Valve announced something that I'm sure a lot of game developers and players will appreciate: new APIs to allow developers to have version switching directly in their games!
Steam has long a way for players to manually opt into a Beta individually per-game, if one is available. This can be used for testing new features or for accessing previous versions. However the current system is somewhat obscure, and relies on you looking around various Steam news posts or forum posts for each game to know if there's a new feature Beta available, or if they provide an older version of the game you can switch over to via the Beta system.
Valve's announcement makes it clear that the idea of this new set of APIs is to allow game developers to present this to gamers directly in-game. Valve give some examples on why developers may want to use this like preserving game saves when making major changes to your game, something Paradox Interactive do with their various strategy games. Like this for Stellaris:
So with the new system, developers could just put this in-game directly.
As part of this, a recent Steam client update also shows you on the game page in your Library when you have a Beta picked:
Really seems like a nice addition that I'm surprised hasn't been a thing until now. Hopefully more developers will think about keeping older versions available now, especially with Valve suggesting it as a good idea in some cases.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
i can understand balance patches on multiplayer, but the same game single player being affected, should be optional, if i dont care about becoming pro, i dont care if the damage of my attacks is different on singleplayer vs multiplayer for example.
Quoting: elmapulhoneslty, this shouldnt be opitional but mandatory, so developers cant screw players by removing content they paid for, or doing patches that destroy the game.
i can understand balance patches on multiplayer, but the same game single player being affected, should be optional, if i dont care about becoming pro, i dont care if the damage of my attacks is different on singleplayer vs multiplayer for example.
Especially since it already exists but you need external tools for it.
There have been more than a few games that have had updates that really fuck their functionality or aesthetics, like how the Resident Evil reboot game raytracing updates bloated the file sizes of the game significantly but made them run a lot worse, or how LISA The Painful had to change the samples in Work Harder which removed a lot of the hilarity, or like how Ghostwire: Tokyo added denuvo DRM a year after the game's release via patch, or a game breaks modding support in some way, Games that do "Remaster" updates that make a lot of changes and not all of them are good, or how the older GTA games like San Andreas had their soundtracks removed, etc.
There are some games that survive this with the beta branch, like how Beat Saber has a legacy version in betas that has the best version of the game for mods, and the aforementioned resident evil reboots let you roll back, but not every game is so lucky.
Last edited by WMan22 on 8 November 2024 at 7:57 pm UTC
Philadelphus 59 minutes ago
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