It’s because Nintendo still haven’t implement server client networking and host their own dedicated servers. It’s why people paid Nintendo Online to play multiplayer Nintendo games are getting scammed.(even Capcom or EA/Epic did batter job on switch then Nintendo.)
That’s why you get no real online plays, blame Nintendo’s internal policy, not networking complexity.
Bg3 it’s not an strategy game, it’s and RPG, in fact based in the trrpg rules of d&d 5
Also BG1 and 2, weren’t grided, so it’s not like they doing it to “modernize” the game.
I really enjoyed all xcoms (from the msdos first games, so many hours wasted with xcom apocalypse…) But also enjoyed al bg (including not MMO Neverwinter, icewind Dale, etc)
Still I’m not convinced of Steam OS compared to Windows 11, since I would like to play also Epic games and maybe some emulators
You can actually play games from Epic Games and other stores on Steam Deck with Lutris or Heroic Games Launcher (or a few other options) and you can install emulators on it too, it has a desktop mode, so you’re not locked into only Steam stuff. Also, you can put Windows on the Steam Deck too as an option if you prefer, I don’t know many people who have but the option is there.
Thank you. And do most of Epic games run well? I’m not interested into latest triple A games and the best of the best performance and resolution, but I would like to some of them being at least playable. What do you think of the Chinese alternatives of the Steam Deck?
I don’t have a steam deck, but I use Linux and often play games from the epic store through the heroic launcher. I haven’t had an issue with a game not working. Worst case scenario, I just had to switch proton versions, which heroic makes really easy.
They should for most. If the games are on both Epic and Steam you can check protondb.com to get a general idea of how well it will run, for any games that are only on Epic, I’d recommend doing some quick searches to see how much luck people have had getting them to run on steam deck/linux. Most games for me have worked perfectly fine with similar performance as Windows, and installing Windows on the Deck is still an option for the games that don’t.
As for the alternatives to the Steam Deck, I wouldn’t go for them over the Deck personally, but I have never used them. I would think the games that have been optimized for the deck would run better on the deck than the alternatives due to its popularity. I might consider them if they were a good bit cheaper than the Deck though and it was a good deal.
Edit: I should also note that I play on a Linux Desktop, not the Deck, but aside from the specs difference the games actually working or not would be almost exactly the same between the two because of how Proton and Wine work.
This wasn’t wholly your question but you might like to look into what NOT to do with LA Noire. Originally the game’s dialogue options were labeled, “Coax,” “Force,” and “Lie.” You play a 1940’s police detective who has to solve crimes, so dialogue naturally comes up when you are interviewing witnesses or interrogating suspects. However, Rockstar as publisher made a shock change late in development where the devs had to change the options to “Truth,” “Doubt,” and “Lie.” These options, however, don’t actually quite fit with the actual dialogue of the game. Something I noticed a lot when I played the game was when I selected “Doubt,” to theoretically doubt what I thought was an obvious logical error or a half-truth, phelps instead just started screaming at the top of his lungs about executing people. Or other times I’d select “Truth” because the witness wasn’t lying but just being cautious with their words. It turns out that option was ‘wrong’ because I didn’t force out the key info I needed.
It wasn’t until I learned later on in my playthrough of this fatal publisher error that I instantly became way better at the game. Just had to switch around the words in my mind to what the original devs intended. Later releases of the game had “Truth” and “Doubt” changed to “Good cop” and “bad cop” but both of those also don’t really fit too well. Phelps isn’t always bad cop when forcing the truth, sometimes he’s just yelling because the witness is an asshole.
The reason Lie was never changed is because when you select Lie, you’re doubting their version and coming up with evidence to prove the contrary, like in Ace Attorney.
Just a little thing to keep in mind about dialogue options. Even though the words “Coax” and “Force” sound a little… advanced I guess, they still work way better mentally just because they actually describe the options. Truth and Doubt might help you reach a younger or less intelligent audience, but they don’t work because they don’t actually describe what the options give.
This was a meme for some time, like he’s talking to a little girl and suddenly screaming at her. Didn’t know the labels changed but that the dialog a huge joke.
I can't hype The Outer Wilds enough. It's such a fun exploration game that evolves into a big mystery.
I also just finished Ixion for the second time. It's a city builder but with stress. I enjoyed it a lot because it scratched my particular brain itch, but I can see it not being for everyone though. IXION soundtrack is a banger though.
I was a big fan of Frostpunk but Ixion is damn hard, I think I failed around the 3rd or 4th level 3 times before giving up? It's really easy to get into a cascade failures in that game and the space you have to build in is much smaller than it looks at first. That was before they added the easy mode though so maybe I'll try it again at some point.
I failed a handful of times before I made it through. It's really about keeping am eye on your numbers in the top bar. If any of them aren't looking right pause the game and find out why.
Just a heads up there are some bugs still and you'll need to hit some things with a hammer.
Absolutely, I would still play DA:O and even the storylines of SWTOR over some other games that bloat the main story with unnecessary parts because otherwise the game is not long enough.
Hey! The first half was actually really good. The second half didn’t happen.
Seriously, I remember replaying Fahrenheit like 2 or 3 times and always stopping at the halfway mark. That very first level in the diner promised soooo much, and the game never delivered.
The early God of War games were so unbelievably brutal for these. On harder difficulties, I would often master a boss only to have to retry it again a few more times because the quick time events to actually finish them off would be kicking my ass.
Fast travel remains a staple mechanic because game devs:
Often can’t figure out a way to make travel itself into a gameplay mechanic or experience that is varied and interesting.
Keep designing checklists of things for the player to do, with games built around them, as opposed to inverse of that… which trains players to just be checklist checker offers.
There’s no point to having an open world if it is not engaging or interesting, so… when your open world lacks depth, you end up in a nonsense situation where you have a poorly designed feature, with essentially a ‘skip’ mechanic for said feature.
… Why bother with the feature, at that point?
Hell, even the Rockstar games would give you interesting dialogue, in transit… not really gameplay per se, but it is generally engaging, can help with action intensity pacing, and of course, give you the story.
There are so many ways you could gameify or at least make travel itself more interesting.
Do that, and fast travel becomes near totally pointless.
Realistic open worlds are generally boring, to most players.
Thats why almost no popular open world games have realistic distance scaling.
Skyrim, for example, is a teeny tiny place, compared to how large the lore describes it as, everything is scaled in a kind of exaggerated way, same with all GTA games, even RDR and 2, they’re not even close to being realistically scaled, they’re scaled based… basically on an estimate of a player’s average attention span.
You want realistically scaled?
Go play an ARMA game, and just go on a hike, over a close to one to one scale replication of an actual island or penninsula, for a real world entire day.
Yeah that shit’s boring as fuck to most people.
… But I did not at any point say that a good open world is a realistic world, or anything like that, but thats what you appear to have read, out of what I wrote.
Fascinating.
Anyway, what you should do to make an open world that doesnt suck, is make it interesting, in an actual game mechanical sense, not merely ‘pretty’.
Maybe as you travel, enemies of one kind or another have a chance of spawning nearby and cresting over a hill or emerging from a forest.
RDR2 does shit like this very well, oh I’m just gonna relax, trot along, enjoy the scenery… and … my throat has been ripped out by a pack of wolves, goddamnit.
Or you go for the Bethesda approach and have 500, one time discoverable locations with basically some kind of a mini dungeon or staged scenario you can wander into.
Or you can do the Kenshi approach, no real questlines, just simulate the entire world as a kind of sandbox that tens of thousands of other npcs live in, do their own thing in… with actually closer to a realistic sense of distsnce scaling… and just give the player save states and the ability to fastforward or pause time, by default… and maybe they bumble in to some particularly interesting people, or maybe its oops all beakthings, or maybe you’ve now been enslaved by either cannibals or the Holy Nation, while you were afk for your literal 12 mile hike across the map.
Or you could just make some kind of game where fast travelling requires the player to engage in something on the order of a hacking/lockpicking minigame, to… keep the wheels from falling off or something, I dunno.
Maybe vehicles are simulated in some kind of way that… if you’re reckless and innatentive, you’ll break em, and now you’re fucked, in the middle of nowhere. State of Decay 2 comes to mind, sort of.
Point is… there are many ways you can make travelling itself into an engaging, alternate form of the game itself, or a kind of minigame, or a way to experience some kind of story or plot development, or reward the player for picking up on contextual cues during transit, punish them for missing them…
Hell, make a minigame out of trying to pick a song to listen to that your npc companion doesn’t hate, throw in guitar hero style karaoke minigame, why the hell not? maybe it can boost or demerit your relationship with that npc, land you on different paths of a branching storyline.
… Travel doesnt need to be realistic.
It just needs to be more interesting, rewarding, engaging, than skipping it.
Ok serious comment: That’s a damn good review. And a surprisingly good quality device that’s a little ahead of its time.
I’m impressed that you reached out to devs, contrasted with other handhelds, and tried so many different games. That’s almost everything I’d want to know.
What kind of battery life does it get with various games? Sorry if I missed that. I expect ARM is a lot less power hungry than x86.
Thank you so much! It’s always a bit of a nervy experience when I’m sharing a review. Even more so when I linked it in their own Discord, because if anyone will rip through details and point out flaws…its gaming fans. So hearing this? SO kind of you!
I’m lucky that I manage to somehow convince all these people (the devs and other creators!) that they should in fact be friends with me, and that they’re all kind enough to listen to my requests. In fact, the PortMaster team are going to let me interview them soon, so that’s something to look forward to!
Battery depends on settings, like always. But one example was Nier: Automata with high settings across the board, for around 1:25 playing, it took just under 20% of battery. But that’s because I pushed the settings. Emulating PS2 it coasts, but best to limit to to say 2.5x upscale (obviously), unless you’re going for a full 4K in a monitor. And further down, the old systems will go for eons. Android native games gave me 7ish hours at the highest settings I could opt for? While running at 120FPS and not dropping a single frame.
Take this with salt, because I’m hopped up on codeine waiting for Tuesday when I can get tooth pain sorted!
To the best of my understanding, AMD/Nvidia/Intel each run their own forms of architecture (eg. AMDs RDNA) which are probably closest to RISC for simple instructions and SIMD/SIMT (single instruction, multiple data/threads) for more complex vector calculations.
Not gonna lie, the concept “pushing the enemy back without killing it and having infinite ammo” sounds pretty interesting to me, like an Vampire Survivors but the enemies never die, it would be pretty hard!
Reminds me of that one enemy (in form of a ghost) in Phasmophobia, a Deogen (if my memory serves me correctly). Unlike the rest of the ghosts which only know your location based on any noise you make, any interactions you make with certain objects, or if you are in its line of sight… This ghost ALWAYS knows where you are, except it is really slow.
I love/hate the idea of an enemy slowly making it’s way over to you from across the map, and you can’t see it, but it can see you. * shudders *
It would be pretty neat to have a game based solely around prolonging your inevitable demise, trying to survive for as long as possible, maybe with roguelike features such as rng and differing runs.
I love the deogen. I was just playing phasmophobia last night and encountered one or two of them. I love that it flips the game on its head. Quite literally every other ghost wants you to hide somewhere, usually in a tight spot like a locker or behind a cabinet so the ghost can never get line of sight on you. But for the deogen that’s the exact opposite of what you should be doing, and if you don’t know that or don’t know it’s a deogen before it hunts, you’re screwed. Nothing gets my heart pumping like hearing a ghost rapidly running towards my exact location like Usain Bolt as I realize what it is and desperately try to escape my hiding place before it traps me.
Fun thing about the deogen is that it’s the second fastest ghost in the entire game, and then it slows down to be the slowest ghost when it’s extremely close to you. So you can’t safely hide anywhere, no matter how far away from it you are. By the time it’s near you, the deogen becomes slow enough to out-walk, but if you manage to back yourself into a corner? Good luck.
However, I haven’t played the game in quite a while (despite it being one of my most played games) since imho the devs did a great job of royally fucking up the game. With the direction they took it, I just get burned out when playing it after such a short time nowadays.
Bear in mind this example is one of a long list of things I believe they got wrong: I initially thought the equipment overhaul was a good idea, except after having played for over 100hrs I don’t feel like grinding to get all my old equipment back again, especially after so little has been done to make the core gameplay more interesting.
Anyway, sorry, rant over, used to be one of my all time favourite games.
I was also a big fan of the gear overhaul initially, until I saw how it was actually implemented and really came to dislike it. I just don’t see who it’s here for. It screws over newer players who are stuck with really poor gear, making the already punishing learning curve the game has significantly worse, and it screws over any experienced players by punishing anybody that actually wants to interact with the level prestige mechanic once they do get themselves to level 100. Meanwhile anybody who doesn’t prestige just permanently has even better gear than what previously existed and never needs to worry about the other tiers. And since there’s no reward for prestiging aside from a cosmetic badge, why should you interact with the system at all? Overall it was a poorly thought out and unbalanced update.
While some updates haven’t been great and some things desperately need to be reworked, I’ve still been really enjoying the game. Once you get to around level 40 and unlock all the original gear, you can largely pretend the gear overhaul never happened. The newer maps and map reworks are awesome (aside from the new-ish lighthouse map point hope, that thing sucks), and I don’t play frequently enough to get too bored of the basic gameplay loop. Playing on nightmare where you only get 2 evidence helps since it adds a bit more strategy to each round than just getting 3 pieces of evidence and leaving. The newly reworked media evidence is pretty fun too, where you get rewarded for getting videos and pictures of unique forms of evidence rather than taking 10 pictures of a pile of salt that somebody stepped in.
I just mash mod key + backspace on hyprland to kill it haha. Bye mfer!
But also sometimes lately hyprland hasn’t been playing as nice with steam games and my mouse doesn’t interact with the game. The fix I found is to fling the steam client over to the other monitor. Works I guess. Linux problems lol.
Relatedly, I’ve noticed ports of console games, particularly by Japanese devs, and especially Sqeenix, not actually having an option to quit to desktop. Sometimes hitting Esc will pop a plain system theme window with an option to close the program, but I’ve seen ones that didn’t even have that and had to be killed externally. It’s not as bad as it used to be, but even exiting DragonQuest 11 is a pain.
This is also hella common in a lot of online or multiplayer live service games recently. Forces you to alt-F4 if on PC. Especially bad with Sony’s playstation ports; they treat it like you’re on the PS5 and can just switch games to automatically close the running one.
I just want to let you know that when I was director of production at a multimedia studio, one of the rules in my ux design “bible” was that an interface must never present an “are you sure” prompt to a Quit action. Yes there were fights over it.
Historically, it was conventional to have a “you have unsaved work” in a typical GUI application if you chose to quit, since otherwise, quit was a destructive action without confirmation.
Unless video games save on exit, you typically always have “unsaved work” in a video game, so I sort of understand where many video game devs are coming from if they’re trying to implement analogous behavior.
There’s a roguelike I play, which combats save-scumming by only giving one save slot per character. And so the only reason to save the game, is when you’re done playing. So, you hit Ctrl+S to save, and it instantly quits as well. 🙃
Which is interesting, because at least for me, the main reason I try to save often like that is because of games like bethesda games or other games that don’t autosave and will crash, losing you HUGE amounts of progress.
Ah yeah, it does auto-save regularly, too. But I don’t think, I’ve ever seen it crash without me doing some out-of-game fuckery. 🙃
Well, and of course, losing progress is baked into the gameplay of a roguelike, so whether your savegame corrupts or you die yet another stupid death, you just start another run and you’re right back into the action.
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