When I used Windows I mainly bought on Gog for the DRM-free aspect. Now that I’ve switched to Linux almost completely, I find Steam’s software for running Windows games on Linux to be just about the most seamless and easy to use, compared to other stuff I’ve tried like Lutris and Heroic Games Launcher.
Same story here. I thought Linux support would be right in line with GoG’s philosophy but their stance has been understandable but a bit disappointing. Valve makes it easy for me so they get my money.
The OS is built for the hardware and is optimised accordingly. It’s like the other handhelds have performance leaks everywhere while the Steam Deck doesn’t. I blame win11. So even if the others are better on paper, actual performance is way better on the Deck. There are so many tools you can download to make it even better, personalise whatever you want. Linux really shines on this thing. And I’ve never used Linux before in my life. You can emulate everything up to the newest Nintendo games. It handles God of War, it handles Elden Ring and Diablo 4. Controls are awesome. Somehow even my Switch is more tiring to hold even tho the Deck is way bigger. For me it just clicks. I know I sound like I’m on their payroll but I just feel it’s that good. And I would swap the Deck in a heartbeat if anything else would be better. But it isn’t.
Not OP but I can take a crack at it. For starters, the build quality is fantastic. As someone who’s used quite a few mainstream handhelds (Gameboy up through Switch light, PSP/Vita, and most recently the GDP XD) The deck feels sturdy, and although it is quite bulky, it fits with case and charger in a backpack that’s flown cross country several times. I’ve had to replace other devices that just couldn’t stand up to that kind of abuse.
It’s also quite powerful - enough to run Elden Ring at a very consistent 30 FPS. More lightweight titles have zero issues. The same is also true of emulated hardware up to 6th gen, including KH1/2, Metroid Prime, etc. Which is quite a feat for a portable computer like this.
The backend/desktop mode is easy to access and makes setting up those emus quite simple, and with a little command line work you can get applications running that aren’t available via Discover.
Really, the only thing lacking here is battery life, but even then, 2-3 hours is on par with most laptops.
But I definitely wouldn't swap it straight up for any of the rest.
The Deck is big and heavy compared to the field, but it uses the size for a couple of purposes:
It has full controller sized everything (this is without measuring; it feels extremely comparable to the Xbox controller, though), plus the touchpads that are IMO an absolute requirement for interacting with the OS at all. Using any joystick to move a mouse cursor is terrible, and you will have to interact with the OS. You can work around this by only managing stuff at home with a mouse and keyboard plugged in and launching everything through a controller friendly launcher, but it's a headache.
The Ally has the same 40WH battery the Steam Deck does (per a 30 second search), but if you go smaller you almost definitely have to go smaller. On a similar note, much of the rest of the space is cooling. If something is advertising comparable specs in a meaningfully smaller package, they're sacrificing one or the other. It's just physics. The Ally can kick up the power to higher top end performance, but it's at a higher power draw and you can get down to ~2 hours battery life on the deck. Again, the basic limitations of physics say that's going to make a dent in the already tight battery life constraints if you use the power. (Yes, having it while plugged in is still nice.)
The shape is really comfortable. It does take some awareness to avoid resting the weight on your elbows, but once you recognize that you can comfortably play long sessions (compared to the switch, but a lot of the slightly smaller ones have very comparable designs because they're the only way to make a real dent without shrinking the screen).
You can also install Windows without major issue if that's your preference, though if you don't play games that choose to block you out for anticheat you probably don't need to.
Ultimately, all of these devices have to make compromises. It's a handheld and there's only one real supplier for chips to make it with (unless you go the basically Android only ARM route). Steam chose an extremely balanced approach such that you don't really feel any of them. Others chose to push harder to one metric or another, but because of the bottom line constraints of the form factor, they had to sacrifice something else to do it. It's possible you prefer the other approaches better, and that's fine. Valve will be perfectly happy if enough good options become available that there's no need for a second deck. Their goal was to make handheld PC gaming a thing (and cut down their reliance on windows), and they were extremely successful at both.
It runs linux <3 But seriously the user experience is so good, i thought they would stop refining it after a year or so but no, it keeps going like a smash mouth song stuck in a loop.
Also i had blast tinkering with it in desktop mode and discovering how the whole gadget runs after docking it and plugging a key board, mouse and monitor.
The emulation options are fantastic if not a bit tricky to set up, but there are some tools that you can familiarize yourself with in just a 10 min youtube vid.
Of course it sucks that it cant run the latest AAA, but it is amazing for casual games without micro transactions, indies and ps3 level games. I mean get a real pc if you want to play thoses for sure, but imo satisfying graphics fidelity was reached by the ps3 era, and only gameplay really matters now.
Honestly my fav games atm are steep, stray, and witcher 3 which i would consider the max amount of graphics it can handle (without maxing, but without setting everything to low).
On the indies side I had a blast with carrion, donut county and vampire survivor, games that I thought I would never play sitting in front of my PC.
The idea of a 720 p screen kinda sucks at first, but you dont really feel a difference in game. Personally when I dock it with a screen i set the res higher and on some small indie games i game at 4k since it can take it.
Steam Deck still holds its own on new releases if you’re happy to downgrade them a bit. I’m getting a decent 30 FPS experience on BG3 right now at mid settings. As someone who’s primarily a console gamer used to not having the ultra settings on games, it works for me.
The Nintendo effect. Not only is Steam a “brand” that people know and recognise and very well have a collection of games already on, they’ve designed their software to be very functional for people who don’t know how to go digging for all the hidden options in windows. I can muck about with things like the thermal power limit, frame rate and refresh rate locks, half rate shading, scaler options, from one button access to eh side menu on my deck.
Slay the Spire works great on a touchscreen as well. It runs great on my Surface.
However, there is a weird bug if playing on a Surface, that I feel obligated to let other know when recommending this game. You have to have the keyboard attached for the touchscreen controls to work in Slay the Spire. But you can flip it around the back and still play with the touchscreen.
The hardware architecture on the PS2 and PS3 was so radically different, it effectively makes emulation impossible.
The change made in the PS4 and PS5 makes the transfer of those games relatively trivial, but attempting the replicate the now abandoned Core processor of the PS3 is the hold up there, as is the PS2 Emotion Engine.
The reason the PS3 was so expensive was including PS2 hardware to handle the backwards compatibility. They weren’t going to repeat that mistake with the 4 and 5.
Meanwhile, on the Xbox side, Microsoft never had that problem.
Software emulation is very much possible. There is software for x86 and even ARM processors that emulate PS1, PS2(doesn’t work great on ARM I many cases) and PS3 (x86 only currently)which work well enough. If Sony cared to they could develop their own software emulation layer to run on PS5 to run just about everything from the previous generation.
Also Microsoft had similar issues in hardware emulation because, while the original Xbox and the Xbox one were on x86, the 360 was a Power PC architecture similar in some ways to the PS3 which ran Power PC with other proprietary coprocessors. They had to develop a Power PC emulator in software to run 360 games on the Xbox one.
A first party solution can’t work “well enough”, it just has to work.
PS1 emulation at this point should be trivial, 2 and 3 is not. The first time someone puts a disc in and it doesn’t work would be worse for them than not having it at all.
I think the thing holding back PS1 emulation is that once they open that door, everyone will go “What about 2 and 3?”
PS1 emulation is a breeze, but with current hardware in the PS5, I think a PS2 emulator on the platform wouldn’t be too insane. But yeah, PS3 emulation? Not happening.
I think you’re wrong on the disc not working thing though. The original Xbox was only half supported for a long time.
I think the problem with emulating a PS1 is “don’t meet (play) your heroes”.
Most of us played PS1 on dinky little CRT screens before we got used to the graphical fidelity we have these days.
Playing PS1 games on your 65" OLED will probably hurt your eyes.
It’s one of those things that you want to do because of nostalgia, but isn’t really great when it comes to it.
Besides, at the end of the day Sony is selling every PS5 they make, just like they did with the PS4 and PS3.
Adding backwards compatibility doesn’t make any financial sense as long as it’s not a killer feature that shifts sales towards Microsoft then Sony has little insensitive to do it.
They much prefer you buy those new AAA titles or subscribe to PS+.
Playing PS1 games on your 65" OLED will probably hurt your eyes. It’s one of those things that you want to do because of nostalgia, but isn’t really great when it comes to it.
That really depends on the game and upscaling methods used. Duckstation for instance does a pretty amazing job of making most of those old games look good. Check out this video of Crash Bandicoot running at 4K for instance.
I actually go the opposite direction and add CRT/scanline filters, especially since a lot of sprite work back in the day was built to be viewed that way. Those games look much better on CRTs with scanlines than they do in crystal clear integer upscaling.
Honestly, I remember playing full 3D titles on friends’ PS1s back in the day and thinking they’d given me eye cancer, even with the fuzz of an old CRT TV working in their favor. I don’t think I would want to play them now without a boatload of emulator graphic enhancements to deal with all the wonky 3D projection and unfiltered low-res texture mess of OG PlayStation games.
Didn’t stop them putting out a HDMI Mini PSX. You get around that by cleaver pixel replication and filtering upressing, etc. The PS3 PS1 emulator actually had options for this.
I’m 22. I grew up playing my PS1 on with an upscaler on the 55 inch Vizio in the front room. I like the PS1 art style quite a bit and think that a good upscale and maybe a filter is all you need to make things look how I want.
Idk, I think it would make a difference in the Microsoft v Sony sales. Nintendo doing the N64 and NES eShop have been massively successful. Xbox doesn’t really have any killer apps, they’ve really just had Sony beaten on software features the past two generations. Sony implementing the software features that Nintendo and Microsoft offer would make a decent difference.
Plus, imagine how well a “play your childhood discs on your xplaytendo switchtion” would work in an ad campaign. Getting people to pull out their childhood game collection would make for a great viral campaign for gamers as well.
Idk, the thing about the internet that I don’t think older people have realized is that it creates an even larger freeze in culture than ever before. If you started gaming in the 90s, you likely heard about older games via word of mouth and got your games at a physical store. There were no minor celebrities that would turn a cult classic into an actual classic. Nowadays? Old media is fully capable of wiping out new media in the right circumstances. Songs like “Dreams” by Fleetwood Mac and some Pink Floyd (if I remember correctly) have taken #1 Billboard spots in the past 2-3 years. LSD Dream Emulator went from a game nobody played to a PlayStation classic because of some YouTube videos. We’re in an age where there is an extremely high demand for old media and no way to access most of it without piracy. There is a TON of money to be made by charging money for emulation and moving things to new consoles.
Mark my words, Skyrim will come out on the next generation Xbox, because Bethesda understands that accessibility is good enough to charge for.
I’m 36, not feeling the nostalgia, but then again I was always a PC gamer and never really had to struggle with the lack of support for old games.
I’ve played old games on newer hardware all the time over the years.
The most common realization is that the games were simpler and looked worse than you remembered.
Games also hold up better on PC, PS1 graphics was severely limited, and PS2 was a bit better, sure, but PC graphics were ahead of consoles.
PS3 and Xbox360 finally got to a level where the PC vs. console graphics playing-field seemed more even, and since then console graphics have been properly good in terms of value for money.
I paid more for my 3070Ti than my Series X, but I can’t really tell the difference without spending a lot of time optimizing the settings (or maybe I just need to break out other titles?).
The huge difference is that I can play any of the games I’ve bought over the years, plus most of the ones I acquired in my teenage years - if I wanted to.
Yet - what do I play? Surprise surprise - it’s not the games of yesteryear.
Obviously I’m just one data point, but considering how many gamers I surround myself with and I can’t recall when any of them wanted to play games from the 90’s that weren’t readily available console classics from Nintendo or Sega I’m not convinced it would make a huge difference if the classic games were available.
Maybe they’d sell more consoles, but people just don’t want to pay AAA money for 25-30 year old games. And it’s the games that make them money, not the consoles.
Skyrim is a game that probably deserves to be mentioned along Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac.
But in general comparing games and music is not that simple. Music production and recording has had high fidelity for ages. But pick up a worn cassette and put in an old tape deck and you might feel a bit what playing those old games feel like.
Only if you dramatically lower your standards for what backwards compatibility means. PS3 emulators might be progressing, but they're far from the native hardware in actual functionality, especially with games that actually used the features of the hardware that made the PS3 a powerhouse.
Emulators can wave that away as "it is what it is". Sony advertising backwards compatibility couldn't.
We’re almost at that point. PS3 emulation on the Steam Deck is ALMOST there. Another generation of hardware improvements should push us over the edge. Then it would be up to Sony to decide “hey, we want to make money on the titles we can license and put back in an online store…”
PS2 games work almost flawlessly on my steam deck under emulation and the PS5 is more powerful than that, and Sony have access to the OG system engineers, software and hardware to work from, note they already had PS2 games working on the PS4. The PS3 is the tricky but people do have it working on PC so no reason Sony couldn’t. There’s no excuse not to have PS1, PSP or PSVita emulation games as they’re all easy
Time-limited consumables as buffs can be a huge annoyance. In a ton of games I just end up stacking them, waiting for an opportunity where I need them, but usually when I need them, I don’t have the time to stop and use them. I keep ending those kind of games with an inventory full of potions.
I really like minor stat boosting items instead. So rather than giving me an inventory full of potions, give me three or four slots for items that can have a huge range of different bonuses and penalties, and they are pretty minor, but they’re permanent. That way I get to craft a build instead of just being annoyed
That fucking suuuuuuuuucks. I wonder if there’s a mod that could accommodate you somehow. I’m not trying to spawn a big debate about difficulty in games here, but I really wish you’d be able to play it for yourself, somehow.
I agree. I was imagining maybe a time dilation mod that you could toggle on/off to make your inputs less physically demanding, but I don’t know if that exists. That’s how I’d do accessibility in this game personally. I don’t know anything about your condition though, so really I’m just spitballing and daydreaming simultaneously.
Valve is being sued because they are forcing others to follow policies that further entrenches Steam as the largest store.
Since Epic bought the game developer, it only applies to themselves. It is much harder to sue someone over a decision that only applies to something they own. How can a company be sued for not selling their product at a store? Should Valve be sued for not selling their own games on Epic or GOG?
Is Epic’s decision to only sell their games on their store annoying for users? Yes. But unfortunately, there is nothing illegal about. There would be a better chance of a lawsuit of Epic paying other game developers for exclusivity, but that would still not be easy as game exclusivity is still a significant factor on game consoles as well. Albeit much less than in the past.
Not allowing devs to sell steam download codes on other stores, But the ban only applies if they are selling the download code for cheaper than Steam
Not allowing devs to sell steam DLC download codes on other stores
I don’t think 1 or 2 puts other stores at any disadvantage. If a store wants to sell steam download codes then Valve has to get their normal cut. If they don’t want to pay the valve tax, then they don’t need to offer a Steam download code.
There are laws that say that abusing a monopoly is illegal. Steam is objectively a monopoly in pc games. Sure, you don’t have to use it, but it is basically impossible for indie developers to make a living without it.
Now, the question is if valve’s actions are actually abusing the monopoly, or normal business practices.
Notably, almost none of those are indie games, and almost any indie game that you did list came out in the 2000s like Roblox, before Steam was the behemoth it is today. Half of them are games by the same sets of AAA studios like Epic Games, Blizzard, and MiHoYo, and most Blizzard games have an entire franchise of games older than Steam itself to piggyback off of. Speaking of, anything by Blizzard isn’t even true… their most recent games like Diablo IV and Overwatch 2 are both on Steam. Tarkov is also on Steam now, but I’ll admit I’m splitting hairs here since it spent nearly a decade off of it. Though the fact that it released on Steam with its 1.0 update does say something.
So I really don’t think any of those games aside from debatably Tarkov shows that the average modern indie dev can be successful outside of Steam.
To be clear, the original comment I responded to said:
looks at Hytale doing quite well without even touching Steam
In response to a comment that said:
There are laws that say that abusing a monopoly is illegal. Steam is objectively a monopoly in pc games. Sure, you don’t have to use it, but it is basically impossible for indie developers to make a living without it.
I never moved the goalposts; modern indie devs were always the goalpost.
Hytale has incredible publicity for an indie release and caters to a target group that’s used to a separate launcher. Not comparable to the usual release.
Because, they aren't like Epic, who has been going around and locking games behind exclusivity deals. Name me one game by one developer, who Valve went to and was like "hey, I'm going to give you a $5 Million exclusivity deal. I'd like for your game to be available on our Steam platform for 2 years before you're allowed to sell anywhere else!"
I'm sure nobody can find that game. Meanwhile, Epic has done this to Metro: Exodus, Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 for the PC and outright buying studios going "hey, delist your game on Steam and only be available to our platform."
How the fuck can that broad be so stupid to not notice that? But it's all Valve's fault, somehow.
I don’t understand the reply. I was replying to the topic. I’m not a fan of Epic either but people are being kinda stupid about some of the justifications for the hate.
I don’t know if valve are or aren’t abusing their monopolistic position. I am not a lawyer and i don’t have a horse in the race.
I was just answering to someone who said “if you don’t like valve policies, dont publish your games there”, which would be true for a normal business, but specifically not true of a monopoly, which steam is, unquestionably
Epic can do things much more freely, because they dont hold a monopoly on pc games
It's hard to really call Valve a monopoly when, there is competition. If there's no competition, then Valve would clearly be a monopoly.
It's not like back in the 90s when Microsoft bundled their Windows OS with Internet Explorer that edged out Netscape back then. Because there really wasn't a lot of browser alternatives available to have made it where competition was there. Microsoft was considered a monopoly back then because competition was very little during their peak then.
In the digital PC gaming landscape, it's entirely different. There are numerous marketplaces for digital games. And they're big enough to where Valve is just simply an alternative and can go without if someone chooses.
Valve doesn't force anyone to use Steam or strong-arms people to buy games from them. They just exist, the people have spoken both by their own loyalty and their wallets. And that made companies like Epic mad and jealous. They just came late into the game when Valve was developing itself.
There are not many objectively provable monopolies and i doubt that English law would support that claim without extremely strong evidence, generally utilities are the only ones that'd get close. A necessity with high fixed costs and infrastructure lock-in.
Steam has high market share in a segment, but not necessarily a distinct segment, I'm sure steam would argue that there are enough consumers who can and do substitute between pc and console and mobile, as well as other vendors so that their market power is mitigated by a fair amount of consumer mobility.
So what you're looking to prove is unlikely to be a pure "monopoly" but 'excess market power', and 'abuse of market power'. That is a complex legal art that the competition regulator is usually not that successful at proving, at least in English law.
Abuse of market power has to impact consumers not producers. There are always marginal producers struggling to make a profit - that happens in competitive markets, producers bidding prices down, some going out of business. I'm not saying I agree, but that's more or less how the law sees it, lookup what they let supermarkets get away with in contracts with farmers.
To show consumer harm from upstream market manipulation you'd probably have to show a material dearth of choice being created by steam policies in order to jack up prices. Maybe that can be demonstrated, but it's not simple and more likely to come down to subjective interpretation of the arguments and evidence from both sides rather than any unarguable objective truth.
If it were unarguable or objectively true then the CMA might lead the investigation itself instead of this being a private action. Though maybe this is too small a market for them to worry about.
You have to differentiate between a monopoly in economics and a monopoly in law.
In economics a monopoly is the only seller of a good with no other competition. If I am the only one who owns apple trees, I got a monopoly on apples.
In law a monopoly is someone who owns so much of the market that they can charge unfair prices. If I am the only one who owns large orchards full of the best kind of apple trees, it doesn’t really matter to me that someone else has a couple mediocre trees in their backyard. I am not a economics-monopoly, since someone else is also selling apples, but I hold enough of the market that I can set the price to whatever I want.
(Ok, the analogy isn’t perfect, but you get it, I hope. Basically the “excess market power” thing you talked about is the legal definition of a monopoly.)
Customers don’t necessarily need to be end customers. If steam is charging their business customers too much, that counts too. (It also affects the end customers too, btw.)
So the question is: If I don’t release a game on steam, will that cause it to underperform significantly? If so, does steam charge a lot above market price? If both of these questions are answered with yes, a lawsuit could be successful.
My point was that proving dominance and abuse is rarely objective fact. It sure isn't showing market share and that some games companies go out of business. They have to show the things that valve does to restrict competition - being popular isn't enough alone.
Your last question is quite a good example of how hard it is to prove because it includes counterfactual comparisons.
This might be why it seems (if the journo is to be believed) that they're going down the tie-ins angle for the DLC, not necessarily headline pricing. Thou the latter would probably a worse outcome for valve if guilty.
I could see Valve controlling a bit of a monopoly in the game launcher and gaming social media markets.
A pro-consumer change that the EU could impose would be to split up the game marketplace from the game launcher and gaming social media markets through intercompatible APIs.
Maybe you could download games from steam in GOG or Lutris, and the steam overlay works on GOG or Lutris too. Maybe your discord friends could show up in the Steam friend list.
A stonemason’s hammer, also known as a brick hammer, has one flat traditional face and a short or long chisel-shaped blade.[1] It can thus be used to chip off edges or small pieces of stone, cut brick or a concrete masonry unit, without using a separate chisel. The chisel blade can also be used to rapidly cut bricks or cinder blocks. This type of hammer is also used by geologists when collecting rock and mineral samples and is one of several types of geologist’s hammer.
If I’d known this, I’d have put it in my review! Thanks for sharing!!!
Just to be clear, this is basically a guess but feel free to add it if you want, if I am right I didn’t come up with it, it was just lost in translation.
Absolutely, especially with handheld PC gaming becoming more popular. Drives me nuts having to fiddle with settings just to get it functional only to realize I missed something that was critical for a game play mechanic
Don’t know, I really would like to love the game. Everytime a new update drops I try to pick up the game, but time and time again I struggle to find a game loop which really grabs my attention and keeps me playing. I either fall back into ressource grinding or trying to unlock all expedition rewards. Both getting repetitive and boring after some hours of playing. It’s really a shame as I love the aesthetic and somehow casual feel of the game.
If you guys have any recommendations how to make the game enjoyable again, please feel free to drop a comment, would love to hear from you how you play NMS.
That was my experience as well for the first couple of years. But with the drop of the update where you can build your own Corvette, I finally converted. Finally I could build my very own Serenity! Next step is to make my way as a smuggler across the universe!
Edit: this is built after another players YouTube-tutorial by the way.
That’s a sweet looking ship indeed! How was your experience collecting all the necessary ship parts to build this? Do you think it helped make it more enjoyable to follow a youtube guide?
Nowadays being over 30 and having a child I don’t find as much time playing games anymore. Which makes the grinding part of games so much less enjoying and worth while. So following a youtube tutorial sometimes helps me to get through the more grindier spects of a game if its not possible to circumnavigate them.
PS: Woulf you mind sharing the youtube tutorial you followed?
So, as I’m also an “older” gamer, it definitely helped with the time management 😉 How I did it was to first just look up which parts he used and try to find as many of them as possible, or otherwise trade for them in the Corvette parts shop. For some parts I also used alternatives until I had managed to collect all of the “original” parts. And when I had collected all the parts, I then followed the tutorial to do the actual build. And I enjoyed doing it this way 🙂
There are several different alternatives, but the youtube video I followed was this: youtu.be/WyxeEKAnlek
Hehe wonderful, thanks for going into a deeper explanation on how you did it! Definitely gonna give it a try the next time I decide to start up the game again 🚀
I would pay good money for a mod that has Jayne as a crewmember, and any time you ask him to do anything he just walks away murmuring “I’ll be in my bunk”.
I really would like to love the game. Everytime a new update drops I try to pick up the game
Are you me?
I have it installed right now, I logged in to play all this new, raved-over content and found myself on some planet with too much air-traffic making noise overhead, needing to collect minerals to power my ship, and a base with some minecraft-like chests of loot.
I know the game is vast and deep and full of surprises and such, but I have the hardest time connecting with it enough to feel like I want to explore several hundred hyper-colorful planets.
Who knows, in one way or the other we might be (hello parallel universe?!)
Haha yeah I played it back in the days before the game had a real multiplayer, where you only saw other players as floating lights. Back then the game had a more “lost in the stars” vibe, more so as the sphere was no multiplayer hub and no player made buildings you stumbled upon while exploring. To be fair it also felt somewhat more empty as well.
That may be it, I am expecting something more grand or epic or complicated to start uncovering, not really realizing that what I’m already doing is “it” and the rest is just exploring for the sake of exploring.
It’s fun for a while, but it’s a pretty shallow sandbox and after you’ve played in the sand for a bit, it’s all just sand.
If you’re not setting yourself a complex and/or grindy goal, like building a neat base, finding the perfect weapon or ship, filling out your reputations or lexicon, or learning all the crafting recipes to make the ultimate mcGuffin, then there is really not much to do. And, for me, once that goal is accomplished, I’m done for a while.
Each planet is just a collection of random tree/bush/rock/animal/color combinations that are mechanically identical (unless something’s changed. I haven’t played since they added VR). I’m also a gamer who likes mechanical complexity and interactions; I don’t tend to play a game for the actual ‘role playing’.
The hand-written “quests” were fun to do most of the time, but that content runs out quickly.
I have the same problems with Elite Dangerous (I have an explorer somewhere out a solid few hours away from civilized space) and unmodded Minecraft (I can only build so many houses/castles). I’ll pick all of these up every now and then, but the fun wears off more quickly each time.
I have high hopes that Light No Fire will learn the lessons from NMS and make a world that is both dynamic and interesting, but grounded enough in a single planet that it’s not such a slog to explore and it’s not just “Oh, neat, a green planet with blue worm aliens and purple trees, this is a color/creature combo I haven’t seen in hours.”
Also, imagine how nice it would be if they just drop it as a huge MMO and you just drop in somewhere and people start randomly finding each other and building communities. That would go so hard, and yet the studios capable of making that kind of experience are soooo scared of the 2% of players who will play that and whinge all over the forums that they’re “bored, lost and can’t find anyone.”
You hit the nail on the head with your explanation. And I fully agree, played alot of Elite Dangerous when it released but the game loop got boring really fast. I also don’t know how many times I’ve started a Minecraft server with friends, only for us to abandon it after playing on and off for a couple of days.
The same in NMS, tried to make the game more enjoyable by playing with friends, but just the same as with Minecraft. You really need to find or define your own goals you want to achieve. But nowadays with everyday life and a limited amount of time to spend gaming, I tend to gravitate more and more towards more linear/story based games and less sandboxy ones.
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