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The Talos Principle

Unkillable Cat

LEST WE FORGET
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Possible, and yeah, this is much less bad than what that other game I remember did, which gave players of pirated copies random CTDs. And random CTDs are much harder to just dismiss as "lol you pirated it" than "I'm stuck at a very specific section".

It's still not a method I would use, were I a developer.

IIRC it was Titan Quest that had various bugs and CTDs introduced as a copy protection scheme.

I agree that having hidden anti-pirating measures can result in negative marketing, and I believe it was the reason that Titan Quest floundered back in 2006. But in today's era of social media it is very easy to stay on top and announce quickly when something is clearly an anti-pirating mechanic and not a bug. Croteam did even better and, as has been said, introduced a new element instead of just having random CTDs. Players first had to deal with the unkillable purple scorpion, but if players managed to reach Level 5 regardless, their mouselook would lock up and point them up at the sky...a "bug" that's very easy to find the source for.
 
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What a shitty alt. You know who you are.

yeah its horrible how it completely fucks over the paying customers oh wait

Yeah, it's infinitely better than DRM. It's just retarded for the devs themselves as most people won't bother understanding what is causing the "glitches" unless Kotaku writes an article about it and will assume the game is a buggy piece of shit (and so will the people reading their impressions). Alan Wake made it more obvious (the character gets a pirate hat).

edit: actually it's an eyepatch. :)

SOWKh.jpg
 
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Metro

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When someone compares copyright infringement with bank robbery, you know you are dealing with a grade-A retard.
Try-harder, edgelord. You can dance around the philosophical discussion all you want -- derp NOTHING REMOVED FROM INVENTORY -- but the bottom line is you aren't a paying customer so what the fuck are you complaining about?
 

Phage

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A. anyone actually complaining about the elevator thing is fucking stupid. probably took a member of croteam an hour max to implement and he probably did it while burnt out as a fun side thing to throw in.

B. I'm 20 minutes into the game. So far it has nothing Portal about it at all beyond being a first person puzzler. That could change I guess. Game has some issue where it freezes randomly - going to try changing some configurations. It could be my desktop, but I'm skeptical since I can run serious sam 3 (same engine) on high settings with absolutely zero issues at all (and SS3 is a much more demanding game due to all of the enemies on screen)
 

Jaesun

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This is basically a big "puzzle" game with a story, and this looks really interesting/fun.

Adventure gamers:

The Good:
Huge collection of deeply clever and challenging puzzles; an intriguing, mysterious storyline that hits the right intellectual and emotional notes; world full of secrets ripe for uncovering; consistently solid soundtrack.

The Bad:
Repetitive environments drag a bit thin; no single innovative “hook” that stands out; hint system isn’t very useful.

Our Verdict:
Bursting at the seams with challenging puzzles and thought-provoking science fiction, The Talos Principle is a philosophically-minded first-person puzzler that’s well worth your time.



It is a bit expensive at $30 (but seems worth it, looking as the beautiful environments etc...). Adding to my STEAM wishlist and wait for a sale I guess.
 

MRY

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I think Croteam's move is less an anti-piracy measure than it is a piece of performance art designed to attract paying customers to the game; of course they know pirates will work around it, and I can't imagine that they think that it will deter piracy. They probably don't even hope that it will cause a single pirate to buy the game, though I suppose some small number of them might in a touche kind of hat-tip. Rather, the audience is people who have already paid, who will feel better about having paid because they can laugh at pirates, and people who haven't bought the game but will hear about it, and/or about the developer, in a way that will make the game and/or developer seem clever. This seeming cleverness could attract customers to the game.

In my view, current technology does not offer a feasible way to stop piracy of traditional single-player games, so I don't think it's worth pretending otherwise if you're a developer. You have to accept piracy and work within a reality in which people can get your game for free almost as easily as they can buy it. That said, I think it's mistaken to believe that piracy harms no one. Pirates also need to accept reality, and reality is that widespread piracy causes major developers to implement DRM that harms the gaming experience in various ways. Even assuming piracy imposes no other costs, it worsens games in that regard. Moreover, the perception -- whether fair or not -- that piracy suppresses sales is probably a significant cause of various trends that have worsened games, specifically increased movement toward: (1) consoles; (2) games with inescapable online integration or at least an online-experience priority; (3) F2P with microtransactions; (4) "early access," crowdfunding, pre-ordering, and other ways of locking in money before piracy can conceivably suppress sales; and (5) using post-release patching (which is to say, premature release) to encourage legal purchasing. It's impossible for me to quantify the effect, and maybe I'm spinning a just-so story, but it certainly seems to me that the two are related. As someone who grew up in the age of standalone, well-made single-player game, it's distressing to see that type of game being relegated to a niche. Of course no individual act of piracy is responsible for this state of affairs, just like no individual purchase is responsible for a developer's financial well-being, and at least in certain circumstances it's hard to be annoyed at someone for pirating a game. Holding all else constant, as between someone pirating Primordia and not playing it at all, I'd much rather they pirate it.

As I get older, I'm slowly coming to the view that the market is the best system for pricing goods but that an individual participant in the market should not give controlling moral weight to the market. In other words, that customers are willing to pay a certain price does not necessarily mean that you shouldn't sell it cheaper, if you can; that sellers are willing to sell at a certain price does not necessarily mean you should offer not a penny more. I wish more developers would stop charging for their games when they can afford to give them away (esp., with older games), and I wish more gamers would not pirate games when they can afford to buy them.
 
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Pirates also need to accept reality, and reality is that widespread piracy causes major developers to implement DRM that harms the gaming experience in various ways.

In other words, piracy is inevitable but they are too stubborn to accept that reality and keep finding new ways to make their products harder to use because hey, there are people who want to buy our stuff anyway so what's the harm in annoying them as we try to make life more difficult for the people who can't/won't buy our stuff. Makes me wonder how they even manage to stay in business with such poor decision making.

At this point I'm waiting for a big developer/publisher to release a good game with no DRM whatoever and enjoy massive success, just to see the faces of all the "b-but it's a necessary evil!" people.
 

Jick Magger

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I'd imagine nine times out of ten the DRM schemes are just forced upon the game by the publishers because the idea of having no security against piracy at all scares the bajesus out of them. It might be easy for you to say that piracy doesn't greatly affect sales (which at this point is really unquantifiable), tell that to the people who've sunk millions of dollars into the game's development. I don't really agree with it at all, but I somewhat understand where they're coming from. Same way that games'll emulate prior successful games to try and capture some of their thunder, it's a corporate decision made by suits who care more about the profit than people bitching about their DRM causing slow-down.
 

groke

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I wasn't even going to touch this piece of shit, but now I will pirate it and shitpost loudly for a month about how terrible it is. DRM lyfe.
 

MRY

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In other words, piracy is inevitable but they are too stubborn to accept that reality
Well, piracy is no more inevitable than DRM;* both are the result of people making decisions, not immutable laws of nature. (* DRM might be easier to stop because there are fewer decision makers, and those decision makers can more easily be held accountable, of course.) All I'm saying is that pirates who say, "We aren't hurting anything!" are factually wrong even if you accept the premise that they would never have bought the game.

Makes me wonder how they even manage to stay in business with such poor decision making.
When successful companies engage in some behavior that seems obviously foolish -- or when large numbers of people make choices that are seem plainly wrong -- I tend to try to second-guess my own assumptions. (For example, if you think, "Disney's decision with respect to Pixar/Marvel/Star Wars is dumb even to me, the company clearly doesn't know how to manage a brand!" -- and who hasn't thought that at some point? -- it's a useful corrective to remember that Disney has long successfully managed brands, while we never have.) So, for example, it seems to me quite possible that companies have gone through an analysis like: (1) DRM makes things worse for our paying customers; (2) DRM also makes things harder for pirates; (3) we've run the numbers and only a small but vocal minority of paying customers will actually stop buying because of DRM; (4) by contrast, a relatively large number of stupid people will be unable to pirate the game. I mean, I haven't run any such numbers or wouldn't even know where such numbers would come from, but it seems possible.

As someone who scrupulously buys products -- since I don't watch/read/play all that much any more, it's not too expensive -- the thing that amazes me most is not gaming DRM but the unskippable shit on DVDs. BBC repays my courtesy in buying their product with a semi-unskippable set of ads, an unskippable FBI warning, an unskippable "commentaries are not our official policy" warning, an unskippable logo sequence, and then slow-ass menus. This is true for basically every company. (Disney is in some ways the most outrageous, announcing that their DVDs are "equipped with fast play" that can be "bypassed by pressing menu"; "fast play" actually means that if you press nothing, you watch a long series of ads, while pressing menu puts you through an unskippable series of warnings.)

At this point I'm waiting for a big developer/publisher to release a good game with no DRM whatoever and enjoy massive success, just to see the faces of all the "b-but it's a necessary evil!" people.
Galactic Civilizations 2 is a decent example, but despite what they claimed, it did have a form of DRM, namely the release of a piece of shit game that required dozens of week-one patches that could only be downloaded with a valid purchase. Of course the patches were themselves ultimately cracked, etc., but as far as a I know, no developer has set it up so that pirates enjoy a game no worse than bona fide customers.

For myself, I've always tried to help Primordia pirates when I see them on Twitter, etc., mostly for the performance-art reason.
 

Phage

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This really, really isn't an adventure game. Who moved it here and why? lol

Unless the likes of Portal and Bejewled are adventure games now.

Btw - as the only person on the entire forum who has played this apparently, it's gud.
 
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7h30n

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And let's not forget that bigger developers achieve all (or most) of their profits from preorders and day 1 purchases. If a DRM is able to stop a pirate from playing for a week that is an amazing success. Since games are trend and hit based, 'desperate' gamer will buy the game instead of waiting for a crack. If he can wait for more than a week then he probably wouldn't even buy the game in the first place. Those first couple of weeks are crucial.
Unfortunately I fear it's the smaller teams that can lose a lot more because of piracy since they can't really sell their games for as much as 50 or 60$ dollars but must target lower ranges. Croteam is somewhere in the middle and they really wanted to break out of Serious Sam games but they have to keep 'em making if they want to survive. I really hope for them Talos Principle made them good profit (me being Croat and all) even though I'm not really interested in the game.
Btw do you know on how many pages in one of the main Croatian newspaper was this game's global critical acclaim mentioned? I would say it's about a tenth of one single page...
Sorry went a bit toward a rant about game dev industry and it's shit state here...
 

Starwars

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So, they sure screwed themselves over by doing all that pirate business, right?

:smug:

Got this on the recent sale (not the expansion though). Hope it'll be good.
 

Forest Dweller

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I've played it since I made this thread. I liked it a lot. Puzzles are good with some real challenges. Each puzzle is in a discrete area, but then there are "star" puzzles which require you to think outside these areas and usually combine things from different puzzles. I like the "no bullshit" approach to the puzzles where they just lay them out in front of you and allow you to take them at your leisure. It's non-linear as well, so you can skip a puzzle and come back to it later if you can't figure it out. The story is interesting and philosophical, but told through audio tapes you find and interactions on a computer, which means it's never forced upon you. All in all, this is my favorite game of this type. It's got a significant amount of length to it too.
 

Phage

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Yeah I finished this game back in February and can mirror Dicksmoker 's sentiments. It's better than Portal imo, but definitely not nearly as 'inviting' or 'player friendly' or whatever buzzword you fancy. I also like it a lot more than other games in the genre like antichamber, over the void, the ball, and inMomentum. So yeah - pretty much my favorite first person puzzle title yet.

The only thing I'll disagree with is that I thought the story was a bit pretentious, but I can't say I really care since the point of the game is the puzzles. The final puzzle was really fucking good and tied everything together in a neat way without resorting to "epic meme spouting boss xD cake!" like the Portals did. (And yes, I'm aware that the memes/cake shit was the fans' fault)

Looking forward to the DLC to go on megasale.
 

racofer

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Jaesunkun, what is your take on this game? I tried out a couple of levels on the "demo" and now I'm considering buying while it's on sale.

Is it long? Like Portal 2 long (or preferably longer)?

I really liked the setting and the writing so far, but there's no way I'm spending money on it and Road to Gehenna if it's a 3 hours ride.
 
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Jaesunkun, what is your take on this game? I tried out a couple of levels on the "demo" and now I'm considering buying while it's on sale.

Is it long? Like Portal 2 long (or preferably longer)?

I really liked the setting and the writing so far, but there's no way I'm spending money on it and Road to Gehenna if it's a 3 hours ride.

It's longer than portal 1 and 2 combined. I spent a total of 22 hours to complete the game plus some wandering, and that's just the base game. Bought it in this sale, and I enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed portal too, and there are some similarities. Portal uses HL 2 assets, and this one uses serious sam 3 assets. But is a lot less linear, and much more difficult than portal ever was. Even when you actually solve a puzzle, sometimes you wonder if you did the way it was intended or maybe you broke some rules accidentally and got successful. The playback game play mechanics is the one I felt most difficult to grasp, since it is presented in the early end, and this game gives no tutorial to understand the mechanics. You learn as you go. That's why you may actually try lots of puzzles if you get stuck and all and so you learn new ways to use the gadgets - in portal, puzzles were sequential and one at a time.

Also, the stars: there 30 stars scattered through all levels, and to get them, it will require a lot of brain work, and in some cases, walkthroughs. Some solutions are so bizarre that borders exploitation of the engine quirks, like messing with items from different puzzles, and jumping on walls that supposedly are not fit for the player character to move. They're not necessary to the best ending though, but to open up more difficult levels, the make possible for you to get to a "middle" ending (there's also a good and a bad endings, a total of three). Sometimes, even when you figure the solution, it also requires some control skills, and precise timing abilities, and you have to backtrack a lot.

There's a story, and I quite actually liked it, but it feels like those walking simulators, and the ending was predictable, but I couldn't stop playing to see it for myself. And I like the ruins visuals, even though they are repetitive, the game is quite beautiful, it runs flawlessly on my rig, very smooth solid 60 FPS. Lots of readables, by the end I was just rushing through some texts, selecting those I felt interesting. They're there just to give you the info about the situation overall.



TL;DR: Game is good, challenging, long and beatiful, story is well done. You may get tired of it but you feel like completing those damn hard puzzles.
 

Alex

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I think Croteam's move is less an anti-piracy measure than it is a piece of performance art designed to attract paying customers to the game; of course they know pirates will work around it, and I can't imagine that they think that it will deter piracy. They probably don't even hope that it will cause a single pirate to buy the game, though I suppose some small number of them might in a touche kind of hat-tip. Rather, the audience is people who have already paid, who will feel better about having paid because they can laugh at pirates, and people who haven't bought the game but will hear about it, and/or about the developer, in a way that will make the game and/or developer seem clever. This seeming cleverness could attract customers to the game.
(snip...)

Well, I have no idea what this game is about, but from this thread, what I do know about it is that the guys who made it possibly don't know how to program. And that is exactly why doing DRM like this might not be in your best interests.
 

Naveen

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I really like it, and some puzzles are very clever and require out of the box thinking (quite literally.) Unfortunately, that was exactly my problem, that I like it and wanted to know more about the story, hear the audio logs, etc. After 12 hours or so, I said "screw this" and I just watched some LP or walkthrough because I couldn't be arsed to play more bizarre puzzles.
 
In My Safe Space
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In other words, piracy is inevitable but they are too stubborn to accept that reality
Well, piracy is no more inevitable than DRM;* both are the result of people making decisions, not immutable laws of nature. (* DRM might be easier to stop because there are fewer decision makers, and those decision makers can more easily be held accountable, of course.) All I'm saying is that pirates who say, "We aren't hurting anything!" are factually wrong even if you accept the premise that they would never have bought the game.

Makes me wonder how they even manage to stay in business with such poor decision making.
When successful companies engage in some behavior that seems obviously foolish -- or when large numbers of people make choices that are seem plainly wrong -- I tend to try to second-guess my own assumptions. (For example, if you think, "Disney's decision with respect to Pixar/Marvel/Star Wars is dumb even to me, the company clearly doesn't know how to manage a brand!" -- and who hasn't thought that at some point? -- it's a useful corrective to remember that Disney has long successfully managed brands, while we never have.) So, for example, it seems to me quite possible that companies have gone through an analysis like: (1) DRM makes things worse for our paying customers; (2) DRM also makes things harder for pirates; (3) we've run the numbers and only a small but vocal minority of paying customers will actually stop buying because of DRM; (4) by contrast, a relatively large number of stupid people will be unable to pirate the game. I mean, I haven't run any such numbers or wouldn't even know where such numbers would come from, but it seems possible.

As someone who scrupulously buys products -- since I don't watch/read/play all that much any more, it's not too expensive -- the thing that amazes me most is not gaming DRM but the unskippable shit on DVDs. BBC repays my courtesy in buying their product with a semi-unskippable set of ads, an unskippable FBI warning, an unskippable "commentaries are not our official policy" warning, an unskippable logo sequence, and then slow-ass menus. This is true for basically every company. (Disney is in some ways the most outrageous, announcing that their DVDs are "equipped with fast play" that can be "bypassed by pressing menu"; "fast play" actually means that if you press nothing, you watch a long series of ads, while pressing menu puts you through an unskippable series of warnings.)

At this point I'm waiting for a big developer/publisher to release a good game with no DRM whatoever and enjoy massive success, just to see the faces of all the "b-but it's a necessary evil!" people.
Galactic Civilizations 2 is a decent example, but despite what they claimed, it did have a form of DRM, namely the release of a piece of shit game that required dozens of week-one patches that could only be downloaded with a valid purchase. Of course the patches were themselves ultimately cracked, etc., but as far as a I know, no developer has set it up so that pirates enjoy a game no worse than bona fide customers.

For myself, I've always tried to help Primordia pirates when I see them on Twitter, etc., mostly for the performance-art reason.
If it's a matter of weeks, why not release on DRM platform first and then for example release on GOG a month later?
 

pakoito

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I'm halfway through Sector C but the game is starting to feel a bit boring. Is it worth doing the grind of picking all pieces for the final levels?
 

Jaedar

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I'm halfway through Sector C but the game is starting to feel a bit boring. Is it worth doing the grind of picking all pieces for the final levels?
The very final puzzle level is cool. I seem to recall the latter half of C having some cool minihubs as well.

But at the same time, you have seen all the puzzle mechanics at this point.
 

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