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sp3ctr4l, 5 dni temu (edited 5 dni temu) do gaming w Killed the greatest gamer initiative out there for content

Just to correct the record on this more reasonably sized dose of surprisingly overt strawmanning, I don’t think it’s impossible for an end user to run a dedicated server.

Well then maybe you should have actually said that.

The way Scott presents the argument, even acknowledging that he argues that server code may need a dedicated server beyond the capabilities of end users, is just not feasible.

If you wanna say things that are, you know technical, complicated… maybe… do that?

But ok so you wanna be more technical now, let’s see.

I think it’s not feasible to require a version of a modern persistent game server infrastructure, from login to matchmaking to data storage, to be converted or provided to be run or financed by end users.

Ok, well, you are just objectively wrong on all of your clauses there.

Dedicated enthusiasts can and do build home servers, all the time.

People have been emulating and running long officially dead MMOs for almost 20 years.

Login, matchmaking, storage… yep, all of that stuff still works. Sometimes you have to figure out a bit of a workaround, or run your own little side shunt thing as I described via example of Battlefield 1942 in my post you didn’t read.

These days, its easier and cheaper than ever to just rent a virtual server to host… literally whatever you want.

The only real problem that would occur is if say, OverWatch 2 suddenly died… and… a group of enthusiastic OW2 players wanted to be able to support the entire current playerbase.

Yeah, that indeed would likely be unfeasible.

But uh… all you have to do is meet the base requirements for the server binary, the now incredibly cheap compared to 10, 20 years ago storage requirements for the base system… and then you scale up to meet the actual traffic from the number of regular players you want to be able to support.

Theoretically, you could set up a nonprofit to legally finance scaling up to huge player counts, and have a subscription to this nonprofit server provider…

Or you could just have many, many, smaller independent post EoL, enthusiast servers, capable of more or less doing it out of an informal amount of charity.

The fixed costs of standing up a server are almost always so small as to be manageable by one or a few people.

The variable cost, where things can really get expensive… is from scaling up massively.

But you don’t have to do that.

Especially not in a way that still allows pre-existing commercial clients to run normally.

TitanFall 2 has been dead for a decade. No more official servers.

Its got a community made custom launcher that hooks into the community modified servers they run.

Game is literally exactly the same.

You can go play this right now, if you have a legit copy of TitanFall2.

Basically its the same withing with StarWars Galaxies, to just give two examples right off the top of my head.

I mean, for one thing, would you be running one instance or several?

Could be either, depends on what the EoL game wants to do for its final shutdown server release.

Probably it would be much, much easier to both the business and enthusiast post EoL server operators to set things up for many smaller, distinct, divergent individual instances, instead of designing a lemmy like federation system.

You know, how like every major MMO ever basically has different realms or shards or whatever? Welp, now instead of 8 or 16 or 32… theres 456 smaller ones.

Who’s handling how to point the client at the right place?

Ideally this would be a very simple and minor patch to the client to enable this right before EoL, but as with examples I’ve already given, you can wrap the game in your own launcher, essentially ‘hijacking’ it in some sense, to be able to override the now defunct, default server address, and also include a server browser in that launcher.

Then, you have that custom community launcher open source, so everyone can verify it isn’t malware.

But, there are many other possible methods and variations on this that are very specific to each exact game, that will or could work, even if the business doesn’t bother to do a final patch on the EoL client.

Who’s responsible for the legal obligations regarding data storage and personal information?

Uh, the people running the servers? The enthusiasts?

Why would they have personal information beyond a UID, login and password for the player?

The business would have to be immensely, catastrophically stupid to not scrub all other PII and financial type information out of the player db before they made a EoL final release version of it available.

How do you handle monetization hooks in games where scarcity is baked into the design?

Well there’s many possible ways you could do this.

One would be… the business just rips em out, disables them entirely on EoL release.

Yep, that’d break shitty pay to win games that were designed with so much scarcity that obtaining game currency or items through gameplay alone is uh… unfeasible.

Or, you could, just quickly modify the giant basically ini file that describes all the loot drop rates for getting things in game by… 10, 100, 1000, whatever, or let the enthusiast server operators modify these drop rates on their own.

Or maybe its something like cosmetics you would normally have to pay real money for? They’re all free now, woohoo! Just put in a little overide in the ‘checks players real world bank account’ routine to just return TRUE, basically, haha.

There are an astounding number of ways this could be handled, either by the EoL final patch/release, you could just basically rip all that out, make everyone have as much of it as they want, or give the enthusiast post EoL server admins some gui or cli access to the already existing code in the server system to allow them to do a more fine tuned and tweaking approach to this… maybe everyone just gets an automatic allowance of whatever $50 real world dollars translates into in the game currency(ies) every month, who knows.

All you have to do is say ok enthusiast server admins, you are NOT allowed to make money off of our compiled binary we are releasing to you, you have no right to do that, and we will sue you into oblivion if we think we can prove you are.

Existing computer laws and liscenses already very well cover companies going after people who decompile their proprietary code and make money off of it.

Whatever, the technicalities have been deliberated…

Yes, now they have. I made many of these points I made here, and more, in my post you didn’t read, so, uh yeah, kind of a one sided discussion here with a person who’s already made up their mind, yeah.

IronKrill, 6 dni temu do games w Hytale, once touted as the Minecraft killer, is ceasing development

I’m disappointed, but not surprised… I have followed since the first announcement and gave up hope around 2020. Every dev update was “we made 1 step forward and 5 back” with no real substance to show for it.

Assuming the trailers are real gameplay though, it looks like they could have and should have released an alpha years ago. Not sure how they thought it wouldn’t work as Minecraft released in pre-alpha and it worked out in the end. A shame we’ll probably never see the code or even a compiled build from all these people’s work.

Glide, 9 dni temu do games w Monster Hunter Wilds game reviews hit "Overwhelmingly Negative" on Steam — can Capcom turn it around?

I’m famously a World hater, so yes, absolutely. Until Icebourne released, I was extremely disappointed with World, even for a pre-G Rank release.

Though, all of the titles since Generations have had the problem of being released with a portion of the planned content missing. I was more forgiving of it before, though I am having a hard time pinpointing why.

Bigfishbest, 9 dni temu do games w Monster Hunter Wilds game reviews hit "Overwhelmingly Negative" on Steam — can Capcom turn it around?

Cause stupid people buy games on pre release and there’s apparently a lot of them.

squaresinger, 10 dni temu do games w Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games”

So, when I mention the Assassin’s Creed / Far Cry / GTA triangle I really mean to say the poor imitators of those games.

That only happened in the 2010s. That’s when the Ubisoft formula really took off. Assassin’s Creed 1 was only released in 2007, Far Cry 2 in 2008 (FC1 was a quite different game). GTA also only started to get imitated in the 2010s.

Open World in that sense (non-scripted encounters that can be approached from many different angles, with a “living” world) only became a thing in the late 2000s, precisely because of games like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry 2.

I remember reading a pre-release article about Far Cry 2 in a game magazine, where were all hyped about the many different ways a player could take out an enemy camp, e.g. go in guns blazing, or set a fire that would spread to the camp, or startle wild animals which then would stampede through the camp.

While I do get your point about hand-crafted deterministic enemy placement, it’s just two different kinds of approaches that work for different players.

When you say “dumbed-down”, I understand you mean that the difficulty was too low, is that correct? While some players love or even need punishing difficulty levels, others play for other reasons. (Maybe check out the Bartle taxonomy of player types. It’s a bit outdated, but it shows some of these different reasons quite well.) If you want to just kick back and relax after a hard day of work, punishing difficulty might not be the right thing. Some players want to have to learn (or even memorize) levels/bosses/encounters and repeat them repeatedly until they know exactly which button to press when, and that’s fine. For others that’s just tedious busywork, everyone’s different. I quite enjoyed Far Cry 2 and its random encounters and having to adapt to different scenarios all the time.

I haven’t played the rest of the games you list, so I can’t offer an opinion on them, though I have heard that KOTOR was very good.

Forgive me for saying that, but it’s quite harsh to call a whole decade of games uncreative if you haven’t played a lot of the greatest and most creative games of that time.

To get back to the original point:

20 years ago people were complaining about the same lack of creativity in the AAA scene, saying that gaming was better in the 90s. In fact I remember it was a common talking point that AAA gaming had gotten so bad that there would surely be another crash like the one in '83.

That was in the 2010s, not in the 2000s. In the 90s, game development was pretty much completely low-budget, with games rarely having more than 5 programmers on staff, and maybe 5-10 content creators. In the 2000s games started getting bigger, but the studios were still led by game developers, not by finance dudes. Budgets were still not nearly where they are today. Assassins Creed 1, for example, had a budget of $20mio. Compare that to e.g. the $175mio that AC Valhalla cost to make. And AC1 was comparatively expensive back then.

It was only in the 2010s when finance really got into gaming, budgets ballooned and risks were lowered to nothing.

drosophila, 10 dni temu do games w Nier creator Yoko Taro reveals the sad reality of modern AAA game development, “there’s less weird people making games”

I remember reading a pre-release article about Far Cry 2 in a game magazine, where were all hyped about the many different ways a player could take out an enemy camp, e.g. go in guns blazing, or set a fire that would spread to the camp, or startle wild animals which then would stampede through the camp.

So, that’s the thing, that’s interesting emergent gameplay.

Compare that to Just Cause (2006) or Just Cause 2 (2010). It has neat traversal mechanics (paragliding, and in the second one the grappling hook), but it has neither the emergent gameplay of Far Cry or the carefully crafted level design of a less open game.

Or compare Far Cry to Red Faction: Guerrilla. That has cool destructible buildings, but otherwise it just falls within the triangle. In my opinion they didn’t do enough with the building destruction (compare it to how destruction is used in a tactical way in the multiplayer game Rainbow Six Siege, or how its used as the basis for a puzzle game in the indie game Teardown), but the real ugliness of the game design rears its head in the driving missions. I remember being able to flick my mouse back and fourth and see vehicles appear in a space in the split second it was off screen. That wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the fact that these were timed missions, and a vehicle could literally spawn directly in front of you, or directly to your side off camera and plow right into you.

But beyond being really annoying and goofy looking, I have to ask if that sort of system even fit the concept they were going for. The GTA games were satire games, if the spawning system and the wild car chases were a little bit goofy that was part of the joke. And while Red Faction was not the most brutally serious game I’ve ever played, it was one of the most political, especially for the era that it came out. In the first Red Faction you are part of an armed labor uprising very reminiscent of the Battle of Blair Mountain (the workers are miners). In Guerilla you basically fight in a SciFi version of a middle eastern war, on the side of the middle east. So where is this goofiness coming from?

Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent, but I think game design and narrative/themes are intertwined, and IMO this is another instance of taking the open world formula and leaving elements behind while not doing anything to replace them or transform the things you took to make it work in the new context.

When you say “dumbed-down”, I understand you mean that the difficulty was too low, is that correct?

Not really, no. Certainly a lot of people complained about games getting easier and easier, but in regards to Bioshock in particular I mean that its level design and gameplay mechanics were literally more mindless for the player to interact with, conceptually simpler, and less intellectually interesting, than its predecessor System Shock 2. This doesn’t really have anything to do with how mechanically difficult it is to execute an action in either game (although SS2 was more difficult, in a bad way, it was enormously more clunky than Bioshock).

Its kinda hard to explain what I mean by this without writing a giant essay on the game’s designs and the philosophy of the immersive Sim design ethos. The most succinct way I could describe it would be to say that an immersive sim tries to merge an action game and an open ended puzzle game (as in a puzzle game where the player can come up with their own solution) into a seamless whole. Another way to describe is as a game that tries to maximize the potential for emergent gameplay while still having finely crafted encounter design (something that in most games is antithetical to one another). Another way to describe it would be a game that has those sorts of finely designed encounters, but with systems that are intentionally made to be exploitable in a way that many games do on accident. Or in other words the encounters are intentionally made to be cheesed and broken, and and the act of figuring out how to do this was made to be fun, and because of that the games were still usually fun even of you broke them in a way the developers didn’t anticipate.

So, to put it simply Bioshock just did these things much less than its predecessor (the places where it still did was the enemy ecosystem, and to some degree the way you had to plan to take down a Big Daddy). Unless I can dig up some really old YouTube videos you’ll have to take my word for it that there was a sentiment among certain circles, at least in the early 2010s, that was lamenting the death of games like System Shock 2, Thief, Arx Fatalis, and Deus Ex, and Bioshock was held up as an example of that.

At the same time there was a less niche complaint about the death of what we would call “boomer shooters” today. Specifically how they had keys, secrets, and nonlinear levels. The sentiment was that without these elements the player was much less likely to explore of their own volition (not just because its the opposite direction of a waypoint) and think about the level design. Speaking of waypoints I remember the first group of people really complaining that the arrow in Bioshock is even more egregious than waypoints, though IMO the way it encourages you to unthinkingly follow it is actually quite thematic.

Forgive me for saying that, but it’s quite harsh to call a whole decade of games uncreative if you haven’t played a lot of the greatest and most creative games of that time.

I have actually played Portal. I had a section where I mentioned that Valve games were an exception to this sentiment, then I deleted it and forgot when I wrote the last part of my previous comment.

But anyway, I’ll admit that I was really thinking more about the time period from 2005 to 2015.

Crankenstein, 15 dni temu do games w A game you "didn't know it was bad 'til people told you so"?

Indigo Prophecy

Played it when it originally released in the US and I loved it as a pre-teen who had no fucking idea what was happening in the story.

Came to find out no one had any clue what was happening in the story regardless and people thought the game was a mess.

setsneedtofeed, 18 dni temu do games w As The Outer Worlds 2 hits $80, director says "we don't set the prices for our games" and wishes "everybody could play" Obsidian's new RPG

The expectation that it was an open world modern style Fallout game does seem to be a theme among people who didn’t like it. That wasn’t helped by pre-release marketing that emphasized it came from the studio that made New Vegas (despite the writers and game leads all being different).

I went in to the game without expectations and found the structure of the game closer to a classic BioWare RPG. Rather than a single huge open world it was a series of curated hubs to travel between. At those hubs there was space to explore but it was more limited and curated than a full open world. The more curated approach meant that the game could be designed with certain builds in mind since players would interact with certain areas coming from known directions, allowing alternate routes or quest solutions for different builds to be placed.

Accepting it as a hub based RPG that leaned into a specialized build made the game click for me.

malle_yeno, 18 dni temu do games w What people miss about Steam Deck's "loss" to Nintendo

No shame to anyone who bought a switch 2. My partner got one during pre-sales and is incredibly happy to have gotten one, and I feel so happy for him that he gets to have some joy in his life with it. I wish you the same joy.

But I just can’t get into it. I didn’t grow up with nintendo so the properties really don’t mean much to me. And now, I just don’t think I can swallow paying hundreds of dollars to start, then another hundred dollars to get games that seemingly play the same way as they did in the last release, plus a yearly subscription for online play. You may not see what you purchased the same way, and I’m glad that it’s meaningful to you even if I can’t find the same meaning in it – it’s good that there exists something for everyone’s niche.

I don’t see why this needs to be a competition. Are there really people out there who were about to get a steam deck but decided not to in favour of a switch 2? I feel like switch owners are well aware that it’s a Nintendo machine and theyre not gonna be playing a lot of their favourite out-of-franchise games on it. That’s what they expect and thats what they’ll likely get.

Don_alForno, 20 dni temu do games w Asus and Lenovo’s handhelds get price hike as Valve pauses some Steam Deck sales

I genuinely don’t get the “don’t pre order just buy the day it releases” thing.

Nobody ever said the second part.

Don’t pre order, wait for reviews a couple weeks after release, buy if reviews are good and no major bullshit is discovered.

What do you think you’re winning?

Avoiding the major bullshit.

Also, even if you did just buy day one: If developers have a lot of pre orders they know they’ll sell anyway they have less of an incentive to deliver the highest possible quality day one. That’s why people are telling you to not pre order. I could not care less if a stranger struggles with day one bugs, but they are helping to lower the bar for everyone else.

Appoxo, 20 dni temu do games w Asus and Lenovo’s handhelds get price hike as Valve pauses some Steam Deck sales

I genuinely don’t get the “don’t pre order just buy the day it releases” thing. What do you think you’re winning?

It’s about sending a message. A message that pre-ordering is not worth anymore and they (hopefully) stop releasing unfinished beta releases.

DoucheBagMcSwag, 21 dni temu do games w Xbox dumped a mountain of trailers on us

I think persona 4 revival (seriously not “Replay??”) was unveiled too early because Yuri forced their hand.

There’s a reason no release date was provided. That was likely pre alpha

setsneedtofeed, 22 dni temu do games w Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 - Official Teaser

The last Black Ops I cared about was 2. I could almost feel the developers of that one screaming that they wanted to break out of the COD mold. It actually had a lot of cool, if underbaked ideas. There were the sidemissions where you commanded an NPC squad ala Brothers In Arms, there were the pre-mission loadouts where after beating a mission set in the past you could go back and load up with future guns, there were multiple endings driven by choices in the missions.

There was a lot of stuff going on in that game which if it had been given a longer development cycle than the COD treadmill, and more freedom to stray from COD mainstays could have been something interesting. All of the above features could have really been pushed and refined beyond the small implimentation they ended up as. BO2 also tied the setting back to the cold war era roots, which makes it far more interesting that the cutout metal angular girder future design that is just the most generic looking thing ever. Call Of Duty Advanced Warfare was forgotten for a reason and it’s disappointing that Black Ops ended up eating all its aesthetics.

None of this matter of course, since no matter how many story trailers they release or how much people like me talk about what could make single player good, in the end the series is kept alive by tweaked out multiplayer addicts so I suppose it is all just a waste of time to think about.

Cocodapuf, 21 dni temu do games w Microsoft and Asus announce two Xbox Ally handhelds with new Xbox full-screen experience

It probably should have released a could months ago, pre switch2 hype.

Coelacanth, 24 dni temu do games w What are you all looking forward to at Summer Games Fest?

I had no idea it was today so I’m not looking forward to anything in particular. Having just finished Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 it would be amazing news if they had an announcement that they’re intending to release a DLC.

Would also love to see something from Remedy about Control 2 as I love those guys and the Remedy Connected Universe. Well, what I’m really desperate about is Alan Wake 3, but that’s surely not even in pre-production yet (sadly).

Would not mind seeing something from Bloodlines 2 either out of morbid curiosity, but I have no hopes it will actually be good.

BroBot9000, 25 dni temu do games w Please Don't Preorder This...

Pre orders and games as a service are scams from corporations that don’t give a shit about games besides how much money they can make releasing unfinished garbage.

ZeroHora, 25 dni temu do games w Please Don't Preorder This...

Controversial opinion:

Pre-ordering or not make no difference.

You can search for it, in 2014 they have reports of a declining in pre-orders industry wide, they don’t give numbers of pre-orders but even if you look at the ranking of sold games in online platforms people buy more days after the release than before or in day of the release.

The boycott of pre-order kinda of worked, more people avoid pre-ordering than before and did that make any difference in the quality of game release? Hell no, they still release game with bugs, not finished with need of day one patches, the entire boycott made 0 impact on this shit.

ZeroHora, 24 dni temu do games w Please Don't Preorder This...

i think you are misunderstanding the point of the no preorder movement. There never should have been an expectation for it to improve the Day 1 quality of game releases.

“it’s the culture surrounding preorders that is most responsible for the trail of broken and unfinished games that clutter the sales charts” Kotaku 2015

“By pre-ordering, you’re also saying that you’re ok with them cutting content, and that you don’t mind the bugs and problems of the launch copies.” Techraptor 2015

And many other articles or reddit discussions about the topic. That’s what game journalist told the gamers and what many believe. The consumer protection was always the part that made sense, but they tried to push this idea of we could fix the broken release culture by not pre-ordering.