We don't, really. I certainly grew up without them. It did both good and bad things. It did centralize and simplify some things, but that came at a cost of freedom for more power users. It was great for sorting out dependencies at a time games were still often bad at doing that cleanly on their own for less-technical people. I think it did good things for community, though, particularly for those of us who did not use any modern consoles that had various party/SNS-like features baked in.
I hated being forced to use Steam when it launched, after they shut down WON that was used for CS. I want as little applications running in the background 24/7 as possible.
Steam got better overall, making the 24/7 background application actually useful to keep running (controller support to control desktop, chats, notifications of sales, etc). Nobody else does that tho, and I definitely don’t want to use a different launcher for every fucking game/store.
Yeah, to some degree I get it. The guy does need help with some things and can’t perform certain physical tasks. And it is an entirely different thing to be tolerant to that vs. being married to it.
But the guy is kind-hearted, educated and sporty. He’s missing an arm, but others might be missing a brain or a heart, which I feel are much more detrimental for a partnership.
Unfortunately, though, dating someone with a visible impairment really gets the gossip going, and people are scared of that, so I guess, it’s better to date a dumb ass instead.
Having said all that, the guy is married by now and has a healthy son, so all is good in the end.
Having one launcher isn’t a problem for me. Steam’s OS’s launcher even allows me to launch GOG games through Heroic without even really launching Heroic.
Where it starts being a problem is when individual games need their own launcher…
I see the launcher as the system menu in a console…
I’m not a fan of Steam or any launcher really but they have some useful features like friends lists and multiplayer updates. I don’t miss the times of downloading individual patches and having to insert a disc but nowadays has its own problems like “online” requirements for singleplayer and being forced to update. Thankfully GOG exists and some devs still offer DRM free versions and that’s my priority now.
Persona 3 Reload, it’s absolutely sucked me in! Had tried to play the Portable version on Vita a few years back but never got into it. Helps that it runs smooth as butter on Steam deck, super easy to pick up and play with the sleep mode - dangerously so.
Playing Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous and just finished Act 2 today. Kinda not sure about this one.
The prologue was a complete slog. Just stuck at level 2, basically no options to do anything, fights taking hours because the enemy and you constantly miss each other.
Act 1 was a lot better, you gain levels at a decent pace and grow a lot more powerful (compared to the prologue). There were a few challenging fights, I think most or all of them optional, so it wasn’t too bad. Except when you’re “stuck” in a tiny room with no space to maneuver, and enemies that use AoE attacks. Also, permanent debuffs, that you don’t have the tools to remove yet, unless you buy expensive items from a vendor. Fantastic, just like Kingmaker.
Then Act 2 started alright, still had a couple of “trap areas”, that you probably shouldn’t visit as soon as you find them. Then in the later half it got a lot slower, nothing really to explore, and you’re mostly waiting and slowly building your Crusader Army to clear the way. Kingmaker was similar, but only in the later Acts, when you’ve basically done everything, and you just need to wait for the next big event. While this wasn’t as extreme (not by a long shot), it’s a bit worrying that this stuff is already starting this early into the game.
Anyway, Act 2 didn’t end badly, it was actually fun, since you get a lot of power, relatively quickly, so I’ll keep playing. If there’s another one of these super slow periods though, where you’re just waiting around, I’ll either cheat/mod to make it more bearable or drop the game, depending on how I feel at the time.
Apart from that, the game is still extremely buggy, even after all these years of patches. It’s probably even worse than Kingmaker. I’m playing in Turn-Based mode and I regularly just lose turns with characters, which is just frustrating. The enemy aggro system/mechanic is also kind of terrible and possibly also broken. It’s really surprising just how much better Rogue Trader is in that regard. It still has a bunch of bugs, but they are relatively minor.
All the talk of games ownership and preservation overlooks the fact that I can play my first steam game today, while so many of my disks have been lost to time.
And let’s not forget how much bullshit came with those disks. DRM schemes up to and including root-kits. Serial # and activation codes. And don’t forget, though you had physical media, what you actually owned was a licence.
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Aktywne