A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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?
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.
It was the equivalent of console.log everywhere.
We have better debuggers now.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I am gonna bet somehow epistein is involved
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.
No, they removed them because ~console dev modes were easier and more flexible to use. Cheat codes mostly just existed for testing purposes, with the occasional silly one thrown in just because.
I just ordered an amiibo emulator off AliExpress.
My wife is like "isn't that cheating" and I'm like "yeah, but it's pay-to-play, so I'm okay with that".
It's less cheating than a game genie...
Can't a phone with NFC and an app send any Amiibo's signal? I'm pretty sure I've done that before.
Yes. Some phones can even be used to make NFC tags. You can buy blank tags and grab bin files and write them. I have tags for max level Wolf Link and Majora's Mask items for BoTW.
Not sure if the phone can emulate being an NFC tag, but it can program the NTAG215 stickers used by amiibo
I thought it was because everything is a PC game ported to console. No reason to dev what modders do for free.
The most devious of their schemes are the "skip the grind" kind of micro transactions. The sleaziness of making your game a slog just so you can sell the solution to the problem they created is diabolical.
The rich kid solution. Just SMH when I play against some super-low level player with all the skins and kit that normally take months to acquire - if they can even be earned in the first place, some items are cash only. Usually huge tryhards too with other “skill assists”.
Also end game special objects.
Sometimes when you beat a game you get a special skin or object for a rerun.
Nowadays that's a preorder-dlc.
I'm not aware of any game where you can buy literal cheat codes, though.
Closest that comes to mind is Assassins Creed Odyssey with the XP booster.
For 1,000 Helix Credits ($9.99), you can purchase a permanent XP booster that gives you 50% extra experience points for the remainder of the campaign.
Most cheat codes got removed because game devs got better at separating debug tooling from game logic, but especially because publishers and console verification are very strict about what games are allowed to ship with. Shipping with debug tooling is one of the easiest ways to fail validation.