Bethesda’s Redfall needs to be online for single-player mode | Hacker News Reader

Bethesda’s Redfall needs to be online for single-player mode

arstechnica.com

76 pointsevo_965 comments

The only reason is they wish to be able to control the player - when they discontinue the game's servers, they want the players to not be able to play any more. Obviously, when/if they decide to sell the sequel, the original surely must be stopped from working in order to prevent it as being a competition to sales!

When they decide to sell micro-transactions, they wish to stop players from just cheating it in (even tho it's a single player game).

Do not buy a game like this. It aint worth the money, and there's plenty of indie games that are just as good, if not better.

Yeah, this is too much. Will only buy if there's a crack to simulate connecting to the server.

If you buy when there's a crack you're still rewarding them.

I think the trick with modern games is to simply never buy on launch, don’t get too invested, wait till you can get it at a deep discount once all/most of the DLC is out and then consider if you’re happy to play an interactive movie.

I just got a bunch of AAA games for AUD $20 in a bundle. A couple I already own. But I’ve played one over the Xmas holidays while staying with family for several late nights. That’s a decent entertainment to $ ratio. I also got Gloomhaven for free on Epic and have sunk quite a few hours in a campaign.

Unless gaming is your main hobby there is literally no reason to ever pay full price. And even if it is your main hobby you can stand to wait for at least the first discount.

shit man i bought RDR2 a year ago, and now i can't play it because it needs to be online for entitlement verification. thing is, even when i do connect via phone hotspot that's apparently not online enough for the rockstar games launcher.

admittedly i do only get one bar of 4G reception and ~1-2 MB/s download speed max, but that setup worked fine a year ago -- sadly it doesn't any more.

No. This is yet another flawed attempt to counter piracy. What will happened is that paying customers will start to wonder why they should continue to pay for this garbage instead of reverting to piracy

This reminds me of the disastrous SimCity release which required a constant connection but had servers so bad you’d get kicked out regularly. And you had to sit in a queue waiting for a slot to play your single player game. EA claimed this was necessary as the servers were running complex AI required for the game to run.

After a few months the pirate version came out that did full offline play.

Which also proved it didn't have jack for AI.

But man that would be a trip, wouldn't it? You offload a lot of the simulation part to an AI algo in someone's cloud and it generates its own patterns, people, traffic, weather. Occasionally a little emergent behavior where a random citizen becomes a PITA for your city hall, etc.

Curious why that AI claim never found its way to court, if true.

EA is a parody of a company. I will try to avoid them at all costs.

Most of the time is spent updating Origin or EA and the game.

We may need some business model innovation here, like when multiplayer games all went free-to-play

Not sure how people keep getting tricked by this company. They must’ve built up such a large amount of goodwill from Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim. Now they seem determined to cash it all out.

Sad. Does anyone know of a game company that hasn’t gone through this sort of cycle after several decades? We saw the same story with Activision, Blizzard, EA, Wizards of the Coast…

FromSoftware

The company that delisted DS1 from Steam after they released the remake?

I get your point, but tbf the remaster is identical for all intents and purposes, other than it includes the dlc and has a few optimisations

The original also included the DLC.

In any case, the point is not that the remake shouldn't have been made. The point is that there was no reason to delist the original other than to force people to buy the (more expensive) remake.

I can think of another reasonable reason, not that I agree with them delisting it: Reducing consumer confusion. You don't want people buying the wrong one by accident.

I definitely prefer the visual style pre remaster, it has a much more painterly aesthetic. It also runs on old systems

That's the point. It's basically identical, except they charge full price again.

This is extremely common. And tbh it’s not the worst thing ever, prevents some people mistakingly buying the old one too.

I'm sure Steam would come up with ways to reduce the chance of people mistakenly buying the old one. The bigger problem for the publisher is usually people intentionally buying the older (cheaper, and sometimes sadly even better) copy.

And being common does not make it less scummy.

Or the developer can do it themselves.

When the new Dead Space was released, the original was renamed to "Dead Space (2008)".

Similarly the Mass Effect titles had years appended to them when the Legendary Edition was released, even though the names were not the same.

XIII was renamed to XIII - Classic when the new one was released.

Also XIII is an example of why you'd want to buy the original even when the remake is released, because the remake is significantly worse.

Huh, I had no idea that XIII had received a remake.

Delisting the old one when you have released the remake seems completely reasonable to me - they want people to buy the new one. A company isn't compelled to keep selling every product they ever made in perpetuity. If you want to buy most products you can buy the current version, you can't buy either the current version or any other version (your choice) from the past.

>A company isn't compelled to keep selling every product they ever made in perpetuity.

Of course a company is free to stop selling a digital product if it wants to.

Just as I'm free to point out the shittiness of that choice.

Bethesda is just the publisher. The developer is Arkane and none of their prior games have required always online for singleplayer, even their prior game which had an emphasis on online elements. The reason it's even surprising at all is coming from Arkane's heritage.

Publishers do force these kinds of decisions on developers though.

Arkane has been (hostile-)acquired by Bethesda a long time ago and the founder Raphaël Colantonio has since left to form a new studio. It's better ot think of acquired studios as brands than separate entities, even if they still keep their own physical location open.

Ultimately, this decision rests on Microsoft and considering that they also acquired Activision-Blizzard recently it's not too surprising. Heck, even Windows has been blurring the line between an offline install and an online service.

Paradox?

Bethesda's suite of games for all their faults, are in interesting worlds, and offer gameplay that's hard to find done well anywhere else. A few of them are also very moddable which gave them long lasting success.

Anyway, they made great IP purchases, made some great unique games with them, and now you can't get that IP anywhere else. Do I wish they weren't so scummy? Yeah. But I am not the Corporation Morality Police, I just want to play Fallout.

Any corporation that is bought by another corporation or starts buying smaller ones is a corporation that invests a significant fraction (or even most) of it's money in MBA things. Consequentially, it's not going where it should go (games). Thus, as soon as either of those things happen you should assume it has died.

Valve solved this problem by not making games anymore.

(Though jokes aside, Half Life: Alyx is one of the best single-player games I've played in years, with no micro-transactions, tacked-on online mode, forced crafting systems, tons of collectibles and sidequests to pad out the game, etc; they do have collectibles and crafting in the form of resin and fabricators, but they're incredibly lightweight compared to most games.)

> (Though jokes aside, Half Life: Alyx is one of the best single-player games I've played in years, with no micro-transactions, tacked-on online mode, forced crafting systems, tons of collectibles and sidequests to pad out the game, etc; they do have collectibles and crafting in the form of resin and fabricators, but they're incredibly lightweight compared to most games.)

I wouldn't call turning exploration rewards into a mindless grind for weapon upgrade currency "lightweight" crafting. It's pretty central to the game. It may be better than other recent games in the nickle and diming department but it is not free of the modern skinner box game design plague.

Exploration is also extremely limited with e.g. no manual control for the flashlight. And many things that are supposed to be physics interactions are entirely scripted or unimplemented, e.g. try leaning something on one of the rolling shutter doors and then raise them.

Changing Alyx' voice actor was also a pretty meh move - they would have been better off keeping the protagonist mute.

Don't take this that I think the game is bad, but I do think they could have done a lot better. There were many impressive things in there (entirely shader-based fluid "simulation" in bottles) as well some parts that are simply cool (being able to doodle on the windows at the start is such a VR wow factor).

And in their other games, Valve are as bad as other publishers when it comes to unethical monetization. Don't forget that we can thank Valve for normalizing loot boxes and doing their part in pushing microtransactions.

Now I don't want to shit on Valve too much because of their contribution to Linux gaming and because Steam isn't that anti-competitive compared to what other companies would do but Saints they are not.

I agree. Alyx was a lot of smoke and mirrors. I think it is the best VR has. But VR sucks. Alyx highlights 3 issues in combat.

1) you can’t move irl enough to dodge bullets. You can duck behind cover. But moving is hard. I also suspected some enemy types would target you based on where you had last teleported not where your body should be.

2) enemies hitting you in melee are awkwardly far and you have no ability to hit them in melee. For good reason. Melee in VR is kind of dumb. See boneworks.

3) teleporting and stick movement is very overpowered in addition to nausea. When you can move by stick, it is far superior to moving irl, which undermines the point. This is a fundamental problem in VR. You can’t do both irl movement and stick movement at the same time. And enemies have to move at irl speed to be “fair” to people who want to “do the motions”.

The reloading and general sense of ducking is good. Very good. But it only goes so far.

I refuse to buy or even play any game that requires an internet connection for /non-online/ play. It's complete bullshit and people REALLY need to vote with their damn wallets and stop supporting this sort of overreach.

they do, you're just getting outvoted.

I didn't buy Diablo Remastered because of mandatory online account and cut-out LAN game! I won't buy anything that won't run fully without internet! We need to relay this message to these producers/publishers.

Mobile games are horrible for this. You can’t even load Tetris or Oregon Trail on mobile without an internet connection, making them useless for travelling on planes etc.

Most planes have network connections enough for game check-in

Every plane I've flown on recently doesn't have free wifi except certain sponsored services like Apple Music

Not the regional flights I frequently take. And it has been years since I saw free wifi.

Most planes in the US perhaps. The rest of the world it's actually uncommon unless you're on a long haul flight.

Five bucks says the version I'm going to install won't have that requirement.

Arrrr, right matey

It has Denuvo and always online.

Not the pirate version.

There is only one person doing Denuvo currently. They do a couple games a year. There is at least 50 games in the backlog. Each denuvo version takes more and more time.

If the game is worth playing it will still be worth playing in a couple of years. Perhaps you can even buy it officially DRM-free by then.

The other day I wanted to play Diablo 2 Resurrection, and it wouldn't let me because "I hadn't been online in a while" wtf? what happens when they close the servers? Then I just can't play anymore or what? This needs to be illegal.

Diablo II servers have been up for 20+ years already, and you can still play the original offline.

Thing is, with regular old Diablo II, I don't even care, because I can _ALWAYS_ play it offline.

But the new product, I don't know what will happen when they shut down the servers.. I actually really like the new graphics.. I always thought the original game was absolutely beautiful, and yet, I find myself liking the new graphics even more.. So I want to be able to play that forever.

The really sad part about this is that Redfall:

a) Doesn't look that special. Looks like just another generic FPS game. I could be wrong

b) Is doing scummy things like this

c) Is what arkane is doing instead of what they could do, which is making something unique and awesome like another dishonored game

Burned too many times by this publisher in the last decade. They didn't make anything GREAT since New Vegas.

And they didn’t even make that!

They did fuck over those who did though [0]. Well now Microsoft owns both of them so whatever I guess.

[0] https://www.gamespot.com/articles/obsidian-denied-bonus-over...

If you buy games from these publishers, you deserve to get screwed over when they inevitably tank the product you paid for by shutting down the "Online Experience".

Seriously. If you pay Bethesda, you earn the suffering. I don't know how this stuff is even news anymore.

"Do you want pirates? Because that's how you get pirates"!

Redfall is a first party game since Microsoft now own Bethesda, which means it'll be on Gamepass from day one. That also means Bethesda are probably expecting far fewer sales than a normal release. I wonder if Bethesda also believe that means less piracy too, so they can get away with the requirement for a connection..

And here I am adding another provider (att/xfinity) to my home network so I can never go offline. As someone who mostly plays online multiplayer games, this doesn't seem like something I want to spend time getting upset about.

Are you saying you will have two internet providers at once to ensure you are never without a connection?

"You will own nothing and you will be happy."

The reality will actually be worse than that, because happiness won't come if games/shows/media/any product or service/ will be sh*t.

>because happiness won't come if games/shows/media/any product or service/ will be sh*t.

We all enjoy that stuff, however, if you derive your happiness from the media you consume, you need to re-evaluate your life.

Could be malice or simply just incompetence. Maybe they simply can't hire developers anymore that understand how to develop a program that is not depending on web services?

Not even remotely accidental. It's about (at least) data mining and control. Can't say much, but ML is involved in this stuff for at least a decade and your real account is more valuable than the CD/DVD you bought, not just by microtransactions.

"And those fences around us are just by mistake, right?"

It’s probably a form of DRM.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com