NSFW Best Thread Ever [No SJW-related posts allowed]

[Infinitron]

https://www.axios.com/2022/07/14/knights-of-decayden-archipelago-xbox-larry-holland

Axios has rediscovered a long-lost exclusive release for the original Xbox, which was developed by the team behind a series of acclaimed Star Wars games and quietly canceled by Microsoft two decades ago.

Why it matters: Knights of Decayden (sometimes spelled as Decadyn) has been largely unknown to the public until now and helps highlight a hidden part of early Xbox history.

• Axios is even able to share exclusive footage of a build of it in action.

Details: The game went by many names, including Knights of Utu, when it was pitched in 2000 to Sony as a PlayStation 2 game.

• It was then called Archipelago early in its development at Xbox, where the name was changed to Knights of Decayden.
• The team behind it, Totally Games, was best known for Star Wars: X-Wing and a series of sequels.
• Decayden also focused on flight combat but set in an original fantasy world.

Trading X-Wings for flying beasts: Players controlled a knight on a flying seahorse and engaged in ranged combat against other knights and monsters, lance-based slow-motion jousting and diving underwater to fight sea creatures.

• From the pitch to Sony: “Imagine jousting high in the air amid skyscraper-like islands soaring above a sparkling sea.”
• Plans called for a single-player story mode and multiplayer.

Alternate history: Decayden was to be an Xbox exclusive, releasing within a year of the system’s late 2001 launch.

• It would be a signature release from an operation called Studio X that focused on partnerships between Microsoft and outside game teams.
• Instead, it was canceled in early 2002, an early casualty in Microsoft’s effort to enter the console market and create games to rival the output of PlayStation, Nintendo and Sega.

What they’re saying: Totally Games founder Larry Holland remembers the project as “incredibly ambitious and sort of foolish in equal measures.”

• Holland said the process of creating a brand new world and crafting unique flight combat proved overwhelming.
• Worse, though, was a time crunch. “I agreed to a very aggressive schedule,” he said, “probably more for financial reasons and to keep my organization and company not having to lay off a bunch of people.”
• That put the team perpetually in a squeeze, while trying to please early Microsoft game managers who Holland said didn’t have much experience trusting developers. (One boss, he recalled, had previously managed the Excel spreadsheet program.)

No surprise: Holland acknowledges that the game was still rough when it was canceled in early 2002.

• “We hadn’t ironed out all of the issues with regard to scale and speed and melee.”
• He described the cancellation as “demoralizing” but expected: “I learned a lot about what to attempt and what not to in terms of sort of risk-taking and at least balancing the risk-taking with the schedule.”

Today’s spotlight on Knights of Decayden exists because of a passing remark from longtime Microsoft gaming executive Phil Spencer.

First hints: Spencer walked Axios through his career at Xbox for our profile of him, and noted that the first assignment he had when he joined the Xbox gaming team was to “cancel Larry Holland’s game.”

• In 2001, Xbox executives had tapped the enterprising Spencer, who was already a Microsoft veteran and known gamer, to oversee Studio X.
• He didn’t know Holland and hadn’t canceled a game before.
• During our interview, Spencer briefly uttered the name “Knights of Decayden,” but didn’t spell it. A Microsoft PR person spelled the game’s last word as “Decadyn.”

Chasing it down: There is barely any information online about the game.

• When we searched “Knights of Decadyn” after the Spencer chat, it returned a single result in Google in the signature of a user posting to an Xbox forum in May 2002. The user listed the game as one of dozens of “sweet upcoming Xbox games.”
• Weeks after our Spencer interview, Holland, who now designs games for Asylum Labs, happily shared more details with Axios. He revealed that he’s awash in notes and files from his decades of game development and even had an executable for Dacayden but hadn’t been able to run it yet.
• He sent over a pitch document, talked about the game in detail and shared a video. “Technology has advanced quite a bit,” he said after screening it again.

One previous glimpse: In 2009, the game was added to a compendium of canceled games called Unseen 64, under the spelling Knights of Decayden.

• The listing includes a few pieces of concept art scraped from artists’ online portfolios, a logo and several vague screenshots.

The bottom line: As Holland put it to Axios: “We're probably the only two people in the last two decades to talk about this.”

 

[rusty_shackleford]

https://dragonage.fandom.com/wiki/Ser_Isaac_Armor

Ser Isaac's Armor is a medium armor item set obtained with the Ser Isaac's Armor downloadable content for Dragon Age II. The set was announced on January 20, 2011.[1] Players who purchase Dead Space 2 for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or PC (retail only) can redeem this armor.

nearly every time you see the word "blockchain" you can replace it with "very slow database"
absolutely nothing he mentions requires a decentralized blockchain, they're just features nobody but people who spend all their time thinking about money actually want

 

[Bigfass]

You're correct, except he's probably heavily implying RMT. RMT-ing all this shit cross-game & cross-publisher benefits from a public & decentralized ledger, but it makes no sense otherwise.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Caim]

Never thought I'd see so much effort put into a watersport fetish video.

 

[Mikeal]

 

[Jonathan "Zee Nekomimi]

metal gear have better waifu material

 

[Saber-Scorpion]

Guy criticizes “anime tier story” but uses the term “dub,” presumably to mean voice acting in a video game. Self hating weeb?

 

[Tyrr]

Stealth is for sissies.

 

[Strig]

Guy criticizes “anime tier story” but uses the term “dub,” presumably to mean voice acting in a video game. Self hating weeb?

Probably, but in the case of MGS the original voice acting was in Japanese so the English release is technically a dub. What was the original language of Thief we might never know.

 

[pOcHa]

Guy criticizes “anime tier story” but uses the term “dub,” presumably to mean voice acting in a video game. Self hating weeb?

Probably, but in the case of MGS the original voice acting was in Japanese so the English release is technically a dub. What was the original language of Thief we might never know.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thieves'_cant

 

[Dramart]

Both are shit

 

[TheHeroOfTime]

Nah, MGS is tight

 

[Strig]

Nah, MGS is tight

Let's simplify things.

 

[markec]

 

[Baron Dupek]

 

[markec]

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[Curious_Tongue]

 

[Fedora Master]

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Bungie Sues Twitch-Streaming Destiny Cheater ‘MiffysWorld’ For Being Awful

Oh come on, how 'awful' can one player be?

Highlighting his Twitter handle ‘@inkcel‘, Bungie describes the California resident as a Destiny 2 user who routinely streams himself using cheats to gain an unfair advantage over regular players.

Bungie and [Luca] Leone appear to have more than a little history. According to Bungie, access to Destiny 2 is only granted after the user agrees to the terms of a Limited Software License Agreement (LSLA). One of the agreed terms is that if a user cheats, Bungie can ban them. Leone allegedly cheated a lot and as a result, got banned a lot too.

By repeatedly creating new accounts and repeatedly agreeing to the terms of the LSLA, Bungie says Leone committed serial fraud. While that can be a serious offense from a legal perspective, other allegations are much more troubling. Leone’s battle with Bungie seems fairly personal and at times threatened to spill over into the ‘real’ world.

...

Many [bans] feature Leone using an account to stream himself using a cheat suite and Bungie using tools to detect the account cheating. Using display names including 'Hoehitter', 'Bungie', 'bungiemad', and 'hahahalolxd', the time between Leone making a new account and the account being banned became shorter over time. Then things began to escalate.

On May 18, 2022, Leone tweeted an image of Bungie employee Dylan Gaffner. “i just realized i’ll be moving to a place that’s 30 minutes away from dmg [Gafner],” he wrote, adding: “he is not safe.”

“it’s a warm summer day in portland and dylan has just woken up from his restless slumber. He rolls over to pick up his phone so he can check twitter as he sees that someone is cheating with his full government name as their bungie id [sic]. “DYLAN GAFNER LMDOAOAOAOAO.”

...

On July 4, 2022, after temporarily moving to Washington State, Leone doubled down.

Just over a week later, Twitter banned Leone’s account following a tweet stating: “twitter celebrities deserve death.”

...

Bungie already had enough evidence to bring a civil complaint but its investigation lifted the veil on something unexpected.

“Leone is an active member of the ‘OGUsers‘ account hacking and selling forum, where he sells (presumably stolen) social media accounts – and also ‘sells’ Destiny 2 emblems,” the complaint notes

Every sale of a Destiny emblem (a non-transferable digital art badge) is a violation of Bungie’s LSLA. However, Bungie says the technique used by Leone to transfer emblems represents a circumvention of the technical measures put in place to prevent fraud. Even considering the defendant’s previous alleged conduct, somehow this also manages to escalate, this time by affecting the charitable work of the Bungie Foundation.

“[A]mong the emblems Leone sells are emblems Bungie makes available only to players who donate to selected charity drives; thus, not only is Leone lining his own pockets in violation of the LSLA, but he is devaluing an award Bungie grants for charitable giving and thereby harming the Bungie Foundation’s ability to fund charitable causes,” the complaint continues.

According to Bungie, on July 6, 2022, Leone offered two “$100 donation links for $50 each,” adding: “Already redeemed mine”. Bungie says the donation links led to emblems only available to those donating $100 to the Bungie Foundation. Bungie linked the OGUsers account ‘Knight’ to Leone via an email address he also used to buy goods from the Bungie store.

“That combination of conduct makes Bungie’s decision to bring this lawsuit easy. As Bungie has demonstrated repeatedly, it will not allow its game, its community, or its employees to be abused, defrauded, or threatened. Leone has done all three, and this action is the consequence.”

...

Bungie says all infringement was willful and it’s entitled to damages in an amount to be proven at trial. In the alternative, the company seeks $150,000 in statutory damages for each copyrighted work infringed. And there’s more.

“By using cheat software to access data Bungie engineered the Destiny 2 software to withhold from players, Defendant bypassed technological measures Bungie put in place to control access to Destiny 2,” Bungie explains.

Under the DMCA’s anti-circumvention provisions, statutory damages awards are ‘just’ $2,500. However, that is $2,500 for every circumvention, i.e every single use of the cheating software. Whether Bungie can put a number on that is not mentioned in the complaint, but it seems more than likely.

Finally, Bungie is demanding an injunction to prohibit all of the above-mentioned behavior, including to prevent Leone from “harassing, stalking, or otherwise engaging in unwanted or unsolicited contact with Bungie, its employees, or Destiny 2 players.

Boring legal document with all the details.

And people wonder why I don't do online gaming.

 

[karoliner]

 

[markec]

 

[Fedora Master]

 

[Daemongar]

I'm not going to lie: last week I bought a crummy USB Thrustmaster T80 for $20 at a resale shop and Euro Truck Simulator 2 for $6 - and sorta wished I had a setup like this chap. At least for the first 3 hours. After that, I started getting tickets for everything: inching out with a red light, people crashing into me, not having my wipers on, not having my lights on, driving on the American side of the freeway - you name it, I got a ticket for it! The game went from "letting it slide" to an iron rule in the matter of hours. Still fun, but not as relaxing as when I started.