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.

They still have the QA stuff, it's just done differently. An in-game terminal that's disabled for the release build, for instance.

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

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)

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.

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.

Can't a phone with NFC and an app send any Amiibo's signal? I'm pretty sure I've done that before.

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.

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.

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?

Play a mobile game like candy crush or whatever, a sports game like 2k, etc and you’ll that op has a point.

I don't think I ever even got a quarter of the way through new Zealand story.

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.

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 see that as a business opportunity.

Base game: 70€
Infinite ammo: 10€
All guns: 15€
Immortality: 20€
No clipping: 5€

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.

No one is talking as to why they exist but rather why they are in the wild.

It's a shower thought. Pretty heavy judgement for something people supposedly just think about when they have nothing better to do.

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.

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.

Cheat codes were a debugging tool.

As development tools got better, they became obsolete.

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.

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?

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.

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

That's what I heard and it made sense. You didn't want the developer or tester to have to progress normally to test things.

But I guess now we have better debug tools, and release builds vs debug builds. Because resource isn't a problem and we can insert all those extra info on debug build

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.

Good old cheat engine.

Good

I mean you're right but you don't have to be mean about it.