[tpi2007]

[Ars] Bethesda apparently broke its own Denuvo protection for Doom Eternal

[TechSpot] Bethesda accidentally shipped Doom Eternal with a DRM-free executable


It's been patched out by now, but then again, this may have been an intentional PR "oopsie" from the company that has collected great fallout from doing things wrong lately. But then again, when it comes down to it, it doesn't matter, you still have to log-in with a Bethesda account, so DRM 1 or DRM 2, it's still crap, with the log-in requirement being worse as Denuvo is usually removed after a while.

I will only buy it when it's on GOG in a few years when they remove nonsensical log-in requirements for their own benefit for what is at its core a single-player game.

 

[tpi2007]

Meh, both Doom Eternal and HL:Alyx are the only games I've preordered in forever. In fact last games I did was Forza 4 on x360 and Crysis 3 on pc. So far so good on Doom, we'll see if Valve disappoints.

Nobody should only care about whether a game is good, but also what the commercial practices of publishers and developers are. Speaking of Crysis 3, I still didn't buy it or play it. And I will keep my word for as long as EA keeps it as an Origin exclusive.

As to Half-Life: Alyx, in my opinion Valve is making a mistake in making it a VR-only game. Then again, making it about a secondary character pretty much shows that they know it's a niche platform and hence feel comfortable in leaving out the vast majority of PC gamers. VR will only truly take off when the goggles are as small and lightweight as regular glasses and cost ~$99 - $150, which is the price of an entry level / mid-range 1080p 24 inch monitor, and that's considering people will still have to buy a monitor on top of it because nobody will wear VR glasses to do everything on a computer, nor should that ever become a requirement.

 

[tpi2007]

It seems like the game itself is not up to the standard of the previous DOOM game from 2016 and some of the textures and models are not up to par either:


https://www.techpowerup.com/review/doom-eternal-benchmark-test-performance-analysis/5.html

Only a third of the enemies in each encounter are taken out by the ammo in your inventory. For the other two-thirds, you'll find yourself in multiple melee orgies with the demons. Glory kills were introduced as an optional novelty in DOOM (2016), and it should have stayed just that. In Eternal, it's a vital part of the gameplay, and that takes away a big part of the power-trip fantasy or simplicity that made DOOM great. I definitely like that enemies are more aggressive, but they are mostly still just dumb bullet sponges. What reminded me a bit of DOOM 3 is that maps are a chain of encounters that have a fixed number of enemies placed in a certain location that teleport in in waves. Kill, move on, rinse and repeat. Usually, you have to kill them all to progress, no skipping mobs, and sometimes you'll end up looking for that last imp that somehow was forgotten in a corner.

Graphical fidelity of DOOM at the highest "Ultra Nightmare" setting is "good", maybe even "very good", but I'm not seeing anything that looks "next-gen". Many textures are blurry and some models definitely lack geometry. While the structural level design is amazing, I'd definitely have wished for more love when it comes to floor geometry and textures.

Overall, DOOM Eternal is a solid sequel to the epic series, but I'm not convinced it will achieve as legendary a status as earlier DOOM releases.

TL;DR: Decent, but nothing to write home about.

Gabe is on record saying he doesn't expect Alyx to sell very well, nor did Valve ever intend it to. They wanted to do it for their passion for games and innovation, and they wanted to showcase VR and the type of experience players can have. But the IGN interview is surely better at conveying their perspective than a forum post is.

It's hard to call it a mistake yet because it may end up succeeding at its goal. It drove up sales of the Index, at least. But I'd be thankful there are innovative developers and people with disposable income to buy expensive headsets now so you can have your $100 VR glasses one day.

I disagree, it's rather easy to call it a mistake, the degree of the mistake is open for debate, of course, and the current pandemic is only going to skew things in a negative way unfortunately because people will have less disposable income to spend on VR gear, but even without factoring it in, leveraging a Half-Life game to try to boost VR adoption, despite the price of admission remaining relatively high, is a double edged sword, and you can see it being mitigated by the fact that they made it about a secondary character and not with frontman Gordon Freeman. This is a beloved franchise, so leaving out 99% or 98% of the audience can't be considered anything but a mistake in terms of what the audience wants. Valve can internally be happy with the revenue and happy about what they achieved, but globally speaking, the vast majority of people will be left out, watching from the sidelines.

Also, if Valve was incredibly confident, they could have started a new IP altogether to kickstart VR. Even an IP related to the Half-Life universe would have been fine, they did so with great success with the Portal franchise. What I see is mediocrity. In the exact same way that Microsoft shoved the fullscreen Start screen without the ability to skip it in Windows 8 (corrected a year later with Windows 8.1 or through third party tools like Classic Shell) to try to leverage the desktop Windows userbase to get them to use its mobile products.

I used to be like that but I only ended up punishing myself and missing out on games because people vote with their wallet and the masses don't care. The days of just one launcher are long gone unfortunately (and I was one of those that initially didn't like steam when it launched). It'd be a completely different ball game if you had to actually pay a separate license/software fee to use these companies launchers.

If a game is good, I'll buy it. Quite frankly if you dig deep enough into any company you'll find practices you don't agree with and at that point you've got nothing left to do but twiddle your thumbs.

The first big hurdle to overcome in order to solve that mindset is the FOMO (fear of missing out). Once you're past that, you no longer have that self-imposed mental vacuum to fill up with games (or anything else for that matter). Doing ethical relativism like you did at the end only serves to justify your willingness to buy games, rather than having some sort of standard or red line that you won't cross. The point is, it doesn't have to be all or nothing, every company makes wrong decisions, but some of them make bigger mistakes and some are completely unrepentant about it and even unashamedly recalcitrant about making more and more things wrong.

I don't even use a launchers anymore, I buy and download practically all my games from GOG via standalone game installs. I will make a rare exception for Steam, coincidentally the last game I bought there was the previous Doom game.

I waited for Dishonored 2 to have Denuvo removed and what do you know, a while after they even put it on GOG DRM-free. I vote with my wallet, I'm not going to guide my actions by what the masses do.

The requirement is already bypased and because of it there are standalone pirate releases available.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/fm9c56/doom_eternal_bethesda_authentication_bypass_no/
A simple hex edit does it.

Yeah, but you still have to download the DRM-free version, which is not exactly legal to do in the first place, not to mention that you may as well be downloading a virus inside it. I'm not going to reward Bethesda by putting myself at both security and legal risk when all of this could have been officially avoided to begin with.

 

[tpi2007]

The choice to use Alyx in their first real VR game can just as easily be attributed to the fact that they still don't know where to take the narrative. It's easier to do a prequel without frustrating the expectations of the fans, and Alyx, being the second most important character, has background before HL2 and after HL1 - something Gordon doesn't. It WOULD be a mistake to further the storyline without real, meaningful content just to showcase the future of VR.

And it's not like people don't like Alyx.

I like Alyx all right too, but that's besides the point. If after almost 13 years they still don't know where to take the narrative, you're just proving my point about the mediocrity behind choosing the Half-Life franchise to boost VR adoption.

 

[tpi2007]

What other franchise would you suggest? You know, one that would be as well-received as Alyx is being (despite the 0/10 "can't afford VR" trolls).

As I said, a new IP, it could even be related to the Half-Life universe like Portal.

Viruses are not really a problem nowadays.
There's what is called "trusted" sources.
Names that are actually backed and proven in the "pirate industry".
But hey, there's always a virtual machine to check.


Also, you only need the executable which Bethesda released themselves.
AFAIK it also worked on the steam release.

Yeah, they released it themselves, but now you have to trust someone else to get it.

And...

https://www.techspot.com/news/84501...news/84501-ransomware-gang-breaks-promise-not-target-medical-organizations.html

Yeah.

yeah, i'd take doom16 game play, with doom 20 maps.

the play style is just too forced. I keep having this echo in my mind, some developer saying "well, this is how we wanted you to play it! go make your own game if you don't like it!" and that's fine, I like it, I just see some shortsighted decisions, and some copy/pasta decisions.

it'll take an act of congress to convince me they didn't shoehorn in the climbing, & map, after seeing the new star wars title.][

TPI - I 100% agree with your FOMO statement. Ohh no! Poor human missed out on a couple cool clicks cuz they didn't wanna give money to a money vacuum. You know, cuz "everyone else is doing it, it doesn't matter if I don't!, so I might as well too!" that's how you find yourself following someone else off of a cliff.

and Alyx is a mistake, and a statement, all at the same time. Definitely agree they should've made yet another spin off series, but that would've likely resulted in just as much salt as Half Life Origins or whatever the hell it is.

i mean, getting HL2 to run back in the day wasn't an easy task, but I doubt it required a $1,000 upgrade for 99.99% of people wanting to experience it.


and 100% the terminations are coming, from all walks of life. Wuhan is an excuse to reconcile the "Give Rich People More Money cuz they're Rich" financial system yet again, which isn't a national issue, it's a global issue. Trump can claim he's anti-globalist all he wants, but his and Obama's policies made them richer than ever. N the first thing the Rich Guys are gonna do is fire you to save them a little pocket change. Specially if you work in an industry that siphons money off of the working class needing to work, like Workman's compensation insurance. Every single Workman's comp insurance agency is working on pruning the bottom 10% as we speak. N while that sucks, Bai Felicia, sorry not sorry that you sucked at your job!

seriously though, getting fired sucks, even when you suck at your job, and deserve termination. (but of course, none of us suck at our jobs, now do we?! )

Exacty.

Problem is I don't have a fear of missing out on anything. At the same time I am rationale and can acknowledge that yes, if I choose not to buy a game I know I will enjoy I am only punishing myself. This has absolutely nothing to do with what anyone else is doing. And in that case, it would sure suck to live a life without enjoying yourself a bit by such stringent standards on something so meaningless in the grand scheme of life. I know some folks take the gaming industry pretty seriously, but whatever 'wrong doing' said company has done will never be on the scale of something like this..

https://www.powers-santola.com/blog/documents-show-gm-knew-deadly-ignition-switch-defect/

Now that is a solid reason to boycott a company.

There is so much stuff to have fun with in the computer game realm. You could spend years playing great games from GOG, for example. Again, you seem to be putting yourself in the "all or nothing" category when you say "it would sure suck to live a life without enjoying yourself a bit by such stringent standards on something so meaningless in the grand scheme of life".

It seems pretty clear that this is FOMO, especially pertaining to this case.

As I said, it shouldn't be an all or nothing approach and secondly, the gaming industry is a multi billion dollar industry, so it's not exactly "meaningless" either that you can just put everything under the rug "because it's just gaming". Pointing out other areas of life is again, relativism and deflecting.

 

[tpi2007]

New IP requires new ideas, and their latest was a complete letdown.

Portal? Assuming that were an entirely different case from HL (not sure why you'd assume it would be), Portal would be an excellent choice, in terms of fan favorites, for a new installment. Except... it would be horrible for VR. If a considerable amount of people get sick JUST from different types of movement in VR games, I bet you can imagine what would happen in rooms where you had to solve with momentum.

Portal would never work, and it's actually been discussed before. I'm surprised you haven't heard about it.


I seriously doubt that is the case.

Let me be clear, because everything you wrote after your first sentence in the reply above stems from you having misinterpreted what I said: I always meant a new IP, eventually related to the Half-Life universe, like Portal is related to the Half-Life universe. Emphasis on a new IP. Portal is not a new IP.

Also, if Valve was incredibly confident, they could have started a new IP altogether to kickstart VR. Even an IP related to the Half-Life universe would have been fine, they did so with great success with the Portal franchise. What I see is mediocrity. In the exact same way that Microsoft shoved the fullscreen Start screen without the ability to skip it in Windows 8 (corrected a year later with Windows 8.1 or through third party tools like Classic Shell) to try to leverage the desktop Windows userbase to get them to use its mobile products.

As I said, a new IP, it could even be related to the Half-Life universe like Portal.

And yes, I've read about their struggles with making a Portal type of game work in VR. Even the struggles in making the Alyx game work, it's full of compromises in gameplay.

On a more general note, I have serious doubts that VR will ever be widespread because of limitations such the ones that make a Portal type of game impractical (not to mention a plethora of other constraints like cost, space and privacy concerns).

We've been hearing about VR since the early nineties, even before, it's never quite ready, is it?


Fun stuff just for fun: here's Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher in a 1993 episode of "Murder She Wrote" wearing a VR headset and with gloves (future looking stuff, the actual hardware of the time didn't exactly look like that):

 

[tpi2007]

Look, we can chat about this ad infinitum. It's clear to me we will never reach the center of the Venn diagram.

But this all started (my reason to quote and engage you, anyway) because you said you thought the game was a mistake. We can go into the realm of semantics and relativity for it, but it's counterproductive, I think. Instead, I'll just let the attached picture convey what I mean. Not bad for a 2 day old mistake whose target audience is restricted to VR headset owners.

I still think it's a mistake to leave 99% of PC gamers out when we're talking about the Half-Life franchise.

 

[tpi2007]

Don't let FOMO cloud your judgement. I'm sure VR headsets will be much cheaper soon enough. Well, they'll at least be $100 glasses before we get HL3, anyway.

You've got to try a little harder, come on.

 

[tpi2007]

If enjoying titles I've been looking forward to is FOMO then call me it's biggest fan at this point. Your version of this 'FOMO' you speak of is essentially saying 'why try anything new when there is so much already available". Now, I know you are referring to avoiding the 'evil' companies such as EA but quite frankly, I've got no worthwhile vendetta or felt any personal wrong doing by the companies I've bought from so I will continue to enjoy the games I like to play.. With how little time is allotted to me to actually enjoy myself in this world, I'm not going to fret about how a company angered the always angry video game crowd. Also, the movie industry is absolutely meaningless just as games are, these are forms of entertainment, not one bit of either industry is essential.

On a side note, HL:Alyx even on my Oculus really is a ton of fun and runs surprisingly well with my fx-9590 and vega 64. Game is very intuitive and I could see where a headset like the index would take it to the next level. It's honestly a breath of fresh air in gaming for me.

Oh no... I've made a FOMO again and enjoyed myself... :thumb:

Regarding the part in bold, not really, it's about being selective. And again, it's about not falling into extremes, it's not all or nothing. As to culture and entertainment in general not being essential, it's a long discussion, but I think you're wrong. It is essential. Perhaps not computer gaming in particular, but some form of entertainment is essential. And at the end of the day a game costs money and money is money and it's money out of your pocket, regardless of whether you consider entertainment essential to your overall well-being or not.




P.S.: You portray yourself as removed from the cliché "I'm not going to fret about how a company angered the always angry video game crowd", but that's not really true, is it?

It's like they keep trying to put the triangle in the square hole and don't understand why it doesn't work.

I'll always appreciate Bethesda for titles like Morrowind (despite it being full of bugs, but at least they were funny) but they've really gone down the drains recently.

This is my biggest gripe.

Epic isn't some small company, they've been around a very, very long time. They have had the good fortune of Fortnite blowing up beyond what anyone could have possibly foreseen and take less of a cut than Valve does with steam. Developers should be flocking to them under these circumstances - yet they are not.

Epic will ride the fortnite train into the ground (and I can't wait for the battle royale genre to fizzle out) and then what? They can only throw money for so long at developers.

Also, I can't understand the amount of people that can't comprehend the difference between such things as Nintendo only releasing on Nintendo systems vs Epic paying off a non owned company to be on their store only.