Father of a friend of me who worked at an University send an email to Bethesda that Daggerfall was bugged and could not play it anymore. Then Bethesda send floppy's with patches and a walk-trough book for the main story. That was in 1996.
@@chukkie0001 Bethesda is still a fantastic studio, like sure starfield missed the mark a bit , but at the same time it's not as bad as TH-cam cc make it out to be. Bethesda has always been a bit basic interms of quest design new Vegas was obsidian doing their stuff. Bethesda are good at giving you a good solid game with immersive world's. It's just they made the daggerfall mistake again by going for procedural generation instead of making a Immersive solarsytem size world. It's still pretty nice inbetween the nomansky and space citizen
@@joshuagraham967 iget how you feel 😂 I'm normally like that to people who defend blizzard monetization, here the reason I'm stating is one it's more of a fact, second Bethesda is not microsoft ea or ubisoft while it may have zenimax and I'd tech under it , it's not a behemoth, also go look at actual player reviews , the game is much more positive, it's not Skyrim or fallout, but it's not a bad trash game. The only thing I'm critical of Bethesda is trying to monetize mods and the whole fo76 live service bandwagon failure, outside that they are just doing fine, sure you can say creation engine is old and buggy, but it's also way more interactable than most other engines, I'm not against criticising the mistakes in starfield not an i asking you to praise starfield, but just see the game for what it is actually.
@rkrams1989 That's valid, and I'll admit I've become more salty over their recent handling of projects like Starfields steam reviews. Hopefully it's just a misstep and they correct their past actions
@@rkrams1989i'm going to defend procedural generation, because in some instances it can have opposite effect and increases immersion. In Daggerfall you feel like world is actually world due to scale. Your experience feels more personal whan you know situation you have in your game is uniquely due to your decisions and world reactions plus randomness. And yes if you treat it like a normal game walking for few hours is not fun, but that's where creativity and pushing forward comes in. Create new tools to ease people manage that world. For example Daggerfall have mod that allows you to walk with faster speed making travel as fast as you want, but doesn't take you away from the world like fast travel does. Perfectly crafted world feels scripted in comparison where you feel like in a theme park. We've mastered the easier to properly implement hand crafted worlds, but it has limits in potential. Generated content needs much more legwork, research and layers to pay off and we don't see too much in terms of iterations to really get there. It's prematurely to call whole direction as bad because of one previous attempt with half baked and tacked on in next games, so no wonder they are not fleshed out. At least they explore that direction and I commend them for that. But at the same time i think generated content feels better when world is more abstract looking. Definetly something worthy of a spinoff line of games
The internet has made collaborating and learning easier but I noticed that I actually struggled learning through a lot of tutorials. I found that they were really good at teaching specific things but lead to rabbit holes that tunnel my comprehension of the greater picture. through the years I slowly learned to refocus myself, but younger me would still be in those rabbit holes.
I have noticed that too. In general, people learning on their own learn specific topics, where people learning in school gain a wider foundational knowledge. But of course, some people learn better on their own and others learn better in a structured environment, so it comes down to what's best for you.
@@CainOnGames My observation is that we moved from a more push-approach (read an entire tech book, take a semester-long course), to a pull-context (look up tutorials/ideas on-demand). Even apart from shorter attention spans, can't build a comprehensive curriculum for yourself if you don't know what all the parts should be. But the expectations are also less realistic IMO - ppl assume they'll learn everything, quickly, with little or no failure or frustration in the interim. Applies to both self-learners & those in formal education, but the latter group has more guardrails & extrinsic motivation to keep them on-track. Not sure I'd blame the internet, per se, but perhaps its funhouse-mirror comparisons have bled over into education. Read a bunch of papers for my thesis edugame where CS students were dropping the major after a single 100-level course because they assumed that everyone else found it "easy".
@@CainOnGames I think there's a problem we need to solve there -how to funnel people/ensure they can funnel themselves to "what's best for them". I think some go years, or even (god forbid) decades, without being in the right kind of learning environment for them, and then things just don't work out for them through no apparent fault of their own.
I remember being so excited about a game, finally buying it at the store, and opening it and reading through that whole manual on the way home. That feeling was pure magic.
I don't miss boxes - my house is a temple of physical media, hence why we switched to digital. But I do miss manuals. Even for used games, I would find the manual PDF, print it, and add it to a generic box. Physical releases are expensive to produce/ship, and people don't read anything these days, but I kind of wish we still saw manuals, even in PDF/print-on-demand format.
Same, so much time spent in grade school reading over manuals, looking at art, reading lore and getting excited for school to end and be able to go home and play.
I've still got a bunch of old manuals stashed away somewhere. I especially loved the diegetic ones, like Mechwarrior 3's -- full of little in-universe documents coupled with little asides in the margins, ostensibly written from the POV of one of the game's characters (like the PC's uncle or something). And I've actually got manuals for Arcanum in both English and Chinese. Sometimes they'd be dense enough to give those old strategy guides a run for their money. The BG2 manual, alone, wound up being something like 200 pages.
@@mandisaw I miss those games that had so much scope, background story and cool mechanics that you need to read manual with map to get into. In storytelling point of view. I'm also fascinated about book-like story telling in games. It was nice to read story setting from manual.
@@gruntaxeman3740 I have a not-quite-there memory of Zelda 2 and Castlevania 3 having all the backstory in the manual, and then the first screen just drops you in the castle. Always fun to see modern Let's Plays where they are like, "gee, this seems abrupt" 😅
I can't confirm this but i heard that the makers of Wizardry would repair or replace floppy disks that were damaged. On the sequel games some of the enemy parties you would encounter in the dungeons were player parties they had read off disks that people had sent in.
I can confirm *personally* that Agetec did *not* do that. I got a faulty dual-layer DVD from one of the games they published when I was a kid, so by the time I learned the second layer was unreadable, it was far too late to return the game, and they wound up giving me the Customer Service Runaround for something like 14 months (before I gave up, or before I forgot, or before Agetec shut down -- I don't remember which happened first). Still kinda sore about that, TBH.
@@Netherfly There was about a 16 year time gap between when Wizardry came out and when the first DVDs came out. Over that time period the customer service policies changed greatly. There's no way you can say what a company did in 1981 based on their behavior in 1997 or later.
I remember the first time I ever patched a game via the internet. It was Diablo 2. With my terrible dial up, I had to try and convince my parents to let me have the computer on overnight. Trying to explain to them the concept of a patch for a game was nearly impossible.
I remember D2 had a glitch at launch where if you tried to Save and Quit (to the main menu) it would CTD. I remember joking with my brother that is was "Basically correct." (And, importantly, it did actually save!) It's not the earliest patch I ever got, but it's one of the best remembered!
Oh about manuals - have you seen Tunic? On the surface, it's simple adventure game, but it has somewhat hidden layer of late game puzzles. But whether you play only first layer or both, you will experience this game manual nostalgia, as it is weirdly smoothly present in the game itself.
I'm so disappointed that Robocraft 2 was cancelled. It was a lot of fun and I was looking forward to tank tracks. I still can't believe they listened to the haters. It was early access, all they had to do is keep improving it and adding all the features they promised. Everything that was different from the first Robocraft did take some getting used to, but it was really innovative and fun for anyone who bothered to play more than 10 minutes and actually learn everything. It even had a great tutorial for all the new stuff and how to build and everything.
One thing that the industry still hasn't adjusted to is how quickly the community learns and adapts now. If there is a balance problem it will be discovered and communicated in days, if not hours. It isn't the Olden Days when it would take months or years for the community to adapt. Its almost instant now.
Beyond just the internet making tutorials that much more accessible, something I will never forget is when I was struggling trying to figure out how to implement something in a now long-backburner'd project and went "hey, Red Faction 2 did something very similar to what I want to do on the Playstation 2! I wonder if I could just ask somebody who worked on that." This lead to me looking up the credits on Mobygames and then seeking out one of the programmers on twitter, and I went "Hi, I was wondering how you implemented the terrain destruction features in real time on hardware like that" and I got an answer. All I had to do to figure out the answer to the biggest technical challenge I was having was to just ask! Of course, that didn't solve the problem where the game I was trying to make wasn't very fun, but that's a way harder problem to solve a lot of the time.
I miss physically owning my games. Because I actually owned it. It was my copy. Thanks to Steam it has been normalized to not actually own a game in any sense. At least sites like GOG exist.
I miss boxes and manuals. Warcraft and StarCraft came with booklets that had the lore for every faction, unit and building, which was very cool before we had wikis. And I still love my StarCraft 2 boxes, they look beautiful.
Regarding 3:25 - I can imagine that is both a blessing and a curse, as you have to deal with bad faith whining from toxic individuals. Although as a fan it is very cool to be able to directly engage with the people who make the games we love.
@@CainOnGamesI have worked as a community beta tester for a few sports title , i think it helps Dev's as long as a proper constructive feedback mechanism and loop is established that's not emotional criticism and is limited to a few people. Basically a sort of community play test team and have proper forms or Excel sheets for feedback that require some effort than just basic texting.
10:24 this is why I hate the "listen to the fans" stuff. Half the time, "the fans" that devs are supposed to be listening to is really just a small subset of people that have decided they speak for everybody.
I really liked the Half-Life, Unreal, Homeworld, and similar manuals. Very cool reads. I think I enjoyed the Homeworld manual more than the gameplay. I do miss games working well with out day 1 patches. There were games I played for years without any issues, and then later I found out that patches were released fixing small bugs that I never noticed. Now it feels like most new games have major game breaking bugs on release that soon get patched. I'm grateful they are getting those patches they need.
It's interesting how all situations both a 'bad' (negative) and 'good' (positive) elements to them. Is it easier to get access to game dev tools nowadays? Sure! But more competition and more clutter in the marketplace (harder to stand out) immediately come with that. Thanks for pointing out all these different aspects, @Tim!
I first used the internet was at University in 1994. Email seemed like magic. We quite often sat there waiting for replies like it was an instant messanger. I do remember that even at that point you eventually got drowned in random spam porn. Except it would be "drawn" in letters rather than pictures. I really do miss buying games before that where unless you saw it a magazine you had very little clue about what happened in it. You couldn't have a game spoiled unless your friends had played it. On the piracy front though when games were on tape or disk we literally traded copies at school all the time. It was so easy to copy stuff that kids would come in with lunch boxes of them. I lived in the country, and we were all pretty poor. Anyone who got a game the whole village would have it in a couple of weeks. Obviously not on console with cartridges but only a few of us had them.
I used BBSes before the internet, I don't think they count as I never heard that word til the early 90s. I would mostly read and download a few things here and there but I asked a (probably dumb) question on one and Scorpia from Computer Gaming World, which I avidly read, answered. I was awestruck not just because she responded, but at the time it was very dumbfounding that someone far away could instantly respond to you. Sort of like how people must have felt when they heard radio for the first time.
Hey Tim, I enjoyed the momentos video on Friday. Is there any chance that we could get 1 a day as an outro? Even if it’s 30 seconds showing us an old shirt. Maybe items that aren’t enough to get their video like Fridays. Of course I’ll be here either way, just a thought. Have a great day!
In light of the point that people who enjoy the content just silently enjoy the content while a disproportionate number of people who have a complaint express it, let me just say I quite enjoyed this video.
I really miss game manuals. I remember the Morrowind and Oblivion manuals were so thick and full of information that the official game guides just said: "refer to the game manual" for some of the information about the game.
09:14 Manuals, I'll be honest they never really did much for me but my Pillars of Eternity mousepad had lasted from when I got the Kickstarter box to just this year when I finally had to replace it. I do wonder though if Steam could somehow integrate in the store page a pseudo manual or art showcase for people to flip through and read about the game before buying it. I know some games sell manuals or include them in complete editions but there are several games I have looked at on Steam where I am interested to know more before buying or I am waiting for the release date and would like to consume more of them. What do you think Tim?
Most Store page descriptions - incl on Steam - allow for links to the developer's webpage, where you could provide whatever you like. Pretty sure folks already do offer links on their Steam game to manuals, soundtracks, posters, and other goodies, both free & paid.
Just finding out that a patch was available was a challenge. To be fair the internet has been able to provide patches for games since the late 80s. Got a lot easier with the World Wide Web in the early 90s.
Patches were a thing, but via "sneakernet", basically. Arcades got patches, but that meant a document outlining how to rewire the board. Not all arcade owners were able to DIY, or keep someone on staff/speed-dial who could. Similarly, in shareware land, you could definitely reach out to the developer for an update, but you still had to be in-the-loop to even know that one was available. The internet made communication better, but that just multiplies the good/bad practices that humans bring to the table.
Many if not most AAA games do come with gorgeous PDFs manuals. Regarding piracy, being able to buy a game online with a credit card surely made piracy go down in places where game prices are affordable. The old argument that people who pirate games because they can't afford them wouldn't have bought the game anyway. I am also off social media since 2016 it really is not necessary.
I would say piracy was mostly curtailed by Steam more than subscription based services (which came later after the piracy was already dying down). As Gabe said, "Piracy is a service problem." I owe my beginning of programming knowledge from having to crack my own legally bought games because the DRM was too draconian and never worked properly. (It still causes performance issues.)
It's unfortunate to hear, again, that misconception over the boogeyman "piracy". I won't write an essay debunking every truism and false assumptions, and sometime bad faith, we hear on the subject from some people. I'll just point out to GOG: it's drm free, incredibly easy to pirate. Buying something outside of Steam or GOG can sometimes be more involved or complicated than pirating a GOG game. Hell, even more than that: GOG has a 30 day refund window. So you could stay legal, and just buy-play-refund ad nauseam. And yet, what happened? Nothing. There is was no dramatic increase in piracy when GOG came out, there is no dramatic difference in piracy from games release on GOG and those that are not, and there are plenty multi-million units sold games that are sold on Steam; including some games selling multiple tens of millions unit. Why? Very simple, and we've known this for over two decades: the vast majority of the time, those people who pirate would not have bought the game. Those are not sales lost to piracy, those sales never existed in the first place. And sure we all know a couple of idiots who want and can buy a game from a good source and chose instead to pirate it. There are exceptions everywhere. But when one account for the people who bought the game from recommendation from pirates, and those allergic to DRM, and those wanting a demo or a test before buying a game... overall the balance is not negative at all.
It's worth noting that warez groups usually go with the Steam releases of a game because they're usually updated more frequently and because they can claim that they cracked it (even if it's just a simple goldberg emu DLL). You don't get either of those things with GOG usually.
There are people who pirate, play and won't pay on principle. It's mostly children and people from poor countries, so you won't get a lot money from them anyway.
I'm 44. I've been a pirate for the starting 10 years of my time on computers, from the Amiga 500 and then on PCs, up until the first Pentiums. Let's ignore the Commodore 64, I was a kid and that was a toy. My most copied game was Diablo 1, when CDs were 25/30 bucks each and it took almost 1 hour to make a copy, when a small hit on the desk would fail the whole process. I made an average of 8 copies a day, for almost a week, and yet, seems to me Diablo 1 sold like a motherfucker. Didn't it? Again, Bethesda games, they never had a protection, you could copy them freely and I always did, since the first Arena. Yet, they always sold a lot. Don't even get me started on Duke Nukem 3D, kids at school would give their sister for a copy, I only made 'em pay the blank CD or disks (3.5 inches), because it never was about gaining money, it was about sharing the culture of videogames with neophytes, people that would never invest the full price and could never justify to their parent such an expense. Those who wanted and could, became serious gamers and started spending their own money on original games. Because it was better, especially in the era of boxes and manuals. Point is, a good game always had success, in spite of piracy.
@@giampaolomannucci8281 And yet this doesn't justify piracy, which IS theft. It is stealing someone's work, period. And while it may do little to effect AAA studios, it can and does effect smaller indi devs who NEED that revenue. No matter how you slice it, piracy of games (and other media) *is* theft, period and full stop.
The thick manuals that came with games in the early 90s were really great. On the other hand, games became more intuitive in later years and eventually manuals became part of the games, so they are no longer necessary today. I don't miss the days of floppy disks. Being able to buy games online and play them straight away also has advantages.
Re: Piracy, my understanding -- from the consumer level only -- is that piracy skyrocketed in the late 90s/early 00s as the Internet became more prevalent (and, maybe more importantly, *faster*) to the extent that it all-but killed the PC market, with most developers transitioning to focus first and foremost on the console market, where piracy was far less prevalent. (And it was the rise of Steam, offering a competitive alternative to pirating software, which eventually reinvigorated the PC market). Does that gel with your experience, or is that merely an illusion? (IE correlation, not causation?) That's the narrative I've always seen repeated, and it sure makes for a nice narrative (one that certainly plays well with the veneration of Valve that's so weirdly common), but I've never been sold on how accurate it is. EG this "transition" away from PC to consoles also happened around the time of the "great recession," so it probably made more sense for developers to transition to platforms that were cheaper or easier to develop for (see also the rise of mobile gaming around the same time); or the breakout success of the Xbox 360 and Wii, both of which attracted new audiences of players; or the greater ease of online play enabled by that generation of consoles.
There was the "Nintendo Seal of Quality" that assured those cartridges were good. And I still have my Baldur's Gate manual with a big map. Or my Starcraft manual. My Civilization II and III manuals are HUGE with info! I still try to buy physical whenever possible. Limited Run Games, for example, for my Command & Conquer Remastered physical bundle. And I think what diminished the piracy was Steam. An on-line, "fair" price and easy way to play and concentrate games, without the problems that piracy brings. With the steam friends and the possibility to flex your library with "[user] is playing [game]", you almost create a veiled competition on gamers. And the review system... In the end we must adapt to the new ways and the sum of pros and cons is still a net positive.
I'm new to thinking about large level design. How do you go about grayboxing a large game with interconnected rooms and environments? What are the most important steps you would normally go through to fill and eventually polish those spaces, and how do you streamline your process when working with others? Cheers
Really weird hearing "DLC" used to just mean "expansions and supplements" when it literally stands for "downloadable content". I think the first time I remember any game just having free additional stuff available that you could just go to the company's website and get for free was with Alpha Centauri when they released a couple of free extras (the borehole DLC was one) in addition to the physical expansion (Alien Crossfire) that still required you to literally walk to the shop and hand over paper money for a plastic disc.
Wasn't so weird once upon a time not so long ago, but the idea that "DLC" is anything that has to be downloaded (which is everything), including "skins" (recolorings of textures that take minutes to accomplish in Photoshop) and the like being sold today for the same or higher price than expansions and supplements once were has been normalized to the point that younger generations who grew up with it, especially, don't even question it, whether working in the industry or not. It's just "the way things are." Until everyone puts their critical thinking caps back on and starts questioning things like that, the industry abuses dragging down both development studios and communities will only get worse. Also, hard to believe, I know, but not everyone can afford an Internet connection, so the demand for an internet connection to be established even to play a single player game at this point is locking an awful lot of people out of the "hobby". I remember hearing a prominent CEO (definitely not "Creative Director") talking about "the problem of getting everyone on the Internet" and knew there wasn't a care in the world about the less fortunate, but only how much more obscene levels of profit could be made from micro and macro transactions (ntm, "subscriptions") if those people were on the Internet and/or could afford a high speed Internet connection. For those less fortunate, especially, it's just been another slap in the face in a never ending cycle of poverty and despair.
I didn't play Fallout 4 for about 2 years after launch because I listened to the internet trolls saying what a horrible game it was. Bought it on Steam for $19 dollars on a whim and I've now out in 4200 hours on it. Lesson learned.
My late hubby was a PC gamer, and he talked about that when we were talking about the Gold Box games, and the evolution through to the Bioware/Baldur's Gate era. Myself, I was an arcade kid, then console gal for life 🎮 so I remember the Nintendo Seal of Quality 🌟
@@mandisaw I have just spent 2 hours playing Roblox with my granddaughter... If I had a time machine I would take her to an arcade, we would both have had more fun, Ah simpler times. I'll add that to the list after teaching her to tell the time on an "old" watch "thing".
@@seamusbaker3338 Good luck! My first commercial game was a Spirograph for mobile - grandparents introducing the toy to their grandkids were my best customers 💜 Also, depends where you live, but you might find some multi-game arcade cabinets at a local kids' playhouse type space (think Chuck 'e Cheese and the like).
The manual was a workaround for saving storage space, but I really found it interesting how some games basically embraced that limitation to its fullest. For example, an old point-click game Loom came with a manual that was basically a little spellbook that the player was supposed to use as they played. The game revolved around learning very simple staffs of music, that would solve puzzles and to memorize these musical spells you would write the spells' letters (such as c minor, d, e, d) inside the manual. None of it was recorded in the game itself. If you forgot a spell and didn't write it down? You were in trouble. But it was just really cool keeping track of them in the manual, and made you feel like a wizard as your knowledge of your own volition grew.
There was an entire practice of manual-based anti-piracy techniques, including stuff where you'd hit a challenge to type in a specified word from a specific page in the manual. Woe unto you if you still had the disk, but misplaced the manual (or got a copy of the game from your buddy, without the manual).
Man I miss manuals nothing beats a good manual its a good read on the bus and if its well done builds hype to go and play it. My favorite manuals are the ones for Metal Gear Solid because of the manga.
Hi Tim. I have a question, why do some companies get a pass for reusing assets and others don't? I know sometimes it's an artistic choice like with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and others it's a time crunch. Some examples of games that reused assets on a time crunch would be Fallout 2, Fallout New Vegas, and Majora's Mask. I remember when Fallout 76 launched Bethesda caught a lot of flak because they reused assets, one claim in particular was that they reskinned the dragons from Skyrim and called it Scorchbeasts. On the flip side, Elden Ring not only had a long development period but has reused audio and visual effects but they've straight up copied boss moves and weapon move sets. Upon review I noticed that From Software has been doing this sort of a thing for a long time and yet no criticism is thrown their way.
It's about many other factors. With Nintendo and their "established franchises", they usually make very good games, and they have very loyal franchise fans who don't mind "more of the same" as long as it's good, and they are much more forgiving. Also console loyalism is a thing, especially strong with Nintendo. Similarly with Fromsoft, although Fromsoft has done "enough changing" so you can tell they definitely put decent amount of effort into it, or rather, it seems "well intended" and "done in good faith" not just to "milk the cash cow"; and extremely high quality brand new stuff as well (with Bloodborne, Sekiro, Armored Core 6) although I've been criticizing their asset / boss copy-paste since Dark Souls 3 (I'm in the minority of Fromsoft fans). Again they mostly appealed to console games for the first few years (PC gamers were EXTREMELY vocally critical of their Dark Souls 1 port) but with appealing more to the PC crowd recently they got much more criticism (especially Elden Ring performance issues). When it comes to Bethesda, they have done quite a few "misses" and lackluster games over the years, very buggy / underdeveloped games, which leads to the perception that they are not putting much effort into it at all, doing it in bad faith, just milking the cash cow; they have also done some outright lies and shady business practices (pricing,; also they have always appealed to the PC gamer crowd which tends to be much more critical / vocal. These factors compounded to overwhelm whatever past loyalty of the fanbase there was.
I remember New Vegas copping criticism for being a 'glorified mod', though I suppose people never saw how much that and FO3 reused assets from Oblivion.
This reminds me of Valve's Half Life 2 & Portal, both use the Source Engine & to give a reason as to why both look the same Valve just went out & said "oh yeah, they're in the same universe, the same world" I guess it just comes down to the game company & how they address & justify themselves reusing previously made assets.
@@alessandroguarrera2203 It always makes me laugh seeing New Vegas getting flak from so-called journalists when it released & now it's regarded as the best Fallout & one of the best RPGs ever made.
Sorry to leave two comments but I have a question regarding manuals how long did they take to make and why for some games they were longer than others?
patches were available online in the late 90s already. they were a couple hundred kilobytes or a few megabytes at most, so even with the 8 kb/s from a 56k modem you managed to download them in a reasonable amount of time lol
There was a mission pack for red alert you could get pre internet... The biggest rts at the time and you got this buggy second rate disc because there was almost no market, and the price of distribution was really high... On piracy, I used to pirate games, back when i did not have any chance of buying them, I also pirated audiobooks and music, and im not proud of it. And because of that, now that I do have money, i insist on buying and paying for my media, and i am probably used to a higher rate of consumption. I often wonder, if the rate of piracy in the nineties helped kickstart the gaming-culture we have today by making games widely available to demographics that would not have adopted it at full price. Because of my experience with piracy and the conversations we had on the value of supporting artists, i am VERY critical of subscription based streaming platforms like Spotify and audiobook services, because smaller artist makes way to little on their product, and have no other way of cooping, other than producing more, faster, now often using AI, and it is narrowing the field of artist that "make it"... Good games, books and music should cost money.
Hi Tim! Love your games, takes on games and stories too. Have you heard of recent "Stop killing games" initiative? May i ask if you have an opinion on it? Some of your games almost turned into so-called "abandonware" (lost source-code, etc) and that's why i think you may be interested in it. Would love to hear you talk about it
The luxury of having someone to argue with 😢 in computer rpg I would love to have someone arguing about how to make a player character gullible mechanically. I separate stats and attributes into action to the world and reaction to the world, then roughly into physical, social and psychological world. Gullible is reaction and psychological, but that's the realm of player's agency, we can't constraint player's character psychological reaction due to player agency, or can we?
Tim you mentioned a lot about piracy in this video and the measures against them. what do you think about Gabe newels quote that stopping piracy is more about giving better service than people are receiving from the pirates. I would like you to talk about your thoughts about piracy being a lack of service rather than pricing and other reasons.
Yeah before the Internet matured or really advanced pre-2010, any patches or bugs or updates weren’t as accessible to physical copies so what you got on disc is what the game was on release. Nowadays a new update comes out and you wait 20-50 minutes for a 50GB patch.
On the upside, back then a bad game would actually have consenquences, as long as you don't ship a PC game. Now you can handwave any problem to QA or your players and then say that patches and modders will fix it, just to then never do anything.
Piracy and live services: complex matter. If we're talking about online multiplayer games, then it takes some time to create a server emulation software which does, in a way, prevent *some* piracy. Single player games with always-online authentication? No, if anything it's a challenge to crack them in order to spite the companies that do that. As far as I've seen, the thing that works best to avoid privacy is to not do *anything* about it and instead put that effort into building up goodwill with the community. That will make some people who would have otherwise pirated you game buy it instead. Like someone else mentioned: GOG has no DRM and lots of gamers (myself included) love it. Steam was the main contributor to the decline of piracy up until a few years ago, because it offered a lot for the price you were paying. Piracy started increasing again with alternative platforms and exclusive games.
Also Dev's nowadays due to grasping techniques faster make plastic games that look great but don't feel great, like take all ubi openworld or generally most games nowadays they have great graphics realistic looking world NPC , characters customisation. The world is beautiful to look but you can't touch or feel or interact with it, interactivity with the world, not scripted events from some choice but me running around and breaking a chair or lamp etc that world that lives and breaths is not there . Instead everyone thinks they are.making a cinematic movie to watch and are the next video kojima while forgetting that while he adds a cinematic experience he also makes a living breathing world, like in mgs 2 while it's raining on the ship deck and it's cinematic and birds fly away. But he also makes those birds poop on the floor slippery that if you are not careful you will skid and fall. Like games need to feel like a living thing again.
The problem of piracy is a problem of availability. If something is impossible to get legally - its going to be pirated. It can be impossible to buy a game in third world country because its madly expensive - it will be pirated. Regional pricing on Steam fixed that issue for the most part. It can be impossible to buy a game because its locked on a specific platform - it will be pirated. Some publishers weakened their grip on exclusives recently but the problem still exists. It can be impossible to buy a game because its in legal hell, nobody knows who owns parts of it and its been pulled out from storefronts. It will be pirated. There is no solution. Instead of forcing people who will never buy a game to buy it (at expense of people who are willing to pay) publishers should focus on providing the means to actually buy games for people who will gladly do it.
No need to be third world country. Greek depression or post-communism depression in some countries caused that there wasn't much of money for games so piracy increased. For the most part, the games that are pirated would not have been bought anyway. Today I don't think there isn't much of piracy. Games are affordable in Steam and Epic gives them away free. If there is piracy today, it must be related to availability, possible incompatibility or something.
Been making games for 30 years and working in industry for a decade, with some time teaching game dev. I’m still not convinced that video content is a good way to learn a problem-solving based discipline.
Before even watching the video: for the worse. Thank you Unreal Tournament. Thank so very much for ensuring buggy game releases and unplayable games on launch have become the norm. Now to watch the video.
What I'm seeing is more people getting good at replicating established systems and game mechanics with a bit more polish, but even this is surface level. Like they want to just make game mechanics and not actually tell a game. The main difference I see between older games was they were trying to sell you a experience, not a gamemechanic, most of them were trying to make the experience they want on the tools and engine they have, this is why you feel at home when you visit a old game, nowadays while tech has made things more accessible it's also streamlined everything too much that we are just putting together established systems and reskinning a bit rather than build a game. I don't mean everyone is like that but majority feel that way both on aaa and indie side. Also i don't like the monopoly of unreal engine taking over game tech, it's just creating a same type of feel and look and horrible optimization, it's not exactly a unreal engine problem, but it makes it ok to have bad standards, like a ton of unreal engine 4 games had heating issues on amd and bad stutters performance, while days gone ran like butter and looked fantastic. But also precise optimised tech like id software is more important than generalised tank engine like ur with a ton of bloat.
About "negative voices". Why can't you have a poll or survey? Surely it will show more balanced picture as people who liked game/feature/element will vote just as those who didn't like. Also, I would point out that niche games are far more close to "making everyone happy" as their audience is small and has more similar tastes and views. AAA projects, aimed at the most wide and general audience have a lot more different groups of people, who may or may not like specific thing.
Um, you can pirate not just live service games, but whole digital platforms, I know, I had seen this in my very family. My brother had like full on fake steam, with store acces and all the features. He however also had legitimate steam, and these two keep biting at each other. Plus it was endless war of updates (as Valve didn't sit idely )and counterupdates, checking and rechecking. One day he simply deciced it was just too much bloody work to be worth it, and went 100% legit. And later he preety much quit gameing on PC, going for PlayStation insead. And he's one happy gamer to this day :D
Bethesda forums. Akatosh. Also Known As the old smaug himself. It was great when the community was a resource for ideas. Its not so great that we are now paying full price to be beta testers for 3 years before the game is finished.
piracy is not beatable, there will be private servers for online games, there will be cracked single player games. If the game is good people will buy it even if they pirate it first.
I've always been amazed that people who run private servers for online games somehow manage to get their hands on the backend code to run it in the first place.
The internet is by far a net positive overall, but one thing I hate is how it’s made negative, vocal minority groups soooo loud. I’ve seen small studios get blind sided by rabid fans who, in spite being a tiny proportion of the community, make character assassinations of the studio and ravage the games reputation. I’ve seen entire IPs fall to their own communities.
Maybe it's good for games, but to me the homogeneity of games, both in AAA and indie is tiering. There's maybe a dozen games as a services that mot of kids play, and there is the rest. Not much innovation, or excitement. Hundreds thousands of low quality survival games, or metroidvania. Then people stream games so there's no mystery, and you don't even need to play the game to experience it, but it also leads to a lot of procedural levels, which aren't nearly as good as handcrafted ones. And on top of that there are hundreds if not thousands yt channels where people are "developing" their own games, but never actually finish anything, and in fact many of them doesn't really teach correct approaches to coding or design. SO in my view internet did makes things worst.
the internet ruined gaming, the entire industry wanted to kill plaintext binaries, the trusted computing initiative was started by intel, amd and microsoft in 1997 which was to kill root plaintext ring 0 access to your CPU and kill you owning your device, Secure boot and UEFI was specificalyl designed for TPM drm which has been 20 years in the making. Steam/Uplay/MMO's/f2p are all fraud because over 98 % of the assets, code and game are running on your computer. The internet warped us back to mainframe computing of the 60's and allowed valve and everyone to steal PC games on an industrial scale and get off on a technicality, we had more modding capability in 1997 then we do in modern fps games. When's the last time a big AAA game came with a C compiler, or file specs? Tim you are delusional and misremembering the past, from 1997 to 2003 before steam launched, everyone and their mother knew you were going to kill local applications and start ripping out features (like multiplayer) and rebranding PC games MMO so that the industry could monopolize their own products and steal PC games from the public. The last 23+ years has been a theft of PC games on an industrial scale by the industry and hiding behind software licensing and copyright to get off on a technicality of not giving ownership of the games to the kmids. We lost dedicated servers and the basic ability to host our own multiplayer game as complete local applications, go look at quake 3 or Unreal 2004, no DRM and the online portion came with the game and you owned it outright as a plaintext win32 binary. The entire tech industry wanted to kill plaintext assembly compiled binaries, aka the war on game ownership that started in 1997 that was unrelenting thanks to the kids and average gamer being stupid, Denuvo appeared in 2014 and is now making games unpreservable. The modern gaming landscape is a fucking nightmare.
Wrt 9:59: I think internet led to the outrage culture as well (not only in games), where a good chunk of people get each other outraged about stuff they probably wouldn't care much about otherwise.
@@UlissesSampaiobut in hindsight those that were outraged had good foresight. That horse armor opened the gates to the microtranaction hell that we have today.
@@roberteltze4850 They are just selling stuff that some people are willing to buy, how does this affect anyone else? I don't think I've ever bought any mtx related stuff in any game, but if some people have more money than they know what to do with, then good for them I guess. Hating the fact that it even exists is just a cope.
@@roberteltze4850 I was talking about two topics (thus edited my comments slightly). But I think horse armor was just a test drive for DLCs. DLCs in essence are not bad things. The bad thing is that some took it too far.
For a while, I worked at a company that made freemium games. "Why did the company start to make freemium games?" - a colleague asked me. - "Why don't we make something like Tomb Raider [her favourite game]?" She had pirated every single Tomb Raider game and the only time she has ever spent money on a game was in a freemium game. She failed to see any connection between her own actions and the pivot the company made even after I pointed it out to her. Piracy and games as a service, a race to the bottom between companies and consumers.
Tim I respect you as an artist and as a person and I would never go further than typing a comment; but gaming has become so GAY! Even gays I know irl aren't this gay!
Father of a friend of me who worked at an University send an email to Bethesda that Daggerfall was bugged and could not play it anymore. Then Bethesda send floppy's with patches and a walk-trough book for the main story. That was in 1996.
@@chukkie0001 Bethesda is still a fantastic studio, like sure starfield missed the mark a bit , but at the same time it's not as bad as TH-cam cc make it out to be.
Bethesda has always been a bit basic interms of quest design new Vegas was obsidian doing their stuff.
Bethesda are good at giving you a good solid game with immersive world's.
It's just they made the daggerfall mistake again by going for procedural generation instead of making a Immersive solarsytem size world.
It's still pretty nice inbetween the nomansky and space citizen
@rkrams1989 Theyre not going to hire you. You dont need to defend a multimillion dollar company
@@joshuagraham967 iget how you feel 😂 I'm normally like that to people who defend blizzard monetization, here the reason I'm stating is one it's more of a fact, second Bethesda is not microsoft ea or ubisoft while it may have zenimax and I'd tech under it , it's not a behemoth, also go look at actual player reviews , the game is much more positive, it's not Skyrim or fallout, but it's not a bad trash game. The only thing I'm critical of Bethesda is trying to monetize mods and the whole fo76 live service bandwagon failure, outside that they are just doing fine, sure you can say creation engine is old and buggy, but it's also way more interactable than most other engines, I'm not against criticising the mistakes in starfield not an i asking you to praise starfield, but just see the game for what it is actually.
@rkrams1989 That's valid, and I'll admit I've become more salty over their recent handling of projects like Starfields steam reviews. Hopefully it's just a misstep and they correct their past actions
@@rkrams1989i'm going to defend procedural generation, because in some instances it can have opposite effect and increases immersion. In Daggerfall you feel like world is actually world due to scale. Your experience feels more personal whan you know situation you have in your game is uniquely due to your decisions and world reactions plus randomness. And yes if you treat it like a normal game walking for few hours is not fun, but that's where creativity and pushing forward comes in. Create new tools to ease people manage that world. For example Daggerfall have mod that allows you to walk with faster speed making travel as fast as you want, but doesn't take you away from the world like fast travel does. Perfectly crafted world feels scripted in comparison where you feel like in a theme park.
We've mastered the easier to properly implement hand crafted worlds, but it has limits in potential.
Generated content needs much more legwork, research and layers to pay off and we don't see too much in terms of iterations to really get there.
It's prematurely to call whole direction as bad because of one previous attempt with half baked and tacked on in next games, so no wonder they are not fleshed out.
At least they explore that direction and I commend them for that.
But at the same time i think generated content feels better when world is more abstract looking.
Definetly something worthy of a spinoff line of games
In Mortal Kombat 2 there’s a shout out to “Our friends on the Internet forums!” in the special thanks credits. Can’t imagine that today LOL
Community groups do still get mentioned, so it's not really gone away. It's just changed a bit.
I mean, yeah. *Especially* for fighting games.
Risk of Rain gives a shoutout to a game dev thread on 4chan
For many companies now the fanbase is 'horrible trolls who "review bomb" us' and who we want to sue
@@LTPottenger It's because they make crap games and need something to blame for stockholders.
The internet has made collaborating and learning easier but I noticed that I actually struggled learning through a lot of tutorials. I found that they were really good at teaching specific things but lead to rabbit holes that tunnel my comprehension of the greater picture. through the years I slowly learned to refocus myself, but younger me would still be in those rabbit holes.
I have noticed that too. In general, people learning on their own learn specific topics, where people learning in school gain a wider foundational knowledge. But of course, some people learn better on their own and others learn better in a structured environment, so it comes down to what's best for you.
@@CainOnGames My observation is that we moved from a more push-approach (read an entire tech book, take a semester-long course), to a pull-context (look up tutorials/ideas on-demand). Even apart from shorter attention spans, can't build a comprehensive curriculum for yourself if you don't know what all the parts should be. But the expectations are also less realistic IMO - ppl assume they'll learn everything, quickly, with little or no failure or frustration in the interim.
Applies to both self-learners & those in formal education, but the latter group has more guardrails & extrinsic motivation to keep them on-track.
Not sure I'd blame the internet, per se, but perhaps its funhouse-mirror comparisons have bled over into education. Read a bunch of papers for my thesis edugame where CS students were dropping the major after a single 100-level course because they assumed that everyone else found it "easy".
@@CainOnGames I think there's a problem we need to solve there -how to funnel people/ensure they can funnel themselves to "what's best for them". I think some go years, or even (god forbid) decades, without being in the right kind of learning environment for them, and then things just don't work out for them through no apparent fault of their own.
I remember being so excited about a game, finally buying it at the store, and opening it and reading through that whole manual on the way home. That feeling was pure magic.
I miss manuals and game boxes so much! Thank you for the video Tim! Love these!
I don't miss boxes - my house is a temple of physical media, hence why we switched to digital. But I do miss manuals. Even for used games, I would find the manual PDF, print it, and add it to a generic box. Physical releases are expensive to produce/ship, and people don't read anything these days, but I kind of wish we still saw manuals, even in PDF/print-on-demand format.
Same, so much time spent in grade school reading over manuals, looking at art, reading lore and getting excited for school to end and be able to go home and play.
I've still got a bunch of old manuals stashed away somewhere. I especially loved the diegetic ones, like Mechwarrior 3's -- full of little in-universe documents coupled with little asides in the margins, ostensibly written from the POV of one of the game's characters (like the PC's uncle or something).
And I've actually got manuals for Arcanum in both English and Chinese.
Sometimes they'd be dense enough to give those old strategy guides a run for their money. The BG2 manual, alone, wound up being something like 200 pages.
@@mandisaw
I miss those games that had so much scope, background story and cool mechanics that you need to read manual with map to get into.
In storytelling point of view. I'm also fascinated about book-like story telling in games. It was nice to read story setting from manual.
@@gruntaxeman3740 I have a not-quite-there memory of Zelda 2 and Castlevania 3 having all the backstory in the manual, and then the first screen just drops you in the castle. Always fun to see modern Let's Plays where they are like, "gee, this seems abrupt" 😅
I can't confirm this but i heard that the makers of Wizardry would repair or replace floppy disks that were damaged.
On the sequel games some of the enemy parties you would encounter in the dungeons were player parties they had read off disks that people had sent in.
I can confirm *personally* that Agetec did *not* do that. I got a faulty dual-layer DVD from one of the games they published when I was a kid, so by the time I learned the second layer was unreadable, it was far too late to return the game, and they wound up giving me the Customer Service Runaround for something like 14 months (before I gave up, or before I forgot, or before Agetec shut down -- I don't remember which happened first).
Still kinda sore about that, TBH.
@@Netherfly There was about a 16 year time gap between when Wizardry came out and when the first DVDs came out. Over that time period the customer service policies changed greatly. There's no way you can say what a company did in 1981 based on their behavior in 1997 or later.
I remember the first time I ever patched a game via the internet. It was Diablo 2. With my terrible dial up, I had to try and convince my parents to let me have the computer on overnight. Trying to explain to them the concept of a patch for a game was nearly impossible.
I remember D2 had a glitch at launch where if you tried to Save and Quit (to the main menu) it would CTD. I remember joking with my brother that is was "Basically correct." (And, importantly, it did actually save!)
It's not the earliest patch I ever got, but it's one of the best remembered!
Oh about manuals - have you seen Tunic? On the surface, it's simple adventure game, but it has somewhat hidden layer of late game puzzles. But whether you play only first layer or both, you will experience this game manual nostalgia, as it is weirdly smoothly present in the game itself.
I'm so disappointed that Robocraft 2 was cancelled. It was a lot of fun and I was looking forward to tank tracks. I still can't believe they listened to the haters. It was early access, all they had to do is keep improving it and adding all the features they promised. Everything that was different from the first Robocraft did take some getting used to, but it was really innovative and fun for anyone who bothered to play more than 10 minutes and actually learn everything. It even had a great tutorial for all the new stuff and how to build and everything.
Same here. Heard that the biggest sore thumb is the mtx scheme (surprise surprise). It felt like FJ had a really big issue with monetization.
One thing that the industry still hasn't adjusted to is how quickly the community learns and adapts now. If there is a balance problem it will be discovered and communicated in days, if not hours. It isn't the Olden Days when it would take months or years for the community to adapt. Its almost instant now.
Beyond just the internet making tutorials that much more accessible, something I will never forget is when I was struggling trying to figure out how to implement something in a now long-backburner'd project and went "hey, Red Faction 2 did something very similar to what I want to do on the Playstation 2! I wonder if I could just ask somebody who worked on that."
This lead to me looking up the credits on Mobygames and then seeking out one of the programmers on twitter, and I went "Hi, I was wondering how you implemented the terrain destruction features in real time on hardware like that" and I got an answer. All I had to do to figure out the answer to the biggest technical challenge I was having was to just ask!
Of course, that didn't solve the problem where the game I was trying to make wasn't very fun, but that's a way harder problem to solve a lot of the time.
I miss physically owning my games. Because I actually owned it. It was my copy. Thanks to Steam it has been normalized to not actually own a game in any sense.
At least sites like GOG exist.
I miss boxes and manuals. Warcraft and StarCraft came with booklets that had the lore for every faction, unit and building, which was very cool before we had wikis. And I still love my StarCraft 2 boxes, they look beautiful.
Thanks Tim!
Regarding 3:25 - I can imagine that is both a blessing and a curse, as you have to deal with bad faith whining from toxic individuals.
Although as a fan it is very cool to be able to directly engage with the people who make the games we love.
Yes, the signal-to-noise ratio online is low and getting lower, but there’s some good stuff in that signal.
@@CainOnGamesI have worked as a community beta tester for a few sports title , i think it helps Dev's as long as a proper constructive feedback mechanism and loop is established that's not emotional criticism and is limited to a few people.
Basically a sort of community play test team and have proper forms or Excel sheets for feedback that require some effort than just basic texting.
10:24 this is why I hate the "listen to the fans" stuff. Half the time, "the fans" that devs are supposed to be listening to is really just a small subset of people that have decided they speak for everybody.
I really liked the Half-Life, Unreal, Homeworld, and similar manuals. Very cool reads. I think I enjoyed the Homeworld manual more than the gameplay. I do miss games working well with out day 1 patches. There were games I played for years without any issues, and then later I found out that patches were released fixing small bugs that I never noticed. Now it feels like most new games have major game breaking bugs on release that soon get patched. I'm grateful they are getting those patches they need.
It's interesting how all situations both a 'bad' (negative) and 'good' (positive) elements to them. Is it easier to get access to game dev tools nowadays? Sure! But more competition and more clutter in the marketplace (harder to stand out) immediately come with that. Thanks for pointing out all these different aspects, @Tim!
I first used the internet was at University in 1994. Email seemed like magic. We quite often sat there waiting for replies like it was an instant messanger. I do remember that even at that point you eventually got drowned in random spam porn. Except it would be "drawn" in letters rather than pictures.
I really do miss buying games before that where unless you saw it a magazine you had very little clue about what happened in it. You couldn't have a game spoiled unless your friends had played it.
On the piracy front though when games were on tape or disk we literally traded copies at school all the time. It was so easy to copy stuff that kids would come in with lunch boxes of them. I lived in the country, and we were all pretty poor. Anyone who got a game the whole village would have it in a couple of weeks. Obviously not on console with cartridges but only a few of us had them.
I used BBSes before the internet, I don't think they count as I never heard that word til the early 90s. I would mostly read and download a few things here and there but I asked a (probably dumb) question on one and Scorpia from Computer Gaming World, which I avidly read, answered. I was awestruck not just because she responded, but at the time it was very dumbfounding that someone far away could instantly respond to you. Sort of like how people must have felt when they heard radio for the first time.
I was born in late 2000s and the pre-internet era has passed me, it was very interesting to hear such a retrospective. Thank you
Hey Tim, I enjoyed the momentos video on Friday. Is there any chance that we could get 1 a day as an outro? Even if it’s 30 seconds showing us an old shirt. Maybe items that aren’t enough to get their video like Fridays. Of course I’ll be here either way, just a thought. Have a great day!
I recently made halfling banana bread, thanks Tim!
In light of the point that people who enjoy the content just silently enjoy the content while a disproportionate number of people who have a complaint express it, let me just say I quite enjoyed this video.
I really miss game manuals. I remember the Morrowind and Oblivion manuals were so thick and full of information that the official game guides just said: "refer to the game manual" for some of the information about the game.
09:14 Manuals, I'll be honest they never really did much for me but my Pillars of Eternity mousepad had lasted from when I got the Kickstarter box to just this year when I finally had to replace it.
I do wonder though if Steam could somehow integrate in the store page a pseudo manual or art showcase for people to flip through and read about the game before buying it. I know some games sell manuals or include them in complete editions but there are several games I have looked at on Steam where I am interested to know more before buying or I am waiting for the release date and would like to consume more of them. What do you think Tim?
Most Store page descriptions - incl on Steam - allow for links to the developer's webpage, where you could provide whatever you like. Pretty sure folks already do offer links on their Steam game to manuals, soundtracks, posters, and other goodies, both free & paid.
Could you imagine the term “Day 1 patch” before the internet???
Just finding out that a patch was available was a challenge. To be fair the internet has been able to provide patches for games since the late 80s. Got a lot easier with the World Wide Web in the early 90s.
@@TonkarzOfSolSystem Even BBS (or other tech, like Minitel in France) had patches. But those were quite rare.
Patches were a thing, but via "sneakernet", basically. Arcades got patches, but that meant a document outlining how to rewire the board. Not all arcade owners were able to DIY, or keep someone on staff/speed-dial who could. Similarly, in shareware land, you could definitely reach out to the developer for an update, but you still had to be in-the-loop to even know that one was available. The internet made communication better, but that just multiplies the good/bad practices that humans bring to the table.
Many if not most AAA games do come with gorgeous PDFs manuals. Regarding piracy, being able to buy a game online with a credit card surely made piracy go down in places where game prices are affordable. The old argument that people who pirate games because they can't afford them wouldn't have bought the game anyway. I am also off social media since 2016 it really is not necessary.
I would say piracy was mostly curtailed by Steam more than subscription based services (which came later after the piracy was already dying down). As Gabe said, "Piracy is a service problem."
I owe my beginning of programming knowledge from having to crack my own legally bought games because the DRM was too draconian and never worked properly. (It still causes performance issues.)
It's unfortunate to hear, again, that misconception over the boogeyman "piracy". I won't write an essay debunking every truism and false assumptions, and sometime bad faith, we hear on the subject from some people. I'll just point out to GOG: it's drm free, incredibly easy to pirate. Buying something outside of Steam or GOG can sometimes be more involved or complicated than pirating a GOG game.
Hell, even more than that: GOG has a 30 day refund window. So you could stay legal, and just buy-play-refund ad nauseam.
And yet, what happened? Nothing. There is was no dramatic increase in piracy when GOG came out, there is no dramatic difference in piracy from games release on GOG and those that are not, and there are plenty multi-million units sold games that are sold on Steam; including some games selling multiple tens of millions unit.
Why? Very simple, and we've known this for over two decades: the vast majority of the time, those people who pirate would not have bought the game. Those are not sales lost to piracy, those sales never existed in the first place.
And sure we all know a couple of idiots who want and can buy a game from a good source and chose instead to pirate it. There are exceptions everywhere. But when one account for the people who bought the game from recommendation from pirates, and those allergic to DRM, and those wanting a demo or a test before buying a game... overall the balance is not negative at all.
Like Gave Newell said: piracy is a matter of service.
It's worth noting that warez groups usually go with the Steam releases of a game because they're usually updated more frequently and because they can claim that they cracked it (even if it's just a simple goldberg emu DLL). You don't get either of those things with GOG usually.
There are people who pirate, play and won't pay on principle. It's mostly children and people from poor countries, so you won't get a lot money from them anyway.
I'm 44. I've been a pirate for the starting 10 years of my time on computers, from the Amiga 500 and then on PCs, up until the first Pentiums. Let's ignore the Commodore 64, I was a kid and that was a toy.
My most copied game was Diablo 1, when CDs were 25/30 bucks each and it took almost 1 hour to make a copy, when a small hit on the desk would fail the whole process.
I made an average of 8 copies a day, for almost a week, and yet, seems to me Diablo 1 sold like a motherfucker. Didn't it?
Again, Bethesda games, they never had a protection, you could copy them freely and I always did, since the first Arena. Yet, they always sold a lot.
Don't even get me started on Duke Nukem 3D, kids at school would give their sister for a copy, I only made 'em pay the blank CD or disks (3.5 inches), because it never was about gaining money, it was about sharing the culture of videogames with neophytes, people that would never invest the full price and could never justify to their parent such an expense.
Those who wanted and could, became serious gamers and started spending their own money on original games. Because it was better, especially in the era of boxes and manuals.
Point is, a good game always had success, in spite of piracy.
@@giampaolomannucci8281 And yet this doesn't justify piracy, which IS theft. It is stealing someone's work, period. And while it may do little to effect AAA studios, it can and does effect smaller indi devs who NEED that revenue. No matter how you slice it, piracy of games (and other media) *is* theft, period and full stop.
The thick manuals that came with games in the early 90s were really great. On the other hand, games became more intuitive in later years and eventually manuals became part of the games, so they are no longer necessary today. I don't miss the days of floppy disks. Being able to buy games online and play them straight away also has advantages.
Just want to say the manual for Arcanum is one of my fondest gaming memories. Same with the manual for Warcraft 2.
You can't just bring up the age old debate and not come down on a side:
Kirk or Picard?
The answer is obvious.
I have to know aswell!
Re: Piracy, my understanding -- from the consumer level only -- is that piracy skyrocketed in the late 90s/early 00s as the Internet became more prevalent (and, maybe more importantly, *faster*) to the extent that it all-but killed the PC market, with most developers transitioning to focus first and foremost on the console market, where piracy was far less prevalent. (And it was the rise of Steam, offering a competitive alternative to pirating software, which eventually reinvigorated the PC market). Does that gel with your experience, or is that merely an illusion? (IE correlation, not causation?)
That's the narrative I've always seen repeated, and it sure makes for a nice narrative (one that certainly plays well with the veneration of Valve that's so weirdly common), but I've never been sold on how accurate it is. EG this "transition" away from PC to consoles also happened around the time of the "great recession," so it probably made more sense for developers to transition to platforms that were cheaper or easier to develop for (see also the rise of mobile gaming around the same time); or the breakout success of the Xbox 360 and Wii, both of which attracted new audiences of players; or the greater ease of online play enabled by that generation of consoles.
Interesting answer to a good question
There was the "Nintendo Seal of Quality" that assured those cartridges were good. And I still have my Baldur's Gate manual with a big map. Or my Starcraft manual. My Civilization II and III manuals are HUGE with info!
I still try to buy physical whenever possible. Limited Run Games, for example, for my Command & Conquer Remastered physical bundle.
And I think what diminished the piracy was Steam. An on-line, "fair" price and easy way to play and concentrate games, without the problems that piracy brings. With the steam friends and the possibility to flex your library with "[user] is playing [game]", you almost create a veiled competition on gamers. And the review system...
In the end we must adapt to the new ways and the sum of pros and cons is still a net positive.
I'm new to thinking about large level design. How do you go about grayboxing a large game with interconnected rooms and environments? What are the most important steps you would normally go through to fill and eventually polish those spaces, and how do you streamline your process when working with others? Cheers
Really weird hearing "DLC" used to just mean "expansions and supplements" when it literally stands for "downloadable content". I think the first time I remember any game just having free additional stuff available that you could just go to the company's website and get for free was with Alpha Centauri when they released a couple of free extras (the borehole DLC was one) in addition to the physical expansion (Alien Crossfire) that still required you to literally walk to the shop and hand over paper money for a plastic disc.
Wasn't so weird once upon a time not so long ago, but the idea that "DLC" is anything that has to be downloaded (which is everything), including "skins" (recolorings of textures that take minutes to accomplish in Photoshop) and the like being sold today for the same or higher price than expansions and supplements once were has been normalized to the point that younger generations who grew up with it, especially, don't even question it, whether working in the industry or not. It's just "the way things are." Until everyone puts their critical thinking caps back on and starts questioning things like that, the industry abuses dragging down both development studios and communities will only get worse.
Also, hard to believe, I know, but not everyone can afford an Internet connection, so the demand for an internet connection to be established even to play a single player game at this point is locking an awful lot of people out of the "hobby". I remember hearing a prominent CEO (definitely not "Creative Director") talking about "the problem of getting everyone on the Internet" and knew there wasn't a care in the world about the less fortunate, but only how much more obscene levels of profit could be made from micro and macro transactions (ntm, "subscriptions") if those people were on the Internet and/or could afford a high speed Internet connection. For those less fortunate, especially, it's just been another slap in the face in a never ending cycle of poverty and despair.
I didn't play Fallout 4 for about 2 years after launch because I listened to the internet trolls saying what a horrible game it was. Bought it on Steam for $19 dollars on a whim and I've now out in 4200 hours on it. Lesson learned.
Wasted time lul
Yep good lesson:
Wait a couple of years and most games are 60% off and properly patched by then 😅
Anyone else old enough to remember Decoder wheels for games, ah Pools of Radiance my friend. Old school DRM was awsome hehe
My late hubby was a PC gamer, and he talked about that when we were talking about the Gold Box games, and the evolution through to the Bioware/Baldur's Gate era. Myself, I was an arcade kid, then console gal for life 🎮 so I remember the Nintendo Seal of Quality 🌟
@@mandisaw I have just spent 2 hours playing Roblox with my granddaughter... If I had a time machine I would take her to an arcade, we would both have had more fun, Ah simpler times. I'll add that to the list after teaching her to tell the time on an "old" watch "thing".
@@seamusbaker3338 Good luck! My first commercial game was a Spirograph for mobile - grandparents introducing the toy to their grandkids were my best customers 💜
Also, depends where you live, but you might find some multi-game arcade cabinets at a local kids' playhouse type space (think Chuck 'e Cheese and the like).
The manual was a workaround for saving storage space, but I really found it interesting how some games basically embraced that limitation to its fullest. For example, an old point-click game Loom came with a manual that was basically a little spellbook that the player was supposed to use as they played. The game revolved around learning very simple staffs of music, that would solve puzzles and to memorize these musical spells you would write the spells' letters (such as c minor, d, e, d) inside the manual. None of it was recorded in the game itself. If you forgot a spell and didn't write it down? You were in trouble. But it was just really cool keeping track of them in the manual, and made you feel like a wizard as your knowledge of your own volition grew.
There was an entire practice of manual-based anti-piracy techniques, including stuff where you'd hit a challenge to type in a specified word from a specific page in the manual. Woe unto you if you still had the disk, but misplaced the manual (or got a copy of the game from your buddy, without the manual).
Man I miss manuals nothing beats a good manual its a good read on the bus and if its well done builds hype to go and play it. My favorite manuals are the ones for Metal Gear Solid because of the manga.
One unspoken con is organic discovery is a lot harder now unless you black out. The 'mew truck' could not exist today for long.
When thinking about how the internet changed devs, I am thinking about the whole Yasuke drama with the wiki edits etc, I find it all very odd.
Hi Tim. I have a question, why do some companies get a pass for reusing assets and others don't? I know sometimes it's an artistic choice like with Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and others it's a time crunch. Some examples of games that reused assets on a time crunch would be Fallout 2, Fallout New Vegas, and Majora's Mask. I remember when Fallout 76 launched Bethesda caught a lot of flak because they reused assets, one claim in particular was that they reskinned the dragons from Skyrim and called it Scorchbeasts. On the flip side, Elden Ring not only had a long development period but has reused audio and visual effects but they've straight up copied boss moves and weapon move sets. Upon review I noticed that From Software has been doing this sort of a thing for a long time and yet no criticism is thrown their way.
It's about many other factors.
With Nintendo and their "established franchises", they usually make very good games, and they have very loyal franchise fans who don't mind "more of the same" as long as it's good, and they are much more forgiving. Also console loyalism is a thing, especially strong with Nintendo.
Similarly with Fromsoft, although Fromsoft has done "enough changing" so you can tell they definitely put decent amount of effort into it, or rather, it seems "well intended" and "done in good faith" not just to "milk the cash cow"; and extremely high quality brand new stuff as well (with Bloodborne, Sekiro, Armored Core 6) although I've been criticizing their asset / boss copy-paste since Dark Souls 3 (I'm in the minority of Fromsoft fans). Again they mostly appealed to console games for the first few years (PC gamers were EXTREMELY vocally critical of their Dark Souls 1 port) but with appealing more to the PC crowd recently they got much more criticism (especially Elden Ring performance issues).
When it comes to Bethesda, they have done quite a few "misses" and lackluster games over the years, very buggy / underdeveloped games, which leads to the perception that they are not putting much effort into it at all, doing it in bad faith, just milking the cash cow; they have also done some outright lies and shady business practices (pricing,; also they have always appealed to the PC gamer crowd which tends to be much more critical / vocal. These factors compounded to overwhelm whatever past loyalty of the fanbase there was.
I remember New Vegas copping criticism for being a 'glorified mod', though I suppose people never saw how much that and FO3 reused assets from Oblivion.
This reminds me of Valve's Half Life 2 & Portal, both use the Source Engine & to give a reason as to why both look the same Valve just went out & said "oh yeah, they're in the same universe, the same world"
I guess it just comes down to the game company & how they address & justify themselves reusing previously made assets.
@@alessandroguarrera2203
It always makes me laugh seeing New Vegas getting flak from so-called journalists when it released & now it's regarded as the best Fallout & one of the best RPGs ever made.
@@dr.virus1295 Ah, yes, journalists; "like Skyrim with guns", as if Fallout 3 wasn't Oblivion with guns. Or calling Crash Bandicoot 'Souls-like'.
Sorry to leave two comments but I have a question regarding manuals how long did they take to make and why for some games they were longer than others?
Well, who is it? Kirk or Picard?
Picard
Kirk, original Kirk
Sisko 😎
@@mandisaw Garak was right about *one* thing....
patches were available online in the late 90s already. they were a couple hundred kilobytes or a few megabytes at most, so even with the 8 kb/s from a 56k modem you managed to download them in a reasonable amount of time lol
There was a mission pack for red alert you could get pre internet... The biggest rts at the time and you got this buggy second rate disc because there was almost no market, and the price of distribution was really high...
On piracy, I used to pirate games, back when i did not have any chance of buying them, I also pirated audiobooks and music, and im not proud of it. And because of that, now that I do have money, i insist on buying and paying for my media, and i am probably used to a higher rate of consumption. I often wonder, if the rate of piracy in the nineties helped kickstart the gaming-culture we have today by making games widely available to demographics that would not have adopted it at full price.
Because of my experience with piracy and the conversations we had on the value of supporting artists, i am VERY critical of subscription based streaming platforms like Spotify and audiobook services, because smaller artist makes way to little on their product, and have no other way of cooping, other than producing more, faster, now often using AI, and it is narrowing the field of artist that "make it"... Good games, books and music should cost money.
6:25....oh were very aware of how much more pathces we get thewe days and how easier it is sell things in a game store
Games as a service... Don't even start.
Have you heard about Ross Scott trying stop companies from killing games?
Hi Tim! Love your games, takes on games and stories too. Have you heard of recent "Stop killing games" initiative? May i ask if you have an opinion on it? Some of your games almost turned into so-called "abandonware" (lost source-code, etc) and that's why i think you may be interested in it. Would love to hear you talk about it
1:10 I was there, Gandalf
After working on the Outer Worlds 2, do you think there is ever a chance to Kickstart a sequel to Arcanum?
The luxury of having someone to argue with 😢 in computer rpg I would love to have someone arguing about how to make a player character gullible mechanically. I separate stats and attributes into action to the world and reaction to the world, then roughly into physical, social and psychological world. Gullible is reaction and psychological, but that's the realm of player's agency, we can't constraint player's character psychological reaction due to player agency, or can we?
Tim you mentioned a lot about piracy in this video and the measures against them. what do you think about Gabe newels quote that stopping piracy is more about giving better service than people are receiving from the pirates. I would like you to talk about your thoughts about piracy being a lack of service rather than pricing and other reasons.
Yeah before the Internet matured or really advanced pre-2010, any patches or bugs or updates weren’t as accessible to physical copies so what you got on disc is what the game was on release. Nowadays a new update comes out and you wait 20-50 minutes for a 50GB patch.
On the upside, back then a bad game would actually have consenquences, as long as you don't ship a PC game. Now you can handwave any problem to QA or your players and then say that patches and modders will fix it, just to then never do anything.
I really miss manuals
I miss the new manual smell.
"I hope I got that number right." 🤭
Piracy and live services: complex matter.
If we're talking about online multiplayer games, then it takes some time to create a server emulation software which does, in a way, prevent *some* piracy.
Single player games with always-online authentication? No, if anything it's a challenge to crack them in order to spite the companies that do that.
As far as I've seen, the thing that works best to avoid privacy is to not do *anything* about it and instead put that effort into building up goodwill with the community. That will make some people who would have otherwise pirated you game buy it instead.
Like someone else mentioned: GOG has no DRM and lots of gamers (myself included) love it. Steam was the main contributor to the decline of piracy up until a few years ago, because it offered a lot for the price you were paying. Piracy started increasing again with alternative platforms and exclusive games.
Also Dev's nowadays due to grasping techniques faster make plastic games that look great but don't feel great, like take all ubi openworld or generally most games nowadays they have great graphics realistic looking world NPC , characters customisation.
The world is beautiful to look but you can't touch or feel or interact with it, interactivity with the world, not scripted events from some choice but me running around and breaking a chair or lamp etc that world that lives and breaths is not there .
Instead everyone thinks they are.making a cinematic movie to watch and are the next video kojima while forgetting that while he adds a cinematic experience he also makes a living breathing world, like in mgs 2 while it's raining on the ship deck and it's cinematic and birds fly away.
But he also makes those birds poop on the floor slippery that if you are not careful you will skid and fall.
Like games need to feel like a living thing again.
The problem of piracy is a problem of availability.
If something is impossible to get legally - its going to be pirated.
It can be impossible to buy a game in third world country because its madly expensive - it will be pirated. Regional pricing on Steam fixed that issue for the most part.
It can be impossible to buy a game because its locked on a specific platform - it will be pirated. Some publishers weakened their grip on exclusives recently but the problem still exists.
It can be impossible to buy a game because its in legal hell, nobody knows who owns parts of it and its been pulled out from storefronts. It will be pirated. There is no solution.
Instead of forcing people who will never buy a game to buy it (at expense of people who are willing to pay) publishers should focus on providing the means to actually buy games for people who will gladly do it.
No need to be third world country. Greek depression or post-communism depression in some countries caused that there wasn't much of money for games so piracy increased. For the most part, the games that are pirated would not have been bought anyway.
Today I don't think there isn't much of piracy. Games are affordable in Steam and Epic gives them away free. If there is piracy today, it must be related to availability, possible incompatibility or something.
Been making games for 30 years and working in industry for a decade, with some time teaching game dev. I’m still not convinced that video content is a good way to learn a problem-solving based discipline.
Before even watching the video: for the worse. Thank you Unreal Tournament. Thank so very much for ensuring buggy game releases and unplayable games on launch have become the norm. Now to watch the video.
What I'm seeing is more people getting good at replicating established systems and game mechanics with a bit more polish, but even this is surface level.
Like they want to just make game mechanics and not actually tell a game.
The main difference I see between older games was they were trying to sell you a experience, not a gamemechanic, most of them were trying to make the experience they want on the tools and engine they have, this is why you feel at home when you visit a old game, nowadays while tech has made things more accessible it's also streamlined everything too much that we are just putting together established systems and reskinning a bit rather than build a game.
I don't mean everyone is like that but majority feel that way both on aaa and indie side.
Also i don't like the monopoly of unreal engine taking over game tech, it's just creating a same type of feel and look and horrible optimization, it's not exactly a unreal engine problem, but it makes it ok to have bad standards, like a ton of unreal engine 4 games had heating issues on amd and bad stutters performance, while days gone ran like butter and looked fantastic.
But also precise optimised tech like id software is more important than generalised tank engine like ur with a ton of bloat.
IMO Steam with its verification's, ease of use, sales, and community really slowed down piracy.
About "negative voices". Why can't you have a poll or survey? Surely it will show more balanced picture as people who liked game/feature/element will vote just as those who didn't like.
Also, I would point out that niche games are far more close to "making everyone happy" as their audience is small and has more similar tastes and views. AAA projects, aimed at the most wide and general audience have a lot more different groups of people, who may or may not like specific thing.
Um, you can pirate not just live service games, but whole digital platforms, I know, I had seen this in my very family.
My brother had like full on fake steam, with store acces and all the features. He however also had legitimate steam, and these two keep biting at each other. Plus it was endless war of updates (as Valve didn't sit idely )and counterupdates, checking and rechecking. One day he simply deciced it was just too much bloody work to be worth it, and went 100% legit. And later he preety much quit gameing on PC, going for PlayStation insead. And he's one happy gamer to this day :D
I wish the "treasure box" culture could come back. Fan items in a shop is nice but doesn't really do it.
Bethesda forums. Akatosh. Also Known As the old smaug himself. It was great when the community was a resource for ideas. Its not so great that we are now paying full price to be beta testers for 3 years before the game is finished.
Picard for life.
Uncle Tim
I didn't want an update to Fallout 4 or Skyrim.
Because it broke the mods.
Lol
piracy is not beatable, there will be private servers for online games, there will be cracked single player games. If the game is good people will buy it even if they pirate it first.
I've always been amazed that people who run private servers for online games somehow manage to get their hands on the backend code to run it in the first place.
@@arcan762 it's not always the source code, it can either be a stolen PTS build or an emulator written from scratch.
Can you talk about crunch in the game dev space
Crunch
th-cam.com/video/QJHpuJxMqiA/w-d-xo.html
Crunch, Part 2
th-cam.com/video/eXJkecLBhOE/w-d-xo.html
@@CainOnGames Thanks didn't see that
did you get back on social media? when and why?
I made a Facebook account two years ago so I could register a VR helmet
@@CainOnGames hahaha I see
how come its always those obscure nicks with numbers asking these questions :D
Great game on canes bideo
I remember warcraft 2 expansion, not dlc. You would get a whole new campaign, not a halloween costume for your orcs 😅
what bugs me now is when you go to a real store and buy a game box and all you get is a slip of paper with a damn Steam key inside. Gods I hate Steam.
The internet is by far a net positive overall, but one thing I hate is how it’s made negative, vocal minority groups soooo loud. I’ve seen small studios get blind sided by rabid fans who, in spite being a tiny proportion of the community, make character assassinations of the studio and ravage the games reputation. I’ve seen entire IPs fall to their own communities.
I'M NOT HAPPY! ...but I don't think I can blame the internet or any single game or games. Just putting that out there. Happy Monday?
Oh there was plenty of piracy in the 80s.
Maybe it's good for games, but to me the homogeneity of games, both in AAA and indie is tiering. There's maybe a dozen games as a services that mot of kids play, and there is the rest. Not much innovation, or excitement. Hundreds thousands of low quality survival games, or metroidvania. Then people stream games so there's no mystery, and you don't even need to play the game to experience it, but it also leads to a lot of procedural levels, which aren't nearly as good as handcrafted ones. And on top of that there are hundreds if not thousands yt channels where people are "developing" their own games, but never actually finish anything, and in fact many of them doesn't really teach correct approaches to coding or design. SO in my view internet did makes things worst.
🍔🍟
the internet ruined gaming, the entire industry wanted to kill plaintext binaries, the trusted computing initiative was started by intel, amd and microsoft in 1997 which was to kill root plaintext ring 0 access to your CPU and kill you owning your device, Secure boot and UEFI was specificalyl designed for TPM drm which has been 20 years in the making. Steam/Uplay/MMO's/f2p are all fraud because over 98 % of the assets, code and game are running on your computer. The internet warped us back to mainframe computing of the 60's and allowed valve and everyone to steal PC games on an industrial scale and get off on a technicality, we had more modding capability in 1997 then we do in modern fps games. When's the last time a big AAA game came with a C compiler, or file specs?
Tim you are delusional and misremembering the past, from 1997 to 2003 before steam launched, everyone and their mother knew you were going to kill local applications and start ripping out features (like multiplayer) and rebranding PC games MMO so that the industry could monopolize their own products and steal PC games from the public. The last 23+ years has been a theft of PC games on an industrial scale by the industry and hiding behind software licensing and copyright to get off on a technicality of not giving ownership of the games to the kmids.
We lost dedicated servers and the basic ability to host our own multiplayer game as complete local applications, go look at quake 3 or Unreal 2004, no DRM and the online portion came with the game and you owned it outright as a plaintext win32 binary.
The entire tech industry wanted to kill plaintext assembly compiled binaries, aka the war on game ownership that started in 1997 that was unrelenting thanks to the kids and average gamer being stupid, Denuvo appeared in 2014 and is now making games unpreservable. The modern gaming landscape is a fucking nightmare.
In 5:56: Horse armor! 🐎
Wrt 9:59: I think internet led to the outrage culture as well (not only in games), where a good chunk of people get each other outraged about stuff they probably wouldn't care much about otherwise.
@@UlissesSampaiobut in hindsight those that were outraged had good foresight. That horse armor opened the gates to the microtranaction hell that we have today.
@@roberteltze4850 They are just selling stuff that some people are willing to buy, how does this affect anyone else? I don't think I've ever bought any mtx related stuff in any game, but if some people have more money than they know what to do with, then good for them I guess. Hating the fact that it even exists is just a cope.
@@roberteltze4850 I was talking about two topics (thus edited my comments slightly). But I think horse armor was just a test drive for DLCs. DLCs in essence are not bad things. The bad thing is that some took it too far.
"DLCs" became so easy that many game companies now ship games before finishing them to fix them later.
when in doubt blame gamers =)
nah, just kidding, but seriously.
For a while, I worked at a company that made freemium games.
"Why did the company start to make freemium games?" - a colleague asked me. - "Why don't we make something like Tomb Raider [her favourite game]?"
She had pirated every single Tomb Raider game and the only time she has ever spent money on a game was in a freemium game.
She failed to see any connection between her own actions and the pivot the company made even after I pointed it out to her.
Piracy and games as a service, a race to the bottom between companies and consumers.
Tim I respect you as an artist and as a person and I would never go further than typing a comment; but gaming has become so GAY! Even gays I know irl aren't this gay!