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.

You say that but Arcane didn’t deserve this fate. I’d be rooting for a Bethesda game to fail but BioWare and Arcane? That’s just sad. They were both amazing studios ruined by BS. And the AAA space is large enough these days that actual big budget games can indeed innovate.

Like say though, I won’t exactly shed a tear for failing studios like Ubisoft or Bethesda that have been churning out the same crap for awhile now.

Also not every game needs to innovate and it’s not like you lose a lot by having average selling games come out. But even in games packed with AAA bangers, indies still sell incredibly well. It isn’t a zero sum game.

I think my feelings are mixed in that aspect. I used to really love Bethesda games but after playing 1500+ hours of Skyrim and many hundreds of hours of fallout now, I think I see it for its limitations as well. And the mods end up highlighting shortcomings. The vanilla games are still a fun time I think.

Also other games have just come in and created much better story arcs and characters that highlight how bad their writing tends to be. Skyrim was written okay but even then it never did anything that felt like plot development. Instead everything there goes as expected, you’re just wowed by the scenes and dragons.

And yeah I think Bethesda continues to lack polish in what they do and it’s really showing. Even when fallout 4 came out all those years ago, every piece about it felt dated. It felt more like it dated back to Skyrim in ways, so I can see why Starfield failed even if I plan on playing it. I just hope Bethesda fix their issues because Elder Scrolls 6 can’t have this many loading screens, this many bugs, or this flat of a story. Sadly they have a trajectory on all of those things.

That’s what I did. Played it once with no DLCs on release, then ignored it. But with mods it’s actually much better. And if you like the difficulty of New Vegas, the extended mod pack I used helped a lot with that.

I really missed the grit and dark tone of new Vegas and while it doesn’t live up to that, mods get it much closer.

This isn’t a review of the vanilla game, but I get your point. I was mostly just debriefing after the long playthrough after going back to it all these years later.

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.

Well now I’m hoping that the Switch 2 has a working emulator within a handful of months after release.

Exactly. I remember this really being an issue with Far Cry 4. The villain there had me on the edge of my seat since the intro and I still think FC4 was one of the best far cry games to exist. The setting was amazing, mechanics worked really well, and the vehicles rocked.

The thing it flopped on completely was interactions with the main bad guy and any semblance of story development. It wasn’t nonexistent, but the main villain is criminally underused in that game and is on screen for maybe 15-20 minutes total.

But now we have the issue of far cry doing the Ubisoft signature multi-zone storytelling thing where the story is not linear and it’s completely wrecked by that. This game has the same exact issue that’s been here since FC5 and I hate it. I’d rather they keep the lookout points around and have a worse world and a better story with actual progression and characters. It’s like they’re determined to make games at a 6 or 7 out of 10 level.

You’ll get your wish of more Fallout games around about the same time that Bethesda is absorbed into Microsoft around the year 2029 when ES6 performs about as well as Starfield did.

That’s already going to happen. Bethesda is a washed up game studio at this point

Yes but the main reason those consoles were so shaky is specifically because they did not address a much younger audience. The original Wii kind of tried to but if you look at its best sellers, a ton of them were not aimed at adults.

The same is true of the Wii U where rather than targeting that audience, they tried to pivot to a more adult console with games like the zombie launch title.

So most of the success of the switch is just that it finally was a family console again. But keep in mind, they have nowhere to pivot to. That’s why the switch 2 is what it is and why it’s so late. They can’t afford a misstep and they also can’t afford to saturate the only market niche they have left.

I swear that Bethesda tries as hard as possible to mess up everything they do. There’s not much hope left for them so we just have to twiddle our thumbs and wait till they release Elder Scrolls 6, receive more awful reviews and outrage, and then get gobbled up entirely by Microsoft.