off, this isn’t for you’. But genuinely - there are so many games, and no single game should be for everyone. It’s perfectly normal that we all have our own unique preferences.
There are a few games that I’ve dropped due to their gameplay, but wanted to finish the story. So I watched playthroughs of them. Was it at all an issue for me? Absolutely not. Do I wish the game fit my preferences better? Uhh, I guess? But then it would have been ruined for everyone else, so it doesn’t really make sense.
I watched the playthrough of Death Stranding, as it got too depressing for me about halfway through. Totally get it. I paid a lot for it though, so felt kinda bummed that I’d dropped that cash and couldn’t muster the energy to play it to the end.
On the other hand, I’ve got over 2,000 hours in on No Man’s Sky, (I’m playing in creative mode now and having a blast building cool bases in breathtaking locations) which I got on sale through GOG for 10 bucks, so I suppose it balances out.
The one that I’ve come to a complete stop in is The Talos Principle, and I love it but just can’t seem to finish it. Has been as frustrating to finish as Firmament, which was built for VR so playing it in 2D leaves a lot to be desired - there’s a ton of items that require exact placement and it’s hard as hell to see how to manipulate then w/o the 3D… Oyyyy.
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