And this is always the viewpoint that advocates of cheats always use. They always shame those who are against cheats as if it's a matter of being control freaks. Of course the argument has never successfully allowed cheats in multiplayer games, but they always gain ground in single player games by pointing the finger and saying "how dare you dictate how I am and am not allowed to have fun", as if this was ever the point of the argument against cheats in single player games to begin with. It's a complete and utter strawman argument.
Nobody is telling anyone how they are and aren't allowed to have fun. If that were the case, people would be screaming for the removal of cheats in SRB2 outright. This isn't so. If anyone wants to use cheats to have some fun, by all means open up that dev console or pandora's box and go crazy. Manipulate the strength of gravity, make Sonic unkillable, give yourself all the emeralds and 999 rings, do whatever you want. However, cheats are not the same thing as accessibility options. They break the very rules that define the game. There's no reason why players should be able to save their progress after cheating to obtain said progress. It's not a matter of whether doing so is fun or not, it's a matter of games being defined by the very rules that make them what they are. If you cheat to obtain progress, then you haven't earned that progress and therefore have no reason to be able to save that progress or obtain unlockables through it.
Additionally, SRB2's campaign can also be played through as a multiplayer experience, and there's no reason to break parity regarding what progress allows players to unlock unlockables in multiplayer vs single player.
If someone is struggling, what they need to help them progress is genuine accessibility options, not cheats that break the game and give them unearned progress. If anyone absolutely insists on obtaining that progress without earning it, nobody is stopping anyone from downloading a 100% save file to get all the unlockables. I wouldn't recommend this over just playing through the game the normal way, but it's an option that is there regardless, and simply downloading such a save is preferable to complaining about not being able to progress with cheats.
That would vary from person to person, and would also depend on how the hints are delivered. If the hints are forced on you then people might have a leg to stand on complaining about it, but if they are completely optional then the presence of such an accessibility feature wouldn't actually be hurting anyone and would be serving the purpose of helping those who are struggling pull through the right way without resorting to cheats.
Naw I stand by what I said. Progression is just another facet of the game, and if people wanna bypass it too, why not. There's nothing distinguishing the overarching progression from the moment to moment gameplay in my mind, so it's just as sacred as the gameplay, which is to say not at all. Again, I measure the value of a game by the enjoyment people get out of it, so let em do what they want. Nobody really likes 100%ing the game because it's a slog, and that's fine because the enjoyment there is in the feeling of surmounting something, not necessarily in the doing of it, but also I feel like a decent number of people would be happier just, ya know, cheating their way to 100%.
Naw I stand by what I said. Progression is just another facet of the game, and if people wanna bypass it too, why not. There's nothing distinguishing the overarching progression from the moment to moment gameplay in my mind, so it's just as sacred as the gameplay, which is to say not at all. Again, I measure the value of a game by the enjoyment people get out of it, so let em do what they want. Nobody really likes 100%ing the game because it's a slog, and that's fine because the enjoyment there is in the feeling of surmounting something, not necessarily in the doing of it, but also I feel like a decent number of people would be happier just, ya know, cheating their way to 100%.
Games are quite literally only games because of the rules they are constructed out of. When you break those rules, you are no longer playing a game. Unlockables are rewards for fulfilling certain conditions. If you're not going to fulfill those conditions legitimately, you are not entitled to the rewards. That's the way life works in general. Cheating goes against the entire point of games having game design. If you don't have to follow the rules, everything breaks down. The cheats are there as a fun bonus to play around with, but by design are not intended to be a form of legitimate progress. If that's less fun to you, that's a you problem and not an issue with the game.
The same logic generally applies to why cheats are so heavily disallowed in multiplayer games. At a surface level you could say that it gives certain players an unfair advantage, but what it boils down to is the fact that when players start cheating you no longer have a game. The experience is now completely ruined for those who were looking to play a game because someone else decided to cheat and everything breaks down from there. Imagine trying to make the argument of "fun is all that matters" in such a setting. If someone joined a multiplayer match with cheats that give them godmode and aimbot and tried to shame people for complaining about it with "How dare you dictate to me how I am and am not allowed to have fun", they'd be promptly met with a kick at best and a banhammer more likely. While in single player experiences you're not hurting anyone other than yourself by cheating, that still doesn't entitle you to rewards. You're breaking the game, and so you're not actually accomplishing anything, which defeats the entire point to the game being a game. If you want the rewards, slog or otherwise, it's meant to be earned.
Again though, nobody can stop anyone from simply downloading a 100% save file. If you really insist on using cheats, you can beat the game that way. You won't receive the rewards for doing so, but you'll have the rewards anyway if you download such a save file. You lose out on any bragging rights this way, as well as the satisfaction of having actually played through the game, but the odds are if you were willing to cheat and download save files to skip putting in work to begin with you're probably not the kind of person who cares. What it all boils down to is that you already have a method available to you to ignore the restrictions against cheating the game has in place if you truly want to, but you have to do this yourself. The game itself is not obligated to reward you with anything you did not earn from it.
I expect to get flack for saying it, but honestly this boils down to a skill issue. It's not like any of the bosses in SRB2 are impossible, and once you get used to them I'd struggle to even call them difficult. It's just a matter of figuring out their patterns and taking advantage of that knowledge to move away from danger and attack when an opportunity presents itself. Don't give into the pressure and become impatient, just learn how to fight the boss at your own pace and eventually you will succeed.
Games are only games so long as they have rules. If you can just use cheats to bypass things because you personally find them inconvenient, you're going against the entire point of what makes a game a game by ignoring the rules that make the game what it is. In general I'm against mods allowing saves as well as you can use them to accomplish the same thing (What's so different about using objectplace to give yourself all the emeralds and loading in a map that's just GFZ1 but with all the emeralds at the start?), but at least with mods there's a chance for them to be balanced.
A better compromise I think would be bringing back the old difficulty options. It used to be that the game had an easy mode, and this would do a good job of making the game accessible to beginner players without them feeling pressured to use outright cheats to progress. Alternatively, it might be a good idea to implement an Omochao style hints system that gives players pointers if they want them after dying to a boss. Something that points them in the right direction to figuring out the strategy to succeed if they're struggling with it.
Well I understand where you're coming from, but I'd like to remind y'all my original point was that the game should not restrict you from saving the game when you enable cheats. To even unlock cheats, you have to be good at the game. Unlocking cheats proves you're good. Do you see what I'm getting at? Pandora's Box is the ultimate reward for being good at the game, so having restrictions placed even on that is kinda dumb. Do you understand what I'm saying?
The devs can control how people play their games because they're the ones making it. It's their prerogative. That being said, just because they can completely control the game doesn't mean they can't make stupid design decisions. I do think cheats disabling saves is silly, especially considering there aren't any "official" accessibility options. also
I will give you flak for this, so points for self awareness. I am deeply of the opinion that the player should have control over how they get to play the game. I would personally enjoy srb2 less while cheating, but I'm not the arbiter of game enjoyment. If the purpose of a game is to entertain, and an individual would enjoy cheating more than not, then I don't see the point in wagging your finger and saying "no that's not how you play the game." It's certainly communicated that cheating is, ya know, cheating and not the intended experience, and if a person understands that and is still willing to cheat, then I find it likely that their experience with SRB2 will be improved for having cheated, as opposed to trudging through it or simply getting frustrated and giving up. That being said, I do think most would have a better experience with uncheated SRB2, even if they get frustrated, which is why I think it's important to communicate that cheating obviously isn't the intended game experience. I do also like the idea of a difficulty system, though I think a hint system for bosses would just make people more pissy, as I think the thing new players struggle most with is just wrestling with SRB2's fuf'd up physics, (respectfully, I love the fuf'd up physics) and only experience can fix that problem.
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oh also i just found out that changing timescale doesn't count as cheating, which is really nice actually. I think that's probably the best option for someone stuck.
Games are quite literally only games because of the rules they are constructed out of. When you break those rules, you are no longer playing a game. Unlockables are rewards for fulfilling certain conditions. If you're not going to fulfill those conditions legitimately, you are not entitled to the rewards. That's the way life works in general. Cheating goes against the entire point of games having game design. If you don't have to follow the rules, everything breaks down. The cheats are there as a fun bonus to play around with, but by design are not intended to be a form of legitimate progress. If that's less fun to you, that's a you problem and not an issue with the game.
The same logic generally applies to why cheats are so heavily disallowed in multiplayer games. At a surface level you could say that it gives certain players an unfair advantage, but what it boils down to is the fact that when players start cheating you no longer have a game. The experience is now completely ruined for those who were looking to play a game because someone else decided to cheat and everything breaks down from there. Imagine trying to make the argument of "fun is all that matters" in such a setting. If someone joined a multiplayer match with cheats that give them godmode and aimbot and tried to shame people for complaining about it with "How dare you dictate to me how I am and am not allowed to have fun", they'd be promptly met with a kick at best and a banhammer more likely. While in single player experiences you're not hurting anyone other than yourself by cheating, that still doesn't entitle you to rewards. You're breaking the game, and so you're not actually accomplishing anything, which defeats the entire point to the game being a game. If you want the rewards, slog or otherwise, it's meant to be earned.
Again though, nobody can stop anyone from simply downloading a 100% save file. If you really insist on using cheats, you can beat the game that way. You won't receive the rewards for doing so, but you'll have the rewards anyway if you download such a save file. You lose out on any bragging rights this way, as well as the satisfaction of having actually played through the game, but the odds are if you were willing to cheat and download save files to skip putting in work to begin with you're probably not the kind of person who cares. What it all boils down to is that you already have a method available to you to ignore the restrictions against cheating the game has in place if you truly want to, but you have to do this yourself. The game itself is not obligated to reward you with anything you did not earn from it.
Ah I see the issue here. Or not issue but ya know. We seem to have different philosophies about, like, the nature of games. I judge games by basically only one metric: "does the player enjoy it." The more enjoyment a game causes the better it is, so design choices should aim to maximize that. Under this framework, cheating should still be disallowed in multiplayer games, as although cheating might increase one player's enjoyment of the game, it comes at the cost of the enjoyment of others.
You (not to put words in your mouth) think of games more in terms of structures and rules, and so one shouldn't break those rules because that ruins the whole point of the game.
I, of course, disagree with that sentiment, but it's such a fundamental difference in viewpoints that discussing it would practically be philosophy, and I fear that's above my paygrade. Anyway, have a good day I think this discussion's reached it's end for me
Well I understand where you're coming from, but I'd like to remind y'all my original point was that the game should not restrict you from saving the game when you enable cheats. To even unlock cheats, you have to be good at the game. Unlocking cheats proves you're good. Do you see what I'm getting at? Pandora's Box is the ultimate reward for being good at the game, so having restrictions placed even on that is kinda dumb. Do you understand what I'm saying?
Pandora's box is just a convenient way of accessing cheats. You can do pretty much anything that's in Pandora's box immediately from a fresh save file through the commands console, though you need to use an activation code to enable the ability to use cheat commands which in and of itself will disable saving progress. All you are actually unlocking when you get Pandora's box and the various cheats inside of it is a more convenient access to a variety of different effects you can otherwise already access through prompts in the console. You can do a lot more than just what's in Pandora's box through prompts as well, such as changing Sonic's double jump ability, skin color, the speed of the flow of time, and enabling noclip.
If you have the full Pandora's box access legitimately, you don't really have a reason to care about not being able to save progress with cheats enabled anymore anyway because you've already played through all the content and can easily just warp back to whatever map you left off on between play sessions and you already have everything unlocked by then, and can even just give yourself any emeralds you had last time you were playing through the objectplace command or all the emeralds at once through the box.
i saw that once but i pressed enter to skip the death anim when it happened
also this isn't a thread for mods, you should've posted this on the chaotix thread
i saw that once but i pressed enter to skip the death anim when it happened
also this isn't a thread for mods, you should've posted this on the chaotix thread
My Suggestion for Future versions of SRB2:
-Bring back Homing Thok and Light Dash for Sonic
-We need Drop Dash for Sonic
-More Boss Characters: Scourge the Hedgehog (AKA Anti-Sonic), Tails Doll, Metal Knuckles, Metal Amy, Bean the Dynamite, Bark the Polar Bear
-More Playable Characters: Vector the Crocodile, Espio the Chameleon, Charmy Bee, Mighty the Armadillo, Ray the Flying Squirrel, Sally Acorn, Bunnie Rabbot, Sonia the Hedgehog and Manic the Hedgehog
My Suggestion for Future versions of SRB2:
-Bring back Homing Thok and Light Dash for Sonic
-We need Drop Dash for Sonic
-More Boss Characters: Scourge the Hedgehog (AKA Anti-Sonic), Tails Doll, Metal Knuckles, Metal Amy, Bean the Dynamite, Bark the Polar Bear
-More Playable Characters: Vector the Crocodile, Espio the Chameleon, Charmy Bee, Mighty the Armadillo, Ray the Flying Squirrel, Sally Acorn, Bunnie Rabbot, Sonia the Hedgehog and Manic the Hedgehog
oh my god. you don't know who manic is?? he's in sonic underground same with sonia
i do agree we don't need so many characters OR so many bosses, scourge isn't even a thing in classic sonic
oh my god. you don't know who manic is?? he's in sonic underground same with sonia
i do agree we don't need so many characters OR so many bosses, scourge isn't even a thing in classic sonic
but Anti Sonic (or X-Sonic [not the X Sonic of the anime]) is Scourge from classic era, he just turned green after consuming some energy of the Master Emerald.
My Suggestion for Future versions of SRB2:
-Bring back Homing Thok and Light Dash for Sonic
-We need Drop Dash for Sonic
-More Boss Characters: Scourge the Hedgehog (AKA Anti-Sonic), Tails Doll, Metal Knuckles, Metal Amy, Bean the Dynamite, Bark the Polar Bear
-More Playable Characters: Vector the Crocodile, Espio the Chameleon, Charmy Bee, Mighty the Armadillo, Ray the Flying Squirrel, Sally Acorn, Bunnie Rabbot, Sonia the Hedgehog and Manic the Hedgehog
oh my god. you don't know who manic is?? he's in sonic underground same with sonia
i do agree we don't need so many characters OR so many bosses, scourge isn't even a thing in classic sonic
but Anti Sonic (or X-Sonic [not the X Sonic of the anime]) is Scourge from classic era, he just turned green after consuming some energy of the Master Emerald.
you mean the comics. the comics are in a different timeline so scourge doesn't apply to the classic lore, neither the other original characters in there
I suggest add a command named "unban", for it's description. It would be "It's a command that allows host and admins, to unban a player. Which the ban.txt document will remove the person that you unban in-game".
Pandora's box is just a convenient way of accessing cheats. You can do pretty much anything that's in Pandora's box immediately from a fresh save file through the commands console, though you need to use an activation code to enable the ability to use cheat commands which in and of itself will disable saving progress. All you are actually unlocking when you get Pandora's box and the various cheats inside of it is a more convenient access to a variety of different effects you can otherwise already access through prompts in the console. You can do a lot more than just what's in Pandora's box through prompts as well, such as changing Sonic's double jump ability, skin color, the speed of the flow of time, and enabling noclip.
If you have the full Pandora's box access legitimately, you don't really have a reason to care about not being able to save progress with cheats enabled anymore anyway because you've already played through all the content and can easily just warp back to whatever map you left off on between play sessions and you already have everything unlocked by then, and can even just give yourself any emeralds you had last time you were playing through the objectplace command or all the emeralds at once through the box.
If I may add to the conversation, as someone who wants to explore different map packs that have hidden emblems, and beaten the game multiple times with different mods, I think if Pandora's Box was easier to access in someway would be great. Especially on the content-creation side of things. I used to have this bugged customsave file from my old laptop that let me (somehow) access everything in the game (even in a empty map pack mod). I think if there was a simple options toggle would be great. I understand what you mean about game constructs, how you shouldn't get the reward if you aren't willing to earn it. However, the game's unlock system is based off collectibles. I can't speak for every player, but I can for myself: I'm not a total "collect-a-thon" guy. I like Odyssey and 64, but it's not my genre mostly. And this game's unlock system is emblems. I agree with the philosophy of judging a game by how fun it is (as stated here):
Ah I see the issue here. Or not issue but ya know. We seem to have different philosophies about, like, the nature of games. I judge games by basically only one metric: "does the player enjoy it." The more enjoyment a game causes the better it is, so design choices should aim to maximize that. Under this framework, cheating should still be disallowed in multiplayer games, as although cheating might increase one player's enjoyment of the game, it comes at the cost of the enjoyment of others.
You (not to put words in your mouth) think of games more in terms of structures and rules, and so one shouldn't break those rules because that ruins the whole point of the game.
I, of course, disagree with that sentiment, but it's such a fundamental difference in viewpoints that discussing it would practically be philosophy, and I fear that's above my paygrade. Anyway, have a good day I think this discussion's reached it's end for me
I think if you beat the game once or (a suggestion) beat the game with a different character, that would be suffice enough. Just some other way to get the Box.
I don't mind the emblems, but I still haven't done the hunting (and frankly, I don't feel like spending time looking at the wiki for the hidden ones). I personally think if there was more than one method to unlock the Box, things would be fine. But regardless I still would like to hear anyone else's opinions on this.
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