They CAN still be fun. General fact of the matter is that the games we find fun aren’t always necessarily innovating much. Sometimes it’s just a comfortable routine.
Absolutely not going to fault anyone that finds their games boring though.
In my piece, I noted that—so far at least—I hadn’t encountered anything overtly preachy or that one might describe as garishly political or “overly woke”.
Aaand done with the article! Good, that didn’t take too long.
I used Linux Mint 21 first, which didn’t (correctly) support my ancient wi-fi card or graphics driver. I then tried 22, which was much better, but failed to run a number of games, exhibiting a variety of issues not listed on ProtonDB.
I then switched to Bazzite, which ran those same games correctly, but its OS-integrated file explorer was oversimplified far past what Windows does, it failed to install several Linux-native applications, alt-tab behavior was frequently glitchy around games, and often I would come back from sleep mode with bizarre graphical glitches forcing me to restart.
I’m not even highlighting the poor usability, or the stuff I might be able to reconfigure. I’m okay with taking time to tweak my OS how I want it, but not when that’s just a matter of having it work correctly.
You’re saying this to someone who took the time to format a drive to install Linux, read up on recommended partition structure, and take the time tweaking desktop settings to my preference, in genuine hope it would become a daily driver so I could stop using Windows. All of that effort still wasn’t enough.
The quote wasn’t pointed to you, but it was a generalized view of how seeking help turns out. Your above comment, and this one, are showing the same thing: You, and Linux users in general, need only the tiniest justification to belittle someone for not being a 100% Linux devotee/apologist.
Priority one is having a working computer. Priority two is evading future spyware.
Priority three is using an OS where seeking support for issues doesn’t produce the reply “Sounds like you fucked something up, idiot, because it works perfectly for me!”
I gave Linux another shot this past month. It was a lot better than I remembered, but still not good enough, basically in the reliability areas. I wish the experience was “it all just works” like so many have said.
I may not mind giving it another try when Windows Recall goes live.
Some ways I could see the problem at least partially resolved on PC are: Returning to server-side validation, and designing games such that player location knowledge and aiming reflexes are not always the biggest tests for victory. Hackers may, in fact, develop wallhacks and aimhacks for such a game, but may exhibit frustration finding these alone don’t necessarily bag them a win because of bad tactical decisionmaking.
Such games wouldn’t be realistic tactical shooters in the vein of COD, though.
If server validation was still a common practice (as it should be) then cheats wouldn’t come in the form of speed hacks, teleportation hacks, or invincibility. The traditional thing in CS that was hard to prevent is aimhacks and wallhacks. I respect that those are hard to prevent, but they can be much less impactful in modern hero shooters.
It’s not just trust of the game developer. I honestly believe most of them just want to put out profitable games. It’s trust that a hacker won’t ever learn how to sign their code in a way that causes it to be respected as part of the game’s code instructions.
There was some old article about how a black hat found a vulnerability in a signed virtual driver used by Genshin Impact. So, they deployed their whole infection package together with that plain driver to computers that had never been used for video games at all; and because Microsoft chose to trust that driver, it worked.
I wish I could find an article on it, since a paraphrased summary isn’t a great source. This is coming from memory.
The funny thing is, I hear that Concord at least worked on a basic level. It was visually high fidelity, guns worked, and it wasn’t terribly buggy, which is more than a lot of popular releases can say. But, of course, it offered nothing new and the character design was terrible.
Fighting games are a genre where it makes sense to push aggression meta. At times, people have wished that the genre allowed for more defensive counterattacking, but it’s not hard to predict how that would look in effect; two players both staring each other down waiting for the other to make a punishable move.
Basically, fighting games don’t have other mechanics outside of direct combat interactions that allow for fun decision-making. There’s fringe stuff like when someone has power-ups that don’t require landing hits (eg, Phoenix Wright in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3) but they don’t involve much decision-making.
I think the only time rush is an issue in games like Starcraft, thus making it an example, is at the low level of play where people don’t know how to react. So, once players get experience in the mechanics, it’s basically fixing itself. Other games can sometimes have that issue at all levels of play though.
Dead by Daylight has an issue with killers that keep their focus on one of the four survivors, ignoring the core objectives and other players. Worse, it often works well. There are many videos out there of experienced teams that find karmic counters for this practice, helping the victim escape the killer to some completely unknown location on the map, and often leaving the killer late-game with little to work with.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre (a 4v3 horror game), on the other hand, developed some issues where the prevailing strategies for the victims involve stacking up abilities that let them ignore attacks so there’s no need to hide or move slowly. It ends up taking long enough for the family members to even strike them down that some will brute-force objectives right in the family’s face. Part of the game’s issues is, the maps are developed to be relatively tight, so there’s fewer places for family to check, but it also made stealth strategies relatively ineffective.
An old favorite of mine for countering “Rush Meta” is in Team Fortress 2. For single players hoping to run past players to objectives, the Engineer’s sentry locks on to them pretty quickly, and no matter how fast they’re moving, it spells death within a certain bubble. Being automated, it also means no one has to camp for this to stay around. The sentries still die to inexperienced players that are making a unified push.
TF2’s other “rush punisher” is the Heavy - a class with a low skill cap, but a high health pool. He deals ludicrous damage up close, but can’t move quickly. So, he’s most lethal to people that are running at/past him instead of attacking from a distance. He says it right in his intro - he can’t outsmart people. He’s just a strong presence in a push for anyone that doesn’t have a plan to slow themselves down in order to deal the ton of damage needed to kill him. For a long time, in matches where the enemy team stuck to having 3 pyros rushing the frontline, my sole strategy was to pile up on Heavy, forcing the enemy team to consider ranged attackers like Demoman and Sniper, slowing the game down as a result.