I didn’t know CS did this, but yeah, at a high level, that’s how I’d address it, too. It’s probably not a solution that scales super well due to the manual review required, and I know that game has a reputation of people still being annoyed by cheaters, but it might be the best we can do without being very invasive, like the ring 0 stuff.
Nah, cheating is just absurdly hard to stop. Even ring 0 anti cheat doesn’t stop it entirely. At some point, I feel like the answer is similar to piracy, in that you must accept that there’s going to be some amount of it, and then find a way to mitigate the damage. Because there are solutions to both of them that both go too far.
People wrote in to the Giant Bombcast before to say that they were ordered to destroy code and materials at studios that were going out of business, and they instead hid drives with the files in the drop ceiling on their way out.
I haven’t heard of addictive design in the business model of avocado toast.
That’s the analyst prediction, not something that came out of talks behind closed doors.
Most old shooters did this, and I miss it. No one sees the point in a fun multiplayer mode if it can’t be a live service and perpetually monetized.
Why are we asking for live service games? The problem is that they must be hits or they disappear forever, as opposed to putting a deathmatch in the game that you could boot up whenever, have a handful of hours of fun whenever you like, and move on. This genre chasing live service is why I haven’t found a first person shooter multiplayer mode that I’ve enjoyed in over a decade.
Sure, but you can add like a handful of maps and weapons, to supplement the game with what it feels like it’s missing, without having a plan to support the game with new stuff for years.
Whenever this happens, people attribute it to some change or another, but I’m pretty sure it’s basically just inevitable. If the company’s income stream didn’t depend on an ever-present player base, I’d even say it’s normal and healthy.
There doesn’t need to be a winner, but this was a very, very slow trend over the past 20 years for one line to cross the other line, and it didn’t used to be close.
We’ve been able to measure it in games like Elden Ring and Guilty Gear Strive. Games that traditionally didn’t have PC ports until long after the console versions, because they were seen as genres that only did well on consoles.
It’s accessible now, and I think they should nuke it again.
It’s the first sign of any sort of moderation I’ve seen in Steam forums for like two years.
The comments here are something else. This event is completely independent of the sales of the game (a game that probably did just fine). She’s a director who left a company after 18 years at the end of a project, which directors often do, because that’s the best way to accept a lucrative offer without burning bridges. 18 years is a long time to stay at the same company.
EDIT: Oh, apparently this departure is a part of some manufactured internet culture war drama. Allow this from Jeff Grubb to clear the air:
Corrine Busch, director of Dragon Age, really is leaving BioWare. But I don’t think EA is closing BioWare Edmonton. Was told there is nothing solid about that part of the rumor.
In her letter, she said she is moving to a new team to work on a new RPG.
Just to give you all the timeline: Two people reached out to me directly with details about the story before I ever saw Grummz or whoever’s tweets (I have all those blocked). Regardless, their posts contained lies to fuel a pathetic culture war, so I never would’ve felt good about crediting them.
I’m not talking about a metaphorical 50m, I’m talking in the game world 50m. It’s not an analogy for game design, I mean in a very literal sense that the worlds are a bit too small for my tastes.
But the size of the world is a part of the game design. What’s too big for The Outer Worlds might be just fine for Mad Max simply because one of those games lets you drive a car. The distance that those supplies can be away from where you start is dictated by what mechanics you have at your disposal to get there. It’s metaphorical because we’re talking about any time a game makes a decision like this with relation to how they scale their game world, not just that one time that you measured it out to be 50m.
I do think it’s worth examining why this is harder for you to suspend disbelief than other things in video games. You suspend disbelief every time your character loses or gains hit points rather than suffering actual injuries that need time to heal. You suspend disbelief any time you play a game in a real world city that isn’t represented in 1:1 scale (that’s basically all of them) like The Division or Spider-Man. So to the same end, I’ll take those supplies that are 50m away and it’s somehow too far for the quest giver to go get them, because it’s best for the design of the game, just like the scale of the world that they built.
All the immersion Bethesda could muster couldn’t make Starfield a better game than The Outer Worlds. The criticism was frequently that they made 1000 planets but that it would have been better if they’d focused on making 5 good ones, which is basically what Outer Worlds did. Putting the metaphorical supplies 50m away is what they found led to the best pacing, so suspend your disbelief a bit, and have a better time than if they’d put them further away. This isn’t prescriptive, btw. If it’s not your preference, it’s not your preference, but I think most people would prefer the compromise to immersion when it makes the game more fun.
The advantage of putting those supplies 50m away though is that it makes a better video game. Playing The Outer Worlds right after Starfield made me a-okay with every way they shrunk the Bethesda experience.
Statistically, people are more upset when they get crushed by other humans.
Neither of them has even tried to distribute their own store as a Flatpak. That doesn’t strike me as Valve abusing a monopoly position.
Doesn’t Counter-Strike still have this? It serves a different use case than a proper ranked mode, usually, though I’ll admit I’m long out of the loop on Counter-Strike.