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Comment by Agent766 | Hacker News Reader

It's pretty ridiculous for companies ban the alleged cheaters in single player modes too which shouldn't require any server dependencies.

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And, tbh, wtf does it matter if I wanted to "cheat" in single player mode? Oh no - it would be unfair to some AI NPCs? At one point "cheating" in single player mode was called modding -- and it drove communities and made software publishers money by keeping games fresher longer.

I agree. What I find unfortunate is that most single player games are now designed to be incredibly grindy: the developers want player retention so there’s more buzz about the game, resulting in more purchases.

I’m in my mid thirties, and I have career ambitions and hobbies and relationships that I want to nurture. While I would love something I can play and enjoy for 15-30 minutes every other day, I don’t have time for something that takes 5+ hours just to feel the slightest amount of reward. Cheats can take a game that’s designed to be grindy and addictive and instead make it something that can be enjoyed in smaller chunks.

An excellent example of this is Breath of the Wild. BotW requires a ton of slow terrain traversal (at least until you’ve unlocked more fast travel points, and even then the walking/gliding takes quite a while). Playing the game with a mod to enable 5x movement speed makes it a game that I can actually enjoy playing for 15 minutes at a time. Also, it takes something like 45-60 seconds for the game to reload when you die, so temporarily having an invincibility cheat on makes it feasible for me to figure out an enemy’s move set, whereas without I would either have to cheese the enemies or give up on the game entirely: what I’m not going to do is sit down with a hard cap of 15 minutes, die fifteen times, getting a total play time of maybe a minute of actual game play plus 14 minutes or so of loading screen, and then come back the next couple nights to do same thing over again.

A touch of cheats make modern games actually playable to someone who has a busy schedule, but still wants something to decompress with.

Breath of the Wild has probably in part been designed the way it was because Nintendo knew you could take your switch with you during travel; 15mn seems like a difficult goal to achieve for an exploration-focused game.

That said, I agree that anyone should be able to modify a local (that is, local coop/multiplayer or singleplayer) game's behavior to suit their needs.

Some metric on the steam marketplace used to put games on the front page include concurrent users and hours played. I've seen people actively coordinating their customer base to boost concurrent users. It's madness that games are falling in the advertisement trap and even indie need to play the ball to survive

I was with you and imagining you were talking about Ubisoft-style games (the last of which I played in 2014, but apparently they've been reskinning the same game since!). But Breath of the Wild's appeal to me is precisely the exploration! Why would you want to skip that x)

You can save anywhere, so you can make sessions as short as you'd like anyway. There aren't even classic Zelda dungeons anymore! Just 5-10min challenges in the form of a shrine.

Yeah. And it becomes silly the other way around as well. Take the WadjetEye adventures. People complain that the games are just 4 - 8 hours long. But on the flip side, it's 4 - 8 hours filled with charm, content and gameplay. It doesn't contain 30 minute dry stretches every once in a while. And for 10 - 20 euros, it's entirely fairly priced.

And the games tend to be structured by acts, so it's easy to play it for half an hour to an hour until an act is completed. Then it can sit for a day or two and then you continue through the next act.

Many roguelikes feel like they have a similar time structure in mind. Sigil of the Magi, Slay the Spire, Peglin and such have an hour run time generally and that's it. Game sizes like Witcher 3 have grown kind of disheartening to me, as much as I want to like it.

Claiming that you can’t get to places quickly in breath of the wild before you’ve unlocked the warp towers implies to me you’re complaining that you can’t zip through new areas that you’ve never even explored before.

In a world where content is locked behind actual repetitive grinds of the same content for numbers to go up, this strikes me as a preposterous example.

I also can’t think of any game that asks for 5+ hours for any payoff for anything tbh.

> I also can’t think of any game that asks for 5+ hours for any payoff for anything tbh.

MMOs are usually an example of this, where there is rarely any true fun to be had in the opening hours (where either gameplay is extremely slow, many people are zipping through power-levelling, etc.). They're hardly an example of a modern game though.

Yes sorry. I meant modern popular games.

I vehemently disagree - single player games are generally far less grindy than they used to be (with significant exceptions such as Genshin Impact). Basically all single player games now have a story and a rather linear path through it, and tend to carefully design their progression such that completing that main story itself is enough to be able to take on the next steps in it, with at most a small amount of side-content. Even difficulty and saving options are usually tuned such that it is very rarely necessary to re-do the same content, you will almost always be able to finish it in the first try, or 2-3 at most.

A good example is in comparing the newer Final Fantasy games with the older ones. In the older ones, it was 100% required to occasionally run around the map and just fight random encounters to level up and be able to face the next bit of the story. The newer ones eschew this completely, and some don't even have random encounters for most of the time. Save points were also placed such that you would often have to redo an entire gauntlet of fights if you failed once, which is a thing of the past as well.

Also, your example of BotW is not an example of what is normally called grinding. The exploration, the terrain traversal, is, to most people I've seen praise it, the core appeal of BotW, not some repetitive grind the games makes you go through to enjoy the good bits.

On the other hand, I'm not trying to say "you're playing the game wrong". I fully agree that we all have a right to "cheat" in single-player (or LAN) games to make them fit our preferences, regardless of the designer's intentions or the preferences of other gamers.

I assume they don’t want you to breeze through the content or be able to add/modify content without paying them.

After all, who would want to allow a customer to enjoy a product that they paid good money for in the way they see fit.

Yeah, I know why I don't buy anything from some of the major publishers anymore.

Achievements and leaderboards could be an issue.

Then you wouldn't buy the horse armor. [1] That's most probably why.

Some companies sell XP boosters and other P2W crap for even SP games nowadays.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/horse-armor

In the USA at least this could be a felony DMCA violation.

Blizzard's PC games, since Diablo III, all require an online connection to play even single player specifically to prevent privacy.

> specifically to prevent privacy.

I appreciate this typo on a spiritual level.

Freudian keyboard

Well, the argument with Diablo 3 was that the game had an in-game auction house on launch, where you could sell in-game items for real money. So the game had to be fully online to make sure items are only generated when really earned. Of course the auction house disappeared and the requirement to always be online didn't(having said that, the console versions of diablo 3 don't require being online - but from what I understand significant portion of the game was rewritten to allow the game to work online, on consoles, and with a gamepad)

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