I’m going to go against the general consensus here and say you would probably be better served buying a Switch 2. The Steam Deck is awesome but it is bulkier, has less battery life, and is overall less suited for a “pick up, play 10mins and toss is back” usage.
However if you are up for some occasional tinkering, the SD is far more versatile than the Switch and could even replace your laptop depending on your use-cases.
You could get one of those Bluetooth keyboard/ trackpad combos and a case with a kickstand for desktop use. Small screen but usable. I personally wouldn’t replace a laptop with it, but if you didn’t have a laptop it could be useful to buy one device that does handheld gaming and other stuff too instead of buying two devices
I’d still buy two, unless I don’t need a laptop (i.e. phone is sufficient). The ergonomics of a decent laptop are just too good, and I really don’t want to haul around a decent keyboard just to get that on a handheld PC. That said, if I’ll bring both always, then I’d get a portable monitor and make the Steam Deck work, but that’s a really niche case.
Battery life definitely depends on what you are playing. In BG3 I get around 2 ish hours. But I can play older games like Morrowind, or newer retro style games like Skald against the black priory (10/10, do recommend) for 6-8 hours, maybe more.
You also have a lot of control to improve battery life like clock speed, frame rate limiting, etc.
But yeah it has a huge screen and if you play newer games with good 3d graphics it drains fast. Switch doesn’t really have those kinds of games so it’s not a 1:1 comparison.
EDIT: I also agree with your points on it being very bulky and not well suited to a 10 minute session. Launching games is slower on the deck and most PC games have more loading screens before gameplay.
Steam Deck is great but keep in mind it’s way bigger and heavier than the Switch Lite. If you move around a lot, it’s not something you can just toss into a backpack.
I feel like the fragility is more of a concern than the weight. either console is sooo entertaining and nice to have on, like, a trainride or whatever that it more than pays for its weight burden in your pack; The risk of it getting its screen broken and needing to be fully replaced is a lot more daunting to me than the need to carry an additional 5 lb around. My steam deck came with a carrying case that I always really appreciate for just that reason.
You also have to have Donny and Daphne in your party to defeat Maris, but you must sacrifice one to win the battle. The one you sacrifice becomes the next boss. In the end, I think the true final boss should be Frasier himself as his own worst enemy.
Say what you will about what it did with the characters, but Sly 4 took the level design and art to new heights, and that was thanks to modern advancements in graphics.
Jak hit differently though. It had a good mix of great platforming and creative use of graphics. If anything without Jak I wouldn’t have played rift apart or sly.
I’m saying is that modern game engines and rendering tech allow a lot of the things that are good about these games to be turned up to eleven, both in terms of gameplay and art.
I will heavily disagree with you on your evaluation of Sly 4. The higher fidelity models doesn't really add much to the characters that you couldn't glean in prior entries in the series, and really only serves to give the characters a more plastic style all while minimizing the features that made them so memorable - their cartoonish aesthetic and stylized design. Not much changed on the design front for any of the major cast, besides more detail regarding their costumes.
I will admit that more details on the smaller bits of their costume would be nice in the older entries, but compromising the style and aesthetic is a much worse tradeoff for what was gained.
There's many other people evaluating the level design in Sly 4 so I won't go into that too much, but suffice to say, Sly 2 has comparable level design, and some are better in my personal opinion, but Sly 3 has the best level design of the franchise. None of those level designs were hindered or empowered by graphical capabilities. The only part that would have a noticeable impact, if anything, would be the post processing effects from some abilities in Sly 4, but I don't really think those added that much to the experience, as most are gimmicks and costume based, meaning they are only used to solve puzzles and don't play any further part in your arsenal except when the game specifically calls for those abilities.
Now I don't disagree that modern computing power could make the series much better, but AAA has this tunnel vision on graphical fidelity, when the indie scene has proved time and again, style always has and always will trump substance.
Ratchet and Clank made the transition successfully because they didn't overblow the graphical fidelity on Clank, it simply looks like a higher quality model of his early iterations, and has been made easier due to the armor and other sci-fi bits of technology in the series, as the genre scales better with the raw fidelity that most AAA developers pursue than other franchises.
Doesn't really help either that the first step that the Sly franchise took into this modern era was spearheaded by a third party studio. I'm not gonna bash Sanzaru that much, as it's clear they had to put in a lot of work to approach Sony and Sucker Punch to even get permission to work on the franchise, and it shows in the humor of their mission design, although they were uncertain of themselves and it shows. So not only was Sanzaru dealing with the difficult position of having the newest entry of a beloved franchise, but also coming up with ways to modernize the gameplay and graphics in a franchise almost iconified in the early 2000's comic and cartoon aesthetic.
It's clear they had more to juggle than could have honestly been expected of them, not the least of which that the franchise had been dead in the water for 8 years at that point, as the industry had slowed to a crawl after the creep of design scope and the upscaling of the industry caused much of the workflow to stagnate or recursion in on itself.
Thank you! I know some people don’t really care for it or consider it spam so i’m thankful that i’ve been allowed to do these by the mods. I really enjoying doing these
However, I do not believe SteamOS is going to be the silver bullet people think it is. I’m somewhat of a fanboy of Valve but SteamOS is really only good for a console-like PC experience.
People who want to ditch Windows need to look at Linux as a whole, not just SteamOS.
If people want to ditch Windows then the gaming industry needs to stop gating the community. Either get rid of the shitty anti Linux anticheat or tell them to turn on Linux support naturally. For fucks sake I can’t believe I find out most anticheat just needs a simple email to turn it on for Linux.
I agree entirely. An argument could be made about native Linux releases being too much but most games run with Proton if the devs don’t intentionally cripple it through kernel anticheat or other arbitrary limitations.
Also, SteamOS would make a dogshit desktop OS. It’s designed specifically for Steam’s Big Picture Mode. It has Arch running in the background, but that’s not the primary focus of the OS.
It would be great for something like an arcade cabinet or a family TV, but not so great for a desktop.
Yup.
I’ve spent a good while running Deck in desktop mode compared to my laptop running Manjaro, and so far the only thing I’ve noticed is that the Deck has that handy “add to steam” context menu item that automatically sets a 3rd party game to run in proton through steam.
And there’s an AUR package for that.
So unless there’s something major I’ve managed to miss, Manjaro + that package gets you the entire desktop SteamOS experience on any device.
Which Jeff? Jeff, Jeff, or Jeff? Jeff and Jeff are now co-owners, and Jeff has his own solo thing, being a family man, which seems to be how he wants to live his life these days.
I’d say the Jeff that hates Mario party, but now that I think about it, I don’t know how Jeff, Jeff, or Jeff feels about it. I only know how Jeff feels about it.
Forgive any formatting or typos, this one ended up quite lengthy (and reading over it…length for what reason?!), but as ever - thanks to all for letting me share these kinds of posts with you!
This is an extremely specific situation in a game, but…
In World of Warcraft, back in the day, there was a dungeon in Outland, I believe it was Helfire Citadel. It wasn’t particularly hard, but if you died, you were screwed. The way dungeon deaths worked was your spirit would spawn in a graveyard out in the regular world, and you would have to run your spirit ass back to the dungeon entrance to respawn. But finding the entrance to Helfire Citadel was so difficult I told the group if they don’t rez me, they’d have to just kick me, because I’d never make it back in. It was awful.
Lots of the vanilla WoW instances was like that. Often the way to the entrance was populated by the same level elites as the dungeon so you had to run a gauntlet just to get in.
The Deadmines and Uldaman comes to mind. And since you spawned at the entrance you had to dodge and sneak past patrols avoided on the run. Gnomereagan and Maraudon and parts of Dire Maul was very maze like if my memory serves me right
Blackrock Depths was fucking big, too. Later on, with the LFG tool, it was separated into 2 or 3 parts, I think. I mean, running alone back in WotLK days, where you could easily kill everything side, would still take you 2 to 3 hours to fully clear the place
Forgot about BRD. I also remember stranding in Ironforge begging for someone with the key to Upper Blackrock Spire to unlock it. Man that key was hard to get, and the gems did not even have a 100% droprate
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