This was brought on by the Sony news that all disk based distribution will stop.
At what point do I have be concerned that a cart or disk I buy won’t work on my system without a mandatory download?
The ps3 seem pretty clear but I seem to recall a game or two that did require a download, or system update, to play.
How many ps4/ps5 games would I be able to play without a server connection?
What about switch 1 /2 games?
Is there a website that tracks this or a way to tell?
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Theres a couple of steam games like the remake of final fantasy tactics that will not work without an internet connection. I think we should expect quite a few new AAA games to do that…
and for indies to continue doing their own thing. And getting the sales because of it.
It means the next 10 years are going to be hard for game preservation for non indies.
Oh no. I wanted the FFT remake to play offline. Thanks for the warning.
So sad for the news; most of ps4 and ps5 games can be played from disc without an internet connection.
I was hoping for that PS4 is in the spot where I want to collect the games even if I don’t have the console yet.
PS5 is also very valuable since it’s the only console with 9th gen 4k games on discs. The site doesitplay.org can tell you when a game is playable from disc without updates.
Thanks. That is the kind of resource I was looking for.
If you can, buy it from somewhere like GoG or (I believe) itch.io for DRM free games. Download your games and back them up. I have a server for other things homelab and it runs the GoG client to auto install games and back them up on my NAS. if they ever go away for some reason, the last update is still stored locally. You can do that for Steam as well, but not all Steam games can run offline… most can’t due to DRM.
I’m looking for console games. I’m not really into newer PC games.
The traditional appeal for GOG has always been old games. They have newer stuff too, but old games are the primary focus. That’s why GOG used to be called Good on Games.
Anecdotally, my Switch 1 copy of the Spyro Reignited Trilogy has a little warning on it that it requires a download (IIRC, only Spyro 1 was included on the cart). But I don’t know if these warnings are common or required.
I am thinking of my future retro collection. I enjoy my physical copies but the recent news has me thinking
Many Switch 2 carts include just the license, no game data. So, assume you can’t play Switch 2 without downloads.
any way to know ahead of time?
There’s not many games fully on cart on switch 2, like cyberpunk. But switch 1 has a lot of modules (I’m a collector / curator). Watch for the message on the packaging.
Some are also mixed like batman - first game on module, the others are download. Might still be worth it.
Also most games work fine off cart but might not be fully updated and depending on the updates that might be relevant or not.
It’s complicated.
Since you seem I to it I have heard the switch 1/2 games are flashed carts as opposed to the old style of chip making. Do they need to be ‘charged’ to keep the game data?
Yes, sadly both Switch 1 and Switch 2 carts are flash memory. It was the same with the 3DS too, which is already starting to have a handful of games degrade and have issues or outright stop working.
While this is not yet the case for the Switch 2, the Switch 1 can be homebrewed and then used to rip your own offline digital backup copies of your cartridges. You can then continue to play the physical cartridges until they eventually stop working 15-20 years from now (or from whenever that copy was manufactured)
On the 3DS, there’s actually a way to ‘charge’ the games with a feature that comes with Godmode9 which is automatically installed only when you homebrew the console. It doesn’t make 3DS carts live forever, but it does SIGNIFICANTLY increase it’s lifespan if you give them a charge once every few years or less. If you have a 3DS, I recommend doing this, as even the cartridges that seem to work fine often have already degraded a bit, and charging a working cart is still just as good.
Maybe you don’t care about 3DS, but I just wanted to point that out since I’m hoping that someone develops their own equivalent version of this cartridge charging solution for Switch 1 games, and eventually Switch 2 when that gets successfully hacked, too.
I’m not sure about the exact type but no, afaik there’s no battery or anything inside. However, sadly, almost anything can and will degrade and we don’t yet exactly know when that will be.
But honestly, I’ve got quite a few old modules around me (eg gb gg lynx pce - though not collections per se mind you) and some of these have seen really rough days but all of them still work fine. So it might not be relevant to our lifespan and easier to put out of our mind, but still it could surprisingly happen. Working in IT though being certain to maintain data is not a trivial matter of redundancy and moving.
Anyhow. Switch 2 games afaik are more akin to ssd because it has to be streaming data at a far quicker pace to the ram, like mkw or cyberpunk. So in a technical sense I would say the risen price is generally worth it. Switch 1 modules are more like slow mass storage (eg SD, the slow ones, explicitly not EX SD).
But back to the point, none of these need “charging” in that sense (but still degrade).
Game Key Cards are all labeled as such on the bottom of the box. If it doesn’t have a big infobox explaining this, then it’s a normal cart.
Also note, @worhui@lemmy.world, this labelling is only a Switch 2 thing. I believe it’s up to the developer how they want to give the warning on Switch 1 cases, if they even need to at all (either way, the labelling varies game-by-game on Switch 1). But for Switch 2 games, it’s a requirement, and is always at the bottom of the game art.
Edit: Overhauled 2nd sentence to clear up potential misunderstanding.
Game Key Cards don’t exist on Switch 1, those are all full cartridges.
I know that. I wasn’t saying they do. But download-only Switch 1 carts do exist, and what I am saying is that there is no requirement for third-parties to label games a certain way on Switch 1 when making the customer aware of the download. On the Switch 2, if it’s a game key card, it has to be labelled the exact same way on every single game at the bottom of the art no matter what, while on Switch 1, how these games are labelled varies from game-to-game, probably due to publishers varying preferences. On Switch 2 it’s all standardised.
What Switch 1 cart is download-only? The closest thing I know of are some compilations like Final Fantasy X/X-2, which does have X on the cart but then gives you a download code for X-2. And even that is labeled on the box.
Hogwarts Legacy is one example. It only contains a very small portion of the game on cartridge (The tutorial area). The rest you have to download.
There were lots of other games that did this, I’ve seen plenty of games like this on store shelves, but I just can’t recall any more specific examples at the top of my head, since I usually just mentally ignored the existence of any Switch games when they weren’t released properly on cart.
More often then not, download-required games were just a download code with no cart, but there are quite a handful of games that released as a cartridge that basically acted like a key. I don’t know if they differed at all in functionality to the Switch 2’s key cards because I never bought one to test, but I believe it seems to work practically identically to the Switch 2’s Game-key cards.
