Quoting: Phlebiac

QuoteA complete list of all DLC included in the Pass. (i.e. listing each of the four DLCs included in a Pass).

Seems like an odd thing to specify "four", unless that's a really common thing? Are there a lot of games that release quarterly updates these days, and sell those as "season passes"? Must be online multiplayer games, as I'm not familiar with that at all.

I assume they meant "e.g." rather than "i.e." I see them mixed up fairly often. They also used "i.e." to give date examples in the third bullet point, and I doubt they want every DLC to release on June 1st, 2025 ;)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Purple Library Guy

Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: pbThe idea is good but some of it doesn't seem enforceable, I'm sure they will be adjusting these requirements.

That is presumably why they are only doing it with selected partners with a proven track record. This is likely going to work more as a friendly agreement than a set of hard rules.

I think you parsed that bit wrong. As far as I can tell, what they're saying is they'll relax some requirements in terms of how specified the DLC are, only with selected partners with a proven track record. So if they know you well enough to be pretty sure you'll deliver something decent with that season pass, maybe they'll let you get away with being a bit fluffy in how you describe it.

No, I'm with eldaking on this one:

QuoteIf you aren't ready to clearly communicate about the content included in each DLC AND when each DLC will be ready for launch, you shouldn't offer a Season Pass on Steam.

and

Quote(...) we will not offer a Season Pass except in a few rare cases with partners with which we have a well-established relationship and that have a proven track record on Steam.

sounds pretty cut and dry. There is nothing on the source Steam page that suggests different requirements for different partners.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Damn, nice. Valve continuing to uphold their customers-first approach against all odds :)

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: StellaI've played the original and it ran like crap with constant stuttering. So, I'm honestly not sure if a remaster will run any better. But I'm open to it and will probably buy it at some point

Do you mean on the Deck? On my modest desktop it ran at a low FPS initially but improved enough with subsequent updates that I was able to increase some settings.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Supporting older systems is rarely appealing work for developers, but I have a lot of respect for those who choose to do it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: TurkeysteaksGenuinely asking here, what is the path forwards for this situation? I do not see how it can be solved.

The only way you can prevent cheating is by controlling (restricting) people’s actions. The only way you can catch cheaters in the act is by scrutinizing every action they take. This applies to everything outside simply video games. Sports competitions have blood tests to detect drug use. Exams have invigilators to spot concealed cheat sheets and other tricks. Card games have people watching for a literal card up your sleeve. Casinos only trust their own dice. Some methods are more invasive than others, but in each example they have the considerable advantage of holding the competition in person to visually keep everyone in check.

Online play lacks that last lever and is built on eminently fallible platforms with multiple points of vulnerability. User input must be sanitized to account for what’s humanly possible, but in real-time 3D games with freedom of movement, that’s a boggling amount of parameters to account for and since latency kills those games, you have very little time to make a decision when it comes to proactive processing (after-the-fact analysis and sanctions are another story of course). I imagine it’s a lot easier to validate a player’s actions in a turn-based game with a small set of well-defined possible moves.

So you have to restrict the player’s actions, and watch them closely in a way that you can trust what you are seeing. That’ll never happen if you don’t control the machine they use to interface with the game. And even if you do, there’s always things like having accomplices watch a competitor to gain illegitimate strategic knowledge in near-real-time. Remote competitions are a flawed concept altogether, as far as I see it. Rootkits are both necessary and still insufficient: you can’t spy on the player without them, but they still won’t catch everything either. So make your choice: accept that there will be cheaters and take reactive action to punish and disincentivize them, or don’t compete via the Internet. And since cheaters have no trouble evading bans in free-to-play games, the former is also a lost cause as long as you’re not playing in person.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: Bogomipsif I follow your example, if 2 cheaters disturb a game I would say the game is ruined for all the players involve in that round so maybe 10 times (I have no idea of the player count in a round) then, it disturbs 20 people at a time not everyone that's why you always see the same type of comments imho.

Your interpretation of "disturb" seems overly generous. First, even if only one match out of ten puts me up against a cheater, my experience of the game overall will be hampered as that might mean getting paired with cheaters multiple times a week. Second, those games typically have ranking systems and rewards for player performance. If cheaters can easily occupy the top of every leaderboard without skill, it does disrupt the game’s competitive scene for the whole player base and devalues the competition itself.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I wonder why they made the schedule such a tiny, illegible image that you can't even right-click to see in its original size. If anyone else is having trouble with it:

Vertical:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/607436da860d0a6278bc81e7/ebb604c3-f497-4669-b939-5340ff6c70f8/SS24_Schedule_Vertical_2K.png
Horizontal:
https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/607436da860d0a6278bc81e7/b826ce82-2bcf-4a4e-8884-83cadabe6f6c/SS24_Schedule_Horizontal_2K.png

View this comment - View article - View full comments

I got the newsletter this morning announcing that KEYGEN CHURCH (aka MASTER BOOT RECORD) is doing 10 remixes from the original Castlevania OST on this. There’s going to be some bangers there.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

A good point someone mentioned in a previous article is also that Valve are still unable to keep up with the verification process and provide consistent, reliable results on many games. Adding a second hardware target to test against is going to basically double the work needed when it comes to performance and drivers (though not UI/UX aspects like font size and keyboard entry, I reckon).

View this comment - View article - View full comments