I wish that Steam would just unify all their damn search UIs. Like, take every criteria that they let a user search by all across their client and different parts of their website, and then make one unified UI for it and let a user search using that UI everywhere Steam permits for searches. Steam’s got the most-insanely-fragmented set of search UIs I’ve ever seen on an online service, which all have overlapping sets of functionality.
Among other things:
Sometimes permitting searching by a Boolean value — but only for one of the values. For example, searching the Store in the Web UI lets you exclude games in your library, but not include only games in your library. This is despite the fact that for tags, there’s a tri-state (Yes, No, Ignore) checkbox (at least now they do…they didn’t used to permit for exclusion there either at one point).
In the Store search, I can put an upper limit on the price I’m searching for, but not a lower limit.
It’s easy to pull up a list of games by a particular developer or publisher by clicking on their name in a game’s store page, but then one can’t use the Store search criteria to filter that down, nor can one search by developer or publisher in the Store.
Just today, I wanted to sort my games in the left-hand Library sidebar of the client by release date. The Steam client can’t do that…but you can create a shelf, another sort of search visible in the Library, sorted by Release Date.
I can sort by User Rating in the Store, but not in my Library.
I can sort by Release Date in the Store, but not search by it.
I want to have exactly the same set of search functionality in all locations that I can search. I want to be able to sort by all of those fields, search by all of those fields, and search for any value that a field might have.
That means:
In the Store search.
In the Library sidebar.
“Virtual categories” in the Library sidebar, which are basically “saved” searches that are re-invoked to build the category in the sidebar.
In Library “shelves”.
When viewing lists of games available as part of a particular sale or promotion.
When viewing lists of games from a particular developer or publisher.
It improved quite a bit since early days, it’s just the flat structure they used to run with led to a messy development and disjointed feature set.
Valve did make some changes in terms of organisation a few years ago so hopefully all the recent improvements will lead to a serious UI overhaul to tidy things up.
I’m still confused about searching by tags in the store. You can’t search by tag in the normal search bar, and the “categories” dropdown at the top doesn’t have all the tags I want.
Yeah, that’s also an issue. It should be easier to get to the “advanced Store search”. Most websites have some kind of “advanced search” or “more options” button or dropdown or something next to the search field. On Steam, none of that is accessible for the Store search until you’ve actually done a search, and then it’s exposed with the results. So basically, put your cursor in the “search” field, whack your enter key, and you’ll get a list of all Steam games in the Store along with all the options to do tag searches and whatnot in the right sidebar.
Sadly it doesn’t seem to add the possibility of whitelisting/blacklisting games. I do not want to share porn & VAC games, not even with adults, since the bans are shared to the account actually owning the game.
You can mark games as Private in your library now. It hides your ownership, play stats, etc. It doesn’t specifically say it disabled Family Sharing but it’d be silly to keep that. There is also a Hidden Games section which stops it from showing up on your list.
Edit: I just tested it with current Family Sharing (not this beta version). Both Hidden and Private prevent games from showing on another shared account.
That’s only for VAC games, right? The historical advice given by modders is to share your library, and use another account to mod it. If you accidentally login to the online portion of a game with a mod enabled, only that account is banned not the library owner.
This specifically says that getting banned on a shared account will also ban the owner who shared the game. Likely to prevent exactly what you described, where people could evade bans simply by sharing their library with a throwaway account.
You can mark a game as private and it won’t show to the other family members. I verified this just now after signing up for the beta and setting up an account for my spouse. The games I marked private don’t show up on their families library.
"This will enable us to release the vast majority of games that use it. "
So it sounds like the floodgates are opening and now it’ll be up to the users to sort out the flood of BS. None of this is truly surprising, while I’m not cynical enough to suggest their temporary stance was a quick way to score some easy points with the anti-AI crowd, we all kind of have to acknowledge that this technology is coming and Steam is too big to be left behind by it. It stands to reason.
I also understand the reasoning for splitting pre/live-generated AI content, but it’s all going to go in the same dumpster for me regardless.
I certainly think it’s possible to use pre-generated AI content in an ethical and reasonable way when you’re committed to having it reach a strong enough stylistic and artistic vision with editors and artists doing sufficient passes over it. The thing is, the people already developing in that way would continue to do so because of their own standards, they won’t be affected by this decision. The people wanting to use generative AI to pump out quick cash grabs are the ones that will latch onto it, I can’t think of any other base this really appeals to.
Definitely a great game. Recently had a pretty big update adding enemies and combat that has been fun so far but you can also just disable combat mode for a chill time building your swarms/spheres
Seems convenient, I never really felt assed to install and set up additional tools but this being built into the Steam client would make this kind of thing more likely for me to use.
That being said 95% of my games are going to be bottlenecked on my RTX 2050 anyway (paired with an i7-8700 that’s still holding strong)
Feel like this is one of those games that’s super fun but flawed to a point you can’t fix it. Like the last time I played without any cheesy strats, I found myself not wanting to build anymore because the exploders would destroy everything so building a base was pointless.
We’d just find a random gas station or something and just remove any way the dudes could climb up. It’s fun for a bit but after a while you’re just shooting fish in a barrel.
My sentiments exactly. I don’t do many demos, but seeing games on my wishlist that have them, that’s going to be good for the devs and my own curiosity. Win:win:win:sad wallet
Good. This is a game I played and immediately refunded when I saw all the monetization stuff.
I just want a single player TBS, in the style of their other game, Monster Train. But I got immediately turned off by the FTP MMO type design choices in Inkbound.
Did you play it? I’m not really sure how their monetization worked exactly as it never intruded on my experience. Still, it’s nice they’re dropping it. Early access is doing wonders for the game same as it did for Monster Train I hear, although I didn’t play that until release. They added offline play a while ago, completely redesigned movement to be simpler and more satisfying, and have been adding classes and taking things. The game is excellent, even more so in co-op in my opinion but my friend swears by 1p.
I got through the tutorial, and into the ‘hub world’ or w/e it’s called, and it just felt very ‘MMO’ to me. Which, on top of the monetization already putting a bad taste in my mouth, I just refunded there. I hate games that shove ‘multiplayer stuff’ into single player games. Like, I played through Elden Ring in forced offline: I don’t want to interact with others, even through little stuff like bloodstains.
They’ve made a number of strange decisions I think. The game has a lot more story with voice acting than Monster Train. But then it’s also co-op and has this lobby room you hang out in with random people and it doesn’t matter in any way that I can’t tell. The game itself is amazing though and none of the other stuff detracts from it in my opinion. If you’re at all still interested, you could watch a let’s play. I know there are some co-op sessions recorded.
You can enjoy it 100% solo. The only place you see others that you never have to interact with is the hub. There is nothing in the game that force you to do anything with others or even suggest that it is multiplayer except some skills that mention allies (but works on yourself too). If that is too much I don’t think the game is for you anyway.
I love ARPGs, I grew up on diablo 2, have been playing path of exile for 10 years, but Grim Dawn has yet to resonate with me. What am I doing wrong? So many people speak highly of it, at this point, it has to be on me.
Maybe you just played the wrong masteries (classes). I’m not a huge fan of guns, grenades and so on, so style wise it took a bit to find something I enjoy playing in Grim Dawn. Playing a mage also didn’t vibe with me too much.
The furthest I got was with Oathkeeper + Soldier (Warlord), throwing your shield, charging groups etc. was super fun.
As for gameplay: The secret areas and chests are neat, you’re getting rewarded for actually exploring the world. Loot is pretty good too, especially as you can target farm because the monster type you kill matters.
Story is there too, but to get fully into it you need to read a lot (as the meat of the world building is in the messages/logs you find strewn around).
The base game is nice, but they really knocked it out of the park with Ashes of Malmouth, it’s a huge expansion with really good set pieces.
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