Can the lawyers on the receiving end of a DMCA takedown take the other party to court for a frivolous suit? I thought one of the problems was that there is no recourse for those on the receiving end of a bad DMCA takedown?

What I think would happen is the modders send a DMCA takedown, and EA either does take it down, or they file a "we're not violating copyright, promise" form and then that's the end of the DMCA. If they file the "we're not violating copyright" form, then from there the modders can file a normal copyright violation suit if they choose.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

Right, EA would file a counter-notice. Then the modder would have to get lawyers involved and file an actual legal complaint, and EA would respond with their lawyers.

But once they file the counter-notice, you could just stop there. They could sue you for filing in bad faith, but I've never heard of that happening.

[–] SchmidtGenetics 7 points 9 months ago

Sounds like it, not a lawyer, but if you’re wasting peoples time and money, yeah there will most likely be a way for them to get back at you.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 9 months ago

I'd fund that GoFundMe.

[–] A_Toasty_Strudel 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

They'd have to change the content or pay the man prolly.

[–] xkforce 19 points 9 months ago

Ahahahaha I want to live in your world instead of the one we actually live in.

load more comments (30 replies)

[–] [email protected] 104 points 9 months ago (11 children)

And this is not even beginning to touch content and features from other released versions of these games from 20 years ago not present, like four-screen splitscreen."

It's so cool and amazing that we finally have home theatre systems in every fucking house, and that's when devs decided we don't get split screen anymore. Modern hardware is wasted on modern devs. Can we send them back in time to learn how to optimize, and bring back the ones that knew how to properly utilize hardware?

[–] [email protected] 39 points 9 months ago (2 children)

It’s so cool and amazing that we finally have home theatre systems in every fucking house

Yeah I've noticed this too and it bothers me. We had 4 way split on 20inch tube tvs on hardware that measure their ram in MBs... But on modern 75+inch tvs on consoles with GBs of ram... Nah, too hard. You need to buy 4 copies of the game and have 4 separate setups... and probably need to be in 4 separate houses.

Couch co-op dying is basically when I stopped bothering with consoles all together. If I'm going to use a glorified PC, might as well just use a full fat PC and ignore consoles all together. I miss the N64 days.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 9 months ago (5 children)

We had 4 way split on 20inch tube tvs on hardware that measure their ram in MBs

And were still compute-bound. Things like the N64 pretty much used resources per pixel, mesh data being so light that the whole level could be in the limited RAM at the same time -- and needed to be because there weren't CPU cycles left over to implement asset streaming. Nowadays the only stuff that is in RAM is what you actually see, and with four perspectives, yes, you need four times the VRAM as every player can look at something completely different.

Sure you can write the game to use 1/4th the resources but then you either use that for singleplayer and get bad reviews for bad graphics, or you develop two completely different sets of assets, exploding development costs. I'm sure there also exist shady kitten-drowing marketing fucks who would object on reasons of "but hear me out, let's just sell them four copies instead" but they don't even get to object because production-wise split-screen isn't an option nowadays for games which aren't specifically focussing on that kind of thing. You can't just add it to any random title for a tenner.

load more comments (5 replies)

[–] catalyst 5 points 9 months ago

Yes, so much this! We played 4 player goldeneye on screens the size of a postage stamp for goodness sake.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Modern hardware is wasted on modern devs. Can we send them back in time to learn how to optimize, and bring back the ones that knew how to properly utilize hardware?

I think a lot of the blame is erroneously placed on devs, or it's used as a colloquialism. Anyone who has worked in a corporate environment as a developer knows that the developers are not the ones making the decisions. You really think that developers want to create a game that is bad, to have their name attached to something that is bad and to also know that they created something that is bad? No, developers want to make a good game, but time constraints and horrible management prioritizing the wrong things (mostly, microtransactions, monetizing the hell out of games, etc) results in bad games being created. Also, game development is more complex since games are more complex, hardware is more complex, and developers are expected to produce results in less time than ever before - it's not exactly easy, either.

It's an annoyance of mine and I'm sure you meant no harm by it, but as a developer (and as someone who has done game development on the side and knows a lot about the game development industry), it's something that bothers me when people blame bad games solely on devs, and not on the management who made decisions which ended up with games in a bad state.

With that said, I agree with your sentiments about modern hardware not being able to take advantage of long-forgotten cool features like four-screen splitscreen, offline modes (mostly in online games), arcade modes, etc. I really wish these features were prioritized.

[–] almar_quigley 4 points 9 months ago

I agree with you on this point. I think”devs” is conflated for the developing company and its management and not individual devs.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 9 months ago (2 children)

It's not a question of capability. It's a question of cost-benefit spending developer time on a feature not many people would use.

Couch coop was a thing because there was no way for you to play from your own homes. Nowadays it's a nice-to-have, because you can jump online any time and play together, anywhere in the world, without organizing everyone to show up at one house.

[–] chiliedogg 13 points 9 months ago

It also requires multiple copies of the game.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It’s a question of cost-benefit spending developer time on a feature not many people would use

Which is super ironic when you look at games that had an obviously tacked-on, rushed multiplayer component in the first place, such as Spec Ops: The Line, Bioshock 2 and Mass Effect 3

[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago

Goldeneye 007. Yeah seriously. The most famous multiplayer game of its generation very nearly didn't have multiplayer. It was tacked on when they finished the game and had a little bit of extra time and ROM storage.

[–] PillowTalk420 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

I would go back in time to 1995 and give John Carmack modern tools and maybe UE5 and see what happens.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago

Even if you gave him a current-day computer to play with (otherwise, even supercomputers of the time would struggle to run UE5), he wouldn't achieve much, consumer grade computers back then really struggled with 3D graphics. Quake, released in 1996, would usually play around 10-20 FPS.

load more comments (7 replies)

[–] [email protected] 36 points 9 months ago

Aspyr really keeps stepping on rakes with this one don't they? Rereleasing a classic like this should have been a slam dunk. It's really becoming a trend with Aspyr to have issues with their Star Wars ports, but at the same time I have to wonder if if there was pressure from Embracer to rush this out the door. When you're still desperately axing and selling off studios, rereleasing a fan favorite Star Wars game probably sounds like easy money no matter how much more time the game needs to be finished.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Aspyr has a history of laziness and incompetence, unfortunately. I really want to like the company because they were one of the few companies bringing my favorite games to Linux (KotOR and the Civ series) before Steam and Proton got so damn good. But their Civ ports were always plagued with weird bugs not in the original games, not to mention they didn't have cross-platform multiplayer, preventing me from playing online with my Windows-using friends unless I dual-booted or tried to fight Wine. And somehow their Civ save file format is different, so you couldn't even switch between Windows and Linux and continue the same game. It was baffling.

[–] bl4ckblooc 5 points 9 months ago

Only good game they did was Episode 1: Pod Racer.

[–] yamanii 19 points 9 months ago

Seems like Tomb raider collection was the fluke, because that one is almost perfect. But I tried out the dark forces remastered and was met with a godawful AI laser rifle with visible artifacts.

[–] EdibleFriend 17 points 9 months ago (6 children)

It's EA. That's how it keeps getting worse.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 9 months ago (9 children)

The original was EA, this re-release is Aspyr, so as bad as EA are I'm not convinced that they're to blame here.

[–] RightHandOfIkaros 22 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

The original was not EA. It was Pandemic Studios, who released Battlefront 1 and 2 both before they were acquired by Electronic Arts between 2007- 2009.

load more comments (1 replies)

load more comments (8 replies)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Embracer, actually, and while I do suspect that the blame for a lot of these problems lies with them (especially the lack of servers, which was almost certainly down to Embracer cheaping out), it's hard to blame this particular failure on anyone but Aspyr. While Embracer almost certainly created the conditions by not giving them enough time and resources to deliver good work, it's still on Aspyr that they used someone's work without permission. There's no real justification for that, even if you're in a bind.