Thanksgiving and family visiting kinda threw me for a loop as far as gaming goes, but for Diablo 4: Season 2 I managed to move into the Champion chapter at the beginning of the week before anyone showed up. I'm finally in World Tier 4, so I'll be working on that when I have more time.
I got one of those new Steam Deck OLEDs today and am thinking about getting some casual games for that (even though I got a ton of stuff in my backlog).
Dave the Diver is currently the forerunner, and maybe Mega Man Battle Network. I might just wait until the Steam Winter Sale though, since the prices won’t be worse, and maybe even a tiny bit better.
– If you see a game on sale, it will be on sale again. Don’t get baited into buying something you won’t actually play for years.
– Please oh please learn to use the Deck’s quick menu performance options. When people complain about the Deck’s battery life, what they forget is that unlike a Nintendo Switch, it’ll just treat everything like it’s “docked” unless you tell it otherwise. It’ll munch through that battery as quick as you let it, so extending it is your responsibility. The easiest way to do that is to just set a power limit (even the max of 15 watts will help) if a game is running fine. A lot of basic 2d games get by just fine on 3 or 5. Half-rate shading is the other major option. Basically it’ll render some things at half of their normal resolution, sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes it isn’t noticable on the Deck’s screen. With 3D stuff, get the performance overlay up and start dropping the the wattage if the framerate is high enough, or the game’s video settings if it’s not. Ideally just drop both, that’s how you’ll really save the battery. I just drop a lot of games right to “low” settings unless it looks really awful and go from there.
– In a similar vein, framerate limits!! Console games are nearly always locked to 30 or 60 frames per second for all sorts of reasons. In the Deck’s case you’re again thinking about battery life. While you can sometimes argue for framerates higher than a screen’s refresh rate, on the Deck it’s not really justifiable, there’s no good reason to pass 60. Some games play just fine at 30 so lock it to 30 if you can tolerate it. Or, the Deck’s secret weapon… 40fps. Normally you’d never do that, because it doesn’t line up with the screen and things get weird, but the Deck’s screen can actually just drop to 40hz to compensate. Due to some odd math 40fps is actually much closer to 60 than 30 in practice while still saving a lot of battery life.
BUT… BUT BUT BUT, the Deck’s system-wide framerate limiter has problems. Input lag problems. Hopefully you don’t notice and don’t give a shit but if you do, oh god, so much input lag. Thankfully the vast majority of games have their own 60fps locks that don’t have this problem (to the same extent) but for the 40hz thing you need to just deal with it.
This is very helpful!! I’m feeling a lot of FOMO pressure what with the Steam Autumn sale going on right now. There are so many games I have always wanted to play but never had a chance to…and now I can play them all at my fingertips! (For example: Halo: MCC, the Fallout series, and Persona 5). I’m tempted to snag MCC and Fallout 76, or New Vegas, because those prices are awesome.
Can you expand more on the Deck’s quick menu performance options? I’ve already learned about “the Golden 40”, and have locked most if not all of my games to 40fps…but what other “quick menu performance” options should I be sure to optimize?
Taking a look at my wishlist, and seems like I’ve got enough in my wallet to snag a couple of heavy sale games purely from all the cards I’ve sold on the marketplace.
May not get anything, though. Got tons of other shit to play and I’m not aching for anything in particular, although Charrua Soccer and Kopanito All-Star Soccer might be options because I want some good old fashioned arcade football and they seem fun enough.
Oh, and Shadow Gambit and Desperados 3, mainly because getting them now is one of the last opportunities to actually have the money go directly to Mimimi (the developers), who are shutting down end of year (which at least was their own choice and not because some publisher/holding company fired them).
Edit: Oh, I might get one of Frogware’s Sherlock games. Don’t know what the consensus is on the newer ones.
I’ve been trying to play Guardians of the Galaxy but have been too busy with work and school since September. I only recently saw the movie based on a friend’s recommendation, and I loved it. Thought it would make a fun RPG, and sure enough there was already one, and it was on sale when I looked so I snagged it. Maybe I’ll finish it someday.
I think Larian Games do very little to explain their rules to the player. I, too, found it incredibly frustrating when I played Divinity: Original Sin and later, DOS 2. So while I didn't carve out time from my day to learn the ins and outs of Baldur's Gate III, I did have experience with the other two games that helped me navigate it.
I adore these games but it took many hours of training for me to understand what it was I was even supposed to be doing.
Personally, I find that researching games on the internet can be really fun. I get analysis paralysis pretty badly (I’m the guy who is always worried he will be out of consumables when he needs them so he never uses them in the first place!) so researching a little beforehand helps me enjoy myself more. I don’t need to min/max the fun out of a game, but knowing I’m on the right track is really good for my enjoyment levels.
And this is very much a me thing, and that’s okay. We play games to have fun so play the way that’s the most fun for you. If you don’t like doing research before you play, but the game seems to require it, then play something else. It’s okay to not like a game. (I wasn’t super into BG3… shhh! Don’t tell the internet or they will burn me alive! Good game, but not for me.)
Personally, I really like rogue-lites these days. They’re games where you are meant to replay them and every run will be randomized in some way so that each one ends up being unique. (Hades, FTL, Nova Drift, those sorts of games.) The randomness makes it so that there’s no WRONG way to play, just better or worse choices for a given run, which takes that “stress” of making a wring choice away for me.
You gotta find what floats your boat and don’t worry about the other games.
Personally, I find that researching games on the internet can be really fun
Yeah, I don’t find that fun at all, and have no interest in such things, so I’m just trying to figure out if that’s what I need to do, because if so, I’m out, and I don’t want to start walking down that path and spend my valuable gaming time tearing my hair out because the necessary info simply doesn’t exist in the game. I just want to relax.
Honestly just being here reading all these responses and trying to figure out what “min/max” and “rogue-lites” (rogue-likes?) are is exhausting. I just want my games to have all the necessary information in the game.
There are lots of games out there, and just like any kind of entertainment, some will hold your hand and some won’t. Everyone has different tastes, different things they want to do with their time, different amounts of time and money, and there are games that cater to all of them.
Unfortunately, the only way to tell which is which without playing it first is by doing a little research.
So it seems like you’re a little stuck, you either play a game blind and hope it’s right for you, or you look into it beforehand to figure it out before spending your money. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect but hey, you do you. Good luck!
Well, there is a pretty large community of gamers who play games on Youtube and Twitch professionally. You could always watch someone else play it briefly to get an idea of what to expect. Once you eventually find some games you really like the style of, you will be in good shape. You can then ask for more targetted recommendations here on Lemmy, or look up reviews for games in a similar genre, or find streamers who play games you like and look through their old videos for similar games (they tend to stick to a style usually), etc.
First step, I think, is figuring out not what you don’t like, but what you DO like.
I just want my games to have all the necessary information in the game.
Something that I meant to say in my comment but slipped my mind; a lot of these games will have you learn by playing. IMO, games either show too much trying to show you everything or they don’t show you anything and have you learn the mechanics of the game and its engine.
It sounds like you are wanting some information from the game before you start it, but the game is going to do that by experience not by text, which is why so many people have said “oh that’s why we look it up online!”. They’re just doing the same thing you are, just not in the game. I understand not wanting to be in the game and then having to get taken out of it for something though.
It sounds like each game you mentioned you wanted information from the game before you started playing it, which is the same thing that everyone else has done just with the internet. Personally, I’m in the camp of jump in and go and then 40 hours in if there is still something the game hasn’t explained (or realistically, something that I skipped over) then I look it up. Otherwise, you spend all your time reading about what to expect instead of just having it happen to you.
This sounds like it might suit you as long as you give up some expectations. Like I said, from how you’re talking it sounds like you’re still trying to preload on information (like everyone else) but expecting it from the game. The game will show you eventually, you just gotta see the response from your actions and suffer the consequences!
FWIW it’s a wide range of genres out there. Games at this point are being made from decades of existing gamer techniques. There’s games like Monster Hunter where the game gives you an hour and half of learning the game and there’s still more to learn in entirely different aspects of the game (crafting weapons/armor/items and the actual attacks and monster patterns), there’s games like BG3 where there are character traits and specifics that are there for nudging you to play a certain way (where min/maxing is minimum amount of effort for maximum amount of gains - it’s not very ideal to have a strength warrior focusing on magic).
Then there’s games like Pathologic that do tell you exactly what you need to do, but the entirety of the game is made to dissuade you from playing it.
You should try Shadow Warrior. It is a first person slasher where all of your abilities are gained one by one and grow on top of each other. It tells you everything you need to know, no guesswork. Max Payne 3 is a third person shooter that is very straightforward. And Okami, a third person open-area puzzle explorer, where the game makes you think outside the box for abilities it has taught you how to use, and just a few points where you have to do an explicit objective before continuing.
Story based progression games akin to Borderlands but free from inventory and stats. No bothering with how many levels you have to get through before you can level up your abilities, just good old point A to point B action.
Tl;Dr don’t preload information from games, compile information from playing them
Hey, glad I had a good guess that was already up your alley! And sorry for some of the responses - unfortunately elitism has a high correlation to certain min/max communities.
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