Remember when telemetry/data collection across the internet was often optional and pretty minor?
The more shit we absentmindedly agree to because it’s not really a big deal in the short term, the worse it gets in the long term.
If I play a game on Steam, then Playstation, EA, Ubisoft, etc should all fuck off. I already gave those companies my money, it’s insulting that that isn’t enough anymore.
Edit: great point I just saw someone else mention, the fact that Sony has allowed over 100 million users’ data to be exposed due to various breaches by bad actors over the past 15 years. At least one of those times, the data was revealed to be nowhere near as secure as it should have been.
Why is that too high of a bar to clear? I’m not saying every game should be open source from day one (and tbh I think the people who say all software should be free have their head up their ass. People worked on it, some people want to get paid for that work).
However, how does it hurt Ubisoft to wait 5 or so years after shutting down the crew, then releasing the source code? By then, anything relevant to a competitor looking to ape off them, or a bad actor looking to cheat or carry out an attack would be irrelevant, and it would at least give the community a chance at creating something from the leftovers (even a dummy server that doesn’t allow multiplayer, but just lets the game pass any “can I connect to the master server” checks, kind of like what the Single Player Tarkov mod does).
I mean, Doom is the prime example. Would people care anywhere near as much about Doom if it never went open source? It would be a great game, but it would probably no longer be relevant. I can’t see that as being a bad thing for most companies (although I’m perfectly aware that the suits of major game studios will never see it that way).
The reason no one is making HL3 is because no one wants to, at least not long term.
Idk if you know much about how Valve is structured as a game studio, but it’s a bit atypical. It’s not like Gabe Newell comes in and says “today everybody starts working on HL3”, projects get greenlit and then whichever employees want to work on them are free to do so, and if they decide they’re uninterested, for whatever reason, they can leave the project.
What this means, is that if a project starts to pick up steam (no pun intended) within the company, more and more people join in, and this creates a passionate team. Various Half-Life projects since Ep2 have been started, none were finished (until Alyx), not because they were decisively axed for more corporate reasons like many other games, but because for one reason or another, the devs became uninterested or burned out, and went to work on other things they actually wanted to work on.
I think at this point, the only way we’ll ever see HL3 is if a team comes up with something completely groundbreaking and is absolutely dedicated to getting it done. Apparently, there just hasn’t been that winning combo yet. I can’t blame them, because if they half assed any aspect of it, they’d never hear the end of it.
It doesn’t really matter though, because Wine is mature enough that it’s not a hacky diy fix, it’s a viable solution. None of the games I play run any worse on Linux than they did on Windows, and some run better. The vast majority of people don’t care whether it’s native or not, they just want it to work.
This is the first im hearing of project fika, I’d actually looked into co-op SPT a few months back and things weren’t seeming optimistic, it’s super cool that it’s come that far.
And yes, the game has tons of detail and it’s worth at least brushing up on some wiki articles to understand things like ammunition hierarchy. I actually tend to prefer games that lend themselves to a bit of research to get the most out of them (300 hours in Elite Dangerous and I’m still a noob).
Really I was just trying to make the point that this is a game where if you just want to jump in for a few matches without doing that research, you’ll get absolutely demolished, even if you don’t meet a cheater, because so many people play this game obsessively.
That’s why I vastly prefer PVE and always will. That detail is there, but I’m not at a complete disadvantage if I want to take a more relaxed approach. I’m not forced into a match against players who take this video game more seriously than I take my job.
I love tactical shooters and, at its core, EFT is one of the best. By core, I mean the movement, gunplay, physics, sound design, etc. When the going is good, there is almost no experience as visceral as EFT.
What I personally think fucking sucks is basically everything else. Especially the tryhard, creatine-powder-snorting, sweatband wearing *community that has zero sympathy for people who actually have a life and want a really detailed tactical shooter, without dedicating 15 hours a week into researching bullet penetration and common camping spots. Couple that with devs who seem to show active distaste for a lot of their more casual fans, and casual gamers in general, and you end up with a really mixed bag.
I’m one of the people who had this game completely revived for me by the single player mod, SPT-AKI. I can play on my own, with progression, and slightly more laid back difficulty, while still enjoying challenging AI and some of the best gunfights in gaming. I would absolutely love to play an official pve mode, I absolutely refuse to pay $250 for it.
*edit: this only obviously describes a portion of the community. Should clarify that I know there are plenty of players that this doesn’t describe.
Worth mentioning that Helldivers is hugely and openly influenced by Starship troopers, which although not as big as something like D&D, is still pretty well known in pop-culture to this day, at least in the sci-fi circles.
There was never really “a burning” that destroyed it in one go. Over many years, there were numerous factors that caused many of the works to be lost. Some were lost to smaller fires, some were stolen, some just disintegrated due to age. If no one bothered to copy them by hand to have more than one copy, that was that.
Sorry, should say I mean feature complete in a relative sense. Ie, some EA games are essentially tech demos, and you’re funding a theoretical game when you buy. If those games stopped getting updates, you’re left with a mostly empty unreal engine project, not a full video game.
Valheim was a full video game on day one. A buddy and I played many hours when it first came out and thoroughly enjoyed it. If no updates came out, I might have felt like there was some unmet potential, but I certainly wouldn’t have been insulted. Bottom line, take away the roadmap, I still see a great game with enough going for it to stand on its own.
In an age where everyone rags on live service games that will inevitably lose support, a cheap, fun, well made, feature complete game (and was that way on release) that gets infrequent updates is “abandoned” and “insultingly barebones”. Classic 2024 gamer moment right there
So there are no 40 year olds who blindly pre order the 15th CoD game because that’s all they play? This is a general issue in the gaming community as a whole.