Oh, and I just remembered the old Thief games. They had pretty consistent difficulty. At least for the first two. I cannot remember if that was retained with the third because it was a little more open in terms of what you acquired in the hub world and took on missions. And we don’t talk about the fourth (which was a reboot nobody wanted, not even the dev team).
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 could be what you’re looking for. The main story areas are significantly easier than all the side content.
You’ll want to do the side quests because how can you not play that game with cool sunglasses and a baguette on your back?
But you can easily get through the game without doing any side quests. And if you are afraid of being overpowered when you do play the side stuff, they recently added some nice controls to bump up the difficulty.
This is in answer to the Stop Killing Games Initiative. He falsely claims that if SKG were successful every game would be forced to do all that stuff. While not realising that what he is describing is continued support for a game, not a dead game that continues to work without support.
It’s just a strawman, incorrectly inflating the costs by claiming continued support is the same as no support.
Damn, I came really close the other day. Managed to live through the “the game will kill you now” event. Unfortunately I couldn’t keep up when I was at the boss.
But to progress the game you have to get up.
But when you finish the game a new mode is added allowing you to play normally with increasingly more difficult challenges you can put on yourself.
Yes, the legal requirement would (or should) mean after EOL absolutely no dependency on outside services unless the infinite availability of that service can be guaranteed, which is of course impossible.
None of the currently existing services like Steam, Xbox Live, etc are technically needed to run the games. They offer additional services. Hence they are called services. But you do not need any of them to run the core games.
I’m not advocating for developers to implement these services themselves. I’m advocating for the absence of these services not making my games unplayable. I’m willing to compromise for that to only be the case after support for my games was dropped.
That’s continued support. Not EOL. If continued support is his way to EOL his game that is of course his right. But also impossible to guarantee, precisely because of the reasons he listed. Thus an idiotic impossible stance to uphold.
I’m currently watching the video and he is approaching this as if some company would continue complete support with every functionality still available without any interruption. His idea of the “simplest matchmaking” are freaking lobby codes. He can’t even fathom a future without Steam.
For him almost everything involves accounts and big companies and legal entities and central authorities. Stuff you do not need. Never ever. He is caught up on self made problems.
If you put into law that a game has to remain playable developers will figure it out. Either they are stupid and tie everything to central unchangeable entities or they will add a config file where you enter an IP address and call it a day. Capitalism will find the cheapest way to comply.
Yeah, but see, my mate Joe, he just doesn’t run the sign up page or authentication or the matchmaking or the seasonal DLC or the voice chat or the community forums.
He just enters some stuff by hand into the Oracle DB and off we go.
I’m serious. Big corporations tend to overcomplicate this stuff all the time. Especially because they tend to run several components as one. But when you break it down each one is not that complicated. I’ve done that. As my job. Saying it’s not feasible is a massive strawman.
Because as always, if they can do it so can we. This will never change.
Speaking of TED Talks, I’m not reading all of that.
But nobody is talking about running a service. Sure, someone might open up Anime CCG Pocket Collection 2045 Big Continuation Service, run like the original even with support staff. But maybe I’m fine with Joe’s ACPC2045 server, because he’s my mate and we just want to goof around.
There are plenty of fan projects out there that run entire big services for their games. Keeping MMOs alive but also entirely new services based on stuff like Minecraft.
If ACPC2045 wants to make this into an expensive complicated (for them and us) endeavour, let them. There will be plenty of other games that will handle the new requirements with grace because they are not incompetent. Look how quickly Ubisoft was able to turn around with The Crew 2.
Why is it not feasible? This is simply bullshit. If a company can do it the end user can do it as well. Even if they needed a thousand servers with 5090s to run the application it would still be a way to do it.
And nobody is saying that this would be the requirement. The requirement is “to keep it in a playable state”. How they achieve that is up to them.