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Daggerfall was like this, if I’m not mistaken (I got into TES with Morrowind, and I’ve never found the time to play the older games).
The map was about the size of Great Britain, and mostly empty, even if it had about fifteen thousand locations spread about it.
They’re not celebrating “whatever”, they’re celebrating modding.
Stapling unnaturally large breasts on characters where they don’t belong is stereotypically one of the first things modders do to games, so making fun of that seems like a perfect way to celebrate modding (as long as you’ve got any sense of humour, which Larian most definitely do).
Well, Star Citizen is playable right now (and has been for years), and they recently showed over an hour of supposedly live Squadron 42 gameplay (obviously somewhat spoilery for the start of the game), so there’s some hope at least…
Of course, it remains to be seen how much more of the story is finished to the same extent, and at what point will it be consistently playable on contemporary hardware (I haven’t played Star Citizen in a long while, so I’m not sure what state it’s in, and I don’t know if Squadron 42, being a single player game, will be as susceptible to server issues, or if it’ll even need servers), but it gives a good idea of the state of the main game features and how it’s intended to feel.
Well, they recently showed over an hour of supposedly live gameplay (obviously somewhat spoilery for the start of the game), so there’s some hope at least…
Of course, it remains to be seen how much more of the story is finished to the same extent, and at what point will it be consistently playable on contemporary hardware (I haven’t played Star Citizen in a long while, so I’m not sure what state it’s in, and I don’t know if Squadron 42, being a single player game, will be as susceptible to server issues, or if it’ll even need servers), but it gives a good idea of the state of the main game features and how it’s intended to feel.
Only online “games” this maybe wouldn’t apply to would have to be peer to peer, serverless, and probably open source to be safe… and, even then, you’d have to provide a sufficient amount of players to replay them a decade on, as, lacking any actual game, they’re useless without other players.
As for offline games, sure, publishers might attempt to use them in the same way, but it’s much more expensive since a minimum amount of game must actually exist in order for players to fall for it, and they can’t fake it using other players. Asset flips are obviously a thing, but easily detected and avoided. And, most importantly, even those will remain equally playable or unplayable in a few decades, while an online “game” will be unplayable the instant it doesn’t have enough players.
I’m not sure what you mean by
get your customers to make the content for you for free
I mean that (besides always-online DRM, and scamming your victims with subscriptions and microtransactions) the main reason for perpetrating an online multiplayer computer game is that you can get away with not writing a story, or lore, or quests, or puzzles, or NPCs, or AI, or any actual gameplay, or anything even remotely resembling a proper game through the magic of scamming your customers (or rather victims) into paying you for the privilege of filling in the gaps and acting as NPCs, and gameplay, and whatnot.
You get away with selling the rotting carcass of what could have been a game, and scamming your customers into believing it’s still alive just because it’s (temporarily) crawling with maggots.
I can get any old single player game and, provided I can replicate its environment, play it and enjoy it just as much as I could have when it came out, or even more.
Even if it was possible to enjoy an online game, on the other hand, it will have been stillborn to start with, a mere shell of a game, an insult to real games, a sad parody only resembling a game as long as there’s enough victims trapped in the scam; the second they start leaving (supposing the scammers don’t turn the servers off before that, to drive their victims to their latest shiny defecation) it’ll go back to being the empty unplayable shell it’s always been, utterly devoid of enjoyability or replayability.
The very concept is insulting, revolting, and a clear intentional predatory attack on computer game players and the very concept of computer games.
Online computer games are not games. They’re a cheap (as long as you can afford the initial investment), fast, and easy way of extracting as much wealth as possible from their customers using the least effort.
The companies making them don’t care about computer games, or about whatever setting they’re raping and tearing apart in order to promote their crap, or about their customers. They just care about extracting as much wealth as possible from them, and moving on to their next scam.
And if left unchecked they’ll destroy the very concept of computer games as an art form, or even as an industry, and they won’t care, because they’ll have already extracted everything they could.
Why the hate for multiplayer?
Extremely lazy and scammy way to get your customers to make the content for you for free (and as a result what little content there is is absolute garbage).
Just an excuse to implement always-online DRM.
Either subscription based or ridden with pay to win microtransactions, or both. In any case, evidently not worth a fraction of what you end up paying for it, and therefore a scam.
Extremely hostile and unenjoyable experience.
Nothing wrong with being a masochist, but I ain’t one.
I play games to get away from people, not to get an overdose of the damn fuckers. If I for some self destructive reason wanted that I could just go outside.
And, in this particular case, means the game is being sold as a successor to something it’s the opposite of, making it extremely offensive and even more of a scam than most multiplayer games.
Morrowind.
I mean, it's a 22 year old game, but since you asked nicely... 🤷♂️
Seeing that silt strider just outside Seyda Neen after the intro to what looked like your run of the mill D&D style fantasy RPG was a surprise, to say the least…
… and it was just the beginning.
It’s a real shame later Elder Scrolls games mostly lost that otherworldly feel.
I can have 20,000 character long passwords with a password manager
Sure. Most websites will either truncate them or outright reject them due to being too long, but sure.
Most users, however, will use the 12 to 16 characters auto-generated ones, though, which are sufficiently hard to crack (though not as much as an easy to remember passphrase, not that it matters; the easy to remember part is what matters about passphrases).
that makes it significantly less secure
No it doesn’t. Even if a few of the passphrases leak, your algorithm, if well chosen, shouldn’t be easy to reverse engineer… and unless someone is specifically targeting you (and has access to enough of your passphrases) there’s much easier fish to catch; if a leaked passphrase doesn’t work in other sites, no one will waste time trying to figure out if it has some logic to it.
I could have 20,000 character completely unique passwords with a password manager
No you couldn’t. You’d have one password and one password manager (which would have all “your” other passwords; as would anyone else with access to your password manager).
Until you lose access to your password manager, of course… which is bound to eventually happen, due to hardware or software issues or loss of the device if it’s local, or due to network issues, the provider discontinuing the service, or inevitable enshittification if it’s online.
And, of course, you’ll have a single point of attack from which your password can be leaked (or sold, if it’s an online service) or stolen.
vastly more complex passwords
Complexity is practically irrelevant when compared to length when it comes to passwords. That’s the point of passphrases.
do you actually expect people to remember 100+ unique phrases
You can have a small number of passphrases and simply choose one and add a word or two based on the site. It’s trivial to “remember” an infinite number of unique passphrases if you’ve got an algorithm. 🤷♂️
This assumes a) passwords, and b) poor passwords at that.
Passphrases are easy to remember, extremely hard to crack, and easily customisable for every site, and you don’t need no fucking password manager to store them.
Though I’ll give you this: password managers are not, after all, necessarily single points of failure.
If you need a password manager to manage your passwords you’re a much more vulnerable point of failure than your password management bloatware itself.
So people need to be bound by EULAs that they don’t click to agree?
People…? No. And whether they clicked to agree or not should be irrelevant; EULAs should be unenforceable.
Journalists and their employers…? Neither… but then developers don’t have any obligation to provide them with review copies in the future either.
In an industry that depends on mutual goodwill, trust, and agreement, bypassing the implied NDA was completely legal… but profoundly stupid, disingenuous, and unprofessional.
The Verge decided to burn bridges it had probably taken decades to build, for the sake of one single article. It was their right and prerogative to do it, nothing illegal about it, they had no obligation to follow the EULA.
But Valve has no obligation to let them play their invite-only beta either, or to provide them with review copies in the future, and neither has any other developer.
We’ll see how it works out for the Verge in the future.
I dont think it did enough to make me hate corporations
Counterpoint: Biotechnica. Those bastards are almost as bad as scavs. Some of them are worse.
Also, maybe it looks normal for Americans, but what Militech are doing in the badlands definitely ain’t right. (Phantom Liberty kind of ruins it by treating Militech’s puppet president like one of the good guys, though. Night City ain’t part of the NUSA, and it doesn’t want to be!)
And, besides all the relic stuff, Saburo was also seriously considering nuking Night City (properly, not like Silverhand’s half assed job), so there’s that, too.
Eh, I see those as cleaning my town.
If the NCPD wants to pay me for my trouble, fair enough, been paid by far worse, though I’d probably be doing it for free anyway, especially scavs, wraiths, tigers, Biotechnica, and scavs. The rest are mainly just gonks, so I usually just beat 'em up instead of slicing and dicing them.
There’s also that cop you have to get rid of to help some corrupt cops she’s been getting in the way of.
You can either kill her, helping said corrupt cops, or warn her to leave town, thus helping her (to stay alive, at least, though obviously not to do her job).
Either way you’re helping cops, but the NCPD looks like trash (which can also be said for River’s storyline), so there’s that, at least.
Several characters, all keepsakes, all fish except, I think, one, at least one background element…
The voice acting is all there
I’d be very surprised if the number of voiced characters isn’t significantly higher in the finished game. And, of course, we’re missing the top end of the relationship interactions with all characters, which will definitely be voice acted.
the mechanics are all there
I wouldn’t be surprised if we get some new mini games in certain parts of the map we can’t access yet.
Apart from these minor nitpickings, however, I completely agree (well, except that I haven’t had any crashes or significant bugs); I’m already enjoying the game as much as the first one, and I definitely feel I got my money’s worth, which is sadly quite unusual for too many supposedly complete games these days.
There are parts of the story and maps we simply can’t get to because they aren’t there yet (I imagine about 30 to 50%), and there’s a limit to how much we can improve our relationship with the various characters (which means that there’s probably a significant amount of voice acting we can’t hear yet), all of this clearly indicated as provisionally cut content (“you might be able to do this in the future”, “can’t go there yet”, “what happened after this is, for now, literally indescribable”, that kind of thing).
There’s also what’s clearly provisional concept art from time to time, and plenty of placeholder character models and art (plus keepsakes, and fish, the later even having generic descriptions), and there’s almost certainly missing gods and characters (though there’s no indication of which those might be and in which number).
So, yeah, it’s not complete, by a long shot.
That said, I’m fairly certain that there’s already as much content and story as in the complete first game, if not more, or at least it feels like it. And it’s just as fun.
“But the plans were on display…”
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
faithful adaptation
Cue Shady Sands controversy.
It’s a good adaptation, but not necessarily a faithful one (though, frankly, I’m not deep enough into the lore to tell, or care).
Looks like New Vegas might show up in season two, so we’ll see if and how they make the timelines fit (though if they do it’ll have to be a pretty tight fit, seems like).
UE has evolved and changed over time to use new hardware features and adapt to new player needs.
Gamebryo is still the exact same engine that ran Morrowind, just running worse games on faster hardware with more memory. It even still has some of the same bugs, which community patch mods have had to fix for every single game (except Starfield, because that’s become such a clusterfuck of bugs and poor design that even the most dedicated modders have given up).
If I recall correctly you meet a guy who did that with agility (or was it acrobatics?) just after leaving Seyda Neen. It didn’t end well for him.
(Also, I haven’t played that damn game in probably over two decades; how the fuck do I still remember that town’s name…? How the fuck do I still remember Fargoth…!?)
No, but some are arguing that they might be due to peer pressure (which I find unlikely in this particular case, but if someone can be peer pressured into wasting $48,000 on digital assets, they probably can easily afford it), or gambling addiction (which also seems unlikely to apply in this case), since those are common causes of people (especially children) wasting money on microtransactions.
They mean gamers of old. That is, currently old gamers, but back when we were young, and had time, and not a lot of games to fill it with, so we appreciated a longer game.
Current young gamers have vast libraries of games to choose from, and shortened attention spans due to social media.