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GeekNights Tuesday - Games
Tonight on GeekNights, returning from holidays, weddings, vacations, parties, Utena episode preproduction, and early spring, we talk about all the games we've been playing lately. Fantasy Football (Wonderbolts just won the Superbowl), Towerfall, Risk of Rain, Mottainai, Rocket League (online and at a LAN party), Civ V against humans, and more. The Burning Wheel Codex cometh. Netrunner's rules have changed significantly. The PS4 has some strange failings when attempting to do local multiplayer. We'll be live at PAX South with three panels!
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Discussions, moreso than dealings.
Is that not the same for PSN?
On a PC, I just plug a controller in and someone plays. No one has to "log in as a guest" or anything silly like that.
Definitely the culture of pickup and play multiplayer games is dying out. Even the new Halo, doesn't have split screen.
1 console, 1 player. Makes sense for 3D games since the performance is divided between the players on a splitscreen. At least for consoles.
Also there are a few games coming out where the controllers can be smartphone or gamepad which makes party games great.
The second is that PC doesn't allow people to have multiple active accounts at the same time. The Xbox and Ps4 does, so that's why that occurs.
While I understand the benefit of play-by-mail, my computer always takes so long to boot up Civ that it would just drive me crazy to do it that way.
No one else's steam account needs to log into my PC to locally join a game I launched. Just pick up a controller and go. The Steam user logs in at the Steam level, and then can launch any game it owns: anyone with meat in the room can just join the game.
I haven't listened to the episode, so I don't know how arduous this process is on PS4, but back when we still played 360, the "log all the controllers in as guests" thing was something I would just do as the host before handing anyone a controller, rather than sit through the "OK NOW EVERYONE PRESS DOWN, NOW EVERYONE PRESS A" "wait, which one is A?" bullshit.
I have a PS4 and a WiiU. When I play local co-op Diablo III on my PS4 with my roommate, we both log in and anything that he earns while playing "my" game transfers over to his account when he plays by himself in his game. Any gear he earns playing with me, the experience he gets, the quests he completes, even when playing in "my" game transfers over to his game when he plays solo because he's not just playing as a "guest," he's signed in so the PS4 recognizes him.
Contrast that to the WiiU. I have the new Mario Kart game, which is awesome. However, anything that I unlock in my profile does not transfer over to my roommates' profiles, even when they're playing multiplayer with me. The WiiU does not allow my roommates to log in as themselves, they're just guests or other human players, so even if we unlock a new race course or a new driver, or whatever on my profile, my roommates have to do it all over again on theirs.
I would much rather spend an extra 30 seconds or whatever logging in and being able to keep anything that I achieve playing than having to do it all over again because I can't log in and I'm just playing as a guest.
Just press start at GO!
What I was saying in my post is that the whole user account/guest login is actually what the Sony/Microsoft console crowd wants. It's useful to them. If you and your buddies all have those consoles, it's a valuable feature.
If you're entertaining friends who don't often touch consoles, it gets in the way. For most people, it's a small enough roadblock (press 2 buttons to get into the game) that nobody complains about it. But we are on the Internet here, people.
If a person is savvy enough to play River City Ransom, he or she should be savvy enough to follow simple instructions on how to log in as a guest. Is it a little inconvenient? Sure, but we're not talking about anything of Sisyphean proportions.
To compound it, if the person who started the game logged in on the other PS4 (by habit as much as for a reason), it crashed/fucked the game being played in the other room unrecoverably. This happens even if the other players WERE logged in and OWNED the game.
Consoles should be the "just play" platform. It's weird that they're encumbered so, especially for a game like Towerfall that has no advancement and exists pretty-much solely as a local multiplayer experience.
The second one comes from a little bit of poor architecture probably, but also comes from people who want persistent statistics. You don't, of course. But what I was trying to say was that the Xbox and PlayStation platforms were already on the track of "multiple people on the same console" because consoles have a legacy of that. So their systems were designed around allowing other people to have accounts active so that they can get their achievements, etc. Their API was probably just designed to say "You'll always be guaranteed an account will be active", and their achievements platform is probably heavily tied into that concept. The other part is it's probably just easier to leverage that instead of toggling between alternate states within your game. Becomes a minor inconvenience for the sake of simplicity. I guarantee this is a bug in the game, not the platform. Didn't read this until after but you have it correct. It's not beneficial to everyone, but I am pretty sure in betting that they have usage statistics on this.