An article from this weekend that seemingly got buried by soundbites about the Steam Machine price in the same interview, but given that we have no information on price, this seems way more interesting to me. I mean…I basically self-select games that don’t use these kinds of anti-cheat at all, but this is important...
In case this is serious, kernel-level AC has been shown to not be particularly effective. There were people with hacks for BF6 before it released, for example. Them blocking an operating system doesn’t prevent cheaters. It only prevents consumers from having options.
I would doubt it. I don’t even know if that’s a reasonable thing to do on Linux. I don’t see how it could work. Presumably they’re trying to work on something like they did for Easy Anti Cheat. That has a kernel module on Windows, but it doesn’t on Linux. I would assume they’re trying to work with EA, Riot, and maybe some Chinese companies to have their AC option work with Linux.
The reason they do it usually is because some executives hear the Linux is less secure and that it’s only a small segment of users. It isn’t because it’s effective. The games that blocked Linux are almost all some of the games with the worst hackers. Guess what happened when they blocked Linux? Nothing. The number of hackers that were on Linux were near zero.
The issue is they cant be bothered to put the actual money/work to create a solution that’s effective. Instead they signal to their audience that they’re doing something by removing Linux, which doesn’t cost them anything and makes a show that they’re actually trying. It doesn’t fix the problems, but they get to make a show out of it.
I have to cite sources but you don’t? One example is Rust, a notoriously hacker filled game.
Of course they’re trying to make money. I literally explained that. The executives see Linux as not providing value, and it’s extra effort to support it. They’d rather instead use it as a symbol of how they’re actually trying really hard to fight hackers, but it’s a lie. It’s just a convenient excuse.
You haven’t heard an executive say almost anything. They run companies. They don’t publish their every decision. They are the ones making the calls. They’re the ones responsible. They’re also largely technologically innept. They probably don’t even know what Linux is. They just know what they’ve been told.
You’re only going to be surprised when this continues to happen even though the answer is right there.
There are like two major companies doing this. There’s EA and Riot. There’s a tiny minority of minor players, like Rust. There’s also a lot of Chinese companies doing it. (China is infamous for having hackers, so yeah, didn’t solve that problem did it?)
I can’t tell you the last time I booted up a western game and it didn’t work on Linux. (I think it was Squad44, which then added support, and support in the main Squad game has been in for a long time.) Everyone is moving toward supporting it, not away. The only places it’s an issue are large slow companies where the executives have too much control.
Your explanation is bordering on conspiracy theory, so yes.
So the only thing that’s allowed to be speculated is that the companies are perfectly honest and never lie? Yeah, maybe you’re not that reasonable.
Rust cited why they cut support, as did Apex Legends, as did GTA Online.
They didn’t “cite” anything. They gave a reason, sure. It’s not honest though. If less than 5% of players were on Linux, how many hackers do you think they stopped? They didn’t cite any statistics or anything, and I’d wager that they increased the number of hackers as a percentage. All the script kiddies are on Windows, not Linux. Sure, they can’t control Linux as much, but it’s also not a significant source of their hacking issues.
The rest often don’t even bother with supporting it in the first place because of how it always plays out.
The rest support Linux. You’re obviously a Windows user. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. Damn near every game works flawlessly on Linux.
The existence of hackers at all doesn’t mean that Linux anti-cheat is equally effective, and you’d know that if you read the write up from the Rust team.
That is not what I claimed. I claimed their team hasn’t done shit to prevent hackers. The insane number of hackers in that game proves that most of them are on Windows. If they can’t stop the hacking on Windows then what the hell is blocking Linux going to do? No, they saw it was a small portion of users and decide to just block it to make a show. It didn’t solve anything so why did they do it? How is it that this game, with such a large hacker issue, has the problems but not the thousands of games that support Linux? It’s because Linux isn’t the issue. Teams that can’t actually build real anti-cheat solutions are.
Their story doesn’t make sense. The one thing they always say is how few users are on Linux. If that’s true then most of the hackers can’t be. It doesn’t make sense. It does nothing to actually solve the issue. An actual fix wouldn’t matter what OS someone is on.
If you use Linux, and game on it, then why are you saying things are going the way of not supporting it. Clearly you must see what way the wind is blowing. Damn near everything works fine. It’s only EA, Riot, Chinese games, and a tiny number of other games. Everything else usually just works.
It’s going to prevent a more potent vector, which is exactly what they said.
It prevents exactly zero vectors on Windows, which is where the problem is.
Anti-cheat is not heading toward more support without the intervention described in the article.
I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but one more time: The vast majority of games work on Linux just fine! That number is only increasing.
Whatever that results in. Valve is talking about potentially a SteamOS-specific fix
Source? You say I need to provide sources. Where’s yours for this. This isn’t how Linux works. You can add and remove kernal modules at run time on Linux. This will not be OS specific, and it also won’t realistically address any actual issues that may exist and aren’t already solved.
It’s not most games, nor is it most publishers, but between those games and publishers, it represents most players, most dollars spent, and most time spent playing video games (at least non-mobile, anyway). It is an enormous hump to get over if you want to make a gaming device appealing to more customers.
It is not, on PC at least. The most played PC game is CS, and second is Minecraft, according to this. I’m not saying it’s nothing, but also it’s far from everything. The vast majority of hours played by people are on games that work on Linux.
Sure it does. As an example, let’s say there are X players for a game in a month, and 3-7% of those are on Linux. If, as Facepunch says, more than half of that 3-7% are cheaters, then including them is doing more harm than good to your cheating problem.
This number is bullshit probably. If their AC can detect cheaters then they wouldn’t have this issue in the first place. You’re trying to tell me you believe they can accurately count cheaters but are also incapable of stopping them? Yeah…
As a huge sci-fi fan, and fan of most of Bethesda’s games in the past, I disagree. Turd rating is accurate. It just all felt like a waste of time. Like you said, the base building seems like it could be good, but it is never relevant. It’s like this for almost every piece of content. They’re just all on islands that don’t interact.
My biggest issue though is the writing. It’s so boring. It’s like they watched a bunch of sci-fi and put tropes from them in the game, but then they never explore the consequences of them. They just exist for a quest and are gone. Why sci-fi is good is because it uses these stories to explore humanity, which would be made even better with an RPG where the player has agency. They just don’t though. You get a few boring options that don’t actually effect anything and everything goes on as normal. It’s just a bland game that doesn’t respect your time.
You can disagree, but no, I feel it’s a turd. I felt like best thing I can say about it was that it was a waste of time —and that’s not a positive thing. I’ve played really bad games that I still feel respected my time more than Starfield, which in my opinion is one of the worst sins of video games. I’d put it up there with Ubisoft games for not respecting the player’s time, but at least their gameplay is good (or used to be, but I haven’t played one in a decade or more).
Can everyone please stop claiming and speculating that Valve’s new hardware will be loss leaders? If you watch LTT and Gamers Nexus’s first videos on the announcement, they actually spoke with Valve’s engineers. And the Valve representatives already said that the new hardware WILL NOT BE LOSS LEADERS....
It’s not particularly great hardware. It’s fine, but not great. The most obvious thing is 8GB VRAM, which is bare minimum for modern gaming really. Add in that they’re buying in bulk, that price seems reasonable.
Console manufacturers haven’t sold at a loss in a long time.
I agree, it won’t be huge gains directly for them, but even moving people off of Windows benefits them by removing control a competitor (Microsoft) has. I somewhat agree that it won’t be sold at (much of) a loss, but maybe at cost. I’m sure they expect manufacturing prices to go down over time, and engineering was a one-time investment, so sold just below cost doesn’t seem unreasonable to me at launch, which then becomes at cost or above in the future.
This all depends on if their goals for it are short-term or long. Historically, they seem to target long-term. That’s why I think it’ll be as low as they can make it, which they also said they’re doing by only having 8GB VRAM as cost savings. They want to drop the price as low as they can to compete. They won’t compete at $1k. I doubt they’d compete at $600-700. I suspect they’re targeting $400-500, which seems like a reasonable cost for the hardware too.
IIRC, the Deck, at launch, had a limit per Steam account, and it had certain requirements. There’s no reason they couldn’t do something like that here. Sure, it makes it harder to convert console players if they do the same technique, but it could be restricted sales based on something.
Yeah, I enjoyed a bit of 2016, but got bored a didn’t finish it. I think Doom Eternal I had from Steam Family Sharing (or other source I didn’t pay for) and just couldn’t get into it. I hate both of them forcing the melee kill thing that takes you out of the action to watch a cutscene, but Eternal just didn’t feel like it worked for some reason.
I started TTRPGs with Pathfinder (1e). Some people talk about it like some impossible thing to play. It does have a lot more detail than 5e, but it isn’t that bad. (I did play one character as a wrestler, who did grappling a lot, which is notoriously one of the most complex systems.)
5e sells itself as being simple, and it is in how little control it gives you. However, the rules are anything but simple. There’s so many contradictions and stipulations every player has to memorize. It’s a mess. For example, some spells can be used as bonus actions, but not if you’ve already cast a spell, except for some that can anyway. It’s stupid.
Pathfinder 2e seems to make things so much simpler for everything, while still giving players freedom. Actions are just actions. If you’ve got the points you can use them for anything. Movement, attacks, spells, etc. Pretty much everything just is what it says.
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.
Arc Raiders has only been out a day, but it has already surpassed a Steam concurrent peak player count of 264,673, making it one of the biggest extraction shooters ever on Valve’s platform.
I can confirm, both this and The Finals (same developers) works great on Linux. No Kernel level AC for us. I even load into games faster than Windows people I’m playing with, and I just realized this is possibly why.
It’s bland? You can not like it if you want. That’s fine (if you’ve played it). Don’t make shit up though. In the realm of modern shooters, it definitely isn’t bland. It’s pretty unique. It’s got a style you don’t see anywhere else (though still based in realism), and the gameplay isn’t like many other games.
The enemies in particular are incredible though. That’s where it stands out. They’re actually physically based, and if you shoot out a leg or motor then they adjust to compensate. They used some machine learning to have them run in simulations where they learned how to move with different pieces missing. It’s really special how they feel.
ARC has the exact same system by the way. It’s the battle pass thing where you choose the things you want each tier, and that includes the credits (Raider Tokens I think is what they’re called here). You can also buy them. They’re used to unlock other battle passes (no others available at the moment besides the one free one) and also cosmetics.
I’ll agree with the other comment; ARC does not shove then in your face. The only time you see that stuff can be purchased is when you go to the customization menu. That’s it. You also get some of the premium currency for free.
I’m pretty confident theyll handle it well because in The Finals I’ve been playing for about ~2 years and have purchased most of the battle passes and some outfit stuff, all with putting no money into the game. This is a $40 game. I suspect it will be handled well.
You can purchase extra stuff, but you can’t say it’s shoved in your face. It definitely is not. It’s just a way to get extra money from whales. I think it’s probably not smart for a game to ship without some MTX at this point. You can make the game cheaper for most people by having the whales fund it. It’s practical.
EU5 is grand strategy, not RTS. Just a small correction. RTS is like Starcraft — ~30m matches and then everything goes away. Grand Strategy is ~100+h of constant progress where nothing resets. They’re both strategy games, but they couldn’t be more different.
Someone said not Hunt. I disagree. I would say it is.
There is Zero Sievert, which is single player, Gray Zone Warfare, Arena Breakout Infinite (it’s an Asian game with Kernel level AC, so I can’t play it on Linux), Escape from Duckov recently, The Cycle (which I think is dead), and I’m certain I’m missing some.
It’s not a huge genre, but there’s still quite a few.
Yep. I played solo for the first few hours before friends picked it up. I had a 100% extraction rate over like 10 runs because it seems like 100% of people are not there to fight. They’re just trying to loot and get out. It isn’t worth the risk of dying, especially near the end of a run when you can’t carry anything else anyway.
Playing as a group, it’s probably a 95% chance people won’t talk and just fight. Everyone is in a Discord chat and not using in-game voice and are just anti-social. Occasionally you can extract with other people, but during the raid I don’t think I’ve ever had people be friendly. We even had a team down to one person before and told them they could leave and they still decided to try to kill our three man.
I don’t think there’s anything about the genre that requires multiplayer. My favorite way to play Escape from Tarkov is the Single Player Tarkov mod, for example. It’s the same game, but without wipes or other players (I play it for no wipes).
You might be interested in Zero Sievert. If you already own (or obtain) Escape from Tarkov there’s an amazing Single Player Tarkov mod that is legitimately probably the best way to play the game.
Solo? Try talking to people. I’ve found that almost everyone in solo matches are likely to be friendly if you talk. (There’s also a communication wheel if you don’t want to or can’t use a mic.)
Groups tend to fight 95% of the time though. At extract it’s often OK, but before then not really.
Regardless, it sounds like you just might not be used to the genre. You can rat, and play really safe, avoiding high loot areas where players are likely to be. Alternatively, just pay attention. There’s almost always signs players are around. If you see ARC with yellow or red lights, there are players there. If you see open containers or doors, or destroyed ARC then players have been there. You can also hear footsteps and looting pretty well. Just pay attention and you usually won’t be jumped.
I don’t feel like campers are an issue in the game though. I haven’t experienced it. There are people who will spot you with the third person camera who it may feel like are camping, but they’re almost always just being observant while looting and spotted you first. It’s not like they’re waiting at extract for you. I haven’t seen that once yet and I’ve played a lot of matches.
For the PvE aspect, the third person is great. The AI are an actual threat, and having the camera to look around corners or see around the player really helps.
For PvP I think it’s a negative. It promotes safe play and gives an unfair advantage to certain situations.
Overall, I think it’s a wash. Personally, I’d slightly prefer first person, but they’ve made third feel very good. I think you need to try it before making a judgement, and try it with an open mind without an opinion already formed. I thought I’d be more annoyed with it than I am.
I was largely being sarcastic. Yeah, Outer Wilds might be the only game that pretty much does it’s own thing I’ve played in many years.
I’ve been playing The Finals a lot for quite a while now. I would say it’s incredibly innovative and unique. However, it’s still a first person shooter based on capturing an objective point. At its core, it’s derivative. The way everything fits together is unlike anything else though. Just listing features that are shared by other games does not mean it isn’t doing something different.
You aren’t someone when playing a video game besides yourself. A third person view doesn’t suddenly make people unable to feel as if they’re playing as that character any more than a first person view does. For example, people can have a similar feeling even from books, with no agency.
You’re making a weird argument based on some purity metric. Either way, you’re playing a video game and controlling a character in the game. Neither view let’s you be that character. Both let you be immersed and inhabit their role in the world.
Anno is more city builder with some RTS elements. Definitely not Grand Strategy —arguably RTS.
I wouldn’t say they’re “incompatible” but they aren’t synonyms. I haven’t seen a grand strategy that is also an RTS, but I could see them co-existing potentially. Total War is close with its battles, except I think creating units and buildings is a requirement for the RTS genre.
Grand Strategy is generally: you control a nation and operate on a map of the world (sometimes limited to a region). You’re continuously progressing your nation, constructing permanent buildings, unlocking permanent technologies, and improving your economy.
Examples: Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings, Total War.
RTS is: you control an army and win a battle on a relatively small map, where individual people are a relevant scale. You build units during the battle, but very few to no resources come into the battle from anything before, and very little to nothing changes after the battle.
Examples: Command and Conquer, Dune II, Starcraft.
Minecraft: Java Edition has been obfuscated since its release. This obfuscation meant that people couldn’t see our source code. Instead, everything was scrambled – and those who wanted to mod Java Edition had to try and piece together what every class and function in the code did....
With how bad it is at writing it, I’m guessing similarly bad. It’ll do something, but odds are it introduces a ton of errors that you then have to track down. That’s the best case. Worst case, it just creates something totally different that looks similar to the input but doesn’t do the same thing.
My understanding is there’s currently a bug with surfing in CS2 where you’ll occasionally just stop when sliding on a curved surface. I don’t know if that’s been fixed, but I think surf is largely dead in CS2 because of it. You need to go to one of the older games if you want to do surf right now probably.
… CS2 doesn’t have destructible environments, it doesn’t have vehicles, it doesn’t have any innovation at all other than being more like a slot machine than the last Counter Strike which was basically the same as the Counter Strike before it.
Honestly, I think that’s part of why it has lasted so long. None of what you listed are necessarily better. They’re just flashy. They would ruin the design of the game though. CS could have vehicles, and some custom maps did, but it doesn’t work to improve the game so it never became a part of the primary game.
The need to always do something flashy and new I think is a reason why so many modern FPSs suck. They don’t understand their game and ruin it with features that don’t improve it.
I say all this while my primary game for ~2 years is The Finals. It’s easily the most innovative shooter I’ve played in a decade or more. It has the best destruction I’ve seen in a game ever. However, they understood how it work with their game. They didn’t just do it to advertise it as a feature without it adding anything. It actively combines with the other parts of the game to make one cohesive thing.
I don’t think they got rid of it or made it slower. They did introduce a bug where you randomly stop when sliding IIRC. They’ve “fixed” this bug multiple times now, but it never actually fixed it. It could be actually fixed now for all I know, but I remember hearing that surf in CS2 is practically dead because it’s bugged.
In particular including the mouse. The reason why the age is so long is because Disney keeps lobbying to get it extended. It used to be a much shorter period of time.
Like the other comment says, players build cities. A quick search says there are 81 cities with over 5m people eachin the world. Most city builders we’re building at the scale of these large cities, so that means over 81 players would be over the population we have in the real world. If there are thousands of players, yeah, it’s going to get tight. If there are tens of thousands, there’s not enough space.
I got through phases of games, and right now I’m in the one I like to think of everything-modern-is-making-me-angry-so-I’ll-turn-back-to-vintage-games - and that’s in the form of PCSX2 on my Steam Deck....
From my memory, the misable stuff isn’t the important, but it is frustrating to not be able to get. I would say if you aren’t worried about missing a few unlocks, just accept that you’ll miss stuff and don’t stress about it.
If you’re the type of person (like me) who finds out they missed something and feel compelled to restart, even if you were never planning on 100% the game, then yeah, use a guide. I wouldn’t use a guide for everything, but I’m certain there are guides that say when misable stuff is coming and how to get them.
DC2 is still fairly similar with the dungeons (though much less grindy, and far less annoying with running out of water or whatever, from my memory). 2 adds a ton of other things to do though. If you’re tired of grinding dungeons, go fishing, breed your fish for races and events, go golfing, find things to take pictures of for inventing, progress your town for more unlocks, advance NPC quests to add them to your group, etc. 1 is fairly linear with one way to progress. 2 has probably a dozen different activities to progress in, so you can do whatever you want in the moment.
They’re trying to soften the blow by adding new features to each tier, but it’s still just to disguise a price hike. More games are coming to the $15 tier, but it still won’t be day and date releases. First party games come to the $15 tier “within a year”, but that’s even excluding Call of Duty.
I don’t think the comment above is talking about GamePass specifically. They’re talking about the “I’ve been an Xbox customer since…” stuff. That kind of corporate loyalty is a scam. You never should buy a product because you owned the previous one. Do what’s best for you when it’s best for you. Don’t give them any loyalty. Make them earn your purchase.
Honestly, I don’t think it hit me the same way, and I wish it did. I already went into it agreeing with everything you said from our real world. It’s still a great game and I enjoyed it, but it didn’t change my view on anything because it’s just a heightened version of our real world. If you were paying attention to our world then CP2077 mostly wouldn’t change your opinion. Hell, if anything it’s a nicer view of our future than I have based on our current path. There’s almost more social mobility in that game than there is in real life America currently.
That is to say, Johnny not only was right, but is right.
Valve Addresses Steam Machine Anti-Cheat Concerns, Says It's Working Towards Support (thisweekinvideogames.com) angielski
An article from this weekend that seemingly got buried by soundbites about the Steam Machine price in the same interview, but given that we have no information on price, this seems way more interesting to me. I mean…I basically self-select games that don’t use these kinds of anti-cheat at all, but this is important...
It feels good to support angielski
"gaming is dead" angielski
Gaming Pet Peeves angielski
What are some things that just get under your skin about games?...
Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders angielski
Can everyone please stop claiming and speculating that Valve’s new hardware will be loss leaders? If you watch LTT and Gamers Nexus’s first videos on the announcement, they actually spoke with Valve’s engineers. And the Valve representatives already said that the new hardware WILL NOT BE LOSS LEADERS....
What's a recent game you've tried playing that isn't worth the hype? angielski
Three developers' different philosophies on difficulty for their games angielski
Arc Raiders Is Already One of the Biggest Extraction Shooters Ever on Steam (www.ign.com) angielski
Arc Raiders has only been out a day, but it has already surpassed a Steam concurrent peak player count of 264,673, making it one of the biggest extraction shooters ever on Valve’s platform.
Minecraft is removing code obfuscation in Java Edition (www.minecraft.net) angielski
Minecraft: Java Edition has been obfuscated since its release. This obfuscation meant that people couldn’t see our source code. Instead, everything was scrambled – and those who wanted to mod Java Edition had to try and piece together what every class and function in the code did....
Counter Strike 2 update wipes nearly $2 billion off skin market value by making fancy knives and gloves easier to get [Eurogamer] (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Just in case you thought reviving dead games seemed easy enough, GOG had to hire a private investigator to find an IP holder living off the grid for its preservation program (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Project Rebearth (in development), an MMO city-builder, with a top-down map style view, where players repopulate a 1:1 replica of Earth, releases a demo on Steam. (store.steampowered.com) angielski
Once again, looking for PS2 game suggestions! angielski
I got through phases of games, and right now I’m in the one I like to think of everything-modern-is-making-me-angry-so-I’ll-turn-back-to-vintage-games - and that’s in the form of PCSX2 on my Steam Deck....
Xbox consoles are now getting a fullscreen Xbox Game Pass Ultimate ad at boot, just a day after a 50% price hike was announced angielski
source...
Updates to Xbox Game Pass: Introducing Essential, Premium, and Ultimate Plans - Xbox Wire [prices going up] (news.xbox.com) angielski
They’re trying to soften the blow by adding new features to each tier, but it’s still just to disguise a price hike. More games are coming to the $15 tier, but it still won’t be day and date releases. First party games come to the $15 tier “within a year”, but that’s even excluding Call of Duty.
What game changed your life? angielski