I do think it’s about time for a successor. But that didn’t mean the current Steam deck isn’t viable any more. There are still thousands of games it will happily play. And the others can probably be made to run with some TLC from the developers.
The only thing cooler than a living miracle of portable computing is an undead miracle of portable computing that I’d still be playing games on come 2025 🧛
Eh. I find it difficult to have any sympathy for Valve. Sounds like it was only a matter of time before someone did this. If anything this is just free marketing.
Have you tried it? Genuine question, since we’re free to talk about it I’d love to hear why you think it’s mediocre, so far all the talk is always hype so I’m eager for some less positive takes.
I have 125hrs and it’s amazing fun, has a high skill ceiling, isn’t an overwatch clone or anything remotely like that game.
It’s a moba first third person shooter second. Basically dota with guns, or (a better) smite with a y axis (flying around, climbing, high spots, low spots) and guns.
I played a couple of matches and to me the match go for too long.
And I said:
maybe you’ll not like it.
If you like dota2 and LoL ok, if you like dota2 ok, if you like LoL and don’t like dota2(like most league players) I find really difficult to like deadlock.
I played league since s2 and a played some Dota2(+80hrish), the things that I don’t like in dota2 is present on deadlock, for example, like I said before, the length of the matches is too long for me.
I was low elo in dota2 and above average in league(diamond).
The data of the average match length in league is 30min in low elo and 25 in high elo, the dota2 high tier matches with 35min IS TOO LONG. In dota2 I played a lot of matches with +40min, without counting the time paused(I can’t even remember if the paused time is counted in the match time).
Besides in league we can forfeit a match and a lot of fuckup matches end with 20min, in dota2 this doesn’t happen.
The 5min-10min of length in average is a deal breaker for a lot of players. Most of people that I played league with give up on Dota 2 for this reason alone.
And that time is the average, if you people go play dota 2 and has 5 bad matches in a row with 40min without any means to leave that shit is the entire night thrown out.
Not only that for casual league matches is already too long, compare that with Overwatch that the average is below 20min.
Preface that it is an early alpha build and everything can change.
Yes, I have played it. It is literally just a moba. It feels like they took Dota and slapped 5% of an fps to it. The matches can be way too long, and it suffers from the snowballing effect that if you don’t get a good start, it is really hard to be effective. If you are 10 mins in a match and getting outplayed, you probably arent going to enjoy the remaining 20-30 mins. If you took Dota and modded it with 1st person controls, you’d be almost there with this game.
There is some good. The vertical elements do help, and the jungle aspects, along with destroyables, do help somewhat to make up lost ground in your build. The art design is pretty good for being alpha, and I do enjoy the map. There are lots of crisscross paths and hidden areas. There are also some map mechanics that are fresh, like 1 way viewable smoke screens.
If you don’t like mobas, I’d almost guarantee you won’t like this. It’s not a new, genre defining experience, and it doesn’t pull enough fps features to make it different. 4/10 as it sits.
Oh interesting, so it’s not at all like early Overwatch 1 which was way more FPS and was only compared to a MOBA because of the comparatively mild focus on abilities?
That’s both good and bad to hear, but yeah, sounds like overall it has a long long way to go.
I’ve only had the chance to play a handful of matches but I can echo those sentiments so far, I think. Another disclaimer though is that I’ve only played random matchmaking, not any premade stacks or squads.
The resource battle sets the gameplay experience apart from stuff like Overwatch or TF2 - and not really in a good way (so far). It does get very snowbally, but if it’s intended to be a team-oriented game like Dota it’s possible I’m not seeing all the intended catch-up mechanics. It does seem like whichever team gets the best start just wins on stats, which makes the quality of matchmaking impact your fun a LOT. Uneven teams lead to very boring matches. I’ve also run into the classic Dota problem of “finish plz” - where a dominant team farms kills outside your base instead of finishing the game.
All aspects of the game are clearly alpha though - and there is potential here. Like highlighted the map is great and I think the hero designs are good (both visually and mechanically). With both four abilities and four slots for active items the game looks to be making its niche complexity and high skill ceiling - much like Dota (unsurprising given Icefrog is designing this).
I also think the MOBA aspect of pushing and farming isn’t necessarily a bad concept as it does introduce a bunch of micro-objectives which drive player movements and create emergent gameplay. It just needs better balancing I think.
It definitely should not. Gamers use it because there are a range of genres of game. JRPG's ala Monster Hunter and Disgaea are pretty much a 300 hour minimum. There is no way GTA ever produces something worth 300 hours of gameplay, the closest they've gotten is their Online versions which frankly, would be horrible if they were priced per hour.
Racing games would have very little merit in price per hour. Sports games probably in between.
Then there's the whole fact that pacing can be implemented at the whims of the creators. It takes 4 hours to get energy so you can continue? Well, that 4 hours of paid playtime baybee, payyup!
How about games with little to no story? Should the new CoD only be $25 because it's campaign sucks? It's short after all. Or will they try and include multiplayer time, you know, something independent and timeless. Will they become arcades and start charging you per round?
Horrible, horrible idea. No matter hour you look at it, hours per game are only good for gamers with specific intentions, be it their limited time, their desire to 100%, or to see if it simply respects their time in the first place.
Absolutely. This is supposed to persuade people who say they want games to be long enough to be worth their price, but the actual intention is to create an excuse to charge forever while offering very little for it. It's very easy for any game to pad out their playtime with grind.
It's yet another way to trick people into paying for trappings of games that have nothing to do with the actual content. If you buy a board game, or an oldschool game cartridge, you don't need to keep paying for it however many times you go back to it. They may use servers as another excuse, but today servers exist to enable them to charge extra, not because they are truly necessary. There are many older and smaller games, as well as Minecraft, that show that players can run online games on their own just fine.
And they charge extra by selling fiction. Shark cards with in-game currency are just a number in the game that is trivial to change with no effort from them. It's very different from selling content packs including new vehicles and weapons, locations, characters and story. Same goes for games that sell the chance of getting an unit of an item or character, split by arbitrary levels of rarity that have nothing to do with how demanding it was to create that content, rather than selling full access to content packs including those items and characters, to be used however many times they player wants.
It's layers upon layers of something that is pretty much a scam at this point. Taking advantage of people who can't tell apart product and service from a sense of hype and value in an imaginary context.
Joking aside, length of a game is a terrible metric for price. I always consider how much time I spend playing a game compared to the price for the ROI. But a lot of games just add filler content that is copy and paste missions.
I sat down to play it last night, got destroyed by spaceships I’m trying to kill to level up my piloting skill and access class B and C ships, went to the simulator in the UC base to get some free kills and realised I wasn’t having any fun with the game any more, so I closed the game and started playing High on Life. Had way more fun.
After the
spoilerStarborn
reveal
spoiler(which I saw coming as soon as the Starborn were introduced)
I realised it’s just not fun. I can’t get into the roleplay as all the characters are bland cardboard cutouts with weird facial expressions, the only fun I was really having was the shooting which grew stale once all the enemies became bullet sponges.
The lack of city maps, the boring cutscenes for everything, clunky console first interface, drab colours, bafflingly hideous item designs, lifeless procedural planets. The factions are all boring. Permanent skills, with no respec options?! And for god’s sake, let me eat food on the ground by long pressing E.
It’s actually worse than Fallout 4, and that’s 8 years old.
I’ve been noticing that too recently. I’ve been hooked on the game, but not really in a good way. I’m not having fun, I’m checking boxes for quests or leveling and it scratches an ADHD itch where I can’t get off it until I finish what I’m doing, but there’s always a new thing that I’m doing. They have done a good job singing missions together so that it feels like you’re always doing something.
But it doesn’t feel fun. They have less than 10 unique buildings to discover throughout the 1000 planets, to the point where I had seen the same two buildings within the first 5 hours of the game. They somehow couldn’t come up with more than 6 different types of plants that repeat across planets. Running to buildings from landing spots is a real bore.
Progression is a real grind. 32 hours in and I’m only level 22, AND I feel like I don’t have skill points in basically anything compared to how big the skill tree is.
I’m disappointed in how shallow the game is. 1000 planets wide, an inch deep. I’ll probably finish the main story missions and be done with it.
Progression is a real grind. 32 hours in and I’m only level 22, AND I feel like I don’t have skill points in basically anything compared to how big the skill tree is.
Thank you. I’m in a similar situation and finding that the grind is really annoying with not a lot of payoff. And then you’ve got so many skills to invest in and you never quite know if you’ll actually need some of them.
I know planets don’t all have to be super interesting, but I dread landing on anything now, because they’re just… so boring to me.
Running to buildings from landing spots is a real bore.
Don’t know if you know this already, but bringing up your scanner and pointing it to your ship icon lets you fast travel to it.
Also, you can skip the whole “return to ship” thing altogether and open up the star map or whatever it’s called and immediately jump to space and set course/land on another planet. I think it only works if you’re unencumbered, though, but I’m not certain.
Edit: Lol, I accidentally misread that as “running from buildings to landing spots”, so ignore that last bit. Hard agree on running to the buildings. At least in TES/FO there’s interesting stuff along the way. Here, it’s just rocks and minerals and maybe a few animals.
You know it’s bad game design when the most useful superpower the game has is the one to let you keep sprinting so you can try to waste less time (Personal Atmosphere).
The factions are all boring. Permanent skills, with no respec options?! And for god’s sake, let me eat food on the ground by long pressing E.
Apparently that last one is being added with an update soon.
I think the factions are okay, but not nearly as good as their counterparts in previous games (eg. NCR > Freestar Collective, although that’s probably more thanks to Obsidian than Bethesda).
forbes.com
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