Has datamining killed exploration and secrets in video games?

Has datamining killed exploration and secrets in video games?

I was reading this (blue-reflections.net/ragecandybar/projects/pokegods/) and remembered the old days when people would make massive theories about video games. Saying there may or may not have been shit in a game, back when games felt far more alive. half of that mystery is gone these days because dataminers and lets player faggots who make clips showcasing every secret in a game. We'll never have shit like mysteries, fake rumors, or that bullshit "cryptid hunting" that was popular with the GTA games.

The worst part is there's no real way to fix this, is there? No one is gonna just not datamine if you ask them.

They probably will if you tell them you're a journo.

Yes and no

yes

every game that tried to hide secrets in recent years got datamined, it's inevitable at this point.

Remember when the BoI dev got super assblasted when his whole ARG was fucked over by somebody who edited hex values?

The long and short of it is Yes.

No matter how cryptic or well-hidden something is, even if explicit meta-consequences are made clear for data-mining, it's going to happen with anything but a small cult following; and even then places like reddit specialize in ruining communities and mysteries whether or not they have anything to do with the subject, or in this case have even played the game.

See: Undertale, Payday 2, Binding of Isaac, and other recent releases that tried to have some real mysteries in their game. Every time they were datamined, and the creators either completely cut the content or punished the community.

I really dont get this, people are going to explore and find secrets in games one way or the other. Why stop adding them because some faggots can datamine? Thats fucking retarded

I can understand the sentiment but at least some devs still do it. I think there are some secrets going down in the hat in time game last I heard.

In Undertale's case datamining made people more interested, because the dev hid some cool stuff in the game.

You cant tell me more than 0.01% of a playerbase is going to datamine

You know this doesn't count yet you did it anyways for your undertale meme.

Is there a way to counteract datamining?

What the fuck was Toby's problem?
He was as big a lolcow as his game's following.

This kills much more than just mysteries. Everyone will know the best way to do everything and the best setups and best routes and the best gear and the best tactics, just because autists put everything to a wiki and google will find it in 2 seconds.

There's many kinds of games you can't even have because of this.

The issue isn't if devs should add secrets in the first place. It's that whatever secrets they add can be easily checked and discovered in the first week. There's no more sprawling mystery with games, or mysteries that may or may not be discovered. There's no wondering "Is there a secret Monster in this dungeon?" because dataminers already tested and had the answer shortly after launch. And they know exactly how to trigger and discover it if it's there, or instantly disprove it.

Where before games felt a lot more dynamic and "anything is possible", it simply isn't the case anymore.

If a game required connecting to a server you could hide things in the server. Downside is that the game would be online only.

It depends on exactly what you're trying to do; a secret level? A meta-horror or mystery? A message from the developer?

Assets can be uncovered, encryptions can be busted, and text read in plain the moment they are used in-game.

This is the real casualty of data-mining and fandomfaggotry; there's no exploration, mystery, or community anymore. It's too all accessible and estranged; to the point where people trust wikis over developers.

Which is the better waifu? Left or right?

I'm not just talking about the datamining, I mean Toby really flipped out a lot.
I remember he got really angry and ranted on Twitter when he didn't win an award for Undertale.

My bad, was meant for

Toby was a huge autist, I'll give you that, but I don't think anyone could handle the kind of attention something like Undertale brought.
I certainly wouldn't want to be mailed porn of my creations at my home address by Tumblr.

Isn't that incredibly hard depending on the encryption?
I know Denuvo gets busted back and hell but certainly its not actually impossible to make data unreachable enough that nobody will bother.

Look deep within your heart. You already know the answer.

people will see the harder encryption as a challenge, not a wall.

You can't properly encrypt anything because the game must have the key in there somewhere in order to read the data.

The issue isn't that the encryption itself can be cracked (and it can be, the game has to use those files), it's that even with it you can't protect your game from curious autists and attention-hungry faggots poking at values and finding assets.

There is actually a simple way to fix or at least mitigate this problem.
The entire game industry is just too retarded to think of it.

So first off, the game industry is retarded, which means they're desperately trying to protect their copyrights from piracy.
So they try to encrypt their game data WITH THE INTENT OF PROTECTING IT FROM COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT.
Protecting the game's secrets is secondary to this goal.
They encrypt ALL of the code and ALL of the data under one key, so this ALL has to be decrypted to play the game at all.
The game data gets decrypted into RAM in order to play it, so data miners pick up the data in RAM, and bam, RIP most/all of your game's secrets, regardless of whether players have even played through the whole game yet.
Oh, and great job protecting that copyright from infringement!

OK, so imagine for a minute, that we try to encrypt some of our game data WITH THE INTENT OF KEEPING SECRET DATA SECRET.
Not all of the game's data needs to be kept secret, so we can construct our game so that most of the game can be played while keeping secret content still encrypted.

Then, what about the key to unlock the encryption? What do we do about that?
This depends on what you intend to do with your game, but there's a couple options:
With the above example where key is placed in the game, dataminers have to traverse the different parts of the game code/data where it explains how to form the decryption key in order to decrypt the data, so dataminers end up effectively "playing the game" much like players would.
And until the first player/dataminer decrypts the data and uploads the secret onto the Internet, the secret remains secret, as it is encrypted.

In other words, the gaming industry, in its futile attempts to protect against copyright infringement, has failed to protect both copyright infringement and game secrets.
If they'd give up on protecting copyright (which they can't protect anyways) and actually tried to protect their game secrets, they could succeed.
I mean, just look at Pokemon nowadays, they aren't even trying to hide their event Pokemon, even though the 3DS has a system for updating games.

It's just the general spread and normalfagfication of the internet, not secluded to gaming only. It became too easy to share and overexpose information, which support's normalfags' shiteating taste for fast and lowest denominator entertainment.

No more than 0.01% ‘’needs’’ to datamine.
Hell, if a game has 80,000,000 million players and only 1 of them datamines, that’s all it takes. Because that dataminer is going to get on Reddit or 4chan or Youtube and post every single secret he extracted, then some wacko liberal (((gamejourno))) is gonna report on it for clicks, and the experience is ruined for everyone else.
Do you not remember the bitchfit Edmund McMillen threw when guys just cracked BoI for the time-released goodies he was planning to breadcrumb post-Afterbirth launch? The sheer hoops he went through to keep the content of his replacement ARG offline to preserve the process of investigation?
I can’t believe the same community so proud of themselves for causing the Boston Salt Party is so uncomprehending of the simple fact that easy spoilers ruin the joy of speculation or discovering something for yourself, which in turn discourages devs and players from making or getting excited for surprises, Easter eggs, and theorycrafting in the future. Are you really that retarded?

I want to explore her womb
if you know what I mean

dont look at datamine dumps, dont watch lets plays of the games you're interested in. is it really so difficult? you fags have no friends so it's not like they'd ruin it for you either.

It still gets annoying when you're trying to discuss a game in a thread and instead of someone booting up the game to check on something that gets brought up, they just open the wiki in a new tab.

...

I used to datamine for warframe, and I've done it for countless games since 1994.

AMA

I did it for the warframe general on the old board, and when they bitched about it (it was them who asked and complained to begin with, as well as a reddit crossposter who took credit for it on reddit), I stopped.

To short circuit a few questions, the reason people do it is the same reason some people get wrapped up in the mysteries. The big difference is that the people who datamine are intent on getting answers instead of speculating and then masturbating at one another with those speculations.

If you think about it, From software's games do this with their plots. Everything is hidden in plain sight. You can't just crack open the game and watch a cutscene, you have to go to the boss room, look at the walls and see what's lying around before you can tell what happened. This kind of shit is probably the last way we'll be able to have "secrets" in the game.

No. What killed that is publishers and developers aiming for a minimum viable product to maximize profit. There's nothing to explore anymore, it's just an A to B cinematic joyride.

Definitely agreed. I mean I can see that datamining can do harm, but honestly sometimes they handle it so bad you feel completely apathetic to it all.

I'd agree but we're forgetting how much the internet keeps shit from being secret even with no datamining.

Technically speaking, it was unfinished stuff that he made an easter egg, it never was intended to be features.
But then everything changed when the TransMale Burkha wearing asgore attacked

...

Not canon, nor is there any correlation or evidence that this is Gaster.

This really makes me think…
Is the internet ruining videogames?

It's more that shitty hipster ruins videogames, rather than the internet as a tool

its ruining more than just videogames

Think about it tho.

Things that shitty people do, yeah?
I mean someone could shove a screwdriver up their ass, that doesn't make every screwdriver shitty.
Just that screwdriver in particular

Secrets and Rewards in videogames died when cheevos became a thing.

This I can agree with a little more, external reward systems in general bad

Yes but screwdrivers will soon be made illegal if they're mostly used for stabbing, don't you think?
Name one way the internet has improved games.

Rumors still exist today, just like in the early internet, but debunks are easier to find and we are just too old to fall for most hoaxes. Everything is very easy to verify, so you don't have to check whether or not it's real in the actual game. I guess that's it.

But I agree with the general point. The internet is too big nowadays, so information spreads too easily and is therefore harder to not find than to actually find. Kinda kills the mystery sometimes, when you know all of the content in a game before you even play it.

Make it so the secret requires people to find some additional file from a website you control with no direct reference to ingame.
Problem solved.

...

I'd like to see anyone trying to make that happen often enough to spread a panic.

They have dicks, don't they?

It sounds like you want them to.

The internet and all of its various communities are opt-in. It's not mandatory that you read a game's wiki while playing it.

I ask again, because the first time around all the Spoiler Brigade Apologists just ignores me: What can be done about guys who enter forum/imageboard threads where you and your buddies are bantering and theorycrafting about the possible secrets within a game and spam you with all the datamined definitive content in the game code?
Do the words Boston Salt Party mean nothing to you? They shouldn’t; we’re in the place that caused it.

No.

...

Answer the question.

Yep.

That's why I just play traditional games and write all of my GMing notes in a nonsensical format so, even if my players decide to get screwy, they'll never really know.

Actually, it's easy.

Just make your game available only as GameFly-like streaming service, so that no assets ever actually exist on a player's machine at all.

Most of the time it's just information about the plot that is spammed, which is really fucking easy to avoid if you aren't a complete idiot

Stop being homosexual gossip queens and perhaps play the video games. Must be a younger class and require a crutch to even check the controls without an in-game tutorial. Raised on ecelebs where the mainstream pull is it's hip to be bad at things.

you are on Holla Forums, user

there is, user
you know how pokemon red blue and yellow tend to glitch out in certain ways when you do certain things?

well, just write the game's code to achieve things by "glitching out" in such a way that it doesn't seem glitchy, and perhaps dataminers won't find it

Yeah, but there is another word for that
Always-online DRM

Or simply hide your engine under several layers of encryption like square enix usually does.
The point of it should be to slow the dataminers down, since they're bound to crack the thing eventually.

They don't look at the game's code, they look at other files.

Video games are for fun. Secrets and surprises and mysteries are fun. Why the fuck are you playing video games if not to have fun?

oh well then heres an idea
make it an MMO and put the files detailing enemies and maps and items and such on the server side

If you get that angry over someone spoiling "secrets" in the internet about the game, why are you even discussing it?

You're still going to have to have an installation and call for information from the server, user.

There is just one viable way: Make it exclusive to non-breached consoles like the PS4. At least last i checked you can't get access to the files of its games.

Would it be possible to include a bunch of extra shit unrelated to what your doing to throw off data miners?

There are a lot of fake rumors for Devil May Cry when /cgg/ was a thing on 4chan. This was the most obnoxious thing and one of the reasons why I don't interact with other Devil May Cry players or fans nowadays when previously I would be willing to.

There's the original halo gun model in the files of Demon's Souls. Don't think it would "throw off" dataminers though, they are sifting through a lot of unintelligible data as it is.

Or just have data that looks like it's used somewhere else. One of the characters from Pokken Tournament wasn't revealed because the dataminers through it was an assist instead of an actual fighter.

I don't get your point OP. The devs put in the secrets to be found. Just because people either cheat or find them by data mining in a way that the dev wanted them to find it, the dev has obtained the goal of having the players find the secret.

That falls within the players getting smarter. The dev will need to find a way to hide things from the dataminers. I suggest some huge metashit like checks that make sure you're playing the game and not noclipping through shit.

That which can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed by the truth.

Post caps you magnificent fuck, I gotta see this.

Games exclusively on unhacked consoles will be immune until it's figured out how to dump them, which could take years. Games which use proprietary compression algorithms, or procedurally generate shit like textures, would slow down autists. If an MMORPG dev cared they'd avoid sending secrets to the client. Wasn't there recently some MMO space game where faggots discovered unexpected alien life and then a bit later saw an alien ship?

Nothing to be done about it. That age is over. Now we have cheavos, loot crates, gamer fuel, twitchfags, cam whores. You deserve to have your games ruined.

...

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That's literally how MMOs already work. Unless you mean "Make an MMO that doesn't store any files clientside", in which case you fuck yourself and your players over by having them constantly requesting resources from the server, nuking everyone's bandwidth. Which is fucking stupid.

No, I fucking hated the retarded superstition period of gaming where kids lied to each other about shit they saw. Now you can easily disprove retards who lie for attention.

sauce?

Yeah, but not 4/v/ you faggot.
I like straight lewds, I'm okay with gay (2D) lewds, but for whatever reason futa is a massive turn off.

Feelings of mystery and exploration, both in video games and the real world, were crushed by the information age. I can't think of a single urban legend or anything comparable that came about after the mid 90s due to how easy it became to mass communicate with others on the internet. Secrets and easter eggs in video games are no different.

No. Judaism did.

Yeah well nevermind you're all huge faggots.

That's called not being a child anymore you imbecile, this happens to everyone, not just in your snowflake millennial decade you spastic.

Get a load of this faggot
I bet last time you went out of your home was to take a dump since your bathroom is too full of garbage bags and shit everywhere

You have to admit its not the same if you have to keep yourself from looking it up. If it really intrigues you, you'll eventually do it anyway.
For example it's possible that there is some use for the Yharnam Stone in Bloodborne but someone has yet to find it, you don't get these kinds of mysteries with datamining.

Are you aware that you're blaming other people for your own shortcomings in general and weak character specifically? Don't get me even started on the whole idea of somehow forcing people not to do that like some communist totalitarian shithole dictator.

Good, supersitious console shitters are obnoxiously stupid, and this kind of shit just leads to clickbait everywhere, especially on Jewtube. The fact that this is dead is objectively good for the industry, stop being a nostalgic fuck.

Don't be so dense, you can shut yourself off from the world and say "Ooh, i wonder what happend in 1949 in China", that doesn't make it a mystery. It is a difference if you can speculate about it with others and no one actually knows it, or you're just not wanting to look it up.

Even more of these kinds of videos appear ABOUT the datamining results, your point is shit

Datamining is one of the least cancerous problems to appear in modern games, and not worth complaining about. It increases the longevity of the game and gives people something to explore.

No, your point is shit, my still stands that you're a superstitious retard.

Congrats on learning a new world, doesn't make any sense here though

Wikis ruined secrets and exploration if you have no willpower. Look what happened to WoW once wowhead was created, all people did was search the quest and beeline for the spot. Then that was integrated into the addons itself, so you really never had to think. Now almost every game has quest/objective markers so you don't have to think about where you need to go. There's no chance to get lost.

To avoid dataminers, you'd have to either create a difficult to decrypt game file, which BoI did effectively for quite some time, or you can have server-side content. You could also try disc-locked content, but that's even worse than server-side.

Other options include using seemingly ordinary objects to try something funny. For example, if you want bloody text on a wall, instead of making a texture for REDRUM, make 5 different letters and place them, thus making it look like something else. Obviously, a better example is needed.

Though the best way is strong cryptography. If you had something like Denuvo was day-1 in terms of difficulty to crack, and used it only to lock off access to certain files with no slow down

If you like unsolved mysteries so much, go dive head first into hardcore magic or hardcore science. Only primordial things can have anything mysterious about them, nothing that's been intelligently designed has any mystery in it, by the fucking definition.

wew

How about human history? There are a lot of mysteries there, and its not primordial. Same thing goes for the creation of art, like the recent talks of a possibility of a second nude drawing of the Mona Lisa existing. So really that would also go for video games.

Edmund please go

Little to no information is available about human history so it might as well been primordial, it's basically the same as the universe history except shorter.
Yeah I can imagine vagina-bestowed dumbfucks would make up that sort of shit just for gossip. Which makes me thing, is that what you're after? Just pointless speculation? Then clearly magic is your thing.

When the Archeage was released in Russia and someone made a translation patch, I had a ton of fun with a /vg/ group. We had no clue what we were doing, there was no wiki, no maps, nothing. Basic mechanics were spread by word of mouth. We manually combed the seafloor for wrecked ships because there were no maps of where they spawned. It was a glorious time.

It certainly helped that the game itself was gorgeous and the map was really well-crafted, with a fair number of hidden and comfy areas, and that you could go pretty much anywhere you wanted.

New urban legends/rumors/etc were always developing and spreading since the dawn of fucking time regardless of whether or not people grew up. The internet becoming widespread is what killed it, dunce.

Yeah spread of the internet also killed the lochness lake monsters and yetis and alien abductions. Because it only takes one thorough debunking, and the more there are people the higher the odds of one of them being capable of producing such rebuttal.

The painting exists, the question is if it's actually her

My point exactly.

This basically

Oh no, what a loss!

Didn't you get the memo? OP and anyone defending him are those kids

On the one hand, I agree with you because I never read guides or wikis or let's plays and don't spoil games for myself.

On the other hand, I'm a completely fucked up schizoid who goes for week at a time without seeing another human being and I don't care to socialize like most people do. So maybe "LOL so don't talk to anyone, asshole!" isn't a reccomendation most can follow.

I don't get this excuse. If the devs really want to do secrets they will, and you gain or lose nothing if some faggot ass streamer or dataminer reveals it.
Unless you're a viewer or follower of said faggot ass.

Get this fucking flag off of me

They don't do that, but the amount of dataminers that can reverse engineer compiled code and the will to do so is very very very very low.

I got the Dark Souls dialogue off of the bluray before it was released on PC. It can be done, but very few people had PC bluray players and time to work through the encryption and sort out filetypes as well as convert them into something usable.

This. Mysteries in games are dumb because they aren't real mysteries, but merely forced, artificial ones where the answers are not just unquestionably known, they're withheld for no greater purpose than the sake of being mysterious. That's the worst, most pointless kind of mystery, and I'm glad that the internet and datamining have ruined that kind of "mystery," especially in the cases where the mysteries were probably just created for publicity and attention. You want your game to get noticed and stay on people's minds for a while? Then focus on making a legitimately good game instead of some tantalizing fake mystique through vagueness and obfuscation. Tactics other than legitimate quality should fail, and if datamining can negate even one, good for it. Just too bad datamining can't also negate huge ad campaigns and press manipulation too.

Procedural Generation could be an answer but I even need to mention one big flop who tried it and failed spectacularly? Especially if you try to generate riddles instead of terrain and Spore-tier creatures.

It's the internet, not necessarily datamining. The solution is to bury the internet, and go back to distributing games on CDs (DVDs now I guess) and personal contact instead of forums.

I think Undertale could be a good example of that, just throw in as much stupid shit as possible, along with the secret, make it LOOK like it could be some super spooky DEEPEST lore shit that's hidden away in the game, and watch as the retards flail about desperately trying to connect the pieces to a fake puzzle.

I know this goes against the point of the thread, but did anyone ever datamine Shadow of the Colossus? That game felt so huge and mysterious to me. I finished it so many times but always felt like there was something hidden away.

tcrf has, lots of unused shit behind the curtain, no bosses though, but plenty of unused/unfinished ares that were at one time suppose to accommodate them

lurk some moar

I saw a video uncovering all unused assets of Bloodborne some months ago. It's breached as fuck, mate.

And then you have the fake canon those retards came up with becoming the generally accepted canon.

IIRC Doctor Who writers decided to basically use some 1990s usenet fan theory to explain why he is called the Doctor.

It's easier to shitpost about them

In Undertale 2, Sans is officially Ness.

Well you can lock the games data down on certain types of hardware to prevent datamining, but then you get the autistic everything I don't like is drm except the identical thing i do like autists.

Absolutely. MGSV had a heap of theories going into it, then GZ came out on PC and gave it away. Luckily I figured out Medic was Big Boss before this, but this pic was undeniable proof of the whole imposter Snake/Boss theory.

IIRC, the usenet retard that posted that theory about why he's called the Doctor was actually Stephen Moffat, and he wrote his fan-canon in to the show.
Which to be fair was not a terrible reason for his name to be what it is, it's just Moffat writes like shit and completely ham-fisted the whole thing. It could have been done much better.

Self-modifying code and assets generated on the fly (you might even throw in a few XORs to fuck up dataminers). However, I don't believe that many game developers are up to the task.

so they cut out some dudes working eye, just to help with ruse? thats fucked up

It's not always online if you only need to get the required file once user.

Encryption is doable with online-games. You just fragment content in packages, encrypt them individually and only send the key to a package over once a player becomes elligible for that content.

You will still get guides on youtube&co of course once the first player manages to enter said content but it would kill the whole datamined even before release aspect

Also, remember that datamine can't find everything. There's been a 'secret' found recently in the NES Mike Tyson's Punch Out over 20 years after its release. So it's up to developers to create the kinds of secrets that datamine can't find.

One of my thoughts right now is Overwatch datamining. I don't even play the games personally but I'm really excited about the idea of using those hacks that let you know where everyone is in the map and combining that with somehow knowing what type of character they're controlling in order to create a heat map for each type of char in each map. Then, this radically shifts how everyone plays the game. Entering any particular region of the map increases your probability of running into a certain type of character. I don't play the game so I don't know how useful that kind of information might be in reality but nonetheless, I really like the thought of seeing it. Did you do heat maps for Warframe or something similar?

Datamining combined with the new instant gratification era killed exploration. Why look for something when you can just look it up where to get it exactly. Think about it this way, Dead Rising 4's super reaper weapon was tucked away pretty well considering the prerequesets. Thanks to the internet and every child wanting the new shiny toy so they can make a video and get a million billion views on their jewtube page we can no longer have fun things in vidya.

Nah, he just lost it when the explosion happened.
That said, you know they would have removed his eye if they had to and they would do it with a fucking smile because you are just a grunt.

Post the Hex Maniac porn already you niggers.

online tryhard shootans like Quake.

Nah.

...

That's why you make the fake shit as schizophrenic as possible, make sure absolutely NONE of that shit connects in any normally conceivable way, then kick back and watch the retards piece it all together.

Of course it won't stop the autism but it'll be fun to watch that much reaching and shit.

just don't make the game interesting enough to inspire people to look for secrets.

That, and the advent of YouTube and other social media platforms that disseminate at such a neckbreak speed.

Back in the day, certain secrets such as fatalities were purposefully kept hidden by the developers to encourage people to discover it all on their own. The earliest way that you would have found out how to perform a fatality in a Mortal Kombat game is by word of mouth, which game the hobby a sense of whimsy.

Nowadays, nothing good comes from datamining. By eviscerating a game's code and finding secrets, you either spoil a game's story content, which pisses people off, or find out how much the developers were locking behind DLC, which also pisses people off.

I only play games so obscure nobody bothers to datamine them. There, problem solved.

Maybe the world really is constantly getting progressively worse and has been doing that for decades. It'll just keep getting worse until nuclear apocalypse or something cleans the slate.

You will beg for death.

But death will not come.

Oh really?

fuck you rob

The problem is people talking about the vidya just drop the secrets like its nothing, which can be especially irritating when the flow of the conversation changed so fast to the spoilered vidya that you didn't have time to bail

Is this the original rule34?

All these people do is cycle through all items that are in the game by manipulating exported savegames, they can't actually go through the game files with extractors.

>have lurked here for a long ass time
>have never seen this image

fuckin' aye

People have been writing about "things getting worse" for thousands of years. Ancient greek philsophers did that shit all the time.

The only difference is, the way I see it, that we have never been so far ahead, with so large a disconnection with the skills needed to actually survive on the planet rather than just in a city.

Before, if "civilzation" was lost, you just didn't have paintings and huge buildings being made - that's it. Everyone knew how to hunt/farm/cook/build. Now, if youtube tanks, there is almost no fucking hope for survival whatsoever.

It's not that the human situation has changed, it's that the stakes have changed due to our quite recent mastery over our environment.

Eating utensils are restricted and regulated in the UK, for example it's illegal to sell forks to minors.

The thing is datamining makes developers less likely put those types of secrets into games because they know someone is going to dump it all online a day or two after the game releases. Look at how Sakurai wouldn't put the sub-space emissary in Smash 4 because he knew someone would put all the cutscenes on YouTube. I know it's retarded, but that's how devs think.

Please tell me this isn't real