Steam Deck's secret sauce is the software. Steam Deck's software isn't all OSS yet (it's NOT the same as the publicly available SteamOS), so the alternatives are all running on Windows which... is not good (especially for a handheld).
Honestly, just get a Steam Deck. The "power" differences are just not meaningful at that form factor right now.
I hate when games try to make you feel like you have player agency when it’s really just a cutscene and you’re pressing a button. Whether it’s a QTE or “Press F to Pay Respects.” Recently RDR2 was a huge offender of this, featuring probably half a dozen cutscenes where all you do is press W or up on the controller to walk forward or whatever you’re doing. Like there’s one where it’s probably 5 minutes of walking forward interspersed with dialogue. I understand why the developers made you walk that far. It adds to the tension and it adds to the feeling of despair that the character is currently going through. But I think it would’ve been fine if it was just a regular cutscene instead of “Press W to walk” and if you let go you stop walking, meaning you can’t even take a break.
edit: also I dislike stealth games with unrealistic “alert” systems. In a good example like Metal gear solid v, you get a solid 5 to 10 seconds if a guard is outside hearing / sight range of other guards, so even if you’re spotted you’re still fine as long as you take them out quickly and silently. And even if you dont take him out quickly, he’ll still only be able to alert people nearby or he needs to take some time to alert on the radio. On the other hand, in cyberpunk 2077 if just one guard saw you for even a fraction of a second, the entire base would be alerted. I guess lore-wise it makes sense, but from a gameplay perspective it was the least fun I had in that game. Trying to stealth my way through an entire place only for the whole thing to come crashing down because somebody saw my shoulder from 15 meters away. It came to a point where I was just going in guns blazing because stealth just wasn’t worth it.
Spider-man from 2018 was also like this. The enemy hideouts or whatever were based very heavily around the game’s stealth mechanics, but if just 1 guard became alerted, everybody would become alerted and it would start its stupid wave system. The game heavily encouraged you to take out guards silently so it didn’t send in wave after wave of them, but it was just so incredibly punishing to be silent in that game.
Yeah it makes me feel like a dumbass.
I recently bought marvels midnight suns because it was on sale, i didn't even onow it was a card game. I usually don't really play card games. The game is fine, actually i kinda like it. But the things i don't like are the things when you don't play the card game. You just awkwardly walk around in 3rd person. After every fight it's the same. You walk to a guy, go to bed, skip 3 cutscenes, walk to the forge, walk to the upgrade thing, walk to whoever you have to talk. Probably 1/3 of the game is walking the same path every ingame day.
Make an option to skip all of that. Make it a drop down menu or something.
Ehh I disagree with using RDR2 as an example, but I think QTEs in general are probably my least favorite game mechanic. I actually quite like walking around in RDR2 during the missions. A huge aspect of the game is just immersing yourself in the map/world and listening to the NPCs. I can see it getting old during replays but for me it's a hell of a lot better than watching a cutscene and being prompted to hit a button. I vividly remember fishing with Dutch and Josea for at least a half hour just listening to them chat with Arthur
Agree with you, I remember where the person is talking about, press x to walk on guarma, which did drag on, but they were shipwrecked and he didn’t know what was happening yet. Rdr gets exceptions to me because it’s so cinematic, to me the game is realistic, but so much that you aren’t playing a game, you’re watching a movie.
My issue is less that it drags on and more that it’s basically barely even gameplay. You’re pressing a button for minutes on end, then letting go when they talk, then pressing again when they walk again. It’s boring. For a game as cinematic as RDR2 you’d think they wouldn’t be afraid to just make it a cutscene. If they wanted gameplay then at least let me walk around a bit.
Right but it’s a story, it doesn’t all have to be rootin tootin cowboy shooting, the storytelling is a major part of it. It helps the player really feel like theyre expercing Arthur. I get what you’re saying, but they definitely purposefully chose these devices from a storytelling perspective.
Yes and I’m saying the made a bad decision, no matter how purposeful it is. I find your reasoning to be really flawed here. Just because they chose to tell the story that way doesn’t mean I can’t complain about it.
This is what he sees while tripping on acid. In reality he was naked and is now wrapped in newspaper and has a rusty colander on his head. He is actually collecting mushrooms with a plastic knife, though.
Your time in this world is one of your most valuable assets. If a game is incredibly boring to you, you should put it down and play something else that you enjoy.
The same goes for pretty much everything in life, not just games. It might suck in the short term, but just don’t put up with friends/partners/jobs you don’t like. Make a change
My point is that gaming could abandon “A/B” in favor of something more like an actual spectrum of Height, Weight, and Gender Presentation instead of just awkwardly renaming the binary? I wouldn’t get so up in arms about gender replacing body type.
Okay, but an in-depth character creation system that lets you pick and adjust individual features is a lot more work than just manually creating two models and asking the player to pick one. Adding that means something else gets cut.
Putting in half a dozen body types and a boob slider shouldn’t be a ton of work, but devs who only offer two player models to choose from in the first place probably aren’t putting that much thought into character creation.
Putting in half a dozen body types and a boob slider shouldn’t be a ton of work
Body types no but you also need armour and clothing for everything. You quickly get a combinatorial explosion which you can then reign in with shape keys (“sliders”) which make all assets harder to develop.
You can’t automate generation of shape keys. An artist needs to go over every single asset and make it work for every single extreme point on every slider, then make sure that the automatically derived in between points look good and fix those if required, in all slider combinations.
And it’s probably still going to clip during some animations because going over absolutely everything is just prohibitively expensive.
In the context of Runescape this is just a hellish mess, because its ultimately a codebase from the late 90s with graphics created everywhere from the early 00s to the mid 20s. Oh and as an MMORPG anyone who was a player but stops playing is a lost sale so no pressure at all
There is definitely pestering, doesn’t matter what they say or do. People will always pester so all we can do is hope it doesn’t get to them, which we’ve seen happen many times to others. But I don’t think there’s a reason to worry here, they know what they’re doing.
There’s also a recurring theme in all the interviews after release, they were very open about their biggest regret being how much content had to be cut from the original plans for the first game due to budget constraints. Some things were restored in the content packs afterward, but other things were too foundational to the game’s overarching structure to make sense to be patched in after the fact. The Dreamer sanctums were going to be full fledged dungeons with a big climactic boss fight with each Dreamer, the Abyss was going to be an entire zone with multiple bosses rather than a plot only area, the Coliseum was going to be part of a much more involved sidequest, and there were several major zones that just didn’t end up in the game at all. The result was still a great game, but a shadow of the absurdly ambitious project they envisioned starting out. I assume they’re making Silksong with the intention of not leaving any “what might have been” things.
Heaven’s Vault, Hardspace Shipbreaker, and both Subnautica games.
Heaven’s Vault is a puzzle game where you have to learn to translate an unknown language. Haven’t gotten too deep into the game yet, but I picked it up because I liked Chants of Sennaar, which has a similar premise. Chants is 25% off right now, so I think that’s a decent recommendation
Hardspace Shipbreaker is a casual game where you break down spaceships for parts. It seemed fun, and I wanted to have something casual to balance out my library, which currently has more intense games than I would like.
Subnautica is a survival game where you’re stuck on an ocean world. I’m honestly not too sure if I would like this one too much, since I’m not too much of a fan of survival games. It just seemed unique enough from the other survival games, and it had a decent deal, and it was in my wishlist for a while. So I acted a bit on impulse and bought both games (Subnautica and Subnautica Below Zero)
If you liked these, you can check out the other games by Larian - Divinity: Original Sin (1 and 2). There’s also Star Wars: Knights of the old Republic (very old game though). Also, Never winter nights 2. I’m sure there’s a bunch more.
Last Epoch and Grim Dawn are probably most in line with Diablo, I think.
People have mentioned Path Of Exile, and I've played a lot of it, but I don't think it feels particularly like Diablo any more, even though it started out that way. It's quite unforgiving, and even a lot of experienced players feel like they need to follow build guides rather than work things out for themselves. Its learning curve is hundreds or thousands of hours long. Of course, the reason for that is that it has incredible depth, variety and complexity, which may be a selling point or a deterrent depending on what you like! I definitely like the complexity of it myself, but it's very overwhelming when you're new. The reason I don't think it's all that in line with Diablo these days, though, is simply the pacing of the gameplay. You blow up screens of enemies at a time, and your deaths are often so fast that you're not really sure what killed you.
Path Of Exile also heavily revolves around its trading economy. Item drop rates are balanced around players being able to trade for them, which makes trading somewhat mandatory (unless you're a bit of a masochist). The economy is fairly complex, with there being a lot of different currencies, and quite a lot of factors that can affect the value of an item. I'll let you decide whether you find this appealing or not - some people do, some people don't! I do think it causes some issues with the balance and progression of the game, but it's interesting to say the least, even if you wish you didn't have to engage with it.
Grim Dawn feels a little mechanically dated at this point but it's still solid. It's got some good builds, the dual-class system and constellations system make for some interesting variety. It's got an offline mode, as well as online co-op play. Its real selling point, though, at least for me, is it's absolutely soaked with atmosphere. It's very, well, grim, but the world is really immersive and it has a great setting in general with a solid story and some great lore. It also has quite a lot of mods available (including the Reign Of Terror mod I mentioned in another comment in the thread that adds the entire Diablo 2 campaign and all its classes to Grim Dawn).
Last Epoch is more mechanically interesting than Grim Dawn, I think, but it's lacking in the story and world-building. It's still in early access, although its full release is next week. It has quite a lot of depth and complexity, but it's all done in an intuitive way that means you can jump into the game blindly and work things out for yourself fairly easily. It has a good variety of skills, and the fact that each skill has its own fairly comprehensive skill tree means you can play the same skills in very different ways. It has a wonderful itemisation system that does a great job of making you actually engage with the loot you find on the floor (which is an issue in other loot games), and some of the best crafting I've ever seen in a game. The dev team also manages to come up with some really creative and somewhat intuitive solutions to things they perceive as issues in other ARPGs.
Last Epoch's biggest drawback is that its endgame is currently a little lacking in comparison to POE (which has a very rich and deep endgame, but is also a ten-year-old game that's been updated constantly). It's still far, far better than Diablo 4's, though, and will obviously only improve as more is added. Last Epoch has some truly brilliant systems in place for the devs to build off - and frankly, I still think it's great now - but it'll only get better as more content gets added over time.
I love all three games I've talked about for different reasons, and honestly, they're all well worth playing!
The reason I don't think it's all that in line with Diablo these days, though, is simply the pacing of the gameplay. You blow up screens of enemies at a time, and your deaths are often so fast that you're not really sure what killed you.
Yeah, that's why I don't care for POE anymore these days.
This War of Mine. Honestly can't believe nobody else has mentioned it.
You play as a group of civilians in a war torn country. By day you craft things needed for survival like a stove for cooking, guns for protection, barricades to prevent raiders. At night you send one person with a backpack to scavenge an area of your choice for things like food, medicine, supplies etc. The others will either sleep or guard the property. Things you do while scavenging have real effects on your characters. Decided to rob an elderly couple? Your characters will react based on their personality.
Things become grim fast if you decide to start robbing supplies or get attacked. Your players get sick, become depressed, starve, get hurt etc. I've never made it to the end.
It's a great way to understand the struggles of being a civilian in a war. The Polish government actually recommends it for educational purposes and the devs have donated a lot of proceeds to charities serving people impacted by war, including Ukraine most recently.
I was a bit aggressive on like my second playthrough and ended up killing a couple people to get their medicine. The guy that killed them was too depressed to scavenge and killed himself. Then another person got depressed because of that and wouldn't do anything. Then she got sick and died shortly after. I was too sad to play for awhile after that one.
It’s very good, but the tone can be totally broken if you master combat. Killing soldiers doesn’t lower morale, so they are free targets.
Depending on what locations spawn, it is possible to completely ruin the intended vibe. I’ve wiped out the military outpost and ended up with so many supplies I didn’t know what to do with them all.
Trying to desperately survive in a world that’s upside down, fighting the hopelessness and trying to survive just one more day and slowly realising the you’re just one day closer to death…
Man, it’s a really great game, but I can’t play it again anytime soon.
I have two steam accounts, and I was not able to see anything related to a game marked private from my second account except when family sharing was enabled between the accounts. With family sharing on I could see all private games from my primary account on my secondary (including games which were not installed on the local system).
If you have family sharing on, hold off. Otherwise as far as I know it works as intended.
Exclusives suck for everyone. Especially when Epic started out, they only had payment processors in certain countries. This meant that some people literally had no legal way to play the Epic exclusives. I'm not sure where they stand today, but that annoyed me enough, along with other shenanigans by Epic and Sweeny, that I avoid the whole ecosystem.
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