Reading this thread has re-confirmed that gatekeepers are a blight on humanity.
I will cheat in your sacred games and you can’t stop me. I’ll make my own rules. What are you gonna do about it, break into my house and steal my computer?
I don’t think you’re getting the point here. If you buy a game you can do whatever you want with it. Same goes with developers, it’s their creation and they can do whatever they want with it. It doesn’t have to please everyone.
This is a very bad and damaging take and undermines real accessibility options in games.
You are conflating two different things. The game is the food and the difficulty is a nuanced flavor that results from the individual ingredients. You are arguing that the flavor of the dish or the way it is prepared should be changed for everyone to suit your tastes.
Accessibility ramps are structural and in no way related to the food. I in no way want to be seen as arguing against accessibility because I am a strong believer in it myself. But accessibility comes in the form of color blind modes, subtitles, ability to change or rebind controls. Actual structural issues to the game that allow you to engage with it as it has been designed.
I do not suppose I will get through to people that have already taken up this position, but I cannot allow it to go unchallenged. Difficulty IS NOT (*necessarily) accessibility.
If you want to dislike a game: fine. If you want to critique a game: fine. If you want to say, “I think this game is bad”: fine. But do not try to conflate your own distaste with the difficulty level as some accessibility issue.
For a game where difficulty is based on reaction time then it is accessibility. Your whole page of arguments is based on that ableist assumption and doesn’t hold up.
Food and cafe is just an extreme example, you don’t have to discredit the idea based on the specifics of a cafe. It was supposed to make you think about the problem from the perspective of someone who feels excluded which you didn’t do. You just used to to further your agenda with emotive language like “bad and damaging”. It’s a little bit pathetic actually when all people are asking for is a slider
For a game where difficulty is based on reaction time then it is accessibility.
This describes literally any action game.
It’s a little bit pathetic actually when all people are asking for is a slider
And I’m telling you, sliders are not always structurally viable to the game or efficient for the developers to implement. By your arguments here, what do you want? A literal speed timer that slows down the entire game? Should Super Mario Bros. have had an easy mode that runs the game at half frame rate?
A game isn’t a public service. There are many games where part of the experience is that everyone has to go through the same or similar difficulty and the learning curve involved in that. If that isn’t something that you can manage then you don’t have to play it.
If anything, demo versions should be more readily available so that you don’t end up buying something you can’t return.
Who decided that only things that are public services need to be accessible? Why is everyone latched onto that like it’s a given.
If your a dev and you have x hits to kill thing x and you don’t put in a tiny bit of extra effort to multiply that by a difficulty slider “because of art” then I’m going to say you’re a bit of a dick.
Games are barely art anyway. Most are just a toy that you play with for a bit to waste some time
That’s not what people are saying, but the entitled attitude here makes it seem as if games are a mandatory interaction.
If you are a game dev and you decide that part of the experience of your game is the difficulty, so be it. Art was never and isn’t something that pleases everyone. You can call them a dick but you don’t have to engage in what they produce.
That is such bullshit. There is such large variety of games out there that still give meaningful experiences to players that calling all of them “barely art” is just wrong.
There are plenty of places that aren’t essential that are accessible just to be inclusive. A theatre for example.
I’m not even disabled and I struggle with games without a difficulty slider. I can’t imagine to be actually disabled and excluded just because someone’s ego prevents them from adding a single slider to their game.
A theater is a social event and experience. Lots of video games are solo experiences. That’s a huge difference. Social events and activities need inclusion much more.
A dense philosophical book doesn’t need to include a „for dummies“ version. Tarot cards don’t need their meaning printed on them.
I think it would be illuminating for you to try making a game where the difficulty slowly increases, such as Tetris. Once you’ve done so, add a slider to it so that the difficult does not slowly increase.
You will find the experience completely different when you play. Difficulty in games isn’t just about accessibility.
I’ve worked in and run my own game companies. The request for a slider isn’t based in any kind of misunderstanding about how it would be implemented.
For your example in tetris it would be a global multiplier on the speed. The speed would still increase by the same rate but the actual speed is always multiplied by some constant.
The Tetris speed is already multiplied by a constant anyway even if the difficulty isn’t exposed. And this constant has to be picked by a designer. All I’m asking for is to expose it with a slider. There is pretty much always a constant like this in any game
If a game is particularly hard, I’ll use mods or cheats to make it easier. Gamers who sweat for difficulty can play it as hard as they want. I just want to experience the story, even if my play style goes against the creator’s vision.
I hate to keep overextending the restaurant metaphor, but it’s the difference between demanding a world class chef be prepared to make a number of different substitutions on the spot to suit your individual tastes vs. taking the dish home in a doggy bag and then slathering it with ketchup.
It’s fine. There’s no law against it. It doesn’t hurt anyone else (assuming we’re not talking about multiplayer here). No one has to care. No one does. Cheating and mods are a great way for you as an individual to tailor a more personalized experience to your tastes with the tools you have available.
Yep. Fling Trainers usually. I pick one game a year and play it for 3 days, no way in hell am I going to get bogged down on grinding things. I’m there for the immersion, the gameplay, and the plot.
If grinding is the gameplay in the sense that it levels up your joystick skills, then fine I’ll sit and suffer (Souls / Knight). But if it’s grinding for items of all things, no thank you
This was never the argument. Cheat all you want, no one cares.
There’s just a bunch of people in this topic that read these developer’s own words on their artistic takes and were like, “Wow, uh, wrong? Cater your games to me.”
I mean thats how all the people arguing against difficulty options sound.
People need to touch grass. Is your ego really so fragile that you beating a game on hard mode is diminished by someone beating it on easy mode?
The truth is there are really only a “few” games where the difficulty actually matters in that it’s a core part of the games experience, but plenty more games that don’t have difficulty modifiers or really basic ones where the difficulty has zero actual relation to the game.
People need to touch grass. Is your ego really so fragile that you beating a game on hard mode is diminished by someone beating it on easy mode?
No one, least of all me, has been arguing this point. It is not a valid point, I do not give it credit. It’s a straw man that keeps getting brought up repeatedly.
The truth is there are really only a “few” games where the difficulty actually matters in that it’s a core part of the games experience,
This is in fact what is being argued, extensively, yet for some reason you can’t see those arguments as valid. I’m out of breath on this topic, truly I am.
I have gone over extensively why adding a wide and nebulous range of difficulty options to cater to the very subjective notion of what difficulty even is to begin with is not free of development time or cost for the programmers when they are tuning every aspect of their game: movement, stat balancing, enemy placement, level design, attack patterns - to their specific vision. It’s just not.
Of course it’s possible, just like I could wake up and do a 5 mile run every morning but I simply don’t because I have neither the time nor energy to devote to that. Dark Souls was already notoriously rushed - looked into criticisms of the late game areas like the Demon Ruins and the dragon butts.
Lol I dont understand why y’all are so focused on dark souls. Is that the only game available?
I suffered through a lot of butthurt comments in this discussion where the people against “easy mode” are acting like all anyone cares about is dark souls having easy mode.
Sure some people are only arguing that. The majority are just arguing about difficulty options in general
Like I already said there are relatively “few” games where the difficulty is core to the game but a shitload more where the difficulty doesn’t really matter. And of that 2nd bunch there is a poor selection of difficulty options in most of them.
I couldn’t care less about dark souls. Even if it had difficulty options I wouldn’t waste my time on it.
I play Stellaris and Terra Invicta in easy modes basically, cuz I just enjoy nation building and the game mechanics. Tho Easy in Terra Invicta can still be a pain if you ignore certain things.
I feel I would rather just opt out of playing these games. It ain’t worth it.
I feel like they should just host the entire game and stream it to players if they want to eliminate cheating, but that’s probably the most anti-SKG way to publish a game possible. Oh well.
Actually makes it easier to write aimbots and triggerbots, since you’ll have the video feed and can respond with the right inputs. Skips the step where you’ve got to film the monitor on the machine that’s ‘playing’ the game, which is protected by the HDCP between the PC and the screen.
To be honest I haven’t thought about this much because playing online games with strangers is not something I enjoy in the first place. I’m sure others have good ideas, though.
Seeking a technical solution to a non-technical problem. Rather than having one set of company-hosted servers that they then struggle to police, just let everyone host their own, and they can be responsible for banning anyone that doesn’t follow the community rules.
Yeah I wish we could go back to a model like that, the way PC gaming used to be. The sticking point would be battle pass progression, as mush as I hate it and an FPS is pretty much doa without it, although Hell Let Loose allows for rank progression while playing on clan-rented servers so it should work in theory.
The types of cheats that anti cheat in kernel space are trying to detect don’t view the video feed as such. They hook the process directly to read the memory, and the chest developer has reverse engineered the game binary to find out what variables correspond to things like opposing players, then using that information they draw stuff like wall hacks on the screen.
But yeah I guess an fps developer could move to a GeForce now type of model to eliminate cheats like that, but then no one would play that fps because of the input lag issues.
I have ~10k hours in counterstrike across multi game versions and accounts. I noticed a similar thing over my years. The players doing well in a match were often neutral towards gamer girls, but the guy having a shit match would be the fastest sack of shit every time. Especially if one of the top fraggers pointed out they were being beaten by a girl.
Obviously there are always exceptions to any rules but in my anecdotal experience the guys who were confident in their abilities didn’t care about women but losers would attack them just for speaking.
Counter Strike was way better when this was the vibe. I am so tired of competitive this and gun case that. I’ve never been interested in 5v5 scrimming in any serious way, but that’s all CS2 wants me to do.
I want gun game, I want wc3, I want ZM. I want quirky custom maps (glass!) and quake sounds and !bet ct all. I want to fuck around with new friends on a server for an evening, not to sweat my balls off throwing practiced smokes on dust2.
Same thing kinda happened to TF2. I mean, Competitive is dead but the server browser and community servers are not what they used to be. I miss when it was front and center. Today most people just play casual on Valve servers.
After a quick search it seems like the CS2 in-game server browser has gone to complete shit. I hope Valve fixes it. It’s part of the Source Legacy.
If it makes you feel any better those hours were spread out over the last 10 years or longer. I can’t even remember when I started. Just one of those ol’ reliable games for me.
And the worst part of it is that probably half of those hours happened within a few years in the middle there. I played like 6 hours a night every night with my friends. Good times but yeah…
My heavy CS days were early in csgo days. Back when the skin gambling scene and the pro scene were popping early on. My buddies and I would watch the pro games and then get all hyped to improve and we would jump into ranked only to get fucking pub stomped. Good times. Eventually we did start getting good. I only ever got to whatever rank was below global and only two of my buddies ever got to global.
However my top fps bragging moment was actually in valorant when it was a closed beta still I absolutely shat all over pro csgo player at the time named JDM in a lobby. Top fragged and completely dominated him the entire match.
That was when I peaked in my fps gaming lol. It’s all been downhill since. I’m still better than most people at fps games in general, but I am not as sharp and snappy as I was when I was a younger man with way more free time to practice and improve every night.
You’re absolutely correct, I had a similar experience
I played CS for roughly the same amount of time; my clan ranges from DMG to Global, but we had a rule that if you were in the clan, we’d 5-man with you regardless of your rank, so if you were Silver, you’d have a chance to rub elbows and learn strategies from the higher skilled players.
Then we got a Global, a girl named Moon.
Holy hell, it’s like people’s brains did a 180°, they were incredibly mean to her, for no reason, and eventually it came out that she was trans, and they bullied her even worse, out of the server.
I kicked everyone who bullied/demonized Moon for being trans; because at the end of the day, it was about being a honest human being, and not just a CS player/gamer.
Especially if one of the top fraggers pointed out they were being beaten by a girl.
Not really a gold star by the top player’s name for this, either. The comment alone leaves plenty of room to be interpreted as “girls should be easy to beat/poor gamers because they’re girls.”
They wouldn’t say “you’re getting beaten by a girl” as much as they would respond to the guys losing their minds who happened to be below them on the scoreboard by saying things like “Why are you yelling at her she’s playing better than you are shut up”. Kinda way.
I’m not a misogynist but anybody who consistently scores top on a public server pretty much is a pubstomper asshole by definition. And I have certainly been that. You don’t do it for the challenge, or you’d be doing league and more competitive modes.
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They were always conservative. A few years before these ads Nintendo participated in Senate hearings where they advocated for censoring the entire medium. They just had a “fellow kids” period in the early 2000s. Luckily, judging by the sales of the GameCube, most people weren’t fooled.
Definitely oot, but if I could pick two, it’d be this super weird game I’ve never been able to find again, or remember the name of. Had a kind of Hawaiian theme, iirc. There was a conch shell you blew. It was weird, and I loved it so much
I know you’ll be disappointed, but Mario 64 has a fair number of levels and star missions. So, either that or Star Fox (your score can always be a little better).
Intellectual property is a resource. Corporations are in the business of hoarding resources to extort ration at a price. Microsoft doesn’t care about the studios. They care about owning ip.
It’s definitely not the fastest but it’s really close.
The fastest full shutdown currently belongs to The Culling 2 which only lasted 2 days between launch and being closed completely.
The Day Before is another big example of a game that lasted an incredibly short time but despite that game lasting 4 days before no longer being sold, the games servers stayed on much longer than that meaning that it was shut down after Concord despite being cancelled before it.
Including joke reviews, the game had a 16% rating and was so poorly made that within those 2 days it killed the popularity of both Culling games extremely quickly.
The first game was popular because it was a twist on the genre while the 2nd one was a quickly thrown together (almost exact) clone of DayZ.
The word scam was thrown around a lot in those 2 days.
Sounds like the first was made with the mindset of, “it would be cool to make a game that does x, let’s do that and see if it will make money” while the second one was more of a, “all we gotta do is make a game that does x and we’ll make a ton of money!”
That’s 36% but I’m sure it’s higher in some other currencies. 50% would have to be 16.
edit: This is the worst comment I have ever left on this website. I’m leaving it up so people can see what happens when you do math early in the morning. Embrace it, learn from it, live with it.
Just to be clear, by “read the post” do you mean go through all the comments of the mega thread OP shared? That seems unreasonable as opposed to “OP could’ve been clearer”. I’ve read both OPs post as well as the jagex website linked by Reddit and neither have enough information to back up OPs claims without prior knowledge.
Is there a more summarized version then “all the reddit comments on a mega thread” anywhere? Because that is basically halfway to telling someone to “do your own research”. At least quote some specific comments that could be taken as secondary sources.
We’ve had to dilute clickbaity titles before, we’ve also been pissed off at clickbaity titles before. I’d rather that shit not be normalized, personally.
I realized we’re talking about two different things, you’re saying that the post unpacks the clickbait, and I’m saying that there’s no documentation of price increases, which tbf isn’t OPs main point anyways.
^ This, I much prefer this… I mean something about “Body Type A/Body Type B” just feels too “corpo” for my tastes… but Saints Row sliders not so much.
Heck Pokemon even figured this out by just showing you pictures of characters and saying “Hey, which one of these do you wanna play as”, didn’t even have to use words.
What if you found a portal to a parallel universe? What if you could slide into a thousand different worlds? Where it’s the same year, and you’re the same person… but everything else is different? And what if you can’t find your way home?
Monopolies aren’t defined by the availability of alternatives. It’s based on the market share captured by a single entity. We’d need to see statistics to determine if it’s a total monopoly, but I’m not aware of many other hosting platforms for game wikis. Maybe fextralife?
Yeah I think hosting is the thing that they’ve captured, far more than the notion of a domain-specific wiki. Of course, there’s nothing stopping an aspiring wiki admin from hosting on a platform that isn’t targeted at game wikis.
Fextralife is utter shit. Always giving you the most unrelated information in the longest amount of time all while being forced to watch a stream you don’t care about.
The steam machine is, hardware-wise, just a regular Mini-PC. Valve even lets you put whatever OS you want on there. So if this was a loss leader, that would mean that non-gamers and even small businesses would buy these, would install Windows on them and use them as office PCs, with Steam probably not even installed on the PC.
With the Steam Deck, the form factor made it impractical or at least really weird to use them as office PCs. The steam machine doesn’t have that issue.
You’re 100% correct at a sane company. At my employer the hardware team is incentivised to cut costs and impacts to productivity are someon else’s problem. Corporate metrics lead to some pretty hilarious situations.
This happens so often. The new version of the framework our frontend developers use has massive performance problems, which meant that our FE devs couldn’t test their changes locally, they had to upload a release to the cloud to test every single change. That reduces productivity to close to 0. A developer isn’t cheap, so you’d think the company would be quick to issue macbooks that we are also allowed to have so that they can work again.
Nope, it took 3 months for our manager to convince the helpdesk that they can get macbooks. Helpdesk originally said they’d have to wait for 2 years for the scheduled replacement of the laptops.
Was it confirmed that you can install Windows? The video said software, I don’t remember that you could install any operating system. It comes with an Arch Linux.
OSX has several things going for it, primarily, it’s got the clowns at apple running the show, thus, it has a bunch of “natural” interface bullshit that only make sense if you intend to live like a caveman and not understand that computers can function differently to physical objects.
On top of that, they pushed themselves as an “alternative” to windows back when they were even more corporate than fucking Microsoft, while blaring out the ignorant ass ipod adverts whose goal was to make the user into consumers making computing choices based on fashion. The iphone and it’s money gated, walled garden BS was just the cherry on top.
If you wanted a fucking alternative to microsoft, linux has been there for you all along instead of the “worse but shinier” osx, which mac served to just overshadow with its increased advertising budget and psychotic CEO.
And I mean that literally, Steve Jobs was actually fucking insane and a horrible person. From firing people at random, to abandoning his kids, to stealing livers and trying to cure his cancer with smoothies.
Also, it’s basically open/free BSD with more propriety bullshit on it than you can shake a stick at.
I don’t know how anyone can use Windows after 7.
Yeah, windows 8 , 10 and 11 are toxic shitholes. You know what macs did before windows started begging you to log in and create microsoft accounts? Force you to have Icloud or whatever the fuck it is accounts. You know how I know? My work laptops suck ass and forces me to have mac accounts, and is complaining that it can’t sync HEALTH DATA. MY WORK LAPTOP WANTS TO SYNC HEALTH DATA.
Apple blew the doors off for enshittification. They primed the fucking pump, and now microsoft and google are following through the door, you guys are like “yeah, putting osx on a steam box would be cool” fucking no. Ew.
It seems like you’re too emotionally invested to have a normal conversation like a person.
Health is an app you can delete. It’s not forcing you to do anything. You don’t even need iCloud for anything. You don’t even have to use their walled garden App Store. I know because I download and install shit from the internet all the time.
Yes, it’s free/bsd based. Who cares? I just want it to work and the chassis and build quality on the laptops are excellent.
It seems like you’re too emotionally invested to have a normal conversation like a person.
My bad for having opinions. Sorry. /s
Health is an app you can delete. It’s not forcing you to do anything. You don’t even need iCloud for anything. You don’t even have to use their walled garden App Store. I know because I download and install shit from the internet all the time.
I found an answer on the Steam Machine page: Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it’s still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?
It’d be interesting seeing Microsoft in a position where the vendor isn’t automatically making their drivers for them. It’s a massive advantage they have.
This part’s basically guaranteed, yeah. But there’s a secondhand market and also surely some scalping companies saw the Deck launch and went yknow what? It doesn’t cost us much in the long run to make a few hundred Steam accounts now and buy some $0.10 team fortress hat on them just in case Valve does the incredibly predictable thing of releasing more desirable hardware.
Lol this reminds me of that time the US Air Force built a giant compute cluster using PlayStation 3s. Idk if Sony sold those at a loss, but they certainly didn’t see any game purchases coming from the US Department of Defense
Exactly, but I don’t see anything keeping them from selling the Frame at a loss or tight margin. What else are you going to use that with but Steam games?
Even the Steam Controller is useless without Steam Input, but I’d argue it won’t necessarily sell more games. Maybe they could include it with the Steam Machine for “free” to bump the price of the machine up enough to not make sense for a company, but still sell it at a tight margin to sell more games.
Why would they sell any hardware at a loss at all? Console manufacturers do it to lock people into their ecosystem and sell them games at a premium, Valve doesn’t need that, people are already overwhelmingly favoring their store.
The same reason people go into debt for a burrito. It’s easier for people to justify a smaller cost now, and valve will make than money back later with extra games sold, especially in the case of the Frame.
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