I’ve been thinking about making this thread for a few days. Sometimes, I play a game and it has some very basic features that are just not in every other game and I think to myself: Why is this not standard?! and I wanted to know what were yours....
A lot of PC games let you change mouse and keyboard bindings, but not controller bindings, because they have “keyboard and mouse mode” or “console mode” if the controller is used.
I’ve got no problem with having a sensible set of defaults, but if I get a controller with more buttons, unless this is a competitive multiplayer game that needs a level playing field, I’d like to be able to take advantage of them.
I’d rather not have loading screens at all, but if you need them, I’d kind of like a progress bar, rather then just watching some animated doohicky telling me that hopefully the game hasn’t frozen.
I would imagine that it’s probably possible to, if the game emits checkpoints (“loading terrain”, “loading textures”), etc, to record the timestamps for each of those and then, when it emits the same checkpoints next time through, to be able to estimate how far it is through the process.
While I don’t disagree, if part of the game runs on the server and the game publisher is the only one with the server, it makes the game hard to pirate, so they’ve a potent incentive to do this.
Don’t do unskippable cutscenes. Even if you’re using them to cover up for a loading screen or something, at least give me the option to not watch them. Let me tap a button to skip the scene.
A number of games would benefit from also showing a DPS number on weapons. Same idea. Yeah, I can do it in my head, but you’re running on a computer that can flawlessly do billions of calculations a second. Why not do the extra step for me?
Keep a rotating history of 20 or so autosaves/checkpoints, not 1, in case the last autosave was at a bad spot. Storage space is cheap. Yeah, I can do that myself with manual saves, but why make me do that? Maintaining that isn’t a fun part of the game for me, and it’s easy for the developer to do.
Yeah, but if that’s the only way a game developer implements it, they’re tying themselves to Steam. I mean, if I were a game developer, I wouldn’t want to do that, as it’s a lot of lock-in.
I think that Valve’s service is a pretty good one, but they’re taking a 30% cut for doing a number of things for game developers. If they become the only game in town, it’s possible that they might start taking more than 30% and those developers are going to be kind of stuck with that.
It’s common across games, so it doesn’t make sense for game devs to reimplement the wheel, but I’d think that putting as much as possible in the game engine would be a reasonable place.
One issue is that this can be a vector for malware. I kind of wish that game engines came standard with something like the Javascript engine in browsers, with some sort of sandbox for mods. I’m not saying that that’d solve everything – the game code that the mods invoke probably isn’t hardened – but it’d be better then just having arbitrary modifications go in. Especially with mod systems that auto-download new versions – even if the mod author is on the up-and-up, if someone compromises his account or computer, they’ve compromised all the computers using the mod.
EDIT: This isn’t just a problem specific to mods, either. A lot of online software library systems that provide auto-updates (pip for Python, rvm for Ruby, etc) can be a vector into systems. Providing auto-updates where many, many people have rights to push updates to computers is convenient in terms of getting software working, but unless the resulting code is running sandboxed, it’s creating an awful lot of vectors to attack someone’s system. This isn’t to impugn any one author – the vast bulk of people writing mods and open-source software are upstanding people. But it only takes one bad egg or one author who themselves has their system compromised to compromise a lot of other systems, and in practice, if you’re saying “subscribe to this mod”, you’re doing something that may have a lot of security implications for your system.
Consoles and phones already do a decent job of sandboxing games (well, as far as I know; I haven’t been working on security for either of them, but from what I’ve seen of the systems, they at least aim to achieve that). So maybe someone can compromise an app, but there’s a limited amount they can do aside from that. Maybe dump your name and location and such, but they can’t get control of your other software. However, Linux, Windows, and MacOS don’t have that kind of app sandboxing generally in place. I know that Linux has been working towards it – that’s one major reason for shifting to Wayland, among other things – but it’s definitely not there today.
For servers, I think that part of the way that sysadmins have been trying to deal with this is running containers or VMs on a per-service basis. Looking at !homelab, I see a lot of people talking about containers or VMs. But that’s not really an option today for desktop users who want to run games in a sandbox; it’s not set up automatically, and 3D card support spanning containers is not great today, or at least wasn’t last time I looked at it. I can run Ren’Py games in a firejail today successfully on Linux, but that’s not out-of-box behavior, Steam definitely doesn’t have it in place by default, I have no idea whether it’s possible for WINE (which is important for a lot of Windows games that run on Linux) and at least some if not all of the mechanisms firejail uses for graphics won’t permit for access to the 3D hardware.
Hmm. I think that a better way to do it is probably in the OS, rather than in-game, on a per-game basis.
Processors thermal-throttle today, and OSes can limit what modes they’re allowed to shift into. And my guess is that usually, if someone wants to constrain performance, they want to do it systemwide, rather than for an individual game.
On the game developer end, if the player wants to play both in a performance-limited and not-performance-limited mode, I’d think that there are probably two ways to go about that:
Permit for two different sets of saved video settings, where the player can flip between them. Honestly, I think that this is probably more tweaking than most players are going to do.
Provide some kind of adaptive quality mechanism. Then, if the computer becomes “lower end”, then the adaptive quality system just twiddles settings until the target framerate is maintained.
There’s also a third point you make here, and that is that in a world with battery-powered devices, CPU/GPU usage actually matters. It’s not zero-cost to just use whatever’s available. I remember submitting an issue some time back for Caves of Qud, where the thing ran a busy loop when the window didn’t have focus, even though the game was paused (which the dev fixed, kudos to them). I noticed it because the fans would spool up when the game was in the background. That’s a game that, because it’s turn-based, has the potential to use very little CPU time, even when the game is in the foreground.
I think that there’s a fair argument that historically, most game developers, aside from maybe mobile or portable console guys, haven’t needed to worry much about consuming resources if they were available.
Speaking as a player, though, I don’t much care about power consumption if a system has wall power. But I care a lot about it if it’s battery-powered.
For phones, I kind of wish that Google would consider providing a “battery usage” rating in the app store that provides some kind of approximate metric for how much CPU time the game uses while active – if Google is going to send all kinds of telemetry from devices, might as well use that for something useful. Maybe permit the game developer to register multiple “modes” (high-power, low-power) and give a ranking for each. As things stand, though, there’s no way for the potential customer to know power consumption, and this would help push that information out to the customer.
and it means you’re always doing that load “the first time”
So keep the checkpoint list for each world.
perhaps you add new content or DLC regularly that throws off this calculation
If it uses the last checkpoint times, then it should adapt to that.
All that for a return on development time invested that’s probably not worth the effort. It is worth it to show progress to confirm that the system hasn’t locked up
I think that we’re going to have to disagree. I would like to have a progress bar.
I’ve only seen that a couple times, but yeah, the fact that NPCs can be off doing their own thing – the engine is a pretty open sandbox – can mean that they’re talking during a cutscene, and the way Starfield works, whichever character started talking first gets priority for the caption – the other caption only comes up after the first one finishes.
I kind of wish that they’d just stack the captions onscreen.
Hmm. That works for games with static cutscenes. But some games don’t have fixed cutscenes. Like, okay, take Starfield. A bunch of your actions can affect what people say in a given cutscene. So what you’ll see in a given cutscene may change.
Also, at least on the PC, it’s possible to just back up saves.
I mean, I feel like there’s legitimately value to having an “ironman mode”, but I’d really like to have the option not to use it, for a number of reasons.
One of which is that sometimes games have bugs – I just hit a bug in Starfield that was easily worked around by rolling back to an earlier save and taking a slightly different action. However, Starfield had autosaved between the action that triggered the bug and it becoming visible to the player, which would have been a problem if (a) I hadn’t manually saved prior to that and (b) Starfield didn’t do the multiple-autosave-slot thing.
The player can always impose not using saves on themselves, but they can’t debug games.
Anti-cheat systems in general tend to be fragile to changes in the game environment.
Honestly, I used to want that, and I’ll believe that game devs could do better than they do today, but honestly, I think that the problem is, end of the day, fundamentally not a technically-solvable one. The only way you’re going to reasonably-reliably do anti-cheat stuff is going to be to have a trusted system, where the player can’t do anything to their system.
I’d say that it’s one of the stronger arguments for consoles in general versus PC gaming. On a console, the playing field is pretty much level. Everyone has the same software running on their system, the same number of frames on their screen. Maybe there might be limited differences to the controller or better latency to a server, but that’s it. It’s hard to modify the system to get that edge. A console is pretty close to the ideal system for competitive multiplayer stuff. On a PC, in a (real-time) competitive multiplayer game, someone is always going to have some level of an edge. Like, the ability to get higher resolution or more frames per second, the ability of games to scale up to use better hardware, is fundamentally something of a pay-to-win baked into the system.
There will always be a place for competitive multiplayer games, but I honestly think that a better route forward for many games is to improve game AI from where it is today and then use computer opponents more heavily. While humans make for a very smart enemy “AI” in a lot of ways, and using them may be a technically-easier problem than doing comparable enemy AI, there are also all kinds of baggage that fundamentally come with competitive multiplayer play:
Limited lifespan for the game. At some point, nobody (or not many) people will be playing the game any more, even if it doesn’t depend on the game publisher to operate online servers. At that point, the game will head into the dustbin of history – it’ll be hard to meet the threshold to get enough people together at any one time to play a game. Multiplayer games are mortal, and single-player games are immortal.
You can’t pause. Or, well, you can, but then that doesn’t scale up to many players and can create its own set of problems. A lot of people need to change an infant’s diaper or get the door or take a call. They can play against computers, but they can’t (reasonably) play against other players.
Cheating.
Griefing.
Sometimes optimal human strategy isn’t…all that much fun to actually play against. Like, I remember playing the original Team Fortress, and that a strategy was to have classes that could set up static defenses (pipe bombs, lasers, turrets, etc) set them up right atop spawn points. That may well be a good strategy in the game, but it’s also not a lot of fun for the other players.
Immersion. Doesn’t matter for all games, but for some it does. I don’t expect humans to role-play, to stay in character, because I know that it’s work and i don’t want to hassle with it myself. But, end of the day, playing against xxPussySlayer69xx is kind of immersion-breaking.
Latency is always going to be an issue. You can mitigate it a bit with prediction and engine improvements or more telecom infrastructure, but the laws of physics still place constraints on the speed of light. There are ways you can minimize it – LAN parties, if you can get enough people. Regional servers, though that guy who lives in Hawaii is always gonna just have a hard time of it. But it’s always going to be there; you’re never going to truly have a level playing field.
The game is intrinsically mandatory-online. If you have a spotty or no connection, the game doesn’t work.
Another issue is the advance of technology. If it isn’t there now, I can imagine a generic AI engine, something like Havok is for physics, becoming widespread. And as that improves, one can get more-and-more compelling AI. Plus, hardware is getting better. But humans are, well, human. Humanity isn’t getting better at being a game opponent over the years. So my long-run bet is gonna be on game AI tending to edge in on humans as an opponent for human players.
The checkpoint I’ve described has nothing to do with “game checkpoints”, where the game saves. This is going to be a checkpoint in the loading process.
People far more educated than you or I have tried.
Let’s pretend for a moment that you aren’t just making an unfounded assertion. Give me a list of names.
character speed control on PC - we had this stuff figured out in 2002, when Splinter Cell came out! Why the hell are we still stuck with terribly slow walk and slightly too fast jogging?
So, this may not be a real problem if people aren’t dead-set on hard realism, but one point that I recall being made is that in general, in-game characters tend to move more-quickly than real world people do. IIRC from a long-ago article, Quake 2 was calculated to have the main character running at about 35 mph. Even an unencumbered Usain Bolt doing a short sprint isn’t gonna be in that neighborhood. That has some significant tactical impacts in a number of games in terms of, say, the ability to close on a ranged attacker or the value of ambushing.
A number of military sims that I’ve seen – a game genre where having realistic speeds often matter a lot – provide “time compression”, where one can speed up the game world to get through periods where nothing interesting is happening. That does require the game to be able to simulate the world at a higher rate than normal, though.
My problem with analog sticks in FPSes isn’t fine-grained control – most games have zoom, and auto-aim has done a lot to mitigate lack of acuracy. My problem is coarse-grained control – that is, it takes ages in an FPS to turn around at maximum turn speed, whereas a mouse player can rapidly snap around if they are, say, attacked from the side or behind.
I’ve seen some people talk about hacking together some mechanism to try to deal with this using the Steam Controller and Steam Input – I think that it might have been something like a double-tap-to-rapidly-turn, but my impression is that whatever was going on there was more-elaborate than just the combination of an analog stick and a gyro for fine movement.
A number of PC games – where the hardware’s performance capabilities are going to change from player to player – have a “benchmark” option accessible, usually in the video settings, that does a “fly-through” of some relatively-intensive levels, and then gives FPS statistics (I think usually an average count, though come to think of it, a 95% number would be nice too). Thinking of a recent example, Cyberpunk 2077 does this. The earliest game that I recall that had some similar feature was Quake, with the timedemo command, though that wasn’t accessible outside of the console.
That doesn’t deal with testing controls, but it does deal with performance (and can hit a number of the engine’s features), so it does part of what you want.
That could also work with savegames, in that you can have saves, but make the default on startup be to restore where one was in the last game. Many games provide a “continue” option at the top of the main menu, I think reflecting the fact that that’s what a player wants to do 99% of the time.
Two caveats:
If it’s an action game and there’s loading involved, it’d be nice to know when the load is done, since you may immediately have to be reacting to something in-game. I’d rather have it attempt to load the game and then go into a “pause” mode, maybe with some overlay or something indicating the current game state (like to remind you what level or wherever you are).
It’s possible – because we live in an imperfect world with imperfect software – for save games to get into a broken state, and if so, you don’t want to make it impossible to reach the main menu if trying to load the last save game is crashing the thing. Maybe make the game detect that the last load failed, akin to web browsers, and then head to a menu in that case.
Which is why my above suggestion is adaptive to individual computers.
I got exasperated when I ripped out a “fake” progress bar in a commercial product – not a game – that another dev had previously added that I was working on and put in a real one. I don’t agree that this is some insumountable problem.
I agree that it’s a valid insight that a lot of basic input things are not explained and that it’s not obvious to a first time user.
But on the other hand, I think that the vast majority of players have, at this point, learned.
I remember way back when the personal computer was getting going, the first (or maybe second) Macintosh came out with an audio tape that one could play in conjunction with an automated demo showing how to click on things and drag and so forth. What icons and menus were. Today, we just kind of assume that people know that, because they’ve picked them up on the way, so it’s not like individual software packages have a tutorial telling someone what a window is and how to use it.
And I remember being at a library where there was some “computer training for senior citizens” thing going on near me, and some elderly lady was having trouble figuring out double-clicking and the instructor there said “don’t worry, double-clicking is one of the hardest things”. I mentally kind of rolled my eyeballs, but then I thought about that. I mean, I’d been double-clicking for years, and I bet that the first time I started out, I probably dicked it up too.
But I don’t know if the way to do that is to have every game incorporate a tutorial on the console’s hardware doing things like teaching players that the console sticks are clickable. Like, maybe the real answer is that the console should have a short tutorial. Most consoles these days seem to have an intrinsic concept of user accounts. When creating one, maybe run through the hardware tutorial.
If this is for epileptic users who can get seizures from strobing, I disagree. This is a safety feature. It should not be in the video game, where it may-or-may not be reliably implemented and the algorithm to avoid it may differ from game to game. This is something that the OS should implement across the whole system. Like, if the user having a seizure is a risk, then I don’t want to trust that every game developer or movie maker or person embedding an animated GIF on a website is going to have a toggle and that it works. I want my OS telling my video card “give me average brightness frame to frame, and if average brightness is gyrating too much frame to frame, then put a clamp on that now”.
For video game consoles, maybe it should be the TV that implements it, rather than the console.
It should even be possible to stick an intermediate hardware box between the display and the video-outputting device that detects and filters it, if one wants to use existing displays. Like, I get if someone wants to have detection and filtering, but has a large-screen display that they don’t want to replace. If I had photosensitive epilepsy, I would definitely want to be sticking such a box on any large displays that I’m looking at in the dark.
To put it another way: if someone not having a seizure depends on 4chan users not posting animated GIFs with particular characteristics, then the system is already horribly broken.
I mean, if a game publisher wants to try to offset the game price via adding advertisements or to try to market the game via your social network or whatever, fine. I’m not going to try to tell game publishers how to do their business.
However, as a game consumer, I’d like to be informed before I buy a game whether game publishers are doing this in a game before I purchase it, so that I have the opportunity to opt out of buying it. Personally, I’d rather that they at least offer a “premium” version without stuff like this; the mobile video game industry often does an “adware and a premium no-ads” model.
Steam defaults to notifying people on your friends list what games you are playing, though they let you turn it off. I doubt that any user wants that on, all else held equal, other than the specific case of multiplayer games where users play multiplayer games with their friends. It might help a game publisher market their game to other users, but I’d rather just pay whatever extra it takes to make up the difference. I’m not going to say that it’s worth it to every user to pay a little more to maintain game immersion, but it is to me.
High FOV gives you more peripheral vision, which – if you can get used to extremely-high FOVs – is a major advantage in competitive multiplayer FPSes. I know that users used to play with very high FOVs on Quake and the like; I don’t know if that’s a thing today. That’s an argument for constraining FOV in competitive multiplayer environments. Marathon used to incorporate this into the game, have a fisheye powerup that temporarily provided better peripheral vision. So if you want a level playing field for competitive multiplayer games, you cannot let it be changed by players. If you want a level playing field, the only thing you can do is adjust where their head is relative to the display, help them calibrate their head placement.
Even for single-player FPSes, it has some degree of impact on difficulty. Having a high FOV will generally make a game easier, since having more peripheral vision is advantageous.
Games virtually always use a higher FOV than would be accurate for the real world, based on the distance from the eye to display and the size of the display. In the real world, your monitor or TV screen – if at a sane distance from you – provides a very limited field of vision. Trying to play an FPS through a tiny window into the world like that would be a huge disadvantage. They just try to jack it up to a level where it won’t actually make people sick.
The “optimal” FOV will differ on a per-player basis (some people can handle higher FOV without being sick). What would be a physically-accurate FOV also depends on the size of the display and how far away from the display the player is sitting, which the developer does not know and varies on a per-player basis (unless the player is wearing a VR headset).
For consoles, I’d argue that this should probably be implemented at a console-wide level, maybe on a per-user basis, since what a user can handle and where their head is relative to the display should be constant across games. Doesn’t make sense to require a player to set it manually on a per-game basis, since they’re just going to have to be setting the same number.
The question of pause-a-game-when-not-focused is a big question for me. I don’t know if there’s a perfect answer, though I’d at least like a toggle.
I run a Linux environment, with multiple workspaces. I can switch between workspaces by whacking a key combination. So I really, really frequently am swapping between them, even when playing games.
I totally understand how some people might want a game to auto-pause when they switch away from it. I remember once seeing a video recording of some guy who was handling support calls. He was playing video games in between calls, and every time a call came in, he would switch over to his support software and do work. Now, setting aside the question of whether his manager was okay with that, that’s a very legitimate use case where you’d want a game to auto-pause on switch. Otherwise, you have to manually pause and then switch.
On the other hand, I often want to switch away when the game is doing something time-consuming. Starfield can take a while to do a rest, and I’ll often be looking at something on another workspace while resting. I definitely don’t want the game to pause then, else I just have to sit there staring at a screen with a progress bar moving. Same thing with turn-based games that have an AI phase, where the AI is computing something. If a game has any moments with downtime, I’d like to be able to run it in the background without it pausing. It’s really annoying when a game developer tries to “helpfully” auto-pause the game, when I don’t want that. I’d be fine with that as a default, but if there’s no toggle, it’s really irritating (Starfield does have a toggle, albeit one hidden in a config file and without a UI widget for it).
On idles, I agree. Especially for turn-based games like Civilization, it’d be nice to at least have the option to forego idle animations, which would be a big battery usage saver for laptops. The only thing it should need to do, even in the foreground, if you’re not pushing buttons, is be playing music.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Unciv, but it’s a full open-source reimplementation of Civilization 5 for Android and desktop OSes, using simple graphics. It really does drive home how much graphical fluff there is in the series – not that that’s necessarily bad, but it really is not necessary to play the game. And for a lot of people, it’d be nice to have battery-friendly games.
Or if a loud noise outside keeps you from hearing something important.
At one point in my life, during the pre-Tivo era, I lived directly beneath the approach route for an airport. It wasn’t the highest-traffic airport out there, and you learn to just tune the airplanes out for most things – but the one thing that there wasn’t a great workaround for was the occasional snippet of television shows getting drowned out when they decided to have a critical bit of plot right when the 8:00 PM flight was coming in.
Modern video games with voice-acting do tend to mitigate this by having subtitles and turning them on by default, though. And video games usually do let you roll back to an earlier save, maybe lose a few minutes of play, but if you want badly enough to hear the thing, you can. So it’s not quite as bad as the television show, where missing the critical bit of a plot could be really irritating.
Hmm. I guess that’d work if you have a per-save-game list of cinematics. I was thinking of this more in the sense of games that have cinematics that are unlocked and accessible from the main menu.
There’s actually legitimately at least some functionality required there that exists on the console there that doesn’t on the PC. The consoles already have a console-level concept of a player-to-controller mapping. That doesn’t exist on the PC, so the individual game would need to implement it – it’s not entirely free.
A common approach on the PC to handling controllers is to assume that there is one player and that whichever controller is receiving input last is the controller to use. This deals nicely with the case where there are multiple specialized controllers used for different software packages, like “the user has a steering wheel, a flightstick, an XBox controller, a Playstation controller, and a Switch controller plugged in” case. Problem is, then you can’t go just assume that Controller 1 is the Player 1 controller, and Controller 2 is the Player 2 controller. That case doesn’t come up on consoles, because they constrain the controller situation so that you can’t do that, so the problem doesn’t arise on consoles.
I suppose that if you were hellbent on specifically setting this up, you could maybe do multiple VMs split onscreen, though last I looked, the situation for sharing 3d hardware across multiple VMs wasn’t great, and I am sure that it would be horribly inefficient, since each VM would be storing a duplicate copy of textures in VRAM. I have no idea how the PC version of Halo CE deals with weird aspect ratios.
It also wouldn’t have some integration like switching to a single large screen for cutscenes or the menu. But if you were just specifically hellbent on creating a multiplayer, single-screen Halo experience on the PC, you might be able to pull it off like that.
Another approach, if the hardware cost is acceptable, would be to have a laptop per player and then stream the output video to some multiplexing hardware that puts multiple screens on one TV. That would buy you per-player audio, which I don’t believe was possible on the original XBox release.
I always thought that it was intended to either simulate an old television or to make a scene look scarier, but looking at the wiki page I’ve linked to, it looks like there are a number of stylistic uses.
A controller with two analog sticks and two analog triggers has six analog axes of input. A keyboard and mouse has two. There are definitely games that can benefit from more analog axes – think twin-stick shooters. You can use digital inputs for movement, but it’s also less-precise.
On the other hand, a mouse can provide both rapid and precise movement, more-so than an analog stick. And a keyboard has a lot more keys, which is important for some games. And a keyboard is going to be a lot better for text input.
Controllers have output to players, in the form of rumble motors (and with some controllers on some platforms, more-exotic options). There’s no widespread support for any kind of output from the mouse or keyboard. Use of rumble motors can add immersion.
While I’ve used a mouse as a flight input in Freespace 2, generally-speaking, I think that a controller’s analog sticks are better for flight sims (though if you’re playing an old-timey WW2 flight sim, probably getting a full-size stick with all the extra controls is worthwhile).
On the other hand, it’s very hard for a controller to compete with the keyboard and mouse for first-person shooters. I’ve used one for some games that were designed for consoles and aren’t very demanding in response and often have vehicles that are better-controlled with a controller – I’m playing Starfield with a controller. But one is simply going to do much better with a keyboard and a mouse, if one practices with both. Playing an FPS with a controller feels like driving a truck.
Some games, like a number of strategy games, are going to be much-better played with a mouse. I have a hard time seeing Paradox’s grand strategy games being played with a controller, even with a lot of work on the control scheme.
Ditto for RTSes. I’ve tried a few with controllers, like Supreme Commander, and it definitely benefits from a mouse.
Playing interactive fiction of the classic sort, where one types in commands, really, really needs a keyboard. There are ways you can mitigate a bit of the pain, and some point-and-click adventure games have tried to do this, provide a limited set of preset commands, but it’s just not great.
Playing pretty much any game designed for a D-pad, I’d rather play on a controller. Yeah, you can get okay with a keyboard, but it just doesn’t feel the same, not nearly as fluid.
And there are a few other input options that aren’t seen much any more:
Full-size flightstick, maybe with throttle and pedals. Some had force feedback. I haven’t seen many new releases; in the 1980s and 1990s, though, these were common for PCs.
That being said, normally console FPSes are designed to be much more-forgiving as to response time to account for the controller, and there’s typically some level of auto-aim. If you’re playing against other players, they’re going to be using analog sticks too.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m with you on this, would rather have the mouse, just that I dunno if I’d call it a disaster. It’d be a disaster if people using mice/keyboards were competitively playing against people with analog sticks in an FPS.
Ah, that looks neat, thanks, may have to give it a go. Yeah, it looks like it uses the Spring Engine, which was originally intended to be an open-source engine to run TA. I’ve played Zero-K, which is another game running on the Spring Engine that also aims for an TA feel. Wasn’t really aimed for a sequel so much as bringing back TA, though.
I found a lot of things in this review pretty spot on, and am curious if others feel the same. I do still regularly play one MMO which I love (GW2), but dumped all the others I used to play since I got fed up with their obvious shift to practices he discusses here. While Anet may be guilty of employing some, they are not imho...
One thing that keeping exclusive control of the server does is make a game, or at least the game in multiplayer mode, really hard to pirate. That’s a pretty compelling argument in favor for someone making the game.
If their main concern is layoffs – which it sounds like, at least from the article text, though I don’t know if that’s just the author’s take or not – I doubt that the union is going to have much leverage. CDPR isn’t laying people off for fun; the whole industry is seeing a major decline in investment at the moment.
Video Game VC Funding Slumps as Publishers Battle Covid Hangover
Funding opportunities dry up with game companies cutting jobs
Total peaked when people were still indoors because of Covid
VC groups invested $700.3 million in gaming in the third quarter, the lowest total since the second quarter of 2020, according to data from PitchBook. The industry attracted more than $2 billion in every quarter for two years ending in mid-2022.
The past few weeks have been marked by layoffs and studio closures by game companies. Epic cut 830 jobs, while Sony Group Corp.’s Naughty Dog and Worms maker Team17 have also let go dozens of workers.
The Swedish video-game holding company Embracer Group AB, which bought up dozens of gaming companies starting in 2020, is now canceling games, eliminating jobs and closing studios. The company is looking to sell Borderlands developer Gearbox Entertainment.
Since the beginning of 2023, there has been an abundance of layoffs that have hit the tech and gaming industry like a storm. Disney, Take Two, Unity, Twitter (now ‘X’) and even Microsoft have faced massive layoffs since January, and CD PROJEKT RED is the latest to follow this unfortunate and growing trend.
There’s that game with untextured polygonal graphics about naval combat that’s aimed towards having several players running a carrier. Dammit, what’s the name of that?
Not quite the same thing, but one thing I have seen is players that stream slower-paced games chatting with remote viewers.
On Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, Vormithrax, is well-known for this, and watching his videos has often been recommended on Reddit as a way to learn the (quite complicated) game, as he tends to walk people through what he’s thinking about while playing.
Obviously, that doesn’t work with every game genre; they have to be able to field suggestions and questions from viewers while concurrently playing. But for turn-based games, I think that it can work well.
Redfall studio job listing indicates returning focus to single-player
A job listing for Redfall studio Arkane Austin appears to indicate that the Dishonored and Deathloop studio could be returning to single-player games soon.
Honestly, the proliferation of widely-available Internet access and the fact that multiplayer games can be harder to pirate has, IMHO, tilted things a bit overly towards multiplayer games. That’s not to say that multiplayer games can’t be fun, but there is a lot to like about single-player games.
They don’t go away forever once the player base drops off.
On the PC, modding provides for a lot of life for many games. Modding competitive multiplayer games tends to run into issues with people cheating.
More-broadly, it’s not a problem if someone cheats in a single-player game, but it’s usually a problem for single-player, so all the anti-cheat infrastructure has to come along in multiplayer games.
For competitive multiplayer games, providing an even playing field is important, so using a controller with more buttons tied to game functions – a nice quality-of-life improvement – becomes a problwm, whereas it’s fine in single-player games.
Single-player games can be played offline.
Single-player games don’t have issues with connectivity interruptions.
While it’s true that playing against or with a human can be a good way to provide “AI” for other characters, humans aren’t getting better at filling that role, whereas the advance of computing power and software improvement permits for games to have better AI. I still feel like there’s a lot of room for improvement, but most first-person shooters have drastically more-interesting enemy AI than they did in the 1990s, and the technology isn’t going to generally go downhill. If someone makes a good “AI engine”, then many games benefit from improvement.
Single-player games are normally free to let the player pause what’s going on and deal with things In The Real World. If you’ve got an infant who needs their diaper to be changed, say, it’s not an issue. Multiplayer doesn’t generally deal so well with that.
It’s not as bad with centrally-controlled servers, which is the norm these days, but multiplayer games do have security concerns – you’re letting random other people affect your computer via software that probably isn’t very well-hardened.
What is something (feature, modes, settings...) you would like to see become a standard in video games? angielski
I’ve been thinking about making this thread for a few days. Sometimes, I play a game and it has some very basic features that are just not in every other game and I think to myself: Why is this not standard?! and I wanted to know what were yours....
Do you prefer playing with Keyboard or controller more, and for what type of games?
Live Service And The Decline Of Gaming (www.youtube.com) angielski
I found a lot of things in this review pretty spot on, and am curious if others feel the same. I do still regularly play one MMO which I love (GW2), but dumped all the others I used to play since I got fed up with their obvious shift to practices he discusses here. While Anet may be guilty of employing some, they are not imho...
CD Projekt Red devs unionise after its third round of layoffs in three months (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Staff at CD Projekt Red are uniting with others in the Polish video game industry to unionise. The union was formed aft…
Warfare MMO Foxhole is adding naval combat complete with huge multi-person ships (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Can anyone recommend let's play channels or streamers wherein a group of multiple people play single player games together?
Examples include: Scary Game Squad, Gamegrumps, Team Double Dragon, and the like....
Why CCP haven't stopped trying to make an EVE Online shooter for 15 years (www.rockpapershotgun.com) angielski
Redfall doesn’t have enough Steam players to fill a team (www.pcgamesn.com) angielski