gaming

manor-lords’-medieval-micromanagement-means-making-many-messes

Manor Lords’ medieval micromanagement means making many messes

This peaceful, pastoral scene actually represents a ton of hard work!

Enlarge / This peaceful, pastoral scene actually represents a ton of hard work!

Slavic Magic

Do you ever look around at modern civilization and boggle at the sheer complexity of it all? Do you ever think about the generations of backbreaking labor needed to turn acres and acres of untamed wilderness into the layers of interconnected systems needed to provide basic necessities—much less luxuries—to both early settlers and their generations of descendants?

All that infrastructure work is much harder to take for granted after playing Manor Lords. The Early Access version of the game—which netted a million Steam sales in its first 24 hours last month—forces you to do a lot of the heavy lifting that many other city builders tend to gloss over. And while there are still a lot of Early Access rough spots, what’s already there can make you appreciate just how hard it is to build a functioning society from nothing but raw materials and hard labor.

Let go of my hand

In many other city builders, you act as something of a detached, bureaucratic god. Lay down some roads, set aside some zoning, and watch as the microscopic masses automatically fill in the details of the housing, commerce, and industry needed to create a functional society.

Not so in Manor Lords, where micromanagement is essential to survival. The five starting families in your initial settlement must be specifically guided to their tasks, spreading themselves thin between farming, resource gathering, and construction before the harsh winter sets in. There’s no easy residential zoning here—you have to lay out the four corners of every individual “burgage plot” that will be used to house a single family.

Getting your settlement this thriving takes a lot of learning by doing.

Enlarge / Getting your settlement this thriving takes a lot of learning by doing.

Slavic Magic

Assigning settlers to their necessary tasks isn’t exactly a “set it and forget it” matter, either. You have to direct your hard-working families’ efforts to where they’re most needed, as the town’s requirements change with the seasons. This is especially true throughout that all-important first harvest season, where the meager stocks of bread you start don’t go nearly as far as you might like.

And don’t expect Manor Lords to hold your hand through a first tutorial run, either. The Early Access version decidedly does not instruct you on the basics of survival, throwing your settlers into an open clearing with minimal tooltip instructions for what you need to do. That means figuring out the correct mix of agriculture, mining, and construction needed for survival can be a matter of trial and error in the early going.

Learning the hard way

My first run at building a Manor Lords settlement ended in a disaster of harvest timing. After building my first field and farmhouse, I went multiple in-game months before realizing I had to specifically tell my settlers to start planting wheat for the coming harvest. By the time I forced a meager early harvest, my citizens were already going hungry, and I started over so I didn’t have to watch them slowly starve.

I started the planting earlier in my second run, but my meager group of settlers still started going hungry in the summer, months before the wheat would be ready to harvest. This time, I forced my citizens to tough it out through the lean months, building a windmill and a communal oven to be ready to make delicious bread when the time came. But when the harvest started, those buildings steadfastly refused to start processing the wheat and baking the food my citizens desperately needed.

I had to consult the Internet to figure out that my farm workers were mysteriously not threshing the gathered wheat so it could move down the bread production line. Forcing the farmers to focus their work on the farmhouse somehow shocked them out of this reverie, but not before the hungry citizens had tanked the approval level needed to help my settlement grow.

Manor Lords’ medieval micromanagement means making many messes Read More »

40-years-later,-kontrabant-2-for-zx-spectrum-is-rebroadcast-on-fm-in-slovenia

40 years later, Kontrabant 2 for ZX Spectrum is rebroadcast on FM in Slovenia

Cassettes are back, baby —

Celebrating radio waves, magnetic tape heads, and smuggled 8-bit computers.

Kontrabant 2 title image on ZX Spectrum

Enlarge / In 1984, the year 2000 was so promising, students made entire games promising to take you there.

Radio Student

Software is almost impossibly easy to download, distribute, and access compared to 40 years ago. Everything is bigger, faster, and more flexible, but there’s a certain charm to the ways of diskettes and cassettes that is hard to recapture. That doesn’t mean we can’t try.

By the time you read this, it’s likely that Kontrabant 2 will have already hit the airwaves on Radio Študent in Slovenia. At 9: 30 pm Slovenia time (UTC+2 in Daylight Savings Time), if you are tuned to 89.3 FM, hitting record on a cassette tape will capture a buzzing sound that will run until just over 50KB have been transmitted. If all went well, you can load the tape into your working ZX Spectrum or bring it to the Computer History Museum in Slovenia and use theirs to try it out.

<em>Kontrabant 2</em> box art.” height=”388″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/kontrabant3.jpg” width=”324″></img><figcaption>
<p><em>Kontrabant 2</em> box art.</p>
<p>Radio Student</p>
</figcaption></figure>
<p>It’s the 40th anniversary of <em>Kontrabant 2</em>, which was originally published by Radio Študent, both in physical copies and in similar over-the-air fashion. The game is in Serbian, as it was originally made for what was then Yugoslavia, for ZX Spectrums mostly smuggled in from Western Europe. Smuggling was something that lots of Yugoslavs did, in somewhat casual fashion, and it inspired <em>Kontrabant</em> and its sequel, text adventure games with some graphics.</p>
<p>That I understand any of this is thanks to Vlado Vince, a Croatian/Yugoslavia native who wrote about Yugoslavian adventure games for a Spanish magazine, Club de Aventuras AD, and <a href=reposted it on his personal site. Kontrabant, which is text-only, has the player travel about the country (“and beyond!”) to collect all the parts of a ZX Spectrum. You meet famous smugglers from Slovene history, get a picture of yourself so you can leave the country for certain parts, and at one point obtain an Austrian porn magazine, which, in typical adventure game style, is later traded for something else.

A Kontrabant 2.” height=”720″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/kontrabant1.png” width=”960″>

A “Yugosaurus” in Kontrabant 2.

Radio Student/Vlado Vince

Kontrabant 2, from 1984, added the kinds of garish colors and flashing graphics that ZX Spectrum enthusiasts can recognize from a hundred yards away. This time you’re trying “to make your way to the year 2000 and to the amazing computers of the future,” Vince writes, and the game layers in political and social subtext and critiques throughout the journey. Also, the original Radio Študent cassette tape version had punk rock songs by “the Kontra Band” on it, which is neat as heck.

Kontrabant and its sequel were written by Žiga Turk and Matevž Kmet, students at the time, who are talking about the games and the times at the Computer History Museum Slovenia today. If you have a chance to visit that place, I think you should do so, given the impressive number of working vintage computers listed. Turk would go on to found Moj mikro magazine, a monthly computer magazine running from 1984 to 2015. He started the Virtual Shareware Library, which later became shareware.com (now a Digital Trends site I don’t quite recognize), and WODA, the Web Oriented Database. He’s now a professor of construction informatics in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

You can play Kontrabant 2 on the Internet Archive’s emulator if you can read or translate Serbian and understand the text prompts. YouTube lacks a playthrough of the game with graphics, though a later port to a native platform, the Iskra Delta Partner, is available in Apple-II-ish green-on-black.

40 years later, Kontrabant 2 for ZX Spectrum is rebroadcast on FM in Slovenia Read More »

court-rules-against-activision-blizzard-in-$23.4m-patent-dispute

Court rules against Activision Blizzard in $23.4M patent dispute

pay up —

Activision plans appeal, says it uses different network tech in its games.

Acceleration Bay says <em>World of Warcraft</em>‘s networking code infringes on a patent originally filed by Boeing.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/wowcrowd-800×450.png”></img><figcaption>
<p><a data-height=Enlarge / Acceleration Bay says World of Warcraft‘s networking code infringes on a patent originally filed by Boeing.

Activision Blizzard

A jury has found Activision Blizzard liable for $23.4 million in damages in a patent infringement lawsuit first brought to court in 2015.

The case centers on patents first filed by Boeing in 2000, one that describes a “distributed game environment” across a host and multiple computers and another that describes a simple method for disconnecting from such a network. Those patents were acquired in 2015 by Acceleration Bay, which accused Activision Blizzard of using infringing technology to develop World of Warcraft and at least two Call of Duty titles.

Those accusations succeeded in court earlier this week, as a jury found a “preponderance of evidence” that the patents were infringed. The decision came following a one-week trial in which Activision Blizzard argued that its networking technology works differently from what is described in the patents, as reported by Reuters.

“While we are disappointed, we believe there is a strong basis for appeal,” an Activision Blizzard spokesperson said in a statement to the press. “We have never used the patented technologies at issue in our games.”

Acceleration Bay’s website describes it as an “incubator and investor” that wants to “nurture, protect, and support the dissemination of technological advancement.” But the company’s only currently listed venture is Edge Video, a “Web 3 Video Network” that provides crypto rewards and “AI-driven shopping” opportunities through interactive video overlays.

In a 2019 counterclaim stemming from a similar patent case (which was dismissed in 2020), Epic Games argued that “Acceleration engages in no business activity other than seeking to enforce the Asserted Patents.” Epic also said at the time that “Acceleration has asserted the same six patents against other major videogame publishers, even though Epic can see no applicability of the claimed technology to the videogame industry.”

Acceleration Bay has outstanding patent cases against Electronic Arts, Take-Two, and Amazon Web Services, among others.

In 2021, Activision Blizzard won a longstanding infringement suit brought by Worlds, Inc. over a patent for a “system and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space.” In dismissing that case, US District Judge Denise J. Casper wrote that “client-server networks, virtual worlds, avatars, or position and orientation information are not inventions of Worlds” and that its patented technology was not “inherently inventive or sufficient to ‘transform’ the claimed abstract idea into a patent-eligible application.”

Court rules against Activision Blizzard in $23.4M patent dispute Read More »

microsoft-shuts-down-bethesda’s-hi-fi-rush,-redfall-studios

Microsoft shuts down Bethesda’s Hi-Fi Rush, Redfall studios

Closing up shop —

Xbox maker wants to “prioritiz[e] high-impact titles” according to letter to staff.

Artist's conception of Microsoft telling <em>Hi-Fi Rush</em> maker Tango Gameworks they no longer exist as a studio.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/hifirush-800×452.jpeg”></img><figcaption>
<p><a data-height=Enlarge / Artist’s conception of Microsoft telling Hi-Fi Rush maker Tango Gameworks they no longer exist as a studio.

Tango Gameworks

Microsoft is shutting down four studios within its Bethesda Softworks subsidiary, according to a staff email obtained by IGN. The closures include Redfall developer Arkane Austin and Hi-Fi Rush studio Tango Gameworks. While some team members will be reassigned to other parts of the company, head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty said in a letter to staffers “that some of our colleagues will be leaving us.”

Tango Gameworks confirmed in a short social media message that “Hi-Fi Rush, along with Tango’s previous titles [like The Evil Within], will remain available and playable everywhere they are today.” But the closure of Arkane Austin means that “development will not continue on Redfall,” the company wrote in its own social media update. “Arkane Lyon will continue their focus on immersive experiences where they are hard at work on their upcoming project [Marvel’s Blade].”

In his note to staff, Booty said that [Redfall] “will remain online for players to enjoy and we will provide make-good offers to players who purchased the Hero DLC.”

Mobile-focused Alpha Dog Studios announced that its shutdown would lead to an August 7 closure of the servers for Mighty Doom. Players can request a refund for any in-game currency for that game, which will no longer be sold as of today. Roundhouse Studios, which formed in 2019 to help with development of Redfall, will be absorbed into Elder Scrolls Online studio Zenimax Online, according to Booty’s letter.

Doom studio id Software, Starfield studio Bethesda Game Studios, and Indiana Jones and The Great Circle studio Machine Games seem unaffected by today’s cuts.

A change in focus

Redfall was widely considered a failure inside and outside Microsoft.” height=”360″ src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/redfall-640×360.jpg” width=”640″>

Enlarge / Arkane Austin’s Redfall was widely considered a failure inside and outside Microsoft.

Arkane Austin

Arkane Austin’s sad fate is not too surprising given that Booty has publicly admitted that Redfall‘s troubled 2023 release was “a miss” for the company. The Tango Gameworks shutdown is more of a shock though, considering that Xbox Marketing VP Aaron Greenberg called Hi-Fi Rush “a breakout hit for us and our players in all key measurements and expectations” less than a year ago. “We couldn’t be happier with what the team at Tango Gameworks delivered with this surprise release,” he wrote at the time.

In his letter to staffers, Booty said the closures were “not a reflection of the creativity and skill of the talented individuals at these teams or the risks they took to try new things.” And while the changes will be “disruptive,” Booty said that they are “grounded in prioritizing high-impact titles and further investing in Bethesda’s portfolio of blockbuster games and beloved worlds which you have nurtured over many decades.”

The consolidation will allow Microsoft to “invest more deeply in our portfolio of games and new IP” and “create capacity to increase investment in other parts of our portfolio and focus on our priority games,” Booty continued.

“This is absolutely terrible,” Arkane Lyon Co-Creative Director Dinga Bakaba wrote in a scathing social media thread. “Permission to be human: to any executive reading this, friendly reminder that video games are an entertainment/cultural industry, and your business as a corporation is to take care of your artists/entertainers and help them create value for you.”

The Bethesda studio closures come just a few months after Microsoft laid off 1,900 employees in its 22,000 employee gaming division following the completion of its long-sought merger with Activision Blizzard.

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nintendo-pre-announces-a-switch-2-announcement-is-coming…-eventually

Nintendo pre-announces a Switch 2 announcement is coming… eventually

We’ll tell you later —

More info promised sometime before the end of March 2025.

Nintendo will eventually gift us Switch 2 information, hopefully in time for Christmas.

Enlarge / Nintendo will eventually gift us Switch 2 information, hopefully in time for Christmas.

Aurich Lawson

While the past few months have included plenty of informed speculation about the so-called Switch 2, Nintendo hasn’t given even a bare hint that the system is in the works. That changed at least somewhat last night, as Nintendo President Shinto Furukawa shared on social media that “we will make an announcement about the successor to Nintendo Switch within this fiscal year,” which ends on March 31, 2025.

In his pre-announcement announcement, Furukawa warned that an upcoming Nintendo Direct presentation planned for June would include “no mention of the Nintendo Switch successor,” suggesting more information may be coming closer to the end of the fiscal year than the beginning.

Furukawa notes that the eventual announcement will come over nine years after Nintendo first alluded to the Switch’s existence with the March 2015 announcement of a console then called “Project NX.” Nintendo didn’t show that hardware publicly until 19 months later, with a three-minute preview trailer that dropped in October 2016. Hands-on press previews for the Switch came three months after that, and we then had to wait almost two more months for the console to finally hit store shelves in March of 2017.

We probably won’t have to wait two years between the formal announcement and retail launch of the Switch 2, though; multiple reports have suggested that Nintendo is aiming for an early 2025 release for the updated hardware. The nearly eight-year gap between the launch of the Switch and its successors would mark a historically long wait for Nintendo home console hardware, which tends to see a refresh every five to six years. But Nintendo did wait nine years before following the original (and best-selling) Game Boy with the Game Boy Color.

Reports have suggested that select third-party developers have had access to the Switch 2 since the middle of last year and that Nintendo is holding off on the release to prepare a stronger launch lineup of first-party software. On that score, we’d like to point out that it has now been nearly seven years since the original announcement of Metroid Prime 4 (and over five years since Nintendo restarted development with a new studio).

The Switch 2 pre-announcement comes alongside the release of Nintendo’s latest financial results, in which Nintendo said it sold 15.7 million Nintendo Switch units in the 12-month period ending in March. That’s down quite a bit from the system’s peak sales in the 2020–2021 fiscal year, but it’s still a substantial sales performance for an aging system that has now passed 141 million total units sold since 2017. The overall numbers are closing in on the record currently held by the PS2 (155 million sales) and the Nintendo DS (154 million).

Nintendo pre-announces a Switch 2 announcement is coming… eventually Read More »

hackers-discover-how-to-reprogram-nes-tetris-from-within-the-game

Hackers discover how to reprogram NES Tetris from within the game

Building a better Tetris —

New method could help high-score chasers trying to avoid game-ending crashes.

I can see the code that controls the Tetri-verse!

Enlarge / I can see the code that controls the Tetri-verse!

Aurich Lawson

Earlier this year, we shared the story of how a classic NES Tetris player hit the game’s “kill screen” for the first time, activating a crash after an incredible 40-minute, 1,511-line performance. Now, some players are using that kill screen—and some complicated memory manipulation it enables—to code new behaviors into versions of Tetris running on unmodified hardware and cartridges.

We’ve covered similar “arbitrary code execution” glitches in games like Super Mario World, Paper Mario, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time in the past. And the basic method for introducing outside code into NES Tetris has been publicly theorized since at least 2021 when players were investigating the game’s decompiled code (HydrantDude, who has gone deep on Tetris crashes in the past, also says the community has long had a privately known method for how to take full control of Tetris‘ RAM).

Displaced Gamers explains how to reprogram NES Tetris within the game.

But a recent video from Displaced Gamers takes the idea from private theory to public execution, going into painstaking detail on how to get NES Tetris to start reading the game’s high score tables as machine code instructions.

Fun with controller ports

Taking over a copy of NES Tetris is possible mostly due to the specific way the game crashes. Without going into too much detail, a crash in NES Tetris happens when the game’s score handler takes too long to calculate a new score between frames, which can happen after level 155. When this delay occurs, a portion of the control code gets interrupted by the new frame-writing routine, causing it to jump to an unintended portion of the game’s RAM to look for the next instruction.

Usually, this unexpected interrupt leads the code to jump to address the very beginning of RAM, where garbage data gets read as code and often leads to a quick crash. But players can manipulate this jump thanks to a little-known vagary in how Tetris handles potential inputs when running on the Japanese version of the console, the Famicom.

The Famicom expansion port that is key to making this hack work.

Enlarge / The Famicom expansion port that is key to making this hack work.

Unlike the American Nintendo Entertainment System, the Japanese Famicom featured two controllers hard-wired to the unit. Players who wanted to use third-party controllers could plug them in through an expansion port on the front of the system. The Tetris game code reads the inputs from this “extra” controller port, which can include two additional standard NES controllers through the use of an adapter (this is true even though the Famicom got a completely different version of Tetris from Bullet-Proof Software).

As it happens, the area of RAM that Tetris uses to process this extra controller input is also used for the memory location of that jump routine we discussed earlier. Thus, when that jump routine gets interrupted by a crash, that RAM will be holding data representing the buttons being pushed on those controllers. This gives players a potential way to control precisely where the game code goes after the crash is triggered.

Coding in the high-score table

For Displaced Gamers’ jump-control method, the player has to hold down “up” on the third controller and right, left, and down on the fourth controller (that latter combination requires some controller fiddling to allow for simultaneous left and right directional input). Doing so sends the jump code to an area of RAM that holds the names and scores for the game’s high score listing, giving an even larger surface of RAM that can be manipulated directly by the player.

By putting “(G” in the targeted portion of the B-Type high score table, we can force the game to jump to another area of the high score table, where it will start reading the names and scores sequentially as what Displaced Gamers calls “bare metal” code, with the letters and numbers representing opcodes for the NES CPU.

This very specific name and score combination is actually read as code in Displaced Gamers' proof of concept.

Enlarge / This very specific name and score combination is actually read as code in Displaced Gamers’ proof of concept.

Unfortunately, there are only 43 possible symbols that can be used in the name entry area and 10 different digits that can be part of a high score. That means only a small portion of the NES’s available opcode instructions can be “coded” into the high score table using the available attack surface.

Despite these restrictions, Displaced Gamers was able to code a short proof-of-concept code snippet that can be translated into high-score table data (A name of '))"-P)', and a second-place score of 8,575 in the A-Type game factors prominently, in case you’re wondering). This simple routine puts two zeroes in the top digits of the game’s score, lowering the score processing time that would otherwise cause a crash (though the score will eventually reach the “danger zone” for a crash again, with continued play).

Of course, the lack of a battery-backed save system means hackers need to achieve these high scores manually (and enter these complicated names) every time they power up Tetris on a stock NES. The limited space in the high score table also doesn’t leave much room for direct coding of complex programs on top of Tetris‘ actual code. But there are ways around this limitation; HydrantDude writes of a specific set of high-score names and numbers that “build[s] another bootstrapper which builds another bootstrapper that grants full control over all of RAM.”

With that kind of full control, a top-level player could theoretically recode NES Tetris to patch out the crash bugs altogether. That could be extremely helpful for players who are struggling to make it past level 255, where the game actually loops back to the tranquility of Level 0. In the meantime, I guess you could always just follow the lead of Super Mario World speedrunners and transform Tetris into Flappy Bird.

Hackers discover how to reprogram NES Tetris from within the game Read More »

sony-backs-down,-won’t-enforce-psn-accounts-for-helldivers-2-pc-players-on-steam

Sony backs down, won’t enforce PSN accounts for Helldivers 2 PC players on Steam

Purge the stain of this failure with the peroxide of victory —

What will Sony do next for an audience that likes its games but not its network?

Updated

Helldivers 2 player aiming a laser reticule into a massive explosion.

Enlarge / Aiming a single rifle sight into an earth-moving explosion feels like some kind of metaphor for the Helldivers 2 delayed PSN requirement saga.

PlayStation/Arrowhead

Helldivers 2 PC players can continue doing their part for Super Earth, sans Sony logins.

Sony’s plan for its surprise hit co-op squad shooter—now the most successful launch in Sony’s nascent PC catalog—Helldivers 2, was to make its players sign in with PlayStation Network (PSN) accounts before it launched in early February, even if they purchased the game through the Steam store.

Sony and developer Arrowhead didn’t enforce PSN logins during its frenetic launch and then announced late last week that PSN accounts would soon be mandatory. Many players did not like that at all, seeing in it a sudden desire by Sony to capitalize on its unexpected smash hit. Some were not eager to engage with a network that had a notable hack in its history, others were concerned about countries where PSN was not offered, and many didn’t take Sony at its word that this was about griefing, banning, and other moderation. Because of the uneven availability of Steam and PSN, Helldivers 2 was delisted in 177 countries on Steam over the weekend as Steam worked through refund requests.

The pushback made an impression, and now Sony has announced that account linking “will not be moving forward.” In a post on X (formerly Twitter) Sunday night addressed to Helldivers fans, the official PlayStation account wrote that the publisher had “heard your feedback” and was “still learning what is best for PC players and your feedback has been invaluable.”

“Feedback,” in this case, likely included a long weekend of both PlayStation and Arrowhead hearing from a Helldivers fanbase that had previously been relatively sanguine and cohesive, at least for an online multiplayer shooter. Steam reviews of Helldivers 2 took a sad but predictable plummet downward, the game’s subreddit pivoted from cosigned enthusiasm to protest, and lots of people tied to the game spent a lot of time over the weekend trying to address the surge of negative social media.

Johan Pilestedt, CEO of Arrowhead Games Studio, after facetiously asking if now was the moment “to tweet ‘What? You guys don’t have phones?'”, posted on X early Sunday that his firm was “talking solutions with PlayStation, especially for non-PSN countries.” Responding to a reply that asked why he or his firm were “acting all blameless,” Pilestedt was candid. “I do have a part to play. I am not blameless in all of this – it was my decision to disable account linking at launch so that players could play the game. I did not ensure players were aware of the requirement and we didn’t talk about it enough,” Pilestedt wrote.

He added, ‘We knew for about 6 months before launch that it would be mandatory for online PS titles.” Asked why, if known for 6 months, the game was sold to countries without PSN available, he responded, “We do not handle selling the game.”

It will certainly be interesting to see what Sony does next with its success beyond consoles. Helldivers 2 is by far its most successful PC launch to date, and its seventh highest-grossing game overall. There’s a market there for the right kinds of games, but how Sony cultivates that market, and whether they’ll welcome Sony as anything beyond a publisher on Steam, remains to be seen.

The developer of Ghost of Tsushima, arriving soon on PC, made sure to note Friday on X/Twitter that a PSN account was only required for the multiplayer mode of the game, not the single-player adventure.

This post was update at 10: 41 a.m. to note prior international delistings, and Sony’s clarification about PSN requirements for an upcoming game.

Sony backs down, won’t enforce PSN accounts for Helldivers 2 PC players on Steam Read More »

sony-demands-psn-accounts-for-helldivers-2-pc-players,-and-it’s-not-going-well

Sony demands PSN accounts for Helldivers 2 PC players, and it’s not going well

What fresh Helldivers is this —

A surprise hit, a network with brutal baggage, and the Steam profit paradox.

Helldivers 2 player posing in winter armor

Enlarge / This gear is from the upcoming “Polar Patriots” Premium Warbond in Helldivers 2. It’s an upcoming change the developer and publisher likely wish was getting more attention of late.

Sony Interactive Entertainment

There’s a lot of stories about the modern PC gaming industry balled up inside one recent “update” to Helldivers 2.

Sony Interactive Entertainment announced Thursday night that current players of the runaway hit co-op shooter will have to connect their Steam accounts to a PlayStation Network (PSN) account starting on May 30, with a hard deadline of June 4. New players will be required to connect the two starting Monday, May 6.

Officially, this is happening because of the “safety and security provided on PlayStation and PlayStation Studios games.” Account linking allows Sony to ban abusive players, and also gives banned players the right to appeal. Sony writes that it would have done this at launch, but “Due to technical issues … we allowed the linking requirements for Steam accounts to a PlayStation Network account to be temporarily optional. That grace period will now expire.”

“We understand that while this may be an inconvenience to some of you, this step will help us to continue to build a community that you are all proud to be a part of,” Sony writes in the update. The Helldivers community on Reddit is flush with dissenting posts today, and Steam reviews of the game have taken a marked turn since the announcement.

Sony Interactive Entertainment

Oh, right, that PlayStation Network

It’s the combination of “safety and security” and “Sony” that make this more than just the typical grousing about game launchers, cross-play, or other user/password demands. The PlayStation Network was fully and famously hacked in April 2011, with 77 million users’ names, addresses, emails, birthdays, passwords, and logins compromised. Sony Online Entertainment also suffered a separate attack while PSN was down, exposing millions more accounts and thousands of credit card numbers. PSN came partially back online 26 days later, then fully online two weeks later, with a complimentary year of identity protection and Welcome Back packages for subscribers. Less than a month later, other aspects of Sony were hacked by LulzSec.

Sony was fined nearly $400,000 in the UK for the hack in 2013, which regulators said could have been prevented by updating software and taking precautions. Sony agreed to pay up to $17.5 million in a US class-action settlement in 2014, along with some providing free games and other benefits in 2015.

Those with a long enough memory of computers, security, and Sony might also recall the Sony rootkit debacle, which, while nearly 20 years old now, was such a notably bad and bizarre thing that it stuck around.

Sony Interactive Entertainment

An online game people want less online

Helldivers 2 was not supposed to be this big a game. Sony was still cautiously trodding into PC games after years of treating its exclusive and first-party games as console leverage. Helldivers 2 was a sequel to a game that, while well-regarded, didn’t land as a smash hit.

Within one day of its launch, Helldivers 2 was Sony’s most successful PC launch, and it wasn’t even close. Within two weeks, it passed the all-time concurrent player counts of Starfield, Destiny 2, landing at 18 on the SteamDB charts. It helped that it launched on the same day as the PS5 version, was cheaper than most AAA titles, and arrived with no (uncommonly) egregious performance or crash issues. There were, as noted by Sony, early server issues, largely due to demand. Whatever the case, it was Sony’s seventh highest-grossing game as of May 1.

That success hurts the optics of Sony’s demand, months after it had an unexpected hit, that players must now register with its far-from-trusted network to keep playing. A non-mega-budgeted game, a trial-balloon sequel, hits big, and Sony, finding its footing in this new realm, doesn’t want to leave said opportunity as a one-time Steam purchase.

Sony Interactive Entertainment

Two blimps jousting overhead

Helldivers 2 is explicitly multiplayer, and the action takes place on Sony’s servers. But Steam is the means by which Helldivers 2 reaches its players, fosters engagement, and, of course, tries to entice them into DLC, further sequels, and perhaps other Sony PC games—so long as they’re on also on Steam.

There are no rock-solid numbers on Steam’s PC gaming market share, but we know that the biggest competitor, Epic Games, is losing hundreds of millions of dollars each year giving away games just to get some kind of foothold. Steam’s market position, recommendation whims, and broad 30 percent revenue cut have left many companies searching for ways to disentangle their futures from a single platform. Sony just happens to be the one making the hard ask, for reasons that don’t entirely sound obvious months later, and with a network that has some tough Google search results.

It’s worth noting that PSN is not necessarily available in all countries where Steam sells games. We’ve reached out to Sony to ask about this and for further comment on their PSN requirement, and will update this post if we hear back.

Sony demands PSN accounts for Helldivers 2 PC players, and it’s not going well Read More »

mini-settlers-is-a-city-builder-that-you-can-both-enjoy-and-actually-put-down

Mini Settlers is a city builder that you can both enjoy and actually put down

You can definitely get 120 frames on an RTX 4080 —

No zoning, no pollution, no advisers—just squares, circles, people, and time.

Mini Settlers screen showing rocks, fields, and lots of water pumps and farms.

Enlarge / Are you enticed by this kind of orderly madness with a clean graphical layout? Then I suggest you… settle in.

Goblinz Studio

You can’t buy Mini Settlers right now, but I think you should play the free “Prologue” demo and wishlist the full game if you dig it. It’s not quite like any other city builder I’ve played.

Mini Settlers is “mini” like minimalism. It is in the same genre, but quite far from, games like Cities: Skylines 2 (a choice with some proven merit). Your buildings are not 3D-rendered with real-time lighting. Your buildings are colored squares, sometimes with a few disc tokens stacked on them, tabletop-style. Your roads don’t have traffic, but they have drivers (tiny squares) that take resources between nodes. When things go wrong, you don’t get depressing news about pollution and riots; some people just leave their homes, but they’ll come back if you fix what’s wrong.

Mini Settlers announcement video.

Mini Settlers is not the game to play to satisfy your long-running suspicion that urban planning was your missed calling. In the (non-progress-saving) Prologue-free demo out this week, the mines and quarries have infinite resources. There is no “money” to speak of, so far as I can tell. Apple farms must be placed near apple orchards and water pumps by water, and the rest is up to you. The interface looks like a thought experiment in how far you can get from traditional city sim HUDs, but then someone implemented it.

  • A larger-scale view of a developed settlement, one with much better road planning than I achieved.

    Goblinz Studio

  • The game layers information about resources and needs, such that it never feels overwhelming.

    Goblinz Studio

  • Natural resources and land formations require you to work around them in creative ways.

    Goblinz Studio

  • Each circle is a node, and each square is a worker, shuttling resources from node to node, as best they can.

    Goblinz Studio

The biggest challenge I faced in my couple of sessions was textbook logistics, at least from a suburban or small-town perspective. Having developed SimCity Brain throughout prior decades, I tried to keep my residential areas (City Center and the Homes you build around it) away from anything resembling production, like rock quarries and lumber yards. Instead of bolstering housing values or improving aesthetics, which do not exist, this gave me a huge set of supply bottlenecks to try and work through.

Houses wanted regular supplies of apples and water, but spacing out everything made a ton of extra transit work. Every road is a maximum of seven tiles, and each one gets a worker that moves back and forth between waypoints, dropping off goods to buildings or leaving them for the next worker on the goods’ route. I had wanted to create a simple town of people building wood houses and eating apples, and instead, I had a micro-scale Wayfair job interview scenario, complete with tiny warehouses and delivery times.

But, here again, Mini Settlers is different, even when you’re flailing. You simply remove the roads and buildings that don’t work and put them in better places. The buildings take a bit to build again, but there’s no real game timer unless you want to enable one for personal bests. You can even enable a background mode so that the calm simulation keeps running while you absolutely do your best work on a Friday afternoon.

The “Prologue” is not verified for Steam Deck, but the developers have an official layout for it. I think it will do in a pinch, but there’s a lot of thumb-taxing trackpad pointing remaining in a game that seems grid-based enough to do with more gamepad controls. As for performance, it runs great. At 30 frames per second, my Deck guessed it could keep going for nearly five more hours.

Mini Settlers is due out in 2024, seemingly for PC only on Steam, for the moment. The minimum requirements are a Core i3, 4GB memory, and Intel HD Graphics 4000, but “Integrated cards also work.” As the developers at Knight Owl Games note, wishlisting the game helps it circulate inside Steam’s recommendation algorithm, even if you don’t ultimately play beyond the demo. I am going to note a second time here that the demo does not save your game when you exit, which is not another design choice to keep you calm but just a demo thing.

Between this and Against the Storm, I am enjoying the recent broadening of the “city builder” genre. It’s happening, weirdly enough, by going much smaller.

Listing image by Goblinz Studio

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one-and-done:-elden-ring’s-first-dlc-expansion-will-also-be-its-last

One and done: Elden Ring’s first DLC expansion will also be its last

Over and out —

But the studio is “leaving some possibilities” for a sequel that continues the story.

A big erdtree casts a big shadow.

Enlarge / A big erdtree casts a big shadow.

Namco Bandai

The good news for Elden Ring fans is that the two-plus-year wait for the game’s first DLC, “Shadow of the Erdtree,” will end in just a couple of months. The bad news is that “Shadow of the Erdtree” will also be the last bit of DLC for FromSoftware’s multimillion-selling action RPG.

In a wide-ranging interview with Chinese site Zhihu (machine translation), Elden Ring producer Hidetaka Miyazaki said “Shadow of the Erdtree” contains a lot of existing lore and content that was created for the original game but couldn’t fit into the final package. Miyazaki said the team decided to release all of that unused content as one large DLC expansion, rather than multiple smaller bits, because “if they were sold separately, the freedom of exploration and sense of adventure would be reduced.”

As for just how big the DLC will be, Miyazaki balked when the interviewer asked how long it would take players to complete. Miyazaki brought up memories of being called a liar after estimating in an earlier interview that the original game would only take about 30 hours of play to complete—crowdsourced game-length database HowLongToBeat puts the “main story” estimate closer to 60 hours.

While Miyazaki was definitive on the lack of plans for additional Elden Ring DLC, he left open the possibility of further games that could continue the story of the Elden Ring universe. “FromSoftware’s style of doing things is that it generally does not allow the future of an IP to be easily locked, but it is better to leave some possibilities” he said.

Previous games in FromSoftware’s Dark Souls series have split additional content across multiple episodic DLC expansions in the years after their respective releases (though Bloodborne only saw a single DLC expansion, “The Old Hunters“). Last year, Cyberpunk 2077 developer CD Projekt Red confirmed that the “Phantom Liberty” expansion would be that game’s only DLC, owing to an engine transition within the company.

Elsewhere in the interview, Miyazaki said the upcoming expansion would closely match the legendary difficulty of the original game’s second half. The DLC was designed with the expectation that “players… should already have a certain understanding of the game,” he said. But players who have grinded their characters into unstoppable, overpowered machines will be able to turn off the leveling system in the DLC area to add a bit of additional challenge.

Miyazaki also offered a few hints about the DLC’s plot, which will include new characters like St. Trina, a counterpart to Miquella, who was only hinted at via item names in the original game. Most characters featured in the DLC will be completely new to the expansion, Miyazaki said, if for no other reason than that “there may be a situation where the player kills the NPC [in the original game], causing him/her to be unable to appear in the DLC story.”

One and done: Elden Ring’s first DLC expansion will also be its last Read More »

geforce-now-has-made-steam-deck-streaming-much-easier-than-it-used-to-be

GeForce Now has made Steam Deck streaming much easier than it used to be

Easy, but we’re talking Linux easy —

Ask someone who previously did it the DIY way.

Fallout 4 running on a Steam Deck through GeForce Now

Enlarge / Streaming Fallout 4 from GeForce Now might seem unnecessary, unless you know how running it natively has been going.

Kevin Purdy

The Steam Deck is a Linux computer. There is, technically, very little you cannot get running on it, given enough knowledge, time, and patience. That said, it’s never a bad thing when someone has done all the work for you, leaving you to focus on what matters: sneaking game time on the couch.

GeForce Now, Nvidia’s game-streaming service that uses your own PC gaming libraries, has made it easier for Steam Deck owners to get its service set up on their Deck. On the service’s Download page, there is now a section for Gaming Handheld Devices. Most of the device links provide the service’s Windows installer, since devices like the ROG Ally and Lenovo Legion Go run Windows. Some note that GeForce Now is already installed on devices like the Razer Edge and Logitech G Cloud.

But Steam Deck types are special. We get a Unix-style executable script, a folder with all the necessary Steam icon image assets, and a README.md file.

It has technically been possible all this time, if a Deck owner was willing to fiddle about with installing Chrome in desktop mode, tweaking a half-dozen Steam settings, and then navigating the GeForce Now site with a trackpad. GeForce Now’s script, once you download it from a browser in the Deck’s desktop mode, does a few things:

  • Installs the Google Chrome browser through the Deck’s built-in Flatpak support
  • Adjusts Chrome’s settings to allow for gamepad support in the browser
  • Sets up GeForce Now in Steam with proper command line options and icons for every window.

That last bit about the icons may seem small, but it’s a pain in the butt to find properly sized images for the many different kinds of images Steam can show for a game in your library when selected, having recently played, and so on. As for the script itself, it worked fine, even with me having previously installed Chrome and created a different Steam shortcut. I got a notice on first launch that Chrome couldn’t update, so I was missing out on all its “new features,” but that could likely be unrelated.

I was almost disappointed that GeForce Now's script just quietly worked and then asked me to head back into Gaming Mode. Too easy!

I was almost disappointed that GeForce Now’s script just quietly worked and then asked me to head back into Gaming Mode. Too easy!

Kevin Purdy

GeForce Now isn’t for everyone, and certainly not for every Steam Deck owner. Because the standard Steam Deck LCD screen only goes to 800p and 60 Hz, paying for a rig running in a remote data center to power your high-resolution, impressive-looking game doesn’t always make sense. With the advent of the Steam Deck OLED, however, the games look a lot brighter and more colorful and run up to 90 Hz. You also get a lot more battery life from streaming than you do from local hardware, which is still pretty much the same as it was with the LCD model.

GeForce Now also offers a free membership option and $4 “day passes” to test if your Wi-Fi (or docked Ethernet) connection would make a $10/month Priority or $20/month Ultimate membership worthwhile (both with cheaper pre-paid prices). The service has in recent months been adding games from Game Pass subscriptions and Microsoft Store purchases, Blizzard (i.e., Battle.net), and a lot of same-day Steam launch titles.

If you’re already intrigued by GeForce Now for your other screens and were wondering if it could fly on a Steam Deck, now it does, and it’s only about 10 percent as painful. Whether that’s more or less painful than buying your own GPU and running your own Deck streaming is another matter.

GeForce Now has made Steam Deck streaming much easier than it used to be Read More »

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Dave & Buster’s is adding real money betting options to arcade staples

Casino-cade or Arcade-sino? —

“Gamification layer” platform promises to streamline your friendly Skee-Ball wagers.

It's a good thing this kid is too young to bet on Skee-Ball, because his dad is getting <em>beat</em>.” src=”https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/GettyImages-658352856-800×534.jpg”></img><figcaption>
<p><a data-height=Enlarge / It’s a good thing this kid is too young to bet on Skee-Ball, because his dad is getting beat.

Getty Images

Anyone who’s been to a Dave & Buster’s location in recent years knows the arcade’s heavy reliance on so-called redemption games makes the experience more like an ersatz casino than the quarter-munching video game halls of the ’70s and ’80s. On the vast majority of D&B games, you end up wagering money (in the form of gameplay chips) to win virtual tickets that can be traded for trinkets at the rewards counter.

Now, the massive arcade chain has announced that players will soon be able to use the D&B app to directly wager on the results of arcade games through “real-money contests.” The arcade giant, which has over 200 locations across North America, is partnering with “gamification layer” platform Lucra on a system that will let D&B Rewards members “digitally compete with each other, earn rewards, and unlock exclusive perks while competing with friends at Dave & Buster’s,” according to Tuesday’s announcement.

Neither Lucra nor Dave & Buster’s has responded to a request for comment from Ars Technica, so we’re still missing extremely basic information, like what games will support app-based wagering, minimum and maximum bet sizes, or what kinds of fees might be involved. CNBC’s report on the announcement suggests the system will be launching “in the next few months” to players 18 and older across 44 states (and specifically mention Skee-Ball and Hot Shots Basketball competitions). Lucra’s webpage simply says the integration will “provide… social connectivity and friendly competition,” suggesting you’ll probably face off against friends playing in the same location.

Lucra’s system has previously been integrated into Dupr (a Pickleball ranking platform) and TennisOne to let players make casual bets on recreational sports. The company says it has handled $20 million in bets from 150,000 customers across its platforms since its founding in 2019.

Money match

Gambling on arcade games is far from a new concept. Wagering on early pinball games was so common that many US cities banned pinball entirely starting around the 1940s until a landmark 1976 court case determined the tables weren’t games of chance. And the fighting game community has a long tradition of money matches that can often be found along the fringes of major tournaments to this day.

New York Police Commissioner William O'Brien destroys a pinball machine as part of a citywide crackdown on

Enlarge / New York Police Commissioner William O’Brien destroys a pinball machine as part of a citywide crackdown on “gambling devices” in 1949.

Getty Images

Still, Dave & Buster’s officially integrating real-money wagers into its arcade experience feels like the most direct acknowldgement yet of the ongoing casino-ization of the video game arcade. It’s important to note, though, that the arcade games being played at Dave & Buster’s have to have an element of skill, setting the arcades apart from real casinos that can offer purely chance-based wagering. CNBC reports this distinction lets Lucra and D&B avoid the complex web of regulations and licensing required to open a true casino or take bets on professional sports.

Ironically enough, though, many of those traditional casinos have been experimenting with so-called “skill-based” slot machines for years, in an attempt to draw in younger players who want to feel more in control of the experience. But at least one casino’s website admits “the influence that each player has on the reward [in a skill-based slot machine] is minimal, at best,” so maybe there’s still some distinction between arcades and casinos on that score.

Even without a gambling app, though, so-called “advantage players” have long made a lucrative business of racking up jackpots on Dave & Buster’s Redemption games and then selling the high-ticket prizes on eBay.

Dave & Buster’s is adding real money betting options to arcade staples Read More »