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.
I don’t think I ever even got a quarter of the way through new Zealand story.
I’m pretty sure I beat the first boss (the whale) without cheating. Anything past that wasn’t happening with my skills.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.!
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
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?
Some later part of the Risen RPG series IIRC.
I thought cheat codes were there originally for debugging and playtesting
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
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 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 was just thinking about this series a few days ago. Such a good gimmick.
It felt like fucking magic at the time lmao, and the games were legitimately fun and interesting even without the ~best gimmick of all time involved.
Could enjoy the games pretty entirely even with zero discs to scan. But the magic disc lottery, plus access to tons of otherwise unavailable entire species of monster, plus breeding that opens up from there 🤌
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.
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 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.
Quality shower thought
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.
We were never meant to have cheat codes at all.
They removed them because they have the technical ability to do so (due to game engines, ease of testing, etc.)
