I choose to try not to pirate, and thus this kinda thing absolutely pisses me off because this is so disingenuous, because I dig into the nitty gritty of how to do all this stuff legit.
Randomizers alone make Nintendo games in particular so much more alive, and all but require the use of ripping software and quite often emulators.
These emulators can make even current titles look even more beautiful and play more smoothly than their native platform, too.
Yeah, people are going to pirate using this stuff, but its wrong to treating the tools themselves as being inherently bad. They are quite often used by people who care very much about these games, and do give fair financial support to Nintendo.
The reason is the cash shop of course. I know, it’s cheap and fair compared to every other live services, but it still limits your play to be online only.
We can only hope the game does an Avengers when it closes down and patches offline play, but we can’t trust these companies.
But it’s your hardware doing this? Are 3D-headphones illegal then, because of the massive benefit to aurally locating your enemy? Are hall-effect analogue keyboards illegal, due to the configurable much much shorter actuation distance? Etc, etc. Once it’s in hardware, it is a really interesting discussion where you place the cut-off.
You can’t even go "Once it has to actually know which game you’re playing, as profiles already work similar in gaming drivers, plus importantly most 3D audio is per-game optimized.
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And come to think of it, DLSS or FSR are also AI-powered frame-per-frame image analysis to add output to the existing image.
There really isn’t a complicated discussion to be had unless you needlessly complicate things. There’s a big difference between having, say, better monitor or headphones in terms of resolution or sound quality vs having a monitor or headphones that add extra features.
It’s like saying that AR glasses that visualize a ball’s trajectory should be allowed in tennis or football because players can already invest in better rackets or shoes.
The detection problem is not unsolvable. First, you can forbid people that are using that monitor from matchmaking. You can find your monitor’s model number using software so that would be trivial. For a more nuanced approach, you can examine players’ reaction times and ban people that got too good too fast.
There are plenty of EDID blockers and emulators already on the market. Unfortunately, no, “find[ing] […] the monitor’s model number” is not as trivial as you may think, if somebody really wants to evade. It is quite trivial nowadays to spoof the EDID in hardware, without the software able to do anything.
I think the difference is that hardware, like a 144 hz monitor, isn’t really making you better at the game, it’s just that what you had before was making you worse. If you get a 144 hz monitor and your aiming gets better, that’s not because the monitor made you better but because the 60 hz monitor, you had before, was holding you down.
One of the best games I've played in recent memory, even during EA. Extremely polished and well designed, it's worth every cent and if this doesn't convince you I think it still has a free demo you can try.
They have been amazing in terms of updates - regular meaningful updates every 2 weeks, it was amazing to see the game evolve so fast. I hope it means they just had a really good codebase and established workflow rather than they were crunching though.
Whenever a company wants to drop X workers, the first Y people of that have to be the C-suites, and they cannot get a parachute. They leave just on the last pay they received regularly, no bonuses or anything.
Oh course, and I’m half joking. But something has to be done about execs stuffing their own arse full with all the bank notes they get from mass layoffs, when that money could easily keep some of those workers employed.
Oh no, the buffoons who mismanaged the company so badly that scores of people are laid off have to be fired! Now who will fuck things up while making off with tons of cash?
They went downhill since Morrowind… it was their last game that managed to capture players on its own merits, with zero mods.
People forget that Bethesda used to be a sports and arcade game developer back in the day and that Elder Scrolls was very much uncharacteristic for them. They tried and made some interesting things for a while but once they hit mainstream they never went back to the interesting stuff. It also means I don’t think we’ll see an ES6 game worth talking about.
I actually started with Skyrim:SE, had a super silent heavy armor mage and loved it, then I made something and destroyed my save file;
[overexaggeration ahead]: A week later I was riding on a unicorn as Waluigi through a HelloKitty cave, throwing spells of NSWF towards everything. Fun times.
Morrowind was excellent, but I don’t think knocking oblivion out is totally fair. Especially when you add the expansions sans horse armor dlc. Martin Septum frowns upon you.
Kind of similar story of ancient gaming tragedy, I was a young lad going for 100% in FFVII, and after spending however many hours getting everything ready, I saved right by Emerald Weapon, deciding to tackle him right after school the next day. Aaaaand then I came back to everything on the memory card being gone due to some dumb glitch. Still never beat Emerald Weapon.
I loved Secret of Mana and on several playthroughs, the hardest boss, for me, has always been that damn tiger in the witch’s castle. When it zig-zagged like a spike ball, the chances of getting wiped were huge. One hit = unconscious.
Before the Internet got social media, we had the GameFAQs voting thing; you’d get head to head popularity contests of coolest characters. Cloud always won, but it was nice to check daily to see who was most popular.
I still use GameFAQs, though. Even after the buyout, the guides are important to those of us RetroAchevement-ing through some older titles.
If you take a look at all the loot box mechanics out there honestly theirs is the least bad. STILL BAD and shouldn’t be a thing, but they’re way less in-your-face and also you can sell the boxes that you get for free just by playing and use that to buy games.
I’m not defending lootboxes but I will defend history. They weren’t the first one. The physical implementation of the same concept has been around for decades (gatchapon in the east, baseball cards in the west), the first digital implementation was in Maplestory about half a decade before Valve and the first implementation in a western game was in FIFA (whichever it was that contained the ultimate team) about a year before Valve made their implementation.
There’s plenty of blame to throw at Valve, but some of the lootbox blame, namely the one you’ve brought up, should be thrown at EA because EA was first in the western market and the industry would’ve gone down the lootbox route even if Valve hadn’t done anything.
In Western regions (North America and Europe) around 2009, the video game industry saw the success of Zynga and other large publishers of social-network games that offered the games for free on sites like Facebook but included microtransactions to accelerate one's progress in the game, providing that publishers could depend on revenue from post-sale transactions rather than initial sale.[23] One of the first games to introduce loot box-like mechanics was FIFA 09, made by Electronic Arts (EA), in March 2009 which allowed players to create a team of association football players from in-game card packs they opened using in-game currency earned through regular playing of the game or via microtransactions.[26] Another early game with loot box mechanics was Team Fortress 2 in September 2010, when Valve added the ability to earn random "crates" to be opened with purchased keys.[13] Valve's Robin Walker stated that the intent was to create "network effects" that would draw more players to the game, so that there would be more players to obtain revenue from the keys to unlock crates.[23] Valve later transitioned to a free-to-play model, reporting an increase in player count of over 12 times after the transition,[25] and hired Yanis Varoufakis to research virtual economies.[27] Over the next few years many MMOs and multiplayer online battle arena games (MOBAs) also transitioned to a free-to-play business model to help grow out their player base, many adding loot-box monetisation in the process,[25][28] with the first two being both Star Trek Online[29] and The Lord of the Rings Online[citation needed] in December 2011.
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