Hi, I’m Cleo! (he/they) I talk mostly about games and politics. My DMs are always open to chat! :)
I actually didn’t know this but I did play through that recently and I actually have really good things about how that game looks even to this day. I know they did some touching up and I’m assuming updated textures for the enhanced version but it aged a lot better than many other games from that era did
What’s really crazy is to compare Bethesda with CDPR. I’ve been replaying the Witcher 3 and it just struck me how I won’t have to wait 15+ years for the next entry. And to look at how much more efficient they’ve been in the past.
For a timeline, Witcher 2 released in May 2011 and then the Witcher 3 released in May 2015. Took 3.5 years to develop. Cyberpunk released December 2020, only 4.5 years after W3 had its last major DLC. Then in 2023 they released a very large update for Cyberpunk, about 2/3rds the runtime of the main game. And then in 2025 we’ll probably get the next Witcher game. They have like 3 games in active development now.
So what’s the difference with Bethesda? Well Skyrim sold 30 million units and Witcher 2 sold about 8 million. Less than a third the income. Yet if you compare CDPRs staff to Bethesdas at time of their next games, CDPR had doubled Bethesda’s work force. And guess what happened? Witcher 3 sold 40 million while fallout 4 sold 25 million. Thats despite Witcher 3 costing an estimated $81 million while Fallout 4 sits closer to 1.5x that at $125 million.
Then you talk about engines and it gets even worse. CDPR arguably started with a worse engine and I shouldn’t need to explain how much they’ve destroyed BS in that regard as well. Witcher 2 looks worse than Skyrim by a lot imo. But by the time their next game rolled around, it was an industry leader in graphics. And cyberpunk 2077 is like the next Crysis now while starfield is… oh boy. And guess what? After all that work on their engine, they abandoned it. Why? Because their resources are better spent making games and systems in an engine someone else updates for them. Bethesda meanwhile not only can’t juggle the ball of updating an engine and game dev, but they’re not even smart enough to swap engines.
Bethesda has all the signs of a dying studio and Microsoft is the sucker for buying them. And it’s a waste of talent more than anything. Talented people exist at Bethesda whose resources and career development would be far better off being applied on UE4.
Not if they keep on their BS. Let’s look at Fallout 4. The engine is absolutely the weakest part of the game. Can’t even keep 60fps in the city on any settings or on consoles. Frame times are all over the place. And the game isn’t even that pretty, it’s very ugly and textures are real bad. The story was pretty awful and boring, the writing in every way was forgettable.
So that’s why ES6 is screwed. It’s been downhill since Skyrim and even releasing a better looking Skyrim in 2028 on the PS6 isn’t going to cut it. It’ll be the most expensive budget title out there.
They use a hybrid system now and only use peer to peer when dedicated servers aren’t enough, so they could just swap to purely dedicated servers.
However ignoring that, even a peer to peer system can do similar tricks if you don’t isolate the host peer to just one machine. That can even be done by spot checking with a company owned server. You use the server as a verification peer and have it as a backup host to the assigned peer. If your verification peer gets different ram values or what not, you shut the server down at the very least and place that peer on a suspicion list.
But even if they went the cheap route, just distribute the peer network. Let’s say that you have a game of 12 people. You could make it so that each peer is only assigned a certain part of the simulation and players (with overlap on assignments) and cannot track the entire simulation. It’s more complicated than a single server hiding info from you, but they could at least make it to where you’d need multiple infected peers to take over a lobby.
I don’t mean individual servers. What I more meant was let’s say a game uses a standardized anti-cheat. Like EasyAntiCheat or Battleye or similar. And whoever runs your game service (Steam, PSN, Xbox) can vet these anti cheat programs and allow them to create a record on your account of cheating.
And obviously these things get false flags so you can account for that, give people strikes and allow appeals. And games would have the option of banning you for: having too many strikes total, violating only a specific anti-cheat X times, or ignoring this system except to place extra suspicion and resources on those already having strikes.
Also having an account tied to hardware is a no brainer and I’m surprised that this doesn’t get employed often. I know IDs can be spoofed but that’s another barrier potentially.
I think the best thing I’ve heard for long term solutions is to fix a lot of the cheating using server side solutions. In a game like CoD, that means the server doesn’t send you player positions unless you absolutely need to know them.
The other thing honestly is just increasing the investment required to cheat. That could mean that in order to play competitive game modes, you need to have signed in at least once for 4 weeks straight and played the game. Or you need to be a certain level. Issue hardware bans and IP bans to people. Require phone number verification.
What those things do as barriers is actually increase the potency of current detection methods. This should also carry over to accounts. I’m not sure why steams VAC ban system isn’t more popular. As in accounts need to be flagged as a whole when cheating in just one game is found.
There are many solutions but it’s just not a big deal for companies as the prior person said. Plenty could be done to at least make cheating harder and cost more time/money. But that won’t happen
Looks like they use Easy Anti Cheat services which run at the kernel level on windows but not on Linux, that leaves a huge loophole available for Linux which I actually believe will increase cheating dramatically.
As for the software development, that’s on EAC to fix. And in fairness it doesn’t make sense for them financially to do so. Cheating already costs these companies a ton of money to fix as is.
Quite a bit. For your subscription YouTube will take 45%. The other 55% are split among other creators by watch time of the subscriber. For what it’s worth, the creators I watch love that system and benefit from it quite a bit. It’s more consistent and safer than ad revenue.
I thought this was common knowledge about the game but I’ll explain.
Now maybe I do need to get better and become a pro player but I have about 5k hours in the game. Since about 2016 I’ve played at the LEM/SMFC level which is about 5-8% of the top MM players. My current elo still hovers around 18,000 even though I play very rarely now, I play a handful of matches every other month at most. I also used to do a lot of the old overwatch system that let you watch matches of potential cheaters, I got very good at spotting them.
That isn’t to brag, I’m far from the best, but I quit playing around 2020 for a reason. The cheater problem is insane and Valve has done little to curb it. I got so suspicious that at one point I downloaded a publicly available cheat, popped it on a usb stick, and ran with it. I tried to use it intentionally without ruining other peoples fun btw. Even after running quite a few matches with it, no bad happened. And many years later that account is still not banned.
I got especially jaded when I saw people obviously using aimbots or wall hacks and they now have thousands of dollars in skins on their accounts. Meaning they’re so unafraid of getting caught, they put money on the line. That’s insane.
I came back for the CS2 update hoping they had fixed the problem and they absolutely haven’t. Every single VAC ban wave, go look at the leaderboards. Approximately 80% of the accounts get removed from the top 1000 players. That sucks.
And you think “cool well at least VAC” is working. Except it isn’t. Because those accounts cost, at most, $15 and the waves happen with many months between. Sometimes in excess of 6-8 months per ban wave. So that entire time, cheaters can freely exist with cheats until the ban comes down. Also insane.
All they’ve accomplished now seems to be getting rid of the most egregious spinbots and aim hacks. Other than that, the rest are still in the game and so now I play entirely casually.
(A very solid game that openly allows cheating and does little to ensure fair competition)
That’s kind of why I said ask yourself. Because I think some of their titles Id rather see live on at a 7/10 level but others I don’t think need it. Like I could handle a TF3 at that level or maybe even a portal game. But half life would kind of hurt to see it not be a 10/10 maximum effort game. I wish they’d finish the story while Gabe is still at the company.
Ah that makes sense, it’s oddly suspicious they’d do this out of the blue. Though I am curious at the arbitration. Can they not include a clause that just says that the forced arbitration can be waived by them when they so choose? I feel like they would make carve outs for these big cases if they could to where they can still arbitrate on smaller cases which costs them less.
(Also updating my post text, thanks!)
I’m more optimistic about that. I don’t see why the storefront or their general philosophy would change. At least not quickly. What might change is how they treat their IP. Ask yourself if you’d be okay with another half life game being just a 7/10 game. Because I think that’s what would happen.
They’re trying to sell the company and have been for awhile. The problem is that without a win, no one wants to buy.
For a short period, yes probably. But Bethesda is a failing studio and so is Ubisoft. EA has popular sports games but I’d guess that’s a very small portion of PC sales considering those games do poorly on the platform compared to consoles. Epic does have loads of money but not enough to float the other companies.
In my view, Microsoft and their GamePass stuff is the only real competitor that will ever take a small dent out of steams sales, mostly because of the Call of Duty titles being on there now. But in order to take 0.05% or whatever of their sales they had to: own the OS for almost every computer running steam, buy dozens of game studios, compete (and lose) in the physical console market over decades, and they had to buy not one but two of the largest studios out there. To the point where they own a significant portion of the iOS App Store that is orders of magnitude more money than PC games and still they cannot compete with steam on their own operating system.
If that doesn’t spell out how unstoppable Steam is, I don’t know what will. The thing that might actually hurt Steam is if those publishers were all GamePass exclusives. Even then, Steam would be just fine I think. Crazy.
It’s less about most gamers caring and more about people failing to advertise the boycott and act effectively. I just think the gaming community is much larger than people realize and even if everyone in a subreddit about the game agrees to boycott it, that’s nothing compared to the number of people who play that game and aren’t in the subreddit and don’t know to boycott.
Who wrote this? Like just this paragraph:
How does anyone covering this exact story not know about Yuzu? Did I travel back in time?