Is this r/im14andthisisdeep from 2011?
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).
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.!
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.
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.
Yeah they fired all of qa now the engineers test their own code and everything is shitty
Cheat codes were removed?
No longer produced, not removed from existing content. Very few games have cheat codes now. Only thing I can think of is Lego games via code, and even those cheats are available through progress in the game.
I wonder if GTA 6 will have cheat codes. They’ve been a big part of that franchise forever
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…
Cool! Always wondered if a fun solution were ever found for the Monster Rancher PS games where you’d put arbitrary CDs/DVDs in to see what monster was generated.
Can’t a phone with NFC and an app send any Amiibo’s signal? I’m pretty sure I’ve done that before.
Not sure if the phone can emulate being an NFC tag, but it can program the NTAG215 stickers used by amiibo
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.
I bought blank NFC tokens that you can flash any amibo to from your phone via an app. Worked great raining down chests of meat on links head in BOTW lol.
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.
Or worse, its a super hard to gain item… and after the first few people spend months earning it, which increases demand via jealousy and envy, THEN they release a paid dlc of the same damn thing with a different name, that the credit card warriors can purchase and have immediately.
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”.
I remember star wars battlefront 2, which was remastered a few years ago, was the first game where I saw paid progression and loot boxes.
This is the triumph of short-termism, they are urinating in their water supply, people will just stop playing. There are just so many other things to do, training people to hate games is probably bad practice for game manufacturers.
people will just stop playing
Not from what I’ve seen, sadly.
Lots do, but credit card warriors tend to be more active since they have FOMO and the whole idea of “I paid for all this, I’m losing money if I dont play!”
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.
No one is talking as to why they exist but rather why they are in the wild.
My point was that devs made better ways to test things, so the entire practice of having cheat codes at all fell out of fashion. They existed previously because they were used by the devs, and taking them out before release was a hassle. Now, they either don’t need them, or have easier ways to remove them.
The WHY THEY EXISTED is integral to understanding why they existed in the wild.
You are missing the point and just repeating the same thing over, the view being expressed is that they exist in the wild for commercial not incidental reasons.
I’m not missing the point, I’m disagreeing with that incorrect stance. The repetition is because you’re missing the point.
You forgot to mention the cheat codes were for testing the game during development, shape up.
Some people need repetition for things to sink in. I’m not going to knock your learning style.
At least you caught up.
Just to be clear your position is that the cheat codes have never in any way been used for commercial purposes by the games manufacturers or third parties.
I sincerely doubt that is the sole or even primary reason they existed. You cannot tell me the Big Daddy car in Age of Empires was an invaluable part of playtesting.
… One comment above this, I said
with the occasional silly one thrown in just because.
The majority of codes were for testing purposes. Reading context is important. So yes, that was their primary reason.
The skins and p2w shit you get from micro transactions aren’t a fraction as cool as DK mode in Goldeneye or BIGDADDY in AoE.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And Gandhi goes nuclear.
That was an underflow error.
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.
Most cheat codes of the past were literally just shortcuts for QA and other testing. They don’t need them now so they don’t program them in. Though if it’s on PC and has a command console, they do still have ways of using it to cheat. I do hate when an Unreal Engine game disables the console entirely, tho. I know it has one, and a lot of commands are the same across all games on it. I even found it interesting that the Oblivion Remaster uses Unreal’s command console, but all the original GameBryo commands work. Even Ref and ItemIDs are identical.😃
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.
I wouldn’t classify that as a cheat.
Exactly, there are far better descriptive names to call that. But none suitable for use in polite company.
I see that as a business opportunity.
Base game: 70€
Infinite ammo: 10€
All guns: 15€
Immortality: 20€
No clipping: 5€I think you’re going to end up with a time traveling assasine hunting you down one day.
My goal is to have something relevant written into laws and treaties. For example, if a gaming company pulls off a stunt like that, you’re legally permitted to throw a molotov cocktail through their window.
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.
Publishers are always the biggest cunts in the entertainment industry. Personnel managers, record labels, game publishers, book publishers, movie distributors. Of course they’d do their best to remove fun from the entertainment.
Depends on the publisher, but unfortunately there’s enough grubby publishers out there that the word is associated with bad execs. I automatically assume a publisher is unethical unless they prove otherwise. Even annapurna showed their true colours eventually.
That said, I have seen multiple instances of publishers actually saving games by stepping in and putting their own devs into the process. One example would be Valve, with left 4 dead.
What game are you playing that lets you buy cheats from their own store?
