Such good news. I hope someone can answer this either theoretically or practically as I’m not as knowledgeable in this.
One of the things I love about the steam deck is the ability to just turn it off and back on a few days later and the game is exactly where I left off. If steamOS is on a PC or another handheld deck. Would it still be possible to still have this feature? I guess my question is whether this is a software or hardware feature.
I’d imagine this is something the HW has to support, and the software has to implement a solution via that HW support. I’m really excited to see SteamOS coming up as the next mobile linux platform. With the support from Valve, I’d consider a steam deck or similar over other tablet options.
It’s software. I’m pretty sure my linux desktop can do this… It’s not a special feature, exactly, the system state gets saved to RAM, and then the CPU goes to sleep.
On resume the kernel reads the state from RAM and puts everything back where it was and things continue from the exact same point from which they were suspended. Theoretically.
It’s a complex sequence, and windows sleep is famous for getting it wrong on lots of hardware configs. I’ve had trouble with it on linux, as well, almost always relating to the GPU.
Valve very likely put in some work to have it work as well as it does on SteamDeck, but theres no reason it couldn’t work on any given device.
I’m using HoloISO (it’s like 95% SteamOS) on a mini PC (all AMD, 680M iGPU because I wanted to get close to the deck specs). I mostly stream games from elsewhere in the house, but it has a few titles installed locally.
The sleep works perfectly so far for local titles. I assume other Arch based distros with all of the steam software installed (like ChimeraOS) work just as well. If the hardware maker who puts it on their box makes sure their hardware is well supported it shouldn’t be an issue.
It’s 140GB on console and >200GB on PC… You can’t actually uninstall Warzone if you have CoD HQ installed, so MW3‘s total size is technically just 90 GB plus other garbage. Even if all you want to install is the campaign, you still need to download 100+ GB of other data first.
I’m sure they’re waiting for the price tag of a device with the features you describe to be more in line with current steam deck prices before doing that. They probably don’t want to annoy early adopters either.
Thats the main goal imo. Theyre not teying to compete with the high end devices, all of them will likely download steam and give Valve money anyways. Valve always targets on expanding the market, with vr and such. The Steam Deck exists to expand the market to budget pc console like gaming, and it would not make sense to replace it now.
Valve I dont believe sees it like a cellphone where theyre trying to make more money by doing yearly releases. They arent a hardware company fundamentally. They only develop hardware as a means to expand market, not to make profit directly off of.
Its why virtually none of their hardware projects are bog standard, be it steam machine/deck(Linux market), index/vive (VR), Controller (touchpad, HD Rumble), Link(local streaming) as each project was designed to introduce pc gaming to a new market, or expand pc gaming by adding new features
Valve is also a privately owned company, meaning that every decision they make will always affect Gabe, and not someone different every week like most other companies. Valve needs to think long term while their competitors need immediate effects.
Even if the sickness issue is solved at some point I just don’t ever see VR become a dominant way to game. There are just too many downsides.
Story-focussed games can not direct you where to look. You are completely cut off from the world so you can’t e.g. watch a child or elderly relative while you use it or chat with friends while you work using it. Environments need a lot more work for a smaller market share if you can look at them from any angle. Hardware is much more expensive (and always will be) compared to a system that just needs to render a screenful of content at the same quality level. Your UI options are more limited if you want to keep things immersive.
Exactly, and that’s why we don’t have one. Maybe I’ll get one when my kids are a little older, but for now, it’s a lot more fun to experience things together than to have someone completely closed off in a VR world.
Even if I didn’t have kids, I still probably wouldn’t want it because I’d like to spend that time with my spouse, and looking at an avatar just isn’t the same.
I think the entire line of thinking that you need a first person perspective to be immersed in a game or virtual world is also flawed. As someone who has been on Second Life for more than 16 years now which uses neither VR equipment nor a first person camera 90% of the time I can certainly “feel like I am there” despite all of those factors and in the presence of many other factors that do not exist in RL like teleporting and camming through walls just fine.
Is that ever claimed anywhere? AFAIK, VR has just been marketed as a new way to experience a virtual world, not as the only way to be immersed in a virtual world.
I think VR would be really cool, but it just doesn’t seem to fit with my lifestyle at this point. And I’m not sure if I would be able to handle it since I and my spouse get motion sick quite easily.
Starfield is currently a 4-5/10 game and by the time Modders will be done with it, probably a 9/10 game (10/10 if someone mods the whole main story out of the game).
But that's not what modders should be wasting their time on. They shouldn't be fixing the game.
Besides, the changes and oversimplifications Bethesda has made to the engine and the extraordinary announcement that the modkit will take a year to be released, will vastly delay the amount and quality of mods that will be released for the game.
Baldur's Gate was a 7/10 game on release, mostly due to the issues with Act 3. But they took all of a few weeks to fix the vast majority of major issues and bring the game upto 9/10. Every patch and hotfix they released fixed thousands of small and large issues.
Meanwhile Bethesda announced updates right after the game released, fixed like 4 progression breaking bugs and nothing else.
10 days after announcing they were working on bugfixes and patches, not a goddamn peep, not a single thing fixed beyond those 4 small fixes.
It's straight up disgusting how these corporations operate.
All of their games have their mod kits release about that long after the game comes out, so while I can understand the timeline seeming excessive, and I might agree, it's less extraordinary, and more predictably ordinary.
And your 5/10 is my 7/10, so tastes will vary. I think a lot of what makes Starfield problematic is inherent to its design and the growing pain of them moving formats to space and not simply a bug issue, though the bugs are absolutely there, so making your personal rating of it a supposed effect of its bugginess is, I don't think, completely accurate, but your point still stands.
I am waiting for more paid skins to be tossed in the game. I wonder if the mod tools will somehow try and block weapon skins so it stays an only paid feature.
Tbh I'm still not sure what the point of it is. In gtav you get into trouble with police if you rob shops, steal cars or drive over pedestrians, among other things like scripted missions. In saints row it's about gang warfare and them being a nuisance during your city demolition. In mafia you have to obey road laws, hide weapons from plain sight and they are generally a bigger threat.
You can't rob stuff or do heists in 2077, you can summon your own car for free at any point so no need to steal them and since you can fast travel you don't drive as much anyway. The missions that do have car chases are heavily scripted and on the rails.
Is this something just for people who want to go out of their way to fight endless waves of cops and thats it or am I missing something that makes it such a hype worthy feature?
It was a huge immersion breaker for anyone not going stealth/low profile (as the author admits he does). In fact, it was the reason I haven’t played until now. I guess I’m a patient gamer and it irked me what was missing from launch. I’d built my 2070 machine for this game years ago and now I’m stoked to have a 3080 to break it in with.
Seems more immersion breaking to me that you can fight maxtac and get away with it in the first place, or that they all still just forget about you if you hide for a minute or two out of sight, but we'll see. Maybe I'm just missing something and will appreciate it ingame more.
I mean what features are removed exactly? They have all the components needed to install windows/mac/linux and hook up a mouse and keyboard. I really don’t see any distinction besides they come with gamepads and a gaming oriented OS instead of keyboards and a more general OS.
Also I saw that cutscenes once before making it as far as you describe, I don’t even remember how, pretty sure it was midway through act 2. But it’s definitely a semi generic cutscene for when you lose in a particular type of way.
Don’t get me wrong - I’m absolutely happy that this game is doing well, that people love it, that it isn’t exploitative, etc. those are all great things.
But do we need a daily article essentially restating the same thing?
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