Castle Magus

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.)

Full headline: "Don't like $70 games? Monster Hunter Wilds and Dragon's Dogma 2 publisher Capcom says wait 5 years and they'll all be $5"

"Price reductions are always on horizon... unless it's a Nintendo game"

That gets a hearty "No shit, Sherlock" from me. I've been doing that for twelve years now, and I've had very little problem with it at all. If a game that used to be in the $50-$100 range falls to the $5-$10[1] range, that's way more palatable to me than if it was, you know, still in the $50-$100 range, even if it takes five-plus years to get there. And some games hit that threshold within a fraction of that "five years" figure. But even then, that's not a guarantee that I'll definitely buy it.

With that said, though, I'm not sure what Capcom is actually on about, because as of right now, six year old Monster Hunter World is still $29.99 USD on Steam, and that's just for the basic "base-game" level shit, with the actual full game (i.e. including all DLC, presumably) still at fucking $69.97 USD. (It is, admittedly, currently on a Steam sale, for the moment, with the "base-game" at $9.89 USD and the most expensive "full game" version at $24.77 USD, but still.) Also, there are literally 200 separately listed DLC items on the Monster Hunter World Steam store page, almost none of which are on sale, that total a whopping fucking $508.27 USD, though most of that dumbfuckery is probably rolled up into the "Master Edition Digital Deluxe" shit with the $70 USD price tag. In any case, I have not bought any version of Monster Hunter World as of yet. Maybe if that "Master Edition Digital Deluxe Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" version ever hits sub-$10, I might bite on it.

Also, though it is no longer the case now, Monster Hunter World originally shipped with fucking Denuvo, same as just about every other Crapcum game these days (the newer of which are still infected by that shit), so I don't care if the game costs $700 or $70 or $7 or $0.07 or $0.0007, I will not knowingly/willingly buy anything with that shit infesting it.

[1] - For only a very rare few games would I be willing to buy even at the initial "$20-$30" range that I noted in that 12 year old post there. For me, now, today, with 99% of games, it's "either get down to $5-$10 or less or else continue to fuck off."

"Tricking other players with counterfeit ferrystones and beetles will never get old."

Yeah, no, this article is not the ringing endorsement of DD2 that the author seems to think it is.

If anything, these are actual in-game reasons (buried under all the modern video game industry horseshit slathered on top of the game) that make me not want to play DD2. Or, at least, play it with online turned off completely (assuming that's even possible to do, which it likely isn't, considering that the game is infested with goddamned Denuvo).

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And looking more into that "plague" shit mentioned in the above article, yeah... that asinine dogshit doesn't sound like an enjoyable video game experience to me at all.

"In short, Dragonsplague causes any infected pawns to become stronger and more effective in combat. However, it will also, eventually, cause them to turn into a massive dragon and wipe out whatever town you’re currently resting in, killing every villager and then saving your game in the process. Not great!"

You're fucking right that's "not great!" Especially if the only way to "fix" the problem before it becomes game-breaking is to murder your pawns. (You know, like perhaps some of those high-level pawns that you idiotically just wasted real world money on buying DLC rift crystals to recruit, maybe?)

This seems like some of the dumbest dumbshit to ever be dumbshat into a video game. If I were playing this game (which seems even more unlikely at this point) and that shit happened to me, I'd simply uninstall the game and never touch it again.

Seriously, between Diablo 3, Shenmue 3, Mass Effect 3, and now Dragon's Dogma 2 (and several other, lesser examples that I don't care to bother to list here), the modern video game industry has proven very adept at making me utterly loathe sequels to games I'd previously loved.

Also, this Jade King writer on TheGamer.com seems like a worthless troll whose shit I'd be best off not reading in the future.

In addition to the ignominious Denuvo infestation, here is another huge reason not to buy Dragon's Dogma 2 right now. I'll be waiting for a "complete" version, with all the DLC included, Denuvo removed, and for that to hit a $12 sale ($12 being what I paid for the original game+all DLC). If that takes five to ten years, then so be it. (And, maybe, by then I will have a computer beefy enough to actually play it, too.)

Also, I normally hate "joke" reviews for games on Steam, but in this case, I will make an exception. I love that that is the current "most helpful" review.

Of course, none of that is going to matter, the game's going to sell like gangbusters, and video game consumers are going to once again prove that they're blithely willing to attach their lips to the sewer pipe and consume whatever the modern video game industry shits into their willing mouths.

Hey cool Capcom is making an Apollo Justice bundle with the two 3DS games and it's infested with Denuvo.



Really, though, whenever Capcom decides to stop foolishly leaving money on the table and gets around to removing the malware infection in a year or three, I'll still probably get this, eventually, if I see it on a good enough sale. But until and unless the contamination is cleaned up, the game may as well not exist, as far as I'm concerned. (See also: Street Fighter 6, and Dragon's Dogma 2, since the previous two sentences can be applied to those games, too, without changing a word.)

Fuck off forever, Squeenix.

(EDIT) On a vaguely dim, only semi-related bright side, Squeenix has apparently removed the malware from Live A Live, so there's that, at least. Maybe this Star Ocean 2 remake will similarly be actually worthwhile in six months or so, too. (/EDIT)

Apparently, the current trend for idiots/fanbois/rep management drones is to try to claim that it isn't Denuvo itself that is bad, it's any given dev's implementation of Denuvo that can be bad. Like "It's not the Denuvo that's causing the game to run like shit, the devs of the game just implemented Denuvo poorly, that's all. Games with Denvuo run great if the devs implement it properly."

To that I say, if any given dev implements Denuvo in any way, shape, or form, regardless of whether it causes the game to have performances issues or not, it's still bad, and I still won't be buying that dev's game because of it. Even if a game infected with Denuvo runs perfectly flawlessly, Denuvo is still an oozing pustule on the genitals of the modern video game industry, so fuck off and die with your "Denuvo isn't bad, it's just..." horseshit.

Full headline because Dreamwidth continues to suck: "Denuvo plans to offer independent benchmarks in an attempt to prove its DRM doesn't cause performance problems"

It's already been proven many times over that it does cause performance problems. Hell, I know for a goddamn fact myself through personal experience that it does cause performance problems. Their worthless, lying, "independent benchmarks" can eat shit. I will never (knowingly) buy a video game that contains that badware.

And here's the thing, even if there actually weren't any noticeable performance issues, there are more than enough other issues with Denuvo that make it utterly unacceptable. Just as one example: How many games are unplayable now because of lack of support for (and lack of removal of) shit like SafeDisc and SecuROM? How many games are unplayable now because of shit like Games for Windows Live going down (and the games that used it weren't updated to work without it)? And, follow me on this, how many games will be unplayable when Denuvo inevitably dies as well (hopefully sooner than later), if that dogshit hasn't been removed from the games infected with it by then? And there will be games from which the Denuvo malware will never be legitimately removed, regardless of the circumstances or reasons why it should be. So, yeah, even if the games contaminated with Denuvo did run flawlessly (which they demonstrably don't), it's still terrible and needs to die.

Well, it has a Steam page now.

( Denuvo speculation behind cut )