Castle Magus

Okay.

Apparently, Capcom will be removing some of the blatantly predatory DLC from the Dragon's Dogma 2 base game before the new Dark Arisen DLC is released, and they will also be dropping the price of the base game from its current, highway robbery point of $69.99 USD. That's good, I guess.

So... have they also removed or will they be removing the Denuvo infestation yet, after 2 years? No? Then it doesn't matter what else they do, because I still won't be giving the first shit about this game until they do. Honestly, this "expansion" is probably little more than an excuse to keep Denuvo contaminating the whole thing for another year or two.

Of course, even if they do ever get around to removing the Denuvo blight at some point, they'll likely just replace it with Enigma Protector, which is merely different shit with the same putrid stink. On the other hand, Enigma Protector is apparently easier to crack and remove/bypass than Denvuo, so maybe it's still a "better" alternative to Denuvo (for consumers, anyway). Granted, that's academic to me, since I've bought just as many games with Enigma Protector as I have with Denuvo, i.e. zero (well, intentionally, as I had bought some games infected with Denuvo before I ever knew Denuvo was a thing). *shrug*

Pat is correct in that the concept of "tachyon" was not invented by Star Trek. However, to be fair to Woolie (and Woolie's English/Drama teacher), 99.9% of the times I've ever heard the word "tachyon" used has been during Star Trek. The other 0.1% was during non-Star Trek related sci-fi books and movies and video games that had faster than light travel. I'm not sure I've ever heard the word "tachyon" mentioned in a non-science fiction context.

And if you want to know what any of that has to do with horse girl anime, I guess you'll just have to watch the above clip.

I'm in the "hearing the music from outside the room" set for the whole Umamusume thing. I'm not yet inclined to actually enter the room, but I'm also not yet moving away from the room in disinterest, either. I'm pretty sure what very little I know about it at all has come exclusively from the Castle Super Beast podcast, anyway. I have not (yet) watched Woolie's two-shot Let's Play of the game, though. Maybe I'll actually do that at some point relatively soon, possibly.

That said, regardless of any other considerations, I tend to avoid gotchagacha games like the plague, no matter how "good" they may be. I mean, outside of that one Hololive fan game that Steam says I played for 35.7 hours as of September 8, 2023, I suppose. I played that knowing jack shit about Hololive (and I still know jack shit about Hololive, to this day), simply because it was one of the earliest Vampire Survivors clones, so I dunno. Maybe this horse girl game is at least worth a shot, too, even though I know jack shit about these horse girls, since it's apparently free (minus any in-game purchases, which I wouldn't touch with a ten-foot pole, even if I did ever break down and give it a try).

Wait...

"Uses Kernel Level Anti-Cheat
CrackProof®"

Oof. Never fucking mind, then. *weary sigh*

I suppose I can still watch Woolie play it later, perhaps. And I guess you don't have to install kernel level DRM in order to potentially watch an anime movie, either. *shrug*

This is some next level asininity as far as DRM goes. The gist, at least of the first few minutes of the video: two different shitty games have two different shitty kernel level DRM/anti-cheat schemes, and they apparently detect each other as malware and apparently neither will let you have the other game installed on your system.

No, Pat, the player solution is not "play on console and turn off crossplay with PC." The player solution is to simply not buy or play games that do/have this shit at all to being with.

Or, at the very least, that's my solution, anyway. I know my solution is also "unfortunately not viable for a large percentage of players," as Woolie said of Pat's solution, but I also know that that "large percentage of players" is part of the problem of why this shit exists in the first place. If that "large percentage of players" didn't buy games that did this shit, then the large percentage of game devs and publishers who currently do this shit would stop doing this shit.

Pat: "From the industry perspective, it's our good friend Capital who have fucked us on this one." Full stop, video could have ended right there. That said, his reasons for why "Capital" has "fucked us on this one" are absolutely legit. And what Woolie describes after that is one of the biggest reasons I do not play multiplayer games that involve the general public: randos on the Internet almost invariably suck the stinky shit straight from Satan's sulfurous sphincter through a silly swirly straw.

Also, that bit where Pat is talking about some Destiny bullshit where your reward for winning some online tournament thing or whatever the fuck is merely the right to spend real world money to buy the actual reward (i.e. some dumbfuck cosmetic thing), while Woolie is just going "ugh... uuuurrrrgggghhh..." and making puke faces on his side of the video is just the toxic plastic cherry on top of the shit sundae that is all of this abject idiocy.

Woolie: "It is my single most hated thing. Just the fact that you can have a full conversation about a game that has nothing to do with how it actually plays or getting to its content, because it's just the entire fucking economy around it. Yeah. Yeah yeah yeah, that's ridiculous man."

And the tangent that Pat goes into at the end about that academic anti-ChatGPT stuff sounds draconian, and it kind of is, but at the same time, what better solutions are there now? Hell if I know. *shrug*

Pat: "By the way, this is totally off-topic, barely tangential... if you're part of the audience that's using ChatGPT to do your exams or cheat in schoolwork, I want you to stop doing that, not because it's wrong. It is wrong. But you are actively damaging your brain and giving yourself the equivalent of a large-grade concussion. You are hurting your brain. For real. I'm not joking. You are working on giving yourself early onset dementia. I'm so serious about that."

"Video Games Europe, an industry lobby group, is now lobbying against the Stop Killing Games movement. I think we're stirring up the hive."

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I (usually) watch these things, but I don't usually post them here, but this time, I just wanted to make a comment in response to something he showed in the video. He's talking, here, about all the "complexities" of making an online-only game that simply are not needed anymore once the game has reached the end of its life and has been (in an ideal world) simply released into the wild, rather than removed and destroyed forever, and there's a big list of "Examples of microservices NOT NEEDED for an end-of-life copy of a game." I'm just going to transcribe that list here. (pre-post EDIT) And boy did that take far longer than I was anticipating going into it, whew. (/pre-post EDIT)

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( Massive bullet point list behind cut (seriously, you don't really need to look at this shit if you don't want to) )

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That's probably not even close to everything on the full list. That's just what was scrolled on the screen in this video. (Also, my only real concern was making sure I didn't fuck up the formatting/nesting/look of the list [which I did a couple times and had to fix during the creation of this post], so if there were any typos made during the process of transcribing the actual list items that weren't in the list as shown in the Youtube video, then that is my fault, and I'll fix it if I notice it, but I don't really give much of a fuck anymore, either way.)

My comment is simply this: I don't need any of that shit at all, ever in any video game I play (or if that shit is in games I play or have played in the past [e.g. No Man's Sky, Minecraft, Star Trek Online, The Secret World, etc.], it doesn't directly affect me, because I ignore/don't use any of it as best as I am able, and if I must use/interact with such shit, I do so only extremely grudgingly). I don't care if the game is at "end-of-life" or if it's a newly bought game that only just released today (not that I buy games on release day anymore, of course). That is a big, huge, colossal part of why I don't play online-only games at all, to begin with. I simply don't play games that have that shit in them and avoid like the plague games that do have that shit in them (and I know about it). That is all. Simple as that.

So if, as Video Games Europe claims, "[the proposals put forward by Stop Killing Games] would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create" by, presumably, not having all that stupid, worthless horseshit in them (or by having to turn off/remove all that stupid, worthless horseshit when such a game reaches "end-of-life"), even if that was true, which it almost assuredly is not (as Ross himself states), then my only response is this:

FUCKING GOOD. KILL THAT SHIT FOREVER, AS FAR AS I'M CONCERNED.

I was initially going to just put "the best Pat quote" here, as I have in some of the previous CSB clip posts I've made, but then Pat just kept on saying things that could have easily been "the best Pat quote." Basically, this entire video is maybe 70-80% "the best Pat quote." Even Woolie got some good hits in, too.

I've been saying for probably a decade now that I wish for the modern video game industry to crash, and yeah, given everything that's been going on in the modern video game industry for the past year or two, maybe my wish has come true, or at least it has started to, maybe. At least for the way-too-expensive AAAAAAAAAAAAAA video game industry, anyway. And, really, it's not just or even mostly the prices that bother me to the point of wanting it all to burn to the ground, it's all the other modern video game industry bullshit that accompanies the price increases that makes me want the whole thing to implode. And that's not (necessarily) including all the company-specific bullshit that makes me hate them, too, though too much of the company-specific shit that I was complaining about back then has since become industry-wide, to be sure.

Was looking at the Apollo Justice trilogy on Steam. Seems like they removed Denuvo, which is good... only to replace it with Enigma Protector, which is bad. They may as well have just kept in the fucking Denuvo, as far as I'm concerned. I'm guessing they'll probably do the same with the Edgeworth games collection when the Denuvo license expires on that, too. I'm just glad they haven't shoehorned that Enigma Protector shit into the original trilogy I already bought (yet, at least).

Well, I'll say this much, it certainly "protects" Crapcum from getting any more of my money, if nothing else.

Full headline, due to the inexorable fact that the Dreamwith subject field size is inadequate: "If 1 million people sign a petition, a ban on rendering multiplayer games unplayable has a chance to become law in Europe"

"A European initiative is now underway for videogame preservation and consumer protections against publishers 'killing games.'"

As a bonus, I'll embed the Ross Scott (remember him?) video they mention in the article:

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Europeans can save videogames from being destroyed! The European Citizens' Initiative has just launched and represents the biggest and most ambitious chance to create new law against publishers destroying games they have already sold to you. Get EU citizens to sign it!

Link to sign EU initiative:
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu...

Guides on how to sign EU initiative:
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci

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(EDIT) See also: this, to which all of this is a follow-up. (/EDIT)

I'll just say it again. Companies have been gravitating toward online-only games (multiplayer-only or otherwise) not because they believe that's what people actually want to play. They've been during it purely for DRM reasons. That's also a big reason why games are split up into DLC now, rather than being released whole. Well, that and all the extra money they get from selling the game piecemeal at inflated prices, but also because of DRM reasons (i.e. the game having to phone home all the time to "verify" the DLC and all that shit).

As for me, I'm in the US and can't sign the petition, and thus this doesn't directly apply to me, and I don't personally know anyone who lives in the EU, but if my posting this here helps even the tiniest bit, then... *shrug* ...great! That said, I'm not going to be holding my breath until this thing succeeds, that's for sure.

Just for the hell of it, I signed up for the newsletter on the Stop Killing Games base-level site, too (or, at least, tried to, as I haven't gotten any kind of confirmation yet or any other indication that it actually went through [EDIT I tried it again later and actually got an email verification almost immediately, so I guess the first one just got eaten by my aggressive spam filters or something /EDIT]). And I also added the Accursed Farms Youtube channel to my Feedly, which I hadn't already done, for whatever reason.

The comments under the PC Gamer article are about half and half between people saying this is a bad idea (i.e. reputation management drones, utter fucking morons, etc.) and people who can't believe that there would exist anyone who would say this is a bad idea. I think my favorite interaction was the one between one guy (one of the "this is a bad idea" guys) saying something like "But this could have a chilling effect and just end up with them not making multiplayer games at all anymore. They'd go back to making single player games." (Despite the fact that that's not even what was being discussed here.) And a few of the replies were something like "Yes, and? That would be great, actually." (Personally speaking, I don't care if multiplayer-only games exist, I just also wouldn't care if they didn't exist, either, especially if they're being made instead of/at the expense of offline singleplayer games. But again, that's mostly irrelevant to the actual discussion at hand.)

For clarity's sake, the headline for this article on the Google News app on my phone (as well as on the browser tab in Firefox/Chrome/etc.) shows as "Dragon's Dogma 2 gleefully rejects modern game design rules," which conjures a vastly different initial impression than "All the ways Dragon's Dogma 2 will fight against you" does.

So... let's see, then.

Draconian DRM in the form of a Denuvo malware infestation? Check.

Worthless, predatory DLC? Check.

Game-breaking, progression loss bugs? Check.

Bad optimization/performance, even on high-end computers (which is very likely at least partly the fault of Denuvo)? Check.

Dubious design choices? Check.

So... no. Looks to me like Dragon's Dogma 2 gleefully embraces modern game design rules, not rejects them. In fact, Dragon's Dogma 2 looks like a perfect storm of the absolute worst of modern game design. A textbook example of what not to do. (At least if you don't want to be perceived as incompetent, greedy asshats, anyway, which Crapcum seems to not really care about anymore, I guess, like so much of the rest of the modern video game industry. *shrug*)

...

...

<sarcasm> Oh, wait, they were talking about the actual game that's hidden under all that huge pile of garbage listed above? Well, then. Never mind, I guess. </sarcasm> *eye roll + smdh + weary sigh*

This is all academic to me because I had no interest in this game to start with, but if I had, the infestation of it with Denuvo would have killed my interest utterly dead. But then, the main reason I had no interest in it in the first place is because of fucking course it was going to be infected with Denuvo. It's a Warner Bros. game released within the past 5 years or so. Like, no fucking shit the Denuvo contamination was going to be there.

On a related note, along with the above, this other headline here was the one that I saw in my Google News App today that got me to add the topic of "Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League" to my "show less like this" list[1]: "Suicide Squad devs say despite being a live-service game it'll respect players' time because 'We all love playing games, but we also have lives'"

Any game that is a "live service" game is pretty much just as dead to me as any game that is poisoned with Denuvo, and this game happens to be both of those things. (Why the fuck an always online "live service" game even needs Denuvo at all is beyond me, but whatever.) But then, even aside from all of that stuff, everything else I've heard about this game (even just today alone) has given me the impression that the game is utter dogshit, so even if it weren't a "live service" game or a game polluted by Denuvo, I would've had next to no interest in it. Only because of the legacy of Rocksteady and the Arkham games (up to Arkham Knight anyway, but even that one had an incredibly shitty launch on PC initially) would I have even given this game more than a glance, but even that isn't enough for me to care about all of this rancid horseshit.

This game is a textbook example (among many similar examples) of why I think the modern video game industry is nigh worthless and in dire need of crashing again like it's 1983.

[1] - I would've said "ignore list," but there is no "ignore list" in Google News App. Telling Google News App that you don't want to see a particular topic anymore is only the merest of suggestions, at best.

Full headline, thanks to Dreamwidth's too small subject field/PC Gamer's too long headlines: "They're putting DRM in trains, now: Hired hackers Dragon Sector take to the Chaos Communication Congress stage and explain how they caught a manufacturer red-handed"

DRM is asinine. Full stop.

DRM in things like trains or tractors or whatever is especially asinine, though.