Gaming
Game Ban Lets Developers Ban Cheaters On Steam
Valve has been locked in a battle with cheaters pretty much ever since they created Steam. Where there are multiplayer games, it’s fair to say there are probably going to be cheaters. So most Steam users are probably familiar with Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC), the software that monitors users on the servers on which it has been installed and kicks off those that it thinks are cheating. Since it was released with Counter Strike in 2002, some sources estimate more than two and a half million users have been banned by the software.
Yesterday, the folks at SteamDB noticed a new feature had been added. Valve have introduced Game Ban, a system under which troublesome players can find themselves banned from games by their developers. It will allow developers to take full control of their games without having to rely solely on the VAC software supplied by Valve. The move makes sense. With Steam’s popularity growing by the minute, more and more players join online games all the time, and whether people like to admit it or not, some of those players are going to be cheaters. The sheer volume of users on Steam means more cheaters are able to slip through the cracks of VAC. Individual developers, however, are likely to be able to devote the time and energy to monitoring their own games for unscrupulous players. Small developers in particular are set to benefit most, many of them without any other way to effectively keep cheaters off their games.
Valve has described how the process of banning players will work. “Game developers inform Valve when a disruptive player has been detected in their game, and Valve applies the game ban to the account. The game developer is solely responsible for the decision to apply a game ban. Valve only enforces the game ban as instructed by the game developer.”
People are already expressing concerns about the potential for developers to abuse this system. While most developers are likely to apply bans fairly, there are fears that some could use the system to silence players critical of certain aspects of their games. It’s no secret that plenty of developers have a dodgy history when it comes to community management on Steam. As to whether or not this new system will allow such abuse, it’s not yet clear. Valve hasn’t provided a lot of information, other than players with questions about individual bans should contact the developers. That should work.
Gaming
Ubisoft says that future Assassin’s Creed games will need more time to be made
As Assassin’s Creed Shadows is about to sneak up on people in November, Ubisoft says that the time between developing games needs to be longer to find the “right balance.” Shadows has been in development for four years, longer than any other game in the series up to this point. That includes the huge open-world epics Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Shadows lead producer Karl Onnée (thanks, GamesIndustry.biz) says that the latest AC game took 25% longer to make than Valhalla. He says this is necessary to keep the quality of the series that it is known for: “It’s always a balance between time and costs, but the more time you have, the more you can iterate.” You can speed up a project by adding more people to it, but that doesn’t give you more time to make changes.
Onnée says this has as much to do with immersion and aesthetics as it does with fixing bugs and smoothing out pixels. This is because the development team needs time to learn about each new historical setting: “We are trying to make a game that is as real as possible.” We’re proud of it, and the process took a long time. In feudal Japan, building a house is very different from building a house in France or England in the Middle Ages. As an artist, you need to learn where to put things in a feudal Japanese home. For example, food might not belong there. Get all the information you need and learn it. That process takes a long time.”
You’ll have to wait a little longer for Ubisoft to work on each game. Are you okay with that? In what part of Shadows are you now? Is it interesting to you? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Gaming
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP on PS5
You can now pre-order Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP, a remaster that Dragami Games and Capcom both created. You can now pre-order the PS5 game on the PS Store for $44.99 or £39.99. If you have PS Plus, you can get an extra 10% off the price.
The company put out a new trailer with about three minutes of gameplay to mark the start of the pre-order period. Lollipop Chainsaw RePOP is a remaster of Grasshopper Manufacture’s crazy action game from 2012. You play as Juliet, a high school student who fights off waves of zombies.
The remaster adds RePOP mode, an alternative mode that swaps out the blood and gore for fun visual effects. It also adds a bunch of other features and improvements that make the game better overall. You can expect the graphics and sound to be better as well.
The game will now come out on September 12, 2024, instead of September 12, 2024. Are you excited to get back to this? Please cheer us on in the section below.
Gaming
This Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 zombies trailer is way too expensive
Is there really anyone who is following the story of Call of Duty’s zombie mode? We’ve known about the story in a vague way for a while, but we couldn’t tell you anything about it. It looks like the “Dark Aether” story will continue in Black Ops 6, but we don’t really know what that means.
For those of you who care, here is the official blurb with some background: “Requiem, led by the CIA, finally closed the last-dimensional portal, sending its inhabitants back to the nightmare world known as the Dark Aether, after two years of fighting zombie outbreaks around the world during the Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War timeline.”
Wait, there’s more! “Agent Samantha Maxis gave her life to seal this weird dimension from the inside out.” Even worse things were to come: senior staff members of Requiem were arrested without a reason by the Project Director, who turned out to be Edward Richtofen.
Black Ops 6 will take place about five years later, and it looks like it will show more about Richtofen’s goals and motivations. The most important thing is that you will probably be shooting an unimaginable number of zombies in the head. This week, on August 8, there will be a full reveal of the gameplay, so keep an eye out for that.
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