And then you have to field uncomfortable questions with your kids when they ask about whether piracy is stealing. Or worse, the judgment from other parents when your kid brags to all his friends about having all the games and they don’t even pay for them.
Listen, I love my Steam Deck, but it isn’t a reasonable replacement for heavy Switch users, like this guy and his family. It’s not exactly a high-spec’d machine and as a result, in my experience, none of the Switch games play at their original FPS on the Deck. Some are so bad that they are unplayable. Online play is going to be, at best, limited and far more difficult to manage. Heck, setting it up in general for kids that probably just want to play the damn games is going to be more annoying. The worst part would be listening to, “Dad, why can’t we just buy a Switch?” a thousand times.
I hate Nintendo as much as the next guy, but this isn’t answering the OP’s question in a reasonable way.
From the post I am assuming they don’t want something fiddly like emulators for a “current” system that keep getting taken down and you have to hunt for a new one constantly. Another comment also mentioned performance being an issue for Switch emulation on the Deck.
This might be a solution for some, but it definitely isn’t for everyone.
Oh boy, I have so many game ideas that I would love to make, but they’re all so complex I would either need a full game studio or the determination of the dwarf fortress devs.
A fantasy civilization builder in a massive open world. Think stellaris, but on the ground with magic rather than in space with spaceships, where you essentially design a civilization from the ground up, with countless different options for said civilization, and with a massive world to explore full of events and discoveries and other civilizations to interact with. As an example of what I would like to see, you could play as dwarves who live fully underground and end up finding the buried body of a massive god, which they must deal with the consequences of. Or you could play a nomadic civilization that progresses from living out of horse-drawn carts to constructing massive vehicles which they build entire cities on the back of. Maybe those vehicles are actually living creatures, or magically animated constructs. I absolutely love the wildly different civilizations you can create in stellaris and the stories they create, but I always wanted something somehow even more sandboxy, plus I love magic and fantasy so I wanted to mix that in.
An extremely in-depth survival game with a focus on interactivity. Another genre of games I deeply enjoy is survival games that really make you survive. Two examples of this are the excellent games Stationeers and Vintage Story. The first game has a major focus on interconnected systems and full simulation, while the second involves a series of realistic and in-depth yet largely separate systems. I’ve always imagined some combination of the two, a deeply simulated world where everything interacts with everything else, and yet each individual system is extremely in-depth and meaningful. I would hope that this would enable extremely creative problem solving, such as you might find in the newest Legend of Zelda games, yet much more meaningful as now it is actually necessary to your survival. There are some more specific touches that I would personally add to such a game such as separating it from our world, and placing it in a fantasy world with radically different animals and environments, which I believe would open up more opportunities for unique and fun game mechanics when no longer restrained by realism. This is more of a pipe-dream but I would also enjoy if the in-depth systems were so in-depth that mastery of said system would require significant effort, without it getting stale. Combine this with highly intelligent NPCs that you as a player could work with and you could realistically form a village in which you as the player would fulfill a single role, such as being a farmer, or blacksmith, or scholar, without it getting boring, even if you’re playing singleplayer.
Lastly, I’ve been rolling around the idea of an RPG in which the classes are all so different that they feel like playing different games. This came about from frustration with Final Fantasy XIV, where it felt like the only thing that changed when I changed classes was the order in which I press my buttons. I’ve had ideas such as a summoner who plays the game like an RTS, or an alchemist who gathers ingredients and crafts various potions and tools to use in battle, or a bard who casts spells to a beat almost like a rhythm game, or a fighter who dances with his opponent with parries and dodges and counterattacks. Admittedly this game is a much looser concept than the previous two, but I’m mostly just tired of games where class choices feel more like cosmetic options than like actual meaningfully different playstyles.
Going to go out of the shooter box here and say Valheim. I am pretty sure it’s cross compatible with xbox and pc/steam deck. Might not be the thing though if you are just all wanting to pvp, but thought I would throw it out there.
If you are looking for Stardew-likes, I have been enjoying Coral Island. Full disclosure, I think it’s bullshit they they market it as version “1.1” when it is so very clearly not finished, but honestly after 400+ hours in Stardew I’ve been enjoying it despite its very present jank.
If Stardew is a 10/10 for me, I’d give Coral Island a 6.5/10 and mind you that’s on a real 0-10 scale, not the 5-10 scale usually used lol.
See Coral Island is so cute and unique that I personally felt it was just perfect. It wasn’t so closely resembling SDV that I felt like I was playing a bootleg version haha
Yes, I love its characters and some of the ways it diverged from Stardew. But it has a lot of undeniable jank and is objectively unfinished. Mind you that hasn’t stopped me from approaching 100 hours in it, but I would feel dishonest not mentioning it.
The post title was a pun with the mod’s original name, “T-Edition”, and me insisting on playing the Japanese version despite still having difficulties with the language. But besides apparently increasing the main game’s difficulty, the mod adds a ton of optional challenges, including one that, iirc, acts like FFV’s mini dragon.
I just landed on my 3rd - Gleba. Vulcanus and Fulgora are “good enough” for now. Once I have Gleba science up and running, I’ll migrate to a bigger Nauvis base, because my starter base is bottlenecked by copper throughput with no easy way of increasing it.
I would love to see F.E.A.R. with updated graphics. Preferably just a remaster, but if it was remade in the same spirit as the Dead Space remake was, I'd be down for that too, especially if they brought back Fettel's voice actor.
Factorio!! This work week has been hell and I have a week PTO starting Monday. So time to put in some effort in an asynchronous multi-player game with a friend.
No Man’s Sky is doing a Halloween event, too, so I might play around in that to get some unique cosmetics. And the Expeditions usually have a tailored experience that’s always fun.
I’ve been playing Papers Please in the 30 min or so I have for gaming in the evenings lately. I might play more of that to see if I can get all the endings.
Unless the weather is nice. Then I’m going fishing.
I miss good arcade racers. I don’t remember the name of them, but I remember on the Xbox or 360 there were some really fun ones where you race around cities and nice landscapes. You could just jump in with friends and race. These days any racing game I try is like a job. Oh, you want to race? First drive to the garage, pick your car, talk to the mechanic, then spend 20 minutes driving to the race track. Mario Kart is about the only fun racing game I can think of, but I’d prefer something with real cars.
Racing in VR is such a great experience, I’d love to see more of it. Simulation and arcade style. But you’re right, we need one with a robust, slow paced progression system. I remember really enjoying unlocking everything in NFS Porsche Unleashed, going through the eras, starting slow but getting slowly faster. Then NFS Underground 2 came out and still stands alone as the best example of racing progression by a large margin. Then it’s like the gameplay design has been going further back in time since then. I am using the same simple progression mechanics in new racers that I used in Sega GT 2002, and they were old then.
As to why, it feels like they don’t have AAA budgets anymore. The high quality simulator games like the Dirt series have to spend their whole wad getting the physics and performance right, there’s not much left for anything else, so it’s just menus and a simple money system. That’s just my guess, it could just be they need to hire a couple RPG designers among the gear head ones.
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