I imagine they have CGNAT already. But you can run servers that only assist users to establish a connection handshake from behind CGNAT, then all traffic happens peer to peer.
Now, whether the ISPs can get away with blocking that handshake is another story…
Quick disclaimer, I’ve been involved with FOSS shooters for something like 20 years now. I mention that to establish where I come from: in a FOSS game anybody can modify the game client all they want, so all the bullshit is out of the way from the start. You can’t hide behind make-believe notions such as “they can’t modify the client” – which is one of the major lies and fallacies of commercial close-source games. If there’s something you don’t want the client to know or do, you make it so on the server.
There is a lot of things that the server can do that can severely limit cheater shenanigans. If you don’t want them to see through walls then don’t tell them what’s behind walls. If you don’t want them to know what’s behind them then don’t tell them what’s outside their cone of view. If you don’t want them to teleport look where they were a moment ago and where they claim to be now and figure out if it should be possible. You get the idea.
Aimbots can be detected because at the core it’s a simple issue of the client’s aim snapping from one place to the target too fast. What’s “too fast” and the pattern of the movement can be up for debate but it can definitely be detected and analysed and reviewed in many ways – regular code, AI, and human replay.
If this kind of analysis is too much for your server to perform in real time (it was too much, 20 years ago) then you can store it and analyse it offline or replay it for human reviewers. You can fast-parse game data for telltale signs, analyse specific episodes in detail, and decide to ban players. Yes it happens after the game was ruined but at least it happens.
There are a couple of types of cheating that you can’t detect server side:
Modifications to the client HUD that help the player grok information faster and better. This is a large category that can include things like colorblindness overlays, font changes, UI changes, movement tracking on display etc. As far as I’m concerned that falls under HUD modding and should be welcome in any healthy game. Again, if you don’t want clients to have a piece of information don’t give it to them, and design your game in a way that such mods are mostly irrelevant.
Automating input. Again a large category that includes macros that speed up complex chains of operations. Can be slowed down by imposing server-side delays but you can hurt legit fast players this way too. Same as above, if this is what makes or breaks your shooter then perhaps you should rethink it.
Some of the most fun games I’ve seen did not care about HUD mods and macros and on the contrary embraced them. You want to write a macro that will auto-purchase the best gear based on your available coin after respawn? Knock yourself out, because what constitutes “best” gear changes depending of the circumstances, and a veteran with a pistol can smoke your ass anyway if you don’t know how to properly use that fancy plasma gun.
I’ve mentioned human review above which brings up an interesting feature that I don’t see implemented in enough games: saving and replaying game metadata. It’s stupidly simple to store everything that happened during a match on the server side and it doesn’t take much space. You can offer that recording to seasoned players to replay on their PC which allows them to see the match from any player’s point of view. An experienced veteran can notice all kinds of shenanigans this way – and it’s also an excellent e-sport and machinima feature that enables commentary, editing, tutorials and so on.
Edit: Oh, forgot one thing. You may be wondering, then why don’t the big game companies do all this? Simple, cost. Why should they pay for server juice and staff to review games properly when they can slap a rootkit on your computer and use your resources?
The problem with HL is that it had very little to offer beyond “you’re a witch at Hogwarts”. They put together a great setting… then did nothing with it. It’s a huge pity and a great waste of something that could’ve been amazing.
No game should save gigabytes. Even megabytes can be too much. If the game is very linear a save could mean a single number. Even if it has character cosmetic customization and a convoluted plot with lots of choices it’s still usually in the kilobyte range. The larger saves (overall) would be sports games like rally racing where the game needs to be able to provide a thorough replay of every race.
But it is facts In talking about. Nobody in their right mind will pretend there weren’t bugs, or that the quests or talent trees or crafting or alchemy were well made, or that the AI was good etc.
All you’re saying is that you liked the game in spite of all that — either that or you can’t even remember how bad it was before the mods.
Skyrim’s greatest virtue will always be how moddable it is. But that still doesn’t mean that Bethesda put out a great game in 2011.
The original vanilla Skyrim was pretty terrible. Don’t get me wrong it was playable but it was a very forgettable and unimpressive game. The low quality assets, the bugs, the half-assed talent trees, the uninspired and unfinished quest lines, the dumb AI, the barren ugly towns and landscapes etc. Just think about all the things you have to fix nowadays with mods to play it properly, nevermind adding new stuff.
For my curiosity, what on Earth could you possibly do for those 40 hours? Cause for me that’s about 5 times more than it’s worth spending with the game in its current state.
Are you new to Bethesda games or it has just been a while? 🙂
I remember starting Skyrim for the first time and making it as far as the character selection screen (well, after spending a few hours fixing the no-voices bug) at which point I went wtf is this crap and went looking for mods.
They went downhill since Morrowind… it was their last game that managed to capture players on its own merits, with zero mods.
People forget that Bethesda used to be a sports and arcade game developer back in the day and that Elder Scrolls was very much uncharacteristic for them. They tried and made some interesting things for a while but once they hit mainstream they never went back to the interesting stuff. It also means I don’t think we’ll see an ES6 game worth talking about.