I would call Avowed the best action game this year, yes. I think a lot of people were let down by the ways that it’s light on RPG systems, expecting it to be a Bethesda style game, but I’d say that, while it’s not 1:1, that game has a lot in common with FromSoft games but without the tense feeling of being against tough odds. If you haven’t played it yet, you’ll see what I mean. There’s also Eternal Strands, which I haven’t played just because there was so much else to play this year, but it’s got some buzz and interesting design ideas behind it.

What do you consider Obsidian? They put out two bangers this year. Does Split Fiction count? They’re at least an order of magnitude under the budget of a marquis Sony game, let alone the likes of Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty. How about Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves? The Alters? Dispatch? Have you heard of a little game called Clair Obscur: Expedition 33? I hear people like that one. (I’m joking. I’ve played it, too. Budget estimates are still in the tens of millions of dollars.) I’m strongly of the opinion that AA is back right now.

Indie games have had a far better hit rate with me since about 2017 or so, but this year, bigger budget games have been more my speed. I agree; there’s no need to stick to those sorts of categories when your favorite can come from anywhere.

Check out Trail Out.

I’d argue live service killed the full package, where the full package used to be single player and multiplayer modes, sometimes multiple of each.

I’ll have to check this out when I return from the holiday weekend. Timesplitters 2 was the game we played when we didn’t have access to Halo, and while that style of FPS was commonplace back then, the industry basically doesn’t make anything like this anymore.

Source? You say I need to provide sources. Where’s yours for this.

It’s in the article that we’re commenting on right now.

“I think some of that work, by nature, because it’s so close to the platform, will have to be SteamOS specific… some publishers or some game developers will have to decide at their own rhythm if they want to do that work for SteamOS or not. But we’ve been trying to help in any way we can along the way.”

I don’t know how this works with Linux software licenses, but it seems to be something that they’re acknowledging they might have to do, somehow.

It is not, on PC at least.

You’re right, I’ve got some double-counting going on in there. According to Mat Piscatella of Circana, 40-50% of all gaming hours on PS5/XS are spent on just the top 10 live service titles. Surely a target demo for the Steam Machine includes a portion of that, but these games really do represent a huge portion of the market, including on PC. You only need one of those games to be a deal-breaker for someone to make them decide that it’s not worth it to use a Steam Machine or switch to Linux. For instance, I’ve got friends that play primarily games that work on Linux, but if Destiny 2 doesn’t work, then they’re out, full stop. For another friend, it might be Battlefield, or what have you.

This number is bullshit probably. If their AC can detect cheaters then they wouldn’t have this issue in the first place. You’re trying to tell me you believe they can accurately count cheaters but are also incapable of stopping them? Yeah…

I don’t know Facepunch’s methodology, or that of their anti-cheat vendor, but often times they like to do bans in waves so as to not give away how the cheaters were caught. Again, given that they’re not the only developer to come to this conclusion, I have no reason to doubt their write-up. I can certainly disagree with how they’ve responded to it though. If it were me, I’d sooner put Linux users on a prisoners’ island or something than to outright just not let them play.

I understand the desire, but then that might have implications on support tickets, advertised system requirements, separate maintenance and optimizations for only one platform, etc. It might be that turning up the FOV even a smidge over their maximum requires a super computer that doesn’t even exist yet, depending on what it has to render and how it works under the hood.

Quite famously, Unity had a reputational problem because of this. Free users were required to show the splash screen, but companies with larger war chests could pay the higher rate to skip it. It led to Unity being associated with low-budget and amateurish games, while higher quality games running on the same engine, which would be better advertising for Unity, tended to not show the logo.

Anti-cheat is not heading toward more support without the intervention described in the article. Whatever that results in. Valve is talking about potentially a SteamOS-specific fix, which I take to mean that they might have to do something at a kernel level that other Linux distros would find unacceptable. “Only” EA, Riot, Epic, Roblox, and Call of Duty is grossly underselling this: that is most of the video game market. It’s not most games, nor is it most publishers, but between those games and publishers, it represents most players, most dollars spent, and most time spent playing video games (at least non-mobile, anyway). It is an enormous hump to get over if you want to make a gaming device appealing to more customers.

The one thing they always say is how few users are on Linux. If that’s true then most of the hackers can’t be. It doesn’t make sense.

Sure it does. As an example, let’s say there are X players for a game in a month, and 3-7% of those are on Linux. If, as Facepunch says, more than half of that 3-7% are cheaters, then including them is doing more harm than good to your cheating problem.

To be fair to devs, increasing the FOV has a lot of performance implications on how much less they’re culling from the scene as you rotate the camera. In this era of open world games, I suspect it scales very poorly as that FOV increases. Temporarily increasing the FOV is also one of their handy tricks for giving you a sense of speed when you hit a boost button and whatnot, so whatever your FOV is, they need to make it more than that.

Sound test menus are a remnant of arcade design, and when arcades starting dying, this feature made less sense. The OST sale is usually more of a revenue stream for the game’s composer, as I understand it.

Monopoly has been one of the most popular board games for about a century, and hardly anyone plays by all of the official rules. Once I buy a game, if I want to play with house rules, I should be able to. Putting the sliders and such in game, even with the warning message mentioned above, just makes it easier to do so without having to rely on the community to make mods.

I’m generally with you, but there are implications for the online game and matchmaking in the likes of Dark Souls games. By the time they got to Elden Ring, they seemed to care way less about things like invasions.

All fighting games (or anything that runs deterministically on all players’ machines, like fighting games do) should always have a performance test requirement before you hop online. We figured this out over a decade ago, and plenty still don’t do it, resulting in people with weak computers causing matches to appear laggy.

As a society, we should agree on which menu subtitles belong in. Is it language? Audio? Display? Game Settings? Sometimes I’ve seen games put them in multiple menus so that we always find them where we’re looking for them.

I’m no expert on colorblind settings, but I tried playing Monaco with someone who’s red/green colorblind, and that game was nearly impossible for him.

If your game runs online, I should be able to host the server myself, and launching a listen server from within the game ought to be present, too. It might be nice to surface port forward information there as well. LAN is nice; Direct IP connections are better. (Thanks, Larian, for including both!)

So the only thing that’s allowed to be speculated is that the companies are perfectly honest and never lie? Yeah, maybe you’re not that reasonable.

A bit of skepticism is healthy, but it’s far more reasonable to assume that independently reporting the same thing from multiple different unaffiliated companies is the truth compared to making up stories about executive meddling or that banning Linux increases the percentage of hackers, based on nothing except your own feelings.

I daily drive Kubuntu. I hate Windows. I have a Windows partition, but I haven’t booted it since December of last year. My next PC won’t have Windows at all. The operating system I use doesn’t change what is actually happening in the real world.

If they can’t stop the hacking on Windows then what the hell is blocking Linux going to do?

It’s going to prevent a more potent vector, which is exactly what they said.

Your explanation is bordering on conspiracy theory, so yes. Rust cited why they cut support, as did Apex Legends, as did GTA Online. The rest often don’t even bother with supporting it in the first place because of how it always plays out. The existence of hackers at all doesn’t mean that Linux anti-cheat is equally effective, and you’d know that if you read the write up from the Rust team.

Please cite sources for any of that. Game companies aren’t in the business of losing money. If they could make more money by supporting Linux customers, they would do so, and I’ve never heard of a gaming company’s executive ever mentioning anything about Linux except for Gabe Newell, openly or behind closed doors. If they wanted to make a big show of getting rid of cheaters, they’d never have enabled cross play between consoles and PC in the first place. They openly tell you why they don’t enable anti-cheat on Linux, in a way that’s beyond just being plausible, and you refuse to believe them. You’re only going to be surprised when this continues to happen even though the answer is right there.

I wish you the best in convincing devs with the data in front of them that there’s no difference between the two, but they seem to have data that indicates that they see fewer cheaters with ring 0 anti-cheat than when they let Linux players in with user space anti-cheat. If it were true that there’s no difference, surely Valve’s engineers could convince them of that, too, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.

Of course I’m serious. “Not 100% effective” is not the same as “not effective”. And to be clear, I hate it and do not endorse it. I will not buy any game that goes as far as to use that kind of anti-cheat. But developers use it because it’s more effective at catching cheaters than not using it. All downvoting me does is cover your ears to what’s actually going on. There are a number of big live service games that once enabled Proton and have now disabled it after cheaters took advantage of the more lax security. They would not cut off a portion of their customer base if they didn’t have to because user space in Linux was somehow just as effective as the Windows variant that lives at ring 0 in the OS kernel.

Of course not. Go read the reports of any developer who once enabled Linux compatibility and then disabled it.