Is it possible to hide anything in games anymore?

Kojima has still managed to lock away act 3 of MGSV.

because you'll see the blank spots, genius

if there's a room you can't reach, you might not know what's there, but you know that you don't know what's there
if there's something nobody has figured out how to do, or something we know should be there based on all evidence but just can't find it

You could have found the secret, and not told anyone, until now.

A pretty basic logical deduction.

These too

But also asking for things that have just been discovered
If something held on for like 10 years and was only found out recently that's still impressive

can anyone think of a game that came out in the last 10 years that has managed to hide secrets in it for a long time, maybe even up until now?

if such a game existed then we wouldn't know about it, would we?

see above

You still see people talk about a thing in a game like "We still don't know HOW this works-" or "We still don't know what happens if-"

Not every secret is like a singular thing, one single item behind a shelf soemwhere that you can't know is there if you don't look
Some secrets have leads

There's plenty of secrets that still get found in games, the trick is to have no one looking for them. Which is a double edged sword because it probably means no one gives a fuck. Loads of dead on arrival games like concord might have had easter eggs that no one wanted to go looking for.
The big popular games with content rollouts all get datamined to death every single patch though, you're not hiding much in those.

No, datamining is so easy these days you can just swooce right in

I find it both funny and depressing that there are still people who genuinely think GTA V has some kind of grand secret with Mount Chilliad that hasn't been found yet.

Depends. It's all based on time.
The first week or two of a new release it's entirely possible for new things to be discovered and for things to be hidden, but eventually the game's assets will be scraped/mined and there's no way to stop that, there's so much money to be made in creating wikis and pumping them full of ads.

nowadays a game is out and instantly within seconds everyone knows everything and they didn't even do anything convoluted within the game to get there

What fuck are you talking about? This is not true at all.

creating wikis and pumping them full of ads.

is there? most wikis are made on preexisting websites for making wikis and you don't get ads on those if you're not working with them, which the majority of wikipedia editors don't
they just do it out of love and autism

that's why datamining is such a two sides issue
on one hand, i respect such passion, to love a game so much you fully wanna understand it to the last pixel and last line of code and go out of your way to discover it
on the other hand, it ruins the fun for a lot of us

ultimately, i don't respect the people who go straight for datamining
if you already did everything you can possibly do in a game and then decide to mine some more, it's more respectable than just going straight away to dig for everything, that's an inability to postpone gratification and needing all the answers NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW

ultimately it's like the difference between watching some playthroughs or reading up on a game after you exhausted it because you wanna see more, vs doing it after only one playthrough because you can't be bothered and jus wanna say you know all the secrets

What I don't get is why
How do we have people simultaneously saying there's no mystery, no intrigue in games anymore, which is true, but at the same time people are datamining the nanosecond something comes out?

Dataminers do it for clout, non-dataminers are exposed to the cloutfags through no intention of their own. It's not that complicated man.

And can anyone think of a game that came out in the last 10 years that has managed to hide secrets in it for a long time

Black Desert Online, an MMORPG and despite everyone claiming it's "impossible" to hide stuff in MMORPG's it took FOREVER for people to find out the real stats of items and all other crap.

what about that black ops zombies shit thats still going on now. I think they recently made progress only because of the leak or some shit lately

There actually was an instance like this recently but i cant for the love of me remember what game it was

secret bitch sex

The game is slightly different with cutscenes playing differently and characters saying different lines based on your PC specs, so it's not even a save-by-save case

No, it does not. Some cutscenes get fucked up because a player somehow has such a potato of a computer that it can't play video files, but the cutscenes are all the same and looking at the game files says as much. The game randomizes certain textures based on hardware ID, but those have no discernible purpose yet and could just be for randomization's sake.

anon do you live life believing everyone in the world but you holds the same opinions?

i disgree, i don't think all of em do it for clout
many are genuine passionate autists
but those types first experience all the game has to offer, the clout chasers are the type to do it right away

What? Are we even talking about the same game? Anon the game literally decides based on your pc specs which cutscene to even play, it's not just resolution, different characters speak, different lines are said, different things occur.

Are you just making stuff up? Because you sound like you never looked into this and are just looking to disagree for no reason

I still have no idea how to spawn pixiemon in Digimon World 1.
People say it's a random time, but I tried going back and forth in that screen for a full day, but it never spawns.

There are exactly two instances of cutscenes being different, and it's all involving the taxi man. Two lines will randomly be delivered by Salesman or Meanie ENA, and beyond that all cutscenes are basically the same.

those arent the only instances

but that aside, those are still differences, so even now anon is wrong

but i personally think he didnt even play the game

I haven't seen any documentation of other differences, and that cutscene isn't based on your PC Specs.

Noita had some secrets that took a while to figure out because they were baked into the engine or whatever it was so people couldn't datamine it easily.
Nowadays if you want to make some secrets that take a while for people to find you gotta obfuscate your code and make lots of fake assets to hide the real ones to fuck with data miners.

Noita has secrets that are still unsolved despite being discovered.

I'm intrigued, like what?

someone found a secret room in batman arkham asylum recently that no one knew about. I think it was a developer who revealed it

what makes you think it's not? maybe we don't know for sure but i've played a few runs and always got the same variables, and i've heard people on here say they only saw differences when playing on different computers
it doesn't seem difficult to do

Isn't most code and assets from a game inaccessible without the source code or development kit? It seems mostly some models, videos and music can be extracted from most games.

If you mean the room that shows plans for arkham city where you have to triple bomb an unmarked wall, people have known about that since like a year before city came out because the devs spilled the beans on it.

Yeah, but I'm pretty sure the Eye puzzle and the Cauldron room were just never finished instead of being actually unsolved at this point.
Or the dev would have thrown us some hints by now, unless he's just that sadistic.

The Eyes and The Cauldron

The Eyes

After entering a parallel world, east or west, 9 separate and unique arrays of Eye graphics will appear in the world at completely random locations. 5 will appear in the East Parallel World, and 4 in West Parallel. As far as I understand, despite a lot of analysis being done to them, nobody's been able to decode what the eyes say, and the devs have only confirmed that the eyes contain a message.

The Cauldron

Slightly debunked, but there's a room generated in the world that's not indicated by anything. Dig to find it, and you find a room with a Cauldron and a blank stone tablet behind it. On certain days, the Cauldron is filled with Void Liquid, but as a result pretty much immediately destroys the generated room because Void Liquid just eats through everything. The devs have somewhat confirmed it might not be finished by saying "You shouldn't worry about that for now" but the pattern discovered for what spawns the Void Liquid was apparently used to solve a separate puzzle in a later update, but the nature of the room itself is still unsolved.

It should also be noted neither of these secrets spawn if you have any mods enabled.

Depends on the engine used.
If it's Unity, even if the dev encrypts it you can easily just extract anything of value like you said like images, models and even .json scripts and much more.
Same with RPGmaker games, GameMaker and a few others.

God, Velma is so fuckin sexy. I didnt read youre post

made u check thread watcher (:

youre

Because the game literally only checks your PC Specs for display purposes. The random nature, as far as I heard, is just a random hash generated upon starting the game for the first time. It's not based on your hardware, it's just randomly decided at the start and can't be rerolled without completely wiping the game from your computer and resintalling.

And can anyone think of a game that came out in the last 10 years that has managed to hide secrets in it for a long time, maybe even up until now?

Didn't it take people a while to figure out how to get meloetta in pokemon SV?

so i guess you could still say it's personalized

I mean, most of that bloat tends to be textures and audio so it's not like they have to do everything.

No, because personalized implies it's doing something based on something external to the game. The random hash, while unique, is something the game made to tell itself what to do.

but you still receive something unique, so your "copy" is personalized

It's like there's different people with different reasonings

Cool, ty.

No, you're arguing semantics on something with a clear definition. The hash is not personal to you, it is personal to the game. By your metric, every game that produces any file of any kind is personalized to you.

but if the game assigns me a hash, then it is personal

By your metric, every game that produces any file of any kind is personalized to you.

...

It used to be difficult to asset crack but now there's so many tools that encryption is basically pointless. Everything gets cracked and dumped on or before release. (Usually so porn can be made of it.)

Like the jolly jew GABE NEWELL once said: "piracy is s service issue. Makes games more convenient to buy and people will pirate/crack less."

Define your terms because when you say cutscenes I think of the long video introductions and animations and none of those are determined by PC hardware. Things like the taxi man are based on the save file, and the hardware ID is used for very minor stuff like determining a percent chance for a locker to show up in the bathroom and some random rock texture in the hub.

Bonus content can be unlocked in Rayman 3 on Gamecube and Rayman 3 on Gameboy Advance by connecting both games via link cable. This unlocks a bonus multiplayer game in the Gamecube version and 10 extra levels in the GBA version but there are two extra unlockables (A 2D minigame called 2D Nightmare in the Gamecube version and one final bonus level in the GBA version) that can be unlocked if you connect a GBA with a 100% save file on Rayman 3 GBA to a 100% complete save file of Rayman 3 on Gamecube, this does not work however due to the developers of the GBA version forgetting to have the GBA version register the final level as unlocked, leaving Rayman 3 on GBA stuck at less than 100%.

In 2023, someone used Ghidra (a reverse engineering tool) on the GBA version of Rayman 3 and discovered a cheat code (Down, Up, Down, Up, A, Left, B, Right) which gives you 100% completion and also registers the final level as complete which allows you to unlock both final levels without using external cheat devices like Action Replay

but if hardware ID is used for anything, then it's still by definition personalized, no matter how small

Secrets aren't a good thing.

Kys if you think otherwise.

And I mean it. Fucking kys.

It's actually not randomized on installation. The game uses a default function of Unity that looks at your motherboard, BIOS and OS serial number. So uninstalling and installing wouldn't change it.
docs.unity3d.com/ScriptReference/SystemInfo-deviceUniqueIdentifier.html

Yes. I was just correcting you on you saying it changes cutscenes and changing dialogue when it does not.

so what, save files are unique to every person who saves. does that make them personalized? no. fuck off.

yes
your save files are in fact personalized

literally

kys yourself

what makes you think it's not?

Because that's what it does. Refer to my post here:

No. Datamining can and will happen to every single game that ever comes out because dedicated fans want to know everything and to see what, if any, beta or cut content was left on the cutting room floor. Some fandoms even go as far as making custom decompilation tools or trainers that let them noclip and touch debug tools to do so like the Tt Lego fandom on PC.

Assassin's Creed Valhalla is the only thing in recent memory I can think of that actually managed to hide an easter egg for like a year straight before telling people how to do it to get the best bow in the entire game because it requires you to go to a specific spot, rest to a specific time, stare at the sun at a specific angle, and fire your bow a specific amount of times in order for lightning to strike a rock and break it. The reason people didn't find it is because (If I remember right) people just thought it was paid content instead of free.

Another "recent" example (Like, 2018? 2019?) is the room in Arkham Asylum where you had to put three explosive gel on a specific, random wall of either the church or the officer's building, blow them all up at the same time, and it would reveal a room with a bunch of concept art for the game. No one found this because no one even knew to look there at all and no one really datamined the game to find such a room. The devs ended up telling people about it about a decade after release because they were shocked no one found it at all despite hinting at it for years.

piracy is s service issue.

Piracy has always been a monetary issue, he was wrong from the start. There's absolutely nothing inconvenient about buying games in this day and age regardless of the platform but people still do it because they can't afford the game.

well sounds to me like the specific think we called personalized wasn't or was depending on your definition of personalized but some things for certain are

so the game is still personalized

anymore?

What secrets did games have, anon?

tell me about secrets that are fun and well hidden

No no, you first.

But you clearly made some mistakes

If you help the Watcher kid get his net in the Guts caves by jumping to and interacting with him, he's the kid watching the Cinema Arms sitting along with the Head Tombs when you get to the Auction area. Likewise, if you try to jump towards the Warped Giant that's embedded in the building, he appears behind the houses up for auction.

Those things appear regardless of whether you did them or not

If you're wrong about that I think you might be wrong about other things too

No, the fact it doesn't change anything major just means it's purely easter egg territory. Undertale's Fun Value isn't personalization either. It has to be something solely recreatable only by one person.

piracy will never be an issue that is fully solved imo, but it can be mitigated, and gabe is right
giving the average person the convenience to buy is the most important thing

piracy is not a problem when the person pirating wouldn't have bought the game anyway, it's only a problem if they would've bought, but got the chance to pirate instead

idk why you're willing to accept everything that proves it's personalized
but solely refuse the term 'personalized' almost like you just specifically hate that wording

it doesn't matter what it is
it's personalized

but it's not that thing, it's the other thing

still personalized

ok but it's too small of a difference

personalized

only ONE PERSON SHOULD BE ABLE TO RECREATE THAT

wrong, anything that is affected by a variable unique to you is personalized
it's personalized

I know. Like I said, I just wanted to set the record straight. The game is going to be a nightmare over the years if it makes major things personalized based on hardware ID. So far it's only using it for small things.

Am I? Because I'm very sure I'm not. I could certainly read the code wrong but the Watcher kid and Giant both have an invisible box that you can only enter by jumping towards them, after which it stores a Boolean. And later on in the auction it spawns them based on those booleans. Unless someone else looks at the scripts and scenes and shows me what I misread or missed, I can only be sure that I didn't make any mistakes.

resident evil 1

Because the game itself isn't personalized, aspects of the game itself is personalized. And arguing retarded rhetoric like "Save Files are personalized" is exactly why the word is dead.

i didn't do either of those the first time i played and they both appeared

How long are we talking? Remnant 2 managed to hide the unlock requirements for some classes from the internet for a few weeks after launch just because they were so obscure that the people who unlocked them couldn't figure out how they did them either.

the game isn't personalized, ASPECTS are personalized

this bike isn't going fast, the wheels are just going really fast

this meal isn't dairy, just the milk in it is dairy

that cat doesn't scratch, just his claws scratch

wat

this bike isn't going fast, the wheels are just going really fast

The bike isn't going fast, the rider is making it go fast

this meal isn't dairy, just the milk in it is dairy

the meal isn't dairy, just the milk in it HAS dairy

that cat doesn't scratch, just his claws scratch

the cat does scratch, it uses its claws to scratch

Use your words better.

That doesn't make any sense to me but alright. Needs more community research. Plenty of time while waiting 50 years for the next episode.

oh so you're a dishonest cunt who is intentionally changing the meaning of colloquially understood statements to "win" the argument

alright i guess you're disregarded

Coming from the retard saying Save Files are personalized. If they are, then what's so special about a game changing innocuous tiny details that are unimportant based on a randomly changed value? From saving the settings you told it to save? From literally installing the game?

I changed nothing about the mock examples you gave, you worded it all wrong because you're a stubborn retard who can't accept you're using the word slightly wrong. Not even on a definition level, you're literally just applying it slightly incorrectly, and being told that pisses you off.

Pic related.

I think there's a Black Ops Zombies with a super easter egg that hasn't been solved yet

no im not reading any of your replies anymore go away

And yet you read it.

no im not reading any of your replies anymore go away

You're still reading them

no im not reading any of your replies anymore go away

He says, still reading them

no im not reading any of your replies anymore go away

You literally have to read the replies to confirm it's the same guy

no im not reading any of your replies anymore go away

He says, reading them anyway to confirm he can continue copy-paste spamming

Eh, not really, he just has to respond to any (You)s

And burn an unrelated anon by accident?

Well if he's actually not reading he presumably doesn't care.

Here's my idea for secret content.

Each patch of the game comes with a different set of incomplete data for the secret chapter of the game. Which can only be accessed by saving the different versions if the game and compiling them together.

The most recent one that I know of is Bayonetta 2.

In Bayo 1, there were these public phones in one of the early levels that you could use to purchase weapons. They weren't obvious at all, you'd need to stand in front of them and input some complex konami code-esque button sequence - and it only worked if you had millions of halos (currency), enough to purchase each weapon. There was no prompt or indicator that they were anything more than random phones that were part of the level design, so idk how people found out about them originally.

Bayo 2 had no equivalent for years. Some people asked, nobody knew. Then, years later, the devs actually revealed in a blogpost that there WERE secret weapon shops. You had to go knock on the nondescript wooden doors in the first area (on the touch screen). Nobody had any idea until then. I think part of it was that nobody gave a shit about Bayo 2 because Yoshesque badmouthed it on youtube, but idk. Cool secret though.

giving the average person the convenience to buy is the most important thing

Again, there's nothing inconvenient about buying games on any platform, it's all about money.
You can see that in sales by region, game sales skyrocket in areas of the world like Brazil where people can't afford it and piracy is more common any time a steep sale happens.

It has never been a service issue and Gabe was always wrong.

but clearly he's not, convenience did improve sales, games now sell more than ever
look at when the web was just starting to be big, piracy was huge, you could still go to a store and buy any piece of media but who wants to do that? not only does it cost money but it's also inconvenient
now look how many normalfags have purchased streaming services and buy games, more than ever before, because it became easy to do

again, sure, people pirate, but again those people are NOT the target here, if you were gonna pirate for reasons like money, you were never gonna buy anyway, that's simply not a viable audience so it doesn't matter
but give those who have money convenience and they'll buy anyday
clearly game platforms aren't struggling and steam is doing great so that's proof right there
making piracy not an issue is not about stopping piracy, it's about making it irrelevant because people still buy enough

they all still save the same parameters.

JINKIES

You deserve a (you) for this.
It was the first thing that my brain played when I saw the picture.

starwars outlaws because nobody cared enough to look for a speeder skin

Yeah Black Ops 3. I know there are easter eggs from WaW to BO4 that are still unsolved but nothing as complicated as the BO3 hypercube.

It took a few months for players to find all of the hidden paths in 30XX. Then again, it wasn't insanely popular so a larger playerbase likely would have figured it out faster, but still.

character select screen

select girl

it's actually hard/impossible mode due to lower stats

God I'd love that. Everyone from all sides will be mad.

images, models and even .json scripts and much more.

These are just data too. Why can't they be encrypted?

"tools" aren't some magic that can break through any encryption, it's just that standardized solutions have standardized exploits, which usually comes down to the development engine
but dedicated autistic obfuscation still requires autistic cracking to overcome

You can encrypt text, you can't encrypt an image unless you try to do some voodoo nonsense with your spritesheets and whatever else like having every pixel randomized in the spritesheets and then having it be sorted right in game via your own unique method.
Even for text encryption, it's usually easy as hell to crack unless you make some insanely hard encryption form and even then it's gonna get cracked eventually by people who are dedicated enough as long as they have enough samples to compare one another.
You're just making it annoying for yourself and for players that just want to see the assets like CGs/Sprites or modders.

Probably the hitman blood money stuff since it sounds exactly like bullshit people used to make up but actually works

dude if you throw these bodies off two specific ledges in sequence the level becomes a zombie survival horror

there's uhh a briefcase and if you carry it from the start and throw it at a specific wall three times all the guards line up and start dancing

Stretching the timeframe by a bit, but battlefield 4 still has an undiscovered audio easter egg on the karelia map

Cod zombies has a decade+ old easter egg people are slowly uncovering still.
Its not hard to hide secrets in a way that can’t be datamined, its just rarely worth the effort to hide. If people want to sooil it for themselves, who cares?
Personally I enjoy glitches and stuff a lot more than developer intended secrets anyway.

my game is a precompiled binary

what now bitch

Probably the hitman blood money stuff since it sounds exactly

dude if you throw these bodies off two specific ledges in sequence the level becomes a zombie survival horror

there's uhh a briefcase and if you carry it from the start and throw it at a specific wall three times all the guards line up and start dancing

post more anon

there are still secrets in skyrim you havent discovered yet

Yiik has a lot of secrets nobody has found not that most people care about that game

Often enough, the existence of secrets is easy to find but the method to get them can be hard to datamine.
Assets in game files are obvious and usually easy to extract but the game logic in compiled binaries needs to be reverse engineered and understood, which can take a long time and be pretty hard when you don't know what you're even looking for. It's even worse if the devs purposefully obfuscate part of the code. Have a look at entries on ioccc.org for examples.

Like the jolly jew GABE NEWELL once said: "piracy is s service issue. Makes games more convenient to buy and people will pirate/crack less."

I wish they'd make games not cost a fucking stupid amount to buy for what they are

but not the same values
your hash is going to differ from someone elses