This is the first game to truly solve the problem of “criminal investigation” as a game mechanic. There’s no detective vision, and the character doesn’t automatically spout off conclusions when you scan enough clues. When you find a fingerprint on the murder weapon, it’s just that; a fingerprint. It’s up to you to figure out how to connect that to a suspect. You have to actually think about what you’re doing, there’s no handholding. You can peruse security cameras footage, canvas for witnesses, follow leads that will dead end sometimes, stake out a person’s home or job, track down the sales records for a murder weapon, identify a suspect by their footprints… The array of tools at your disposal is incredible. And the murder board is just the best thing ever; you even get to scribble your own notes and make connections with different colours of string, and it’s not some game mechanic, it’s literally just a tool for you to assemble the evidence like a real detective would, so that you can figure out your next move.
I wish talking to people wasn’t all the same canned question/responses. Trying to find witnesses is basically impossible. And security systems turning themself back on after set amount of time. Only two big issues I have with the game
You hit the nail on the head. This is exactly what intregued me about this game. It’s giving the creative and intellectual freedom to solve the mysteries, with no handholding was very refreshing.
Disclosure: i havent played in a few months so some of these might be out of date.
My biggest complaint was it almost always just devolved into sneaking into buildings to get employee data of the suspect which leads you to a fingerprint. There was no deduction through questioning the suspect, figuring out a motive and then tying it all together. Just find the name of the suspect, then find the fingerprints (by sneaking into buildings) of every single individual they had contact with until you find a match. I felt more like a vigilante thief than a detective. I guess LA Noire (i know, one is rockstar’s baby and the other’s an indie title, but still) remains the best detective game for now.
I’m excited to play this game on my Xbox, I’ve watched a few videos on Shadows of Doubt! The mysteries feel so organic and interconnected; as the game seems to weave a large web of intrigue the longer you play.
I had a fun time playing in early access, even with the bugs. I should check it out again when it hits 1.0. I recall generating a new location and immediately falling through the ground to my death and deciding i would wait a bit to play more.
I am going to bang on so many apartment doors until the old lady that lives inside doddles over to answer and when I hear the key rattling in that lock I will flying kick that door off the hinges, blasting her unconscious, so thar I can take everything out of her wallet and her safe.
What was that? Is she a suspect? …Suspect in what? Hey did you see my cool apartment? I can afford a new sofa now!
Boy, it was frustrating to see Thor completely misrepresent the position of the campaign. It wasn’t “vague enough to also include live service games”; it purposely includes them.
Yeah, that’s why he says it’s stupid. It seems like he’s fine with the idea of removing DRM that makes single player games unplayable but forcing devs to make online multiplayer games playable forever is ridiculous.
My position is it’s ridiculous. I agree with Thor. Saying all games must exist forever is too vague because I don’t think all games should be forced to exist forever.
You sold someone some code that you then rendered inoperable by actions beyond their control; that’s what you’d get in trouble for. Delete your own code all you like.
If you sell someone a game that relies on a server you own, and did not advertise clearly that you were selling a service, not a good (something you own), and then break that product for the customer without any possibility of them repairing their good, and you delete the code that could’ve fixed it, you’d be sorta commiting fraud.
If you abandon a product that was sold as a good, and it became inoperable due to forces unrelated to you, you’d be in the clear.
Right, so an MMO charging a monthly fee shouldn’t need to make their game available to everyone if they stop charging people the fee and shut it down? Because that’s what I think too.
A few things. People use MMOs as an example of a thing that cannot be run by users, and the FAQ calls out that this is demonstrably false. Second, there’s the idea of a good and a service, and games have been happy to blur this line over the past decade and change. When you pay a monthly subscription fee, there’s no question that you’re paying for a service; your service ends when that month is up. The problem comes from selling you things as though they’re goods but then revoking access to them at some unknown time in the future as though it were a service or lease that you had no idea when it would expire. So this campaign also demands that if you’re selling microtransactions like a cosmetic mount in an MMO, you need to be able to use that mount after the servers are no longer supported, and as we’ve already proven, it is definitely actually possible for ordinary people to run MMO servers, even if they’re hosting them for a few hundred or a few thousand people rather than hundreds of thousands or millions.
The question on the FAQ is asking if it’s possible, which it is. But in his big video on this topic, he says that subscription based MMOs really don’t count (even if he’d like it to).
I agree with that. That’s what I meant in my original comment that applying this to all games is ridiculous. Subscription based MMOs are a game but this initiative shouldn’t apply to them.
I’m being specific because this is being intended as a law everyone must follow. “All games need to be available forever” is very vague. How will this vague law be applied in practice? People brought up the idea of eternal code preservation. Alright. How does that work?
I’m not picking a fight. I want supporters to explain in vivid detail their expectations because it’s clear not even all the supporters agree on how it would be implemented. Some said it doesn’t apply to MMOs. Some said it does. It needs to be one or the other. That’s not being pedantic, it’s being realistic.
What the petition says is what it’s asking for. What we want may be different. What European parliament drafts, if we’re so lucky, will be what’s actually the law. The concerns in the petition are quite clearly about how this applies to EU consumer protections, and many of us are interested in that plus the bonus that this will grant to preservation by proxy.
A game's code can be submitted to a repository on release to the public to be stored for the sake of preservation. The repository can always be made access on a case by case basis, thus preventing the loss of code and culture while also protecting the IP holder's rights
And every single game dev would be required to do this for the thousands of games released every year? Who would host this massive repository? Who would determine access on a case by case basis? It’s a nice suggestion but mandating this as a law everyone has to follow? Why? I thought this was about consumer protection
Is that repository required by law? Is every author and director required to follow it or be punished? What if an author only publishes it on their website and then takes the website down and it never makes it to the archive are they in trouble? It’s a nice thing, but mandating it as law is ridiculous.
Any company that isn’t completely incompetent has some revision control solution like GitHub. It saves the original and all the changes throughout the life of the code. It’s designed specifically to allow developers to update or even delete code while still maintaining records
An indie dev recently lost the source code to their early access game and had to remove it from Steam. If this law was in place, what punishment would they face for their incompetence? It would be rare for a massive company to not have source control, but it probably isn’t uncommon for small first time devs. So now you have a well intentioned law putting regulations in place that hurt small devs and raise the barrier to entry.
Well, it wouldn’t be retroactive. As a consumer, I don’t think it’s ridiculous to know what I’m buying. If anything, this petition is way softer than my stance. As per this petition, you could get around doing the honest thing of providing the customers the ability to host the servers themselves by just clearly informing the customer at the point of sale how long services will be up for, if you truly want to try to convince people that it’s a service and not a product that they just made worse for business reasons. But they don’t want to do that, because then they can’t sucker people into buying something that isn’t long for this world.
Per the official Stop Killing Games FAQ: www.stopkillinggames.com/faq(apologies if formatting ends up looking weird)
Q: Aren’t you asking companies to support games forever? Isn’t that unrealistic?
A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way. Additionally, there are already real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way, such as:
‘Gran Turismo Sport’ published by Sony ‘Knockout City’ published by Velan Studios ‘Mega Man X DiVE’ published by Capcom ‘Scrolls / Caller’s Bane’ published by Mojang AB ‘Duelyst’ published by Bandai Namco Entertainment etc.
That’s fine for single player games but modifying some massive MMO so that someone can host it on a laptop is literally impossible. This language applies to everything. EVE Online, WoW, FFXIV, all of it would need to be able to run on someone’s home computer when they’re purposefully built from the ground up to work on massive servers?
The difference between a home server and a larger business server is simply the scale of how many players it can host at once.
WoW’s server binary was reverse engineered by fans, and a large ecosystem of privately run WoW servers that players can connect to exist at this very moment.
Private servers running older vanilla versions of wow became so popular, blizzard then created their own vanilla wow server to get in on the action.
It’s not impossible at all. People have done this literally for decades. Classic WoW only exists because people hosted their own seevers and Blizzard wanted in on the money. Star Wars Galaxies the same. I think Everquest 1 as well. And probably others as well.
Because they can be sued for that. Have been sued for that. And while it is possible to reverse engineer this stuff it is incredibly hard to do. So games with smaller fanbases might lack the manpower to achieve it. Or the game was made in such a way as to make reverse engineering impossible.
I don’t think there’s any language in this petition that says it must be hosted on a laptop. The server binary, with a reasonable expectation that someone with documentation, the hardware, and the know-how to use it, would be enough.
If a big MMO closes that’d be rough, but those types of games tend to form communities anyways like Minecraft. You don’t have to pay Microsoft a monthly rate to host a Java server for you and a few friends, you just have to have a little bit of IT knowledge and maybe a helper package to get you and your friends going. It’s still a single binary, even if it doesn’t run on a laptop well for larger settings.
With a big MMO, there will form support groups and turnkey scripts to get stuff working as well as it can be, and forums online for finding existing open community servers by people who have the hardware and knowledge to host a few dozen to a few hundred of their closest friends online.
Life finds a way.
If it’s a complicated multi-node package where you need stuff to be split up better as gateway/world/area/instance, the community servers that will form may tend towards larger player groups, since the knowledge and resource to do that is more specific.
God, finally someone with common sense. The devs do not need to change the software for you to host a server in your 10 year old ThinkPad, they just need to make the software available. It’s not up to them to figure out HOW you are going to host the game’s server, they just need to make it POSSIBLE.
Not a fair comparison. The private servers were written with the small hosting in mind. They would very likely never scale to what Blizzard has in place. For all I know, Blizzard could run their stuff on a Mainframe with specific platform optimizations against an IBM DB2.
But I also don’t think this has to be transferable to a local setup without effort either. Once they release the source, people can refactor or reengineer it to run on smaller scale, replace proprietary databases with free ones, etc.
You found the point. It’s not about having it scale to the level the official servers are at. It’s about preserving it in some fashion, so that the dedicated few can still experience it. We don’t need thousands, we need a few dozen. And, if developers develop with this design philosophy - that eventually the game servers will be shut down and we have to release a hostable version at end of life, then the games can be written from the ground up with that implementation in mind.
Such an architecture is typically shit. Building a system that is simple AND scales high won’t work. Complexity usually gets added to cope with scale. If we don’t allow companies to build scalable (i.e. complex) systems, we simply won’t get such games anymore.
Again: I am completely in favor of forcing devs to release everything necessary to host it. I am not in favor of forcing devs to target home machines for their servers, when their servers clearly have completely different requirements. That’s unrealistic.
Its not said that they need devs to target home machines, it says they need to give the resources so people can host it themselves, period.
Also, tell me you’ve never worked with scalable infrastructure without telling me you have never worked with it.
There are dozens, if not hundreds of games, including MMOs, that are privated hosted, and by that I don’t mean hosted in a basement potato.
Look at Ragnarok servers, there are hundreds of them, DEDICATED servers, with all the newest technology, for an old game nonetheless.
Have you ever seem how massive the infrastructure are for those big minecraft multi-servers? Thousands and thousands of concurrent players.
Im not asking you to research what you’re talking about or anything, but if you clearly dont know what you’re talking about, refrain from sharing your opinion so you may not negatively influence a similar minded person.
Its not said that they need devs to target home machines, it says they need to give the resources so people can host it themselves, period.
Before attacking me with such an arrogant rant, maybe read what I wrote.
I said:
Once they release the source, people can refactor or reengineer it to run on smaller scale, replace proprietary databases with free ones, etc.
So of course it’s about releasing anything (!) at all.
I simply said that you can’t compare a small fan project like a WoW self hosted server with Blizzards infrastructure and the requirements to have a high available setup for millions of players.
ArenaNet is quite open about their infrastructure and you can see that this is far from trivial, but also allows them to have zero downtime updates. That is a huge feat, but also means that self hosting that thing will be a pain in the ass. Yet I would not want them to not do this just so it could be easily (!) self hosted some time in the distant future.
FFXIV has headed in the opposite direction of your claim. They’ve recently been making a lot of changes to major story dungeons so that the experience relies as little as possible on online communities. Right now, playing requires a subscription. It’s more and more believable to see that requirement removed if the game was somehow dead and that ‘had’ to happen.
Many consider games to be works of art in the same way that music, books, movies, and paintings are. In the same way that historians use the creative works of yesteryear to guage how people during events like World War I, historians of tomorrow need access to games to study the events of our lifetimes.
Book burnings have occurred throughout history and they have been devastating, but many works can still be studied because other copies exist elsewhere. The problem with games is that they’re deliberately designed to self-destruct. Historians 50 years down the line can’t study Fortnite’s mechanics or its evolution because as soon as a new update releases, the servers for the previous chapter of the game are gone. Even if we wanted to preserve just the final release, we can’t because it is far easier for Epic Games to hide or throw away the server source code rather than properly archive it when they inevitably kill the game. This is a huge deal because Fortnite has genuinely had an impact on our culture, for better or worse. Even if it didn’t, it is a technical feat to get a game like that to work well, and programmers need to be able to study the game after the industry inevitably moves on.
To be clear, companies shouldn’t need to maintain their games and software forever. However, there is simply no way to play many games because there are no usable servers for them, which is entirely unacceptable. The initiative simply wants us to be in a world where someone can put in a reasonable amount of effort to play abandoned games, and I don’t think that’s a huge ask.
Only if you think the campaign means that companies must pay for the multiplayer servers forever which Ross has said on MULTIPLE occasions is not reasonable and not what he wants.
Giving players the tools to host their own servers or adding LAN functionality, though? That’s entirely reasonable seeing as that’s how multiplayer always used to work. I mean, there are still plenty of Unreal Tournament servers active today without any involvement from the developer in decades.
Especially since, if this initiative works, developers will make games with that functionality in mind.
He’s showing his true colors here. either doubling down so his initial reaction doesn’t make him seem foolish, or he really has a soft spot for mega corporations due to his ties with Blizzard.
Ross wrote a response to Thor’s in the comments of this video, but it’s a bit buried. I’ll include Thor’s for context as well:
Thor:
I’m aware of the process for an initiative to be turned into legislature much farther down the road after many edits. If people want me to back it then the technical and monetary hurdles of applying the request need to be included in the conversation. As written this initiative would put a massive undue burden on developers both in AAA and Indie to the extent of killing off Live Service games. It’s entirely too vague on what the problem is and currently opens a conversation that causes more problems instead of fixing the one it wants to.
If we want to hit the niche and terrible business practice of incorrectly advertising live service games or always online single player only games then call that out directly. Not just “videogames” as stated in the initiative. Specifically call out the practice we want to shut down. It’s a much more correct conversation to have, defeats the actual issue, and stops all this splash damage that I can’t agree with.
Ross’s response:
@PirateSoftware I actually wasn’t planning to write to you further since you said you didn’t want to talk about it with me and I’ll still respect that if you’d like. But since you brought up what I said again I’ll at least give my side of that then leave you alone:
I’m 100% cynical, I can’t turn it off. I wasn’t trying to appeal to legislators when I said that, I doubt they’ll even watch my videos. I was trying to appeal to people who are are kind of doomer and think this is hopeless from the get-go. I wanted to lay out the landscape as I view it that this could actually work where many initiatives have failed. Did it backfire more than it inspired people? I have no idea. I’ve said before I don’t think I’m the ideal person to lead this, stuff like this is part of why I say that; I can’t just go Polyanna on people and pretend like there aren’t huge obstacles and these are normally rough odds, so that was meant as inspirational. You clearly weren’t the target audience, but you’re in complete opposition to the movement also.
I’m literally not a part of the initiative in any official capacity. I won’t be the one talking to officials in Brussels if this passes. The ECI could completely distance itself from me if that was necessary.
In my eyes, what I was doing there was the equivalent of forecasting the weather. You think it’s manipulation, but I don’t control the weather. I can choose when I fly a kite based on my forecast however.
It was also kind of half-joke on the absurdity of the system we’re in that I consider these critical factors that determine our success or not. So yes, I meant what I said, but I also acknowledge it’s kind of ludicrous that these are perhaps highly relevant factors towards getting anything done in a democracy.
Anyway, I got the impression this whole issue was kind of thrust upon you by your fans, you clearly hate the initiative, so as far as I’m concerned people should stop bothering you about it since you don’t like it.
How is it vague? If I buy a game, it should be playable for all eternity. Just like how I can pop in Super Mario on NES and play it just like how it was in the 80s.
Or how I can still play Half Life deathmatch more than 25 years after its release.
I’m aware that exists. But the experience of an MMO on a community server must be pretty different (but I don’t know).
If the desire is to not lose the experience after the company shutters the project, I’m not really sure that’s possible. Maybe it is for WoW. But I can certainly imagine a game like Pokemon Go or something being developed by an indie dev that works by orchestrating live real-time events depending on players locations. Would this game even be allowed in the EU following this law? They can’t allow users personal locations to be released, they can’t create a game they can’t eventually fully release to the public. Even if they found a way to strip out users locations, the experience would be completely broken. So what’s the answer? Just don’t innovate in that space?
I don’t think the intent is to maintain the exact original experience forever and after. It’s to ensure it’s possible to play the game at all even if the developer shuts down their servers.
It’s becoming more and more common that games stop functioning completely when the developers no longer want to support the game anymore - even games that are perfectly playable single player.
Yeah I agree with the single player bit. And even multiplayer if it’s as simple as releasing the server app. But I think Thor’s point and what’s being debated here is that live service games often aren’t like that. So why is this law seemingly including them?
If you don’t like live service games and don’t feel like they should exist, then don’t buy them. I can see some legislation around clear marketing. But if people want to pay for an ephemeral service, that’s up to the consumer.
The answer is to allow people to host it themselves. If you’ve got a Discord server and people who want to experience a game with you, you could get 40 people together to do a WoW raid long after it stopped being profitable for Blizzard. In a case like Pokemon Go, either that stuff is determined algorithmically or there’s a game master with their finger on the button to trigger the event; users could run that too.
I agree. Louis brought a good point when he talked about Gran Turismo licensed content (like Ferrari cars and etc), that some companies have licenses that will expire for content in the game. But you know what? THAT’S NOT MY FUCKING PROBLEM. You buy a game, you should be able to run it until the end of time.
First of all which kinds of games it applies to. It obviously can’t work for games that have a technical server requirement, … world of warcraft, but actually EVE online. The guys who run that game, get experimental hardware that’s usually military only (or at least they did in the past). The server is not something, you could run even if you wanted to. Drawing the legal boundary between what “could be” single player offline (e.g. the crew, far cry, hitman), wasn’t done.
It’s not clear how it should apply to in terms of company scale. The new messenger legislation that was passed, made space for the EU parliament / system to declare and name, individually, who counts as a company that is is big enough, so that they have to open their messenger system to others for interoperability. It’s not clear if the law has to apply to everyone, and every game, or just e.g. companies above 20 million revenue or something.
It’s not clear what happens if a company goes bankrupt, and the system isn’t immediately ready to keep working.
And a few more.
That being said, I think Thor’s stance on this is silly. All of that is part of the discussion that is now starting. He could raise good points and get them included, but I guess that’s not happening.
He’s showing his true colors here. either doubling down so his initial reaction doesn’t make him seem foolish, or he really has a soft spot for mega corporations due to his ties with Blizzard.
I don’t think he have any soft spot for mega corp, is just online figures/influencers can’t never be wrong type of thing.
If we want to hit the niche and terrible business practice of incorrectly advertising live service games or always online single player only games then call that out directly. Not just "videogames" as stated in the initiative.
Spoken like an idealist. Video games is probably the biggest thing that will gain traction. Sure, it would be great to tackle the entire issue, but the people making this initiative aren't using other software that does that shit. Saying "care about all the people" dilutes the issue.
… to the extent of killing off live service games.
I mean… Nothing of value was lost? In my opinion, so far, the only decent live service game to have ever come out is still Warframe. Everything else that cane after is either a pale imitation or straight up cow milking garbage.
We could certainly do with a lot less “live service”.
Honestly him calling Ross a “greasy used car salesman” really hurt to see. I didn’t take Thor as the type to insult someone like that simply for disagreeing with him.
Kind of makes me wonder if his whole nice guy thing is an act. Either way it calls into question the person I assumed he was.
It was on stream, so hopefully someone recorded it and uploads it.
In this video though, at the very end, this guy shows another clip that I haven’t been able to find of Thor reacting to one of Ross’ comments and… well I can’t think of a better word than melting down tbh.
The article says nothing of the sort. They didn't phase it out. The article was released before the game officially was. It does actually say this though:
The danger for any game is simply that people stop playing, so the team focused on retention and on listening to feedback from the community to make Splitgate a “forever game” that can go years, with “seasons,” new features and maps, and so on.
Splitgate became a 2-3 month game, not a forever game. The game only had 1,600 players on Steam when it officially released, there wasn't even a spike in players on that day. It had one spike on 8th August 2021 of 67,000. The developers fumbled with their "lightning in a bottle" as they say in that article.
They are making a new one because it failed to retain the interest of the audience and the $100M from investors has to be made back, are they just gonna keep making new Splitgate's and pray on hype to sell as many skins as they can in such short amounts of time?
I found the puzzles refreshing in CrossCode. It was nice having a game that actually had the guts of challenging your wits, instead of spoiling all your fun with the characters telling the solution before you even manage to look at the damn puzzle. They were my favourite aspect of the game for sure.
A bit sad they decided to tone down on that aspect, but hopefully they’ll strike a balance that makes both of us happy.
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