Problem is that even on a premium product, cost is gonna be a factor. Well, and weight.
I can think of a bunch of features that could be supported in a controller. Problem is, not everyone is gonna want everything, and if they put it on the thing, everyone is gonna pay for it. On the XBox Elite Series 2:
Force feedback thumbsticks: No (I’m not aware of anyone that makes these, but force feedback joysticks were once a real thing, useful with flight sims simulating pre-fly-by-wire aircraft, like the Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback 2)
I decided to buy a good and expensive controller for my PC for the first time,
It‘s not exactly a widespread feature
Gyro has been present in Sony controllers since Dualshock 3.
Not many PC games natively support gyro, however, because most controllers that people have on the PC don’t support it.
Yeah, it’s an input that you can use to rig something up with Steam Input or some sort of macro software, but if you don’t have a large proportion of the userbase with hardware support, game developers aren’t going to put resources into native support, and without native support, most people won’t use it, and if most people aren’t going to use it, not a lot of incentive for game controller developers to support it.
I kind of wish that there were some kind of standard, cross-platform, open-source software package that you could have games hook into on one end and controllers on the other, have a developer-provided profile, but let the package provide some kind of profile that does something reasonable for an arbitrary controller (or multiple controllers, think HOTAS) if the developer doesn’t, and let game controller developers and players publish control scheme settings for games/controllers. Steam Input is kind of the closest thing to this, but is proprietary and tied to one distribution platform (Steam), which sort of sucks.
The sex toy crowd has something like this going on with buttplug.io – which, ironically enough, can actually support linking games to game controllers with vibration, not just sex toys, but for some reason we haven’t managed to get there with normal, actual game controller input. I kind of wish that given that they have their shit together enough to actually get something like this out there, that they’d rename the project to something uncontroversial like GameIO, support hooking up games to arbitrary output devices and input devices, and then expose an input layer to games. Have the option to use the game’s provided profile by default, but also use a custom one.
Steam deck has it.
The Steam Deck is successful for what it is, and maybe one day it will have enough market share to be able to really drive game features, but as things stand, it’s something like a percent.
If you crunch the numbers and assume the Deck does indeed represent 40% of Linux users, which make up 1.97% of Steam users, then the Deck is used by 0.78% of all Steam users. That’s the exact market share number for the Deck APU in the GPU survey, which means at least these datapoints are internally consistent.
That’s maybe the largest single bloc of people using a single specific non-mouse/keyboard input device on Steam, but it’s still a very small portion of the overall PC user base.
It’s not the game in particular – it could be any service that one makes use of over extended period of time. The issue is that one can correlate with other data.
I didn’t read the article and was very confused when I skimmed the comments. There’s a famous Billy Mitchell who was very important in developing American air doctrine around World War II.
William Lendrum Mitchell (December 29, 1879 – February 19, 1936) was a United States Army officer who is regarded as the father of the United States Air Force.
One downside of always-online DRM is that it kind of deanonymizes you. I mean, the game retailer knows that a given person is at a given IP address at a given time, and that information has value that could be used down the line to combine with other sources of data.
Avoiding that would require something like a VPN system that uses a different IP for different services.
I was aware of the Ultimate C existed and I did supposed it was some sort of “lite” version
Yeah, but just to be clear, it’s not just the Ultimate C that doesn’t have them. The fourth link above is to a non-Bluetooth Ultimate variant with no “C” in its name; that particular variant also doesn’t have Hall Effect sticks.
For me, it was annoying because — at least when I bought mine, haven’t checked recently — 8bitdo doesn’t make a Ultimate controller with an XBox button layout and Hall Effect sticks. You gotta settle for a Nintendo-layout controller. You can remap the buttons in software on your computer, and they apparently sell replacement button caps if you want to make the controller , but it’s not internally using the XBox layout, annoyingly-enough.
You sound like you’re specifically wanting a Nintendo layout, so you probably don’t need an XBox layout, but you might still want to be careful that whatever you order does in fact have the Hall Effect sticks.
There are some exceptions – I like playing Nightmare, who is male, in the Soul Calibur series, due to his moveset – but absent broader gameplay considerations coming up, I’ll default to a female choice. I’d rather look at the female character through the course of the game.
considers
I play very few multiplayer games. The last time I was playing a 3D multiplayer game much was a long time ago, probably a Quake 2-based Team Fortress-style game, and then I played a male character, an engineer, because of his role.
I haven’t played MUDs for ages, but there I generally played a male character.
Sometimes games attach some sort of gameplay benefits on a gender-basis (e.g. male or female characters have slightly different stats or characteristics), and then I’ll sometimes choose the main character’s gender based on that, but that’s become less-common, maybe not politically-correct. Mount and Blade: Warband does that – it’s a medieval world and male and female characters have significantly-different roles there; there I’ll play a male character. The Fallout series had a long tradition of having the Black Widow/Lady Killer perk work differently based on a character’s gender; it’s generally advantageous to play a female character there.
I’m very happy that so many people sink real money into it, as I simply am unable to do so myself.
I get what you’re saying, but it does also create incentives to develop for whales.
Like, okay. Take Fallout 76. They – unlike with previous games in the series – do not have large, commercial DLC packages that come out. Rather, they have small, free, seasonal releases of content. Howard has committed Bethesda not to doing any commercial DLC for the game.
I was happy with that “large commercial DLC” model, and purchased them. But, okay, as it stands, I get a game that someone else is mostly paying for, right?
They sell a “premium” subscription for $12/mo, which provides some relatively-minor benefits.
And they sell various cosmetic items that people can place in their camp that one could hypothetically spend a pretty much unlimited amount on.
My problem is that financially, this constrains them to have basically no incentive to do anything other than develop new cosmetic items and sell to people who really want to buy them. And in the past, Bethesda has made some excellent large, commercial expansions for games in the series, like Far Harbor for Fallout 4.
This isn’t to argue in favor of or against the law in China, but to point out that the “someone else will pay for the game” model has some problems with it – if you aren’t paying anything, and someone else’s wallet is covering all the costs, it means that the game developer is entirely-incentivized to do development to appeal to whoever is paying for the thing, not you.
I got my money’s worth out of Fallout 76, but I do have to say that, playing it on a 165 Hz monitor, you can really feel the load stuttering as you traverse the map.
Starfield does a much better job of not letting streaming loading affect the framerate than Bethesda’s past titles.
I suppose that there’s always the outside chance that they’ll re-release some prior game on the Starfield engine. They did do an updated release of Skyrim.
someone delids the secure enclave on the gaming card, extracts the keys
Not a problem. You can potentially go for an attack on hardware, maybe recover a key, but you have a unique key tied to it. Now the attacker has a key for a single trusted computer. He can’t distribute it with an open-source FPGA design and have other users use that key, or it’ll be obvious to the server that many users have the key. They blacklist the key.
It’s because hardware is a pain to attack that consoles don’t have the cheating issues that PCs do.
We went through this in RuneScape with auto miners. You just randomise locations and times slightly and it’s almost impossible to tell the difference.
Depends on whether people working on cheats can see the anti-cheat detection code. It’s hard to ensure that one data set is statistically-identical to another data set.
Recently, Russia had a vote in which there was vote fraud, where some statisticians highlighted it in a really clear way – you had visible lines in the data in voting districts at 5% increments, because voting districts had been required to have a certain level of votes for a given party, and had stuffed ballot boxes to that level.
If I can see the cheat-detection code, then, yeah, it’s not going to be hard to come up with some mechanism that defeats it. But if I can’t – and especially if that cheat-detection code delays or randomly doesn’t fire – it may be very hard for me to come up with data that passes its tests.
However, I would like games to come with servers again so you can play games on your own terms
Please! Not just for anticheat reasons, but also for mods and keeping the game playable when the publishers decide it isn’t profitable.
The problem is that having an essential component of the game run on servers that only the publisher has access to is also a pretty effective way to do DRM, so they’ve got a pretty strong incentive not to do that. It’s a lot easier to ensure that someone paid for an account on publisher-run servers than that someone paid for a copy of the server and client binaries that they are in possession of.
If you want that, I kind of feel like the obligation should be placed on the OS (or maybe Steam or similar distribution platforms) to do sandboxing. Generally-speaking, in the computer security world, you’re better off just not letting software do something objectionable than trying to track down everyone who does it and have the judicial side handle things.
Mobile OSes and game console OSes already sandbox games that way.
PCs could have the ability to do that, but they don’t do that today.
I do think that they’re heading in that direction, though, at least relative to where they were, say, 30 years ago; at that point in time, permission tended to be really at a user level, and if you ran software on your computer, it pretty much had access to anything that the user did. Web browser are generally available and act as a sandbox for some lightweight sandbox. On Linux, Wayland’s a move towards handling isolation of apps at the desktop level – for a long time, desktop APIs really didn’t permit for isolation of one graphical program from another. Also on Linux, Flatpak and the like are aimed at distributing isolated graphical applications.