Quality shower thought
Odd take.
I can’t think of a single thing that used to be a cheat code that is now a microtransaction.
Want easy mode? It’s now a menu. Infinite lives are the default. Immortality modes and slow motion aiming are often under accessibility options.
None of these can be purchased.
Old games had cheats because they were hard as nails, and a game where you can’t get past the second level wasn’t going to hold a kid’s interest for long.
Play a mobile game like candy crush or whatever, a sports game like 2k, etc and you’ll that op has a point.
Its ok to be stupid sometimes op.
The market is flooded w more games than ever…and there’s a brazillion games that dont do this.
Stop playing NBA 2k trash. Start playing indie trash at least.
This is the era where there’s more amateur smut than ever before. Learn to enjoy life. Even a cuck like u can find something good.
The first time I ever paid for access to cheat codes was in 1990.
Provide examples if that is the case.
Cheat codes were originally for testing and, occasionally, for fun. Sometimes they became Easter eggs. I can’t think of a single game where your assertion is true today or in the past.
There’s a big difference between cheat codes and paid stuff for whales.
Uhh, that doesn’t add up. Cheat codes started getting used less, as far back as the PS1 generation - long before dlc existed. It was a pretty rapid shift from that point on.
It’s weird hearing incorrect things about history from people who were evidently not born yet, when I was there. How do I go back?
Cheat codes were a debugging tool.
As development tools got better, they became obsolete.
No, cheat codes as debugging tools is like 25% of the story at best. That may be how they got their start, but it completely misses how they were very much a wider cultural phenomenon for some time.
In 007 there’s a cheat to make everyone’s heads comically bigger. In Tomb Raider, entering a cheat input incorrectly causes Lara to explode. In Heretic, if you enter cheats from Doom you’ll get the opposite of the intended effect. In Gauntlet: Dark Legacy there is an entire litany of secret character models you can play as, if you choose the right character and give them the right name. There’s a cheat that turns Banjo-Kazooie into a washing machine. Another one that initiates a zombie mode in Scott Pilgrim. There was a golfing game where hitting the ball 100 times and then inputting a shortened version of the Konami code generated a completely different Fantasy Zone minigame.
Do those sound like helpful debugging tools?
There was a time when entire websites were devoted to cheat codes and easter eggs (of course the most enduring ones were the broader sites that included whole walkthroughs like GameFAQs), and entire books would be published just for cheat codes.
Ultimately cheat codes were far more about easter eggs and unique game experiences than they were for debugging purposes - especially since as plenty of people have already pointed out, it wasn’t long before better debugging tools were invented anyway.
The end of the day it was just a trend. People had interest in these things, then interest subsided.
IDK man, console access and cheats are still pretty common for PC games. Although there are exceptions too, at least one game series I know, first few titles had console access and cheats, then they removed it after they stupidly left DLC content accessible through console commands in the base game… Which is pretty much an example of what OP claimed. So maybe it’s not always the reason, but it sure is sometimes.
Which game was this?
The gaming industry didn’t remove content from games because it takes too long to develop, they removed it so they could sell us DLC and a half finished game.
We were never meant to have cheat codes at all.
Is this r/im14andthisisdeep from 2011?
It’s a shower thought. Pretty heavy judgement for something people supposedly just think about when they have nothing better to do.
A lot of cheat codes were back in yonder days for testers and Q&A. Need to check something on stage 9, instead of playing through the game use the code to jump there to test. Got stuck but need to test further, noclip to go through terrain then test again for replication purposes. They weren’t intended for us but were a very nice and welcome addition. Now they don’t have extensive Q&A anymore to need such.
They still have the QA stuff, it’s just done differently. An in-game terminal that’s disabled for the release build, for instance.
This is only really possible with modern game engines though. Older games were often using code that was written specifically for that game. So simply disabling the cheat codes could likely break things elsewhere in the game. But modern game engines that were written with those testing tools in mind are able to safely disable the cheats before release without breaking the rest of the game.
Also journalists, many of whom didn’t grow up with videogames.
Difficulty used to be seen as a way to adjust the play time, which was tied to the value proposition for the customer. A lot of older games used to have a gigantic difficulty spike 3 or 4 levels in specifically for rental markets. The Lion King and Battletoads are famous examples. The idea is you get the players hooked with a couple of reasonably challenging levels, then put in a wall that eats up the whole weekend they rented the game for so they want to rent it again next weekend to try to get past it.
If you give journalists cheat codes then they can go and get screenshots of the later levels and write about how cool they are, further incentivizing players to keep renting or jjsy buy the game outright and push past.
Didn’t consider it from that angle, I just know a lot of times it was Q&A testing tools.
So you’d go buy it.
They didn’t make any money if you rented it twice or 1000 times. If you finished the game in a weekend you’d never go buy it.
It was the equivalent of console.log everywhere.
We have better debuggers now.
Yeah they fired all of qa now the engineers test their own code and everything is shitty
It’s more likely because cheat codes were development / QA tools to make testing the game easier. They got left in because they were behind hidden, strange button sequences etc, removing the code risked breaking something that would be harder to test without the codes, and they can be fun.
With better development tools, debuggers/profilers, and easier ways to distribute builds, they stopped being left in the game. And with the gamification from achievements/trophies, cheats would devalue/trivialise unlocking achievements etc and break their purpose.
cheat codes were development / QA tools to make testing the game easier. They got left in because they were behind hidden, strange button sequences etc, removing the code risked breaking something that would be harder to test without the codes, and they can be fun.
That’s maybe how they started, but between then and now was a time when developers would very specifically add in cheat codes that had nothing to do with development or debugging, and were often just extra things added in to make the game more fun to play. (See ‘paintball mode’ in Goldeneye N64 for a prime example of that.) But those kinds of cheat codes seem to have fallen out of fashion.
And Gandhi goes nuclear.
Edit: Sorry, was thinking of the nuclear dudes in AoE I.
That was an underflow error.
Sid himself ultimately admitted that the bug was possible. We should decompile the original and figure it out once and for all.
Not sure where you are taking that from. Wikipedia has
Later, in an Ars Technica interview, Sid Meier similarly stated that the bug was possible, “but it was not intentional”.
On September 8, 2020, Sid Meier’s autobiography, Sid Meier’s Memoir!: A Life in Computer Games, was released, containing confirmation that the Gandhi software bug was fabricated and a detailed background of the urban legend’s formation.
So this sounds like the statement you refer to was not “ultimate” but still part of creating the hoax.
Edit:
Quoting the translation of one of the sources here:The myth was also refuted by Brian Reynolds, the leading game designer of Civilization II - in a video for People’s Games, his quote is mentioned, that the game has only three possible levels of aggression, and not 10 or 255. At the same time, at the first level there was not only Gandhi, but also other leaders, which in this case should lead to similar bugs with many other factions.
[…]
It all started with Sid Meier’s Civilization V. In it, India really had the preference for nuclear weapons to other forms of warfare at a point close to the maximum - at level 12. John Shafer, the leading game designer of the fifth “Civilization”, made this parameter so high solely for the sake of a joke.Article goes into it a bit more, but summary it all started with Civ5 in 2010, where it was an intentional (joke) decision not a bug.
All nuclear ghandi stuff dates to civ5, it did not exist before that time. Then in 2014 someone on reddit made up the hoax and publications just ran with it.No, the sudden aggression of Gandhi was a noticeable thing in the original game. I played it a lot, and I remember it.
But now people want them back… It’s not like people didn’t enjoy them. They fell out of fashion because of the niche audience that kept using them and because eventually everything went digital and selling things like action replay and code breakers and game shark was a hassle to load the codes onto at the time because the cables were very specific but now everything has been transferred to Type C, computers are cheap, wifi isn’t shit there’s two young generations at play and digitally adding in mods is harder than using an sd card with a preloaded cheat code system ready to hack your games or plugging in a cartridge to a flismy cartridge that if you bumped it your game would fuck up (action replay 2006). The n64 game shark destroyed games. For any online system, if you got caught online with cheats you were still subjected to potential bans.
I get why they, “fell out of fashion” but they’re a niche thing that is still oddly enough an enjoyable part of gaming.
You know that Game Shark and all that didn’t use codes that the developers made, right? The “codes” those use are memory addresses and values to set them to. You are directly editing the games memory.
Those fell out of fashion because consoles are basically PCs now and you can’t really guarantee a hard and fast memory layout. Plus, Sony doesn’t want people bypassing DRM using a memory editor.
Also some of the creative and fun codes that did things like altering models in a comical way orreplaceing gunfire with cows mooing just aren’t added as part of development anymore.
Improvements in development/debugging tools definitely explains part of the puzzle - but I think your last sentence is actually a much better explanation, because I absolutely remember games where cheats weren’t just in the game, but were explicitly available to the player through menus (the Ratchet and Clank quadrilogy comes to mind).
The culture around cheats has kinda just changed. People much more value either a vanilla single-player experience, or a truly modded one. Plus the prevalence of multiplayer games has increased exponentially since cheats were popular - and of course outright cheating online is a big no-no (though I wish that were the case with P2W)
Yeah, really need that sense of pride and accomplishment while we pay for another loot box
Not if it’s blood is smiley faces, you fall down you land on a roof, your head gets bigger, omg you can fly!, everyone has a clown nose, you reveal a hidden set of armor that has no actual stats but is purely for looks.
If it’s, it skips you ahead, defeats a part of the game, unlocks achievements and has an effect on the online servers then I understand not leaving them in. If it’s fun garbage Easter egg bullshit, then it should be left in.
Cheat codes were a byproduct of flimsier game development standards.
Main reason why game development times inflated so much were due to today’s gamers have higher standards when it comes to balancing. Some indies even have to rely on volunteer testers, just so they don’t get bomb threats from Asmonfan1488 due to not all weapons were perfectly balanced.
actually i think the standards have lowered, because there is an expectation that if a game is unbalanced, it will be fixed via a patch.
in the past if a game was going to be unbalanced it would always be unbalanced, and so the pressures were higher to get it right the first time.
its problem better to assume that the arms race in graphics and features is more to blame. yet with all that extra time and money indie games still rise above.
cheat code prevalence is fad that comes and goes.
No, games were still broken on arrival, they just were left broken (save for PC).
i mean now-a-days if your console game is broken on arrival and remains left broken, that is a direct choice to do so by the publisher or studio.
i know you still download updates every time you boot up the console, and then everytimr you start the game
Best game balance I ever had was in Control. In the game settings you can make the game super easy. Where most enemies take one or two bullets to stop but inturn I didn’t take any health or defense. So it ended up that I would also die in one or two hits.
Which I really hate, by the way. What even is the point in trying out different weapons, if you can’t find one that’s just stupidly overpowered?
No, you don’t understand, all assault rifles must match the power of each other, with slight variation in sound, firing rate, range, damage per hit, etc.!
Cheat codes were a byproduct of flimsier game development standards.
No, they’re either remnant of beta testing or just recognition that playing game with cheats is just fun for significant part of the audience
I haven’t really seen this trend like… at all. Even Assassin’s Creed style games where you can buy XP packs or certain items or whatever is not really the equivalent of old timey cheat codes.
If anything I would probably argue the introduction of online Achievements probably halted the prevalence of cheat codes.
I credit that to the rise of the subscription model. Why sell an item that gives infinite xp or unlocks all the items like an old-fashioned cheat code when you can instead sell a bunch of items that only give some xp or one item?
I mean, I don’t think so personally. Like I said, we haven’t really seen any type of throughline of cheat codes being replaced by the equivalent effect but in microtransactions. There are tons of games out there with absolutely zero microtransactions and yet still no cheat codes. If some companies were replacing cheat codes with MTX it would follow that at least some of the vast plethora of other developers that don’t use microtransactions still include fun old school style cheat codes in their games. But that isn’t the case. What is the case is that more or less no game full stop has cheat codes anymore. But what do they all have? Achievements.
I get that microtransactions suck and I do hate them too but I don’t think we can just blindly blame everything on them.
True. I don’t agree that they were specifically removed to be replaced with microtransactions. They were removed because games gradually added online features like multiplayer or achievements to the point where very few are exclusively personal experiences where cheating can be isolated to the individual and not affect anyone else. But at the same time, I don’t think they’d ever bring cheats back even if they didn’t mess with online play, because they could sell them back to us piecemeal instead.
Regarding the achievements, there are many that only unlock if you are playing a certain difficulty or ruleset. It’s not difficult to disable achievements while cheat codes are active. Plus people who are cheating with achievements (or high scores) often just fake it entirely and just send steam a fake score or achievement unlock, or use 3rd party tools/mods to do the cheating so the game can’t even filter cheating vs legit achievements.
And this reminded me of a parallel to cheats offered by paradox games: custom rules. With CKII, you can create custom rulers without any limits. It’ll say “don’t go above this score if you want achievements, otherwise do what you want”. You can even replace every single ruler in the game with basically mortal gods before you start and switch between them at will if you don’t care about achievements, or replace everyone else with sickly imbeciles and dominate them all until they start dying off and getting replaced with normal characters.
And mods are another direction customization and replayability were taken vs using cheat codes.
It’s also just like… gaming is different now and the culture is different. Games take themselves more seriously in ways they didn’t use to in say the late nineties/early aughts. There was a whimsical air to early games where you know, it wasn’t a big deal if you used cheat codes, you were just having fun by yourself at your PC. These days games are to a much further extent curated experiences that take themselves seriously and where it’s important to get the full “artistic vision”.
Also in the pre-internet times it was often a benefit to have secret stuff like cheat codes to generate buzz. I’m reusing an example from elsewhere in this thread but it was good word of mouth at the school/work place to have people spread the word about neat things like the Big Daddy car in Age of Empires or whatever. These days you could just find it with a quick search, and the magic and appeal of that kind of stuff is gone.
And again I want to pushback on the MTX angle a bit simply because we are still far from being at a stage where every game has them, even AAA games. Hell, if anything the GAAS and MTX wave seem to be abating. I would be much more on board with your argument if microtransactions were absolutely omnipresent, but we’re not there at all, even in the AAA space. And I could absolutely see a retro-themed indie single player game add some old school cheat codes, I actually think at this point it would be a pretty solid marketing trick.
The only thing close to cheat codes I’ve seen are the bonus modes you unlock in Uncharted, like Slow motion, and mirror mode. Which are not DLC.
