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I don’t think that means it didn’t work, I think that just means it’s not for everyone. I’m a firm believer that, “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”. Small indie games take firm stances on their gameplay all the time, not every game is for everyone, and that’s ok, that’s how you get unique and interesting gameplay experiences. But that’s easy for and indie game to do because making an indie game is cheap.
MMOs have the unfortunate reality that they’re architecturally complex, and expensive to operate, and thus need to appeal to as wide of an audience as possible to justify their existence to investors. They don’t have the luxury of making the experience they want, which is why they all end up just copying WoW’s enshittified gameplay, but with less polish.
My hope is that this indie revolution we’re in expands to “large scale” multiplayer games. Not so massive that it’s prohibitively expensive to run, but not so small that it’s a ghost town. I think that’s when we’ll start to see interesting MMO experiences again.
WoW is objectively huge, but they made it feel tiny by putting fast travel options everywhere. I would guess that any two points in the world are no more than 5m from each other if routed perfectly.
I want there to exist one MMO where you “live” in a city, and traveling to another city is actually so inconvenient that you only do it if you have to. Not because I want to make the trek, but because I want there to be a world just large enough that any one person has usually seen only ~1%, but the playerbase in entirety has seen >50%. I don’t know if any such game exists.
Hah, I had thought, well it’s not quite reincarnation, because you don’t come back as something new, you come back as yourself with the same memories. But I’m just noticing that it does seem like “the Big Problem” is very similar to what [my rudimentary understanding of] the Buddhist quest for transcendence is.
Rainworld
spoiler
All living things are trapped in “The Cycle”, and no one likes it, they all want to die and be free of the burden of living. They called this “The Big Problem”.
To try and find a solution to “The Big Problem”, people* built 3 AI that would constantly be running to try and compute a solution to The Big Problem. This requires a ton of energy, and an ocean’s worth of water to keep them cool. The AIs are generating so much heat that it evaporates oceans worth of water, resulting in periodic violent rainstorms (thus the name of the game). People moved to structures built above the clouds to be safe from the rain.
One day, one of the AI finally solved The Big Problem, notified the other AIs that it was solved…and promptly died before sharing it. The remaining two AI (named “Looks to the Moon” and “Five Pebbles”) continue to iterate on solving the problem, but both have all but given up hope.
You play as a Slugcat, a species specially evolved by the AI to squeeze through pipes and keep their systems clean.
*I said “people”, but I don’t think it’s ever established what planet you’re on or what race of creatures built the AI.
There is a ton of detail I’m skipping…
…but when you start the game, you are merely trying to survive and explore a living ecology full of hostile creatures. The game doesn’t care if you understand any of the lore, it doesn’t care if you “finish” the game, it’s just there to be experienced.
And you can build your own PC and peripherals, yet every aspect of the gaming industry is funded and driven by corporations. Always has been, and Linux gaming is no exception.
I specifically acknowledged the FOSS efforts to eliminate depenence on valve, I think it’s great, but even Bazzite uses the SteamDeck UI. Do you know if there’s a FOSS deck UI replacement that unifies all storefronts/repos, and works as smoothly? I want that to exist.
Steam is just objectively the smoothest linux gaming experience for the largest number of people right now. It’d be awesome if that wasn’t the case, but for now it is.
I’ll be the first to say I don’t like Linux gaming’s dependence on valve. I wish steam wasn’t the best experience, and I applaud all the effort that the FOSS community puts in to keep them honest.
But for the “gambling” monetization in particular, this is really a “don’t hate the player, hate the game” situation. It’s on people/govts to regulate this. If Valve said tomorrow, “you’re right, we’re not going to monetize gambling anymore because we think it is unethical”, they would just lose to a competitor who is less ethical.
It’s the same as saying, “if you’re rich and are pro higher taxes, why don’t you just choose to pay more? Nothing is stopping you.” Because that’s not going to fix anything, it’s just a losing strategy. What you need is a system where everyone is required by law to behave in a way that benefits the society.
To that end, Valve’s most ethical move would be to lobby the govt to ban unethical monetization. I know they’re making bank, but whether they’re making enough to out-lobby all the others who are also doing this, I don’t know…also we all know the US is not exactly positioned for effective FTC policies right now…
I replayed through Red Alert 2 and Yuri’s Revenge recently. The live action cutscenes are beautifully campy. Top notch. In the Soviet campaign, you steal the Allied time machine and use it to go back to stop Yuri; but you quickly learn that “our Soviet power supply is too efficient, and it sent us back 65 million years!” You then spend a minute defending against an onslaught of T-Rexes before it recharges to send you to the correct time period. A whole “level” for that one-off joke! They don’t make em like they used to…
AW2 was incredible, but I knew it wouldn’t do well when I played it, because it’s too niche. I love the Weird Fiction universe they’re building, but it’s just not pulling the Resident Evil audience.
Firebreak I think was their attempt to monetize the IP, but oof, it’s just not fun. I feel like they could have gone more “friend slop” in tone and been much more successful. Imagine a game loop like Repo or Lethal Company, but set in the Oldest House, interacting with weird, goofy phenomena. Instead it’s a very dry shooting experience wrapped in a very dry upgrade system. I want to support them, but it feels like work to play this game…
The “paid more to work less” part is not tenable. The games that fit that bill that you’re thinking of represent less than 1% of their peers. They are outliers, not a sustainable industry; the exception, not the rule. For every Silksong there are maybe 100 that make just enough to make ends meet, and 1000 duds that will never pay for themselves that you’ve never heard of.
What you’re saying is you want fewer steady incomes and more lottery winners. Sure, that’d be nice, but it’s not a sustainable strategy.
Ex. Wildgate launched recently. They deliberately opted to sell the game for a flat $30 rather than going F2P/P2W. As a result, they regularly get reviewed negatively by people saying “dead game, greedy devs won’t lower the price to compete with F2P games” and “the cosmetics you unlock by playing look better than the ones you can buy” (yes, there are people unironically posting those as negative reviews).
So at least understand why the most common strategy is often exploitative, and why it’s actually not a simple solution that a bunch of armchair experts have figured out in a comments section.
How are you defining “live service single player” game? This is a narrative adventure game. I will be surprised if you ever actually interact with another player directly at all. The dev has said that it supports completely offline play.
Edit: the devs have also specifically said you won’t interact with other players in real time. It’s about as “multiplayer” as the bloodstains in dark souls, but if they had a bigger effect on your narrative.
These comments are severely overestimating the level of autonomy players are given in this game. It’s just a branching story, where the branches one player is presented with are dependent on the branch another player chose. I imagine if only a single person plays this game, it will just make stuff up to make it seem like there are other players affecting the world.
Also, also the cynicism on Lemmy is a stale meta at this point. Be the change you wanna see or stfu.
Pausing in StarCraft allowed any player to pause, and any player to unpause. Additionally, each player could only pause a finite number of times (like 5 per game). I think this could work in nightreign.
The hard part is that there’s no chat in nightreign, so someone will pause and you have no idea if it’s legit or they’re just griefing.
There’s so much competition in gaming right now, and good AAA games are so few and far between, that I don’t see a need for piracy. For every $90 piece of garbage there are ten $20 diamonds (don’t forget Devolver in your list of good small companies). I don’t ever buy dlc/deluxe/etc editions unless the company/game has earned it (almost never).
I will admit, Rockstar creates some high quality experiences, but their monetization practices are down there with the worst of them.
I can’t justify not pirating, I just think for me the motivation isn’t strong enough right now. Too many affordable good games to choose from.
If it’s the one I’m thinking of, I barely consider that one a run back. It’s like 40s to get to the boss from the bench. And at that point I the game, I noticed myself start hitting the bounce plants much more consistently after having to do this run many times. Up until then I hadn’t been forced to repeat the same small section yet.
And (staying vague to avoid spoilers), the bench itself was particularly “surprising” specifically because of the long gap without any benches leading up to it, forcing you to repeat the same long platforming/combat sections over and over. Players would not have been “surprised” by it if they weren’t so desperate for a bench.
I will need to play more of silksong to be able to comment fully, but I felt that, even though you could understandably say all the same stuff about Hollow Knight, I still do think that the only times I struggled in HK (on required content) I later found out about an upgrade that was available if i had looked that would have made the fight much easier (nail upgrade, ability, charm, more hp, etc).
No, not to the same degree as Elden Ring, i agree, but I do think HK’s exploration played a very similar role as it did in Elden Ring. In both games i would tell people to only bash your head against a boss if you want to hurt yourself, otherwise go explore.
Do you believe DS and Megaman could have been even more iconic if they had listened to players and made their runs back shorter?
My point is, it’s not like the designers didn’t know what they were doing, this is a very obvious aspect of their gameplay. And regardless of how minor inconveniences like this make us feel as players, we don’t know that it’s not precisely those lows that contrast with the highs to create the intended experiences which made those games cult hits to begin with. You wouldn’t look at a Rembrandt and say, “look how much of the painting is just black! You’re wasting all this space! You could add so much detail and context in there!”
I’m a firm believer that “given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”. If players weren’t complaining about the run back, then they would be complaining about the empty flask drinking animation. Inconvenience is not a convincing argument to me. Just like any art, games are free to evoke any and all emotions. It only becomes a problem if the emotion they keep evoking is boredom lol. But even then, boredom is a valid tool on the artist’s palette; sometimes the only ones who are getting bored are the boring people.
Have you considered that the run back is trying to tell you something? The game doesn’t want you to bash your face against the same enemy the same way. It may not even want you to fight that boss yet at all.
The run back is meant to be an incentive to think about your options. Do I have other areas to explore? What do I keep dying to? Am I overlooking an obvious weakness during a particular boss mechanic, or am I not using an ability as effectively as I could be to stay alive?
If you let the player immediately run back into a boss, they will veg out and do just that until they eventually get lucky and barely down a boss by the skin of their teeth. But that’s not how you should be approaching these fights.
Sometimes the most productive run back even involves a good night’s rest.
This is to be expected. Silksong gained so much hype that now you have a bunch of people trying it who are finding out it’s not their thing.
I know people these days are used to early access garbage being shoved out the door as a full release, and are ready to rush to the comments to explain why the game is wrong, but I promise you this is not one of those cases.
So far, every run back I’ve experienced in silksong has a purpose. If it’s not something you enjoy, I recommend not playing the game. But don’t be in that overlap of the Venn Diagram between people who are enjoying the game and people who are complaining they aren’t enjoying the game. Either stop playing, or finish it and then we can talk about its design.
Personally, I casually played on and off for about 10 years before finally subscribing and spending a few years on the official Classic servers. I’ve seen plenty of others with the same story
I think your anecdotal evidence is an outlier. Blizzard used to publish subscriber counts until it started dipping after wrath. They’ve subsequently never publicly posted sub counts again. I don’t know if this means it’s never been as high again, but given how many more options people have these days, I wouldn’t be surprised. Which means sub counts were never as high as they were before private servers took off.
Also, blizzard has a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to do what it believes will maximize profits, and as a result they’ve chosen to shut down Turtle WoW.
What does this even mean in context of deregulation?
It’s the entire basis for the push for deregulation. You can grift from all the people you have resources to grift, and corpos can grift from all the people they have resources to grift. A completely free market is not a level playing field. The rich get richer. Regulations are how common folk maintain a competitive landscape.
there are no lawsuits, what difference does it make who has more money
So we should just get rid of all civil lawsuits then, that would create a completely fair playing field? Come on now…
But under my perfect legal framework
Lol or lack thereof?
Ever heard of DeepSeek? Every once in a while people figure out how to do the same as previous state-of-art models using 1000x less resources
Why do you think corpos somehow don’t know how to take advantage of DeepSeek, but the little guys do? Why do you believe the poor have an advantage in that situation? Someone makes a 1000x breakthrough and everyone can use it. Great, before: it was your 1 unit of work vs OpenAI’s 1000, an absolute difference of 999; after: it’s your 1000 vs 1,000,000, an absolute difference of 999,000. They run you out of business even faster! The rich get richer!
And OpenAI actually became open a month ago.
You understand that if a model doesn’t expose the training set and training algorithm, there’s no way to know if it has been maliciously trained, right? Their use of the terms “open source” are misnomers. They could be effectively backdoored and there’s no way to know.
Great, let them do it. Let people be able to generate a great game by saying “make me a great game”. That’s fine.
That’s not the question at hand. If you can make a tool like that ethically, I’m all for it. But 1) they haven’t demonstrated they can do so ethically, and 2) there’s nothing to indicate that their goal is to create a tool to enable more artists and engineers.
Their stated goal is to completely eliminate as many jobs as possible. Combined with corporate ownership of fusion research, AI does not currently represent any promise of a democratization of creation. It is the water in a Mad Max movie. The best we will be able to do is fight each other for the bit of energy they allow us to have.
It’s clear you haven’t thought through your positions because you’re just repeating the same trickle-down rhetoric the right has been using to dismantle the US for the last 50 years, all while believing yourself to be anti-corpo. But we’ve fully strayed from the original topic at this point, so i think it’s time we called it. Hope you get some time to seriously re-evaluate your judgments here, cheers.
Unpaid work with no way to benefit from it for community, unpaid work that only makes rich people richer and poor people poorer.
I don’t follow how reverse engineering blizzard’s server makes the rich richer here. Blizzard doesn’t want that information to be public.
I don’t see this as a problem if anyone’s allowed to freely do and sell derivative works of anyone’s else content.
This is the “deregulation” argument that Elon and the rich keep perpetuating. “Just let everyone do everything and let the free market figure it out”. But we already know how it ends: the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. They have the resources to be more unethical than you.
at current point I’m more like heavily pro-AI
Specifically training it on content without permission? Well AI capabilities are directly proportional to energy costs, so that’s another pro “rich get richer” stance.
And I don’t think it makes artists obsolete in any way. We only have to wait a little bit until it becomes as granular and useful for artists as an intermediate tool in their workflow
Less than 5 years ago people were saying that they weren’t afraid of AI because it always looked like easily identifiable slop, always had extra fingers, sounded robotic. Now we’re at the point where it can generate really high quality content indistinguishable from high quality artwork on the first try. The expressed goal of AI companies is to create AGI capable of doing everything itself, not as a tool. So what makes you believe everything will suddenly reverse course and just settle as a tool?
Maybe they put too much trust into Blizzard being good guys
Turtle WoW is a direct response to years of blizzard ignoring players’ request to embrace what people liked about vanilla WoW. They are well aware that blizzard is a shell if its former self and is entirely profit driven. If they thought blizzard were good guys, they wouldn’t need to exist in the first place.
it could have become a general-purpose open-source MMORPG platform, not something that only works for WoW
So first off, telling someone who made a game that they should have made a general purpose engine instead completely misunderstands the intention or relative complexity involved.
A general purpose MMO platform is a holy grail that’s really easy to ask for, but really complex to actually implement. Even for-profit general purpose MMO tooling (ex. Spatial OS, Spacetime DB) are struggling to establish themselves. This is because, one does not simply write a general purpose MMO backend. Every cycle matters because it represents costs in the form of electricity, bandwidth, and latency that scales with the number of connected users. So historically, MMO servers are written specifically for the requirements of the gameplay they are supporting.
And then there’s the actual content, which takes an army of devs and artists.
Turtle WoW devs (if they did any of the coding themselves) are doing something much simpler: approximate existing behavior of the server to support an existing client with existing content. Only then did they attempt to recreate the existing content in UE, and add a bit of extra content.
What you’re asking for is for a handful of volunteers to do with a shoestring budget what an army of professionals did with millions. But you want it to be even better, because it needs to be able to be general purpose, capable of doing anything any MMO would ever want to do.
To make such a leap is, to put it bluntly, incredibly naive.
It is “morally good” for people being able to freely do this. Whether you like it or not…In the end, author should not dictate what other people do, including what other people do with their work.
And yet, my guess is you would feel the exact opposite the moment it’s blizzard taking some small artist’s content and putting it in their games without compensation, no? Is an AI trained on every artist’s content in order to generate new art and sell it for a profit “morally good” to you?
I agree, what you’re saying is subjective, in that it’s not an actual thought out, ethical framework. It’s just a case where you’re losing a game of Monopoly, so on your turn you yell “new rule, my hotels get to take over your hotels!” Thing is, on their turn they take them back and then some. If you want to play that game, corpos will beat you at it, not because they’re capable of being so much more ethical than you, but because they have the resources to be far more unethical. And that’s what stealing an artist’s IP is: unethical.
Instead, I suggest not making rash blanket statements for unethical behaviors and doing mental gymnastics to convince yourself you’re some kind of robin hood. Robin hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, he didn’t say “stealing is morally good”. Just call it what it is, and say you’re ok with it as long as the people you approve of are the ones benefiting.
Ok, so then what is your criticism of Turtle WoW? You’re ok with fan-made art, you don’t care about the legality of IP law, they are more than likely pulling players (and profits) away from blizzard, so are you just critical of the fact that they’re not profiting as much as they could/should be?
On the note of “morally good”, consider Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes. Watterson had the integrity and legal protection to say that Calvin and Hobbes should exist as a set of comic strips and nothing else. He refused to do what every other comic creator did, selling their IP to mass produce toys, and movies, and clothes etc. He didn’t want to monetization to taint people’s experience with the characters.
So if i understand your position correctly, it is “morally good” that people regularly violate his copyright by creating those bumper stickers of Calvin pissing on various brands and sell them for their own profit, a profit that Watterson himself refuses to enjoy for the good of the art. But you disagree, and profits of others is more important?
The scale is not comparable at all
Totally agree, but a dozen apples and a bushel of apples are both a bunch of apples. Scale doesn’t really change what I’m saying.
creator profit & corpo profit = good <- this is where most of fanart is
If I understand your point correctly, it’s not the profit from the fan art that the creator gets, it’s that the fan art drives profit of their original artwork, right? Because we both agree that profiting from someone else’ IP is illegal, right?
no creator profit & corpo profit = bad <- this is where most of the modding for popular and live games like WoW and Minecraft is
As well as any fan art itself, legally speaking, right?
the main mechanic to get more commissions is to become more popular
Similarly, there are many popular games who started as a mod for another mainstream title, gained support, and pivoted to their own independent game.
And the whole copyright thing is way less of an issue in fan arts, I regularly see a lot of people freely taking money for doing commissions of popular characters like Hatsune Miku
But you recognize that is always illegal, right? The only reason it happens is because they’re too small and distributed for lawyers to go after every single one. But if one started gaining traction selling custom work featuring copyrighted IP, they should expect a lawsuit just like Turtle WoW. Mods are fan art, Turtle WoW is fan art, they just got popular enough that blizzard lawyers now care.
The only difference here is that, as I said before, technically if Turtle WoW did it right they would never have to distribute any blizzard assets, and never make money from blizzard IP. They could theoretically be completely independent from blizzard and still distribute the exact same content. Meanwhile fan art is always dependent on the IP it references. So ironically, all your criticisms of about work being dependent on the corpos always applies to fan art, but only maybe apply to Turtle WoW if they messed up.
I wouldn’t want to waste my time doing…mods myself to support [corpos]…
Fan art is in much better place because it’s a mutual benefit: artists benefit from working with popular franchise because it draws attention to them.
Doesn’t that seem like a double standard? Mods that support “corpos” are a waste of time, but somehow fan art is mutually beneficial? But “mods” are literally “fan art”, the only difference is the word you’re using using. Fan art is limited in all the same ways Turtle WoW is and vice versa.
Again, if they’ve covered their bases, they don’t need to distribute any game client, blizzard assets, or blizzard-owned IP, they only need to run their own server code, and distribute a patcher for the official client (which could optionally add any of their own assets). But there was never any option that allowed them to charge money to use blizzard IP.
rebuilding its systems, network stack, and filling massive databases by hand…making the game accessible and endlessly customizable (to the point where private servers could even create entirely new content)
That’s all reasons why the community was deliberately not dependent on blizzard IP. If they had roses tinted glasses, they would have never done any of that and just played the blizzard version.
IMO if Turtle WoW covered their bases correctly, they shouldn’t have anything legal to worry about (aside from corporate bullying). Their servers should be running original code, they shouldn’t be hosting any of blizzard’s binaries or assets, and they shouldn’t be charging money for any game content based on blizzard-owned IP.
If so, then they messed up…
Ah yes, the ol’ ‘ostracize the core fanbase to gain a more ephemeral one’ strategy. A popular choice these days, unfortunately.
Yeah, I put dozens of hours into Hunt with some friends. We would only be able to play every few months. So every time we logged in, they had made new mechanic changes, some of which made the game less of what we liked. I always appreciated that there were no respawns. If you killed someone, they were out, period. If I die, then i wasn’t careful enough.
And then one day we come back to play, and kill someone, only to have them pop back to life behind us. I felt like the gameplay I enjoyed had been betrayed.
Not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but Hunt: Showdown is a pvpve experience set in a fictionalized horror-themed 1900s old west.
The guns have few shots and are very slow to reload. Often your best strategy is to move very slowly and deliberately, looking closely for any movement from other players, taking care not to make any errant noises. Every single sound you make, including right clicking to aim down sights, is audible to your opponent if they’re close enough. One good shot is enough to down someone.
The result is a unique experience that can hit both extremes: agonizingly slow build up of anticipation, or a fast paced chase through the woods to cut off an escape.
There are space games with procedural large scale galaxies to the point that the entire playerbase can only ever hope to see ~15% of the systems, but that’s why I put the >50% qualifier in there. That’s TOO big. Anyone can generate an effectively infinite procedural world, I want a large world.
When I had originally conceived of this, it was in the context of a pokemon MMO. You would have your home town, and as a trainer, or researcher, or rocket member, etc, you’d travel at a real-time pace akin to the show.
Alternative IP that it could work with are dragonball (imagine the playerbase on a months long search to find/fight over the dragonballs so they could awaken the dragon and make a wish to the devs), or Avatar (each player would have a chance to spawn in as a random bender. One player at any given time is the Avatar. Events happen to strengthen some benders and weaken others. Players make war and peace at will).
There would obviously be challenges in running these types of experiences, but currently it feels like the cost of standing up an MMO is so much that no one ever does anything interesting. Instead they just copy WoW.