Probably for the best. The Deck certification process on games would probably be annoying if they had a whole bunch of revisions with only like 10% difference in performance.
Wait a few years and make the next one a meaningful jump.
Exactly. I’d like to see a few significant improvements for the next gen - namely in screen and performance to match, but my dream would be to see Valve license Framework’s module system (or build something similar of their own) and integrate one of those somewhere on the deck.
It’d be great for the obvious, like adding high-speed storage, but just imagine the possibilities for a handheld gaming console of attachments people could build with a module system that locks in place like that.
Obviously the module thing is a pipe dream and unlikely to happen, but I just feel like there’s a ton of additional potential for that form factor that’s unexplored, and I’d like to see longer generations not only for support, but also so that larger iterative work like designing a module system or whatever can be prioritized over rushing out regular performance upgrades.
I would upgrade for a slightly smaller, more battery efficient Steamdeck with an OLED screen. I know that's a lot to ask for, but definitely performance is the least of my concerns.
I’m holding off until a new version. Doesn’t necessarily need to be faster, but I’m sure they’ve learned a ton with this release. Interested to see their 2.0 release.
Only thing I would ever want more is battery, but I’ve never even drained it and I carry my power brick with me everywhere for my phone/ laptop anyway so. I’d just get this version on the next discount (if I did not have a similar device).
Fair enough, it seems like we’re starting to see smaller performance gains per generation especially in battery devices. Makes sense to not force an update until real iterative performance is available. Asus’s ROG Ally was 1.5-2 years after Steamdeck and seems mostly on par.
Most resources have been diverted to the single player campaign for a while. (Squadron 42)
They communicate what is being done for the persistent universe (Star Citizen) but it’s a slower trickle of features due to the resource allocation.
Generally, they made some really great gameplay engagements over the years but features are being prioritized based on the S42 needs. They only update on S42 once a month, but the updates have been looking like they are nearing feature completion (community speculation, not announcement) just due to them moving more toward bug fix/QA type stuff in recent months.
The next big information dump is scheduled for October at the convention that’s coming up.
They’ve given up on giving dates because the community is very unforgiving if the dates are missed. And in software, dates are almost always missed.
They have a progress tracker on the website that shows the various components that are left to be worked on and which game is for. robertsspaceindustries.com/…/deliverables
Always take the dates with a grain of salt because they usually only list about 1-2 quarters only. But until recently, most of the bars were in S42 rows. I’m hoping for big news around it in October.
The other big indicator for their focus on it was last year when they relocated a bunch of senior leadership in the org to the UK with the stated reasoning of focus on S42 with the trans that were already working on it.
It’s still moving towards completion. At a snail’s pace but it’s moving. To their defense they’ve done some really cool tech with the game engine and stuff but idk if that justifies the timeline imo.
My money is spent regardless though, so I’ll zoom around in my leather interior ship whenever it does release.
Lol arguably, you can actually walk around the interior of your ship in SC. The FPS portions are pretty good. But last time I played (like two years ago) I fell through a staircase.
They have decided to adjust all development focus on being able to stimulate the perfect realistic animation of a poop crowning out of an in-game dog's ass.
The previous world record holder before BG&E2 was Duke Nukem Forever which took 14 years to develop and 9 years from the initial announcement in 2001 to the release in 2010.
Half life 2 episode 3 is supposedly still in the works and supposed to have been out in 2007. You might argue it was cancelled in 2011 when they announced half-life 3 was in development. Half life 3 has yet to be officially cancelled and leaks came out a few years ago of it being an active project.
Counterpoint: Consolidation in such a fast paced industry with a low barrier to entry isn’t as bad as physical goods consolidation. If Microsoft acts in bad faith, people just won’t buy games from that studio anymore, developers will just leave the company and start a new studio, free lance, or work for another party. It’s not like ABK was lighting the market on fire either. Microsoft is buying a trash heap and hoping to turn the internal culture around to bring back neglected IPs
Counter-counterpoint: When Activision bought and consolidated Blizzard an Blizzard North, they made it worse and people still slave away for them, and enough people buy their objectively inferior products to keep them going on life support to be sold again.
They became a poster child of what’s wrong with the industry (Diablo Immortal) and nobody learned anything. Baulder’s Gate 3 did more to further a healthy ecosystem than any merger has.
And how many dozens of indie games came out that same week whose studios folded afterwards? Or how many devs didn’t even release their first games because they ran out of money during development? Or how many smaller studios who were making fun games got irresistible offers from big studios to buy them out? What about the engines that are becoming increasingly more hostile towards devs?
There is currently a handful of devs doing the occational balance patch for SC2 otherwise the game is complelty dead from the developer side. On the MS side, AoE2 and other even older games are doing so much better.
And SS1 came out 29 years ago and just got a remaster. This isn’t a years-pissing context. Starcraft II was supported way long, and extensively. And like all good games, eventually the vast vast majority of players have moved on, and then the devs might move on, too.
The issue is not not players of devs, but the management that probably doesn’t think it’s profitable enough anymore. Yet, Microsoft manages to keep AoE2 going with an even smaller playerbase than SC2.
So MS taking over an abandon francise I care about sounds pretty sweet to me.
yes it does matter. These are businesses. They make money by selling things. You cannot compare one rereleasing the same game with minimal changes for new money to keep supporting an existing game without charging new money.
Isn't the expansion content between SCII's expansions and AoE2's expansions significantly different?
EDIT: the last one was 3 races (note: races are significantly less diverse in AoE2 vs in SC2) and 3 campaigns, each with 6 maps each
I feel like the Co-OP commanders they added fairly frequently would constitute roughly the same amount of race content. Campaign content not so much but the main campaign of each SC2 expansion is 26 stages, not including branching paths.
Not that much. Yes, AoE2 usually adds new factions, that won’t happen in StarCraft II. But introducing new units or reworking existing one is possible.
Adding singleplayer mission is pretty mich the same.
Also the Co-op mode of SC2 is quite popular and there is room to add a “new factions” there.
But do they need the games to be good? Activions sucks balls, but why would microsoft make the games good again and remove all the shit with microtransactions etc.?
I haven’t played it but I have read that Diablo 4 has been mostly well received. I guess there’s been a fiasco about one of the updates to it, but that’s not something unique to Blizzard and theoretically could be fixed in another update, no?
Me too, I know it’s not a popular opinion on here (for good reason) but this should put more pressure on PlayStation and drive competition there, make gsmepass more attractive and hopefully shake things up at Activision blizzard which could go either way, but worth the risk given how shitnthey currently are.
Let’s hope they can chew what they’ve attempted to eat. They can barely manage their first party studios, and now they’re going to attempt to manage one of the biggest publisher/studio.
I mean yeah, that’s how acquisitions and exclusivity works. It’s not like PlayStation bought Bungie to lose money or make exclusivity deals with third parties to bring games to Xbox. That’s just how this industry works.
By manage I mean, they’re gonna handle so many companies without a good track record of being able to do it. To make the money from King they will need to be able to retain talent and steward its properties properly.
they’re gonna handle so many companies without a good track record of being able to do it. To make the money from King they will need to be able to retain talent and steward its properties properly.
No they don't. As we've already seen, MS doesn't have to do anything in regards to development. Promotion, marketing will get a boost but they can be hands off most of the technical details and still make bank. Bethesda, King and Activision are all quite profitable on their own. Now they simply can't develop for Sony and they get distributed on Game Pass day 1.
Also, exclusionary buy-outs are bad for the market and should not have been allowed. MS buying up huge game competitors and then restricting their choice on which platforms to develop for is clearly anti-competitive behavior.
You’re right, they’ve been hands off and basically done bare minimum for marketing and promotion. And it hasn’t been working well for them at all, exhibit A: Halo Infinite, exhibit B: Redfall. Clearly they can’t sustain this anymore.
Starfield has been probably the first example where they actually got invested in the production, delayed a game by a year, got their entire QA team test it. Layoffs from top to bottom at 343 is probably another example of them intervening.
Regarding exclusionary buyouts, I don’t know if you aren’t aware of it. But it has been a thing in this industry for decades. This is how Sony got where it is today, by being highly competitive by making exclusionary deals and buying studios with whom they had exclusionary deals with for years. Sony entered this industry out of nowhere and bought their way into success, and everyone agrees that only made the market more competitive. Xbox had no games and was not bringing competition in market, and now that it has more games, it’s anti competitive?
The difference with MSFT is that they bring their games to PC (an open platform) via Steam, and to Xbox, along with a price accessible service of GamePass, so it doesn’t force a gamer into first buying a $400 console and then a $70 game to play on it.
We can agree to disagree, my original point is primarily around lack of confidence in MSFT’s ability to manage these studios and do justice to their legacy. Sure making workspaces less toxic and inclusive for everyone is a massive win, but will employees stick around under a new management that seems pretty incompetent to eff up their own flagship series (Halo).
No way Microsoft let’s that happen. He’ll be forced out. The only reason Microsoft looked into this consolidation is because he was running the company value into the core of the earth.
Of all the games to choose to remaster they decided on Oblivion and not Morrowind? Man, Bethesda couldn’t confirm how out of touch they are even harder if they tried
I can kinda see why they went with Oblivion. For one, Morrowind would be harder to do because it relies heavily on invisible dice rolls and she stats of you vs the enemy for…basically everything. From hit chance, to if your spell is succesfully cast, to how much damage your armor (or the enemy’s) eats up. Unless they gut that entire system and do a more modernized one instead (like Oblivion/Skyrim’s)
Another reason i wanna say they picked Oblivion is because, frankly, it’s the middle redhead child of the “modern” elder scrolls main games. Everyone praises Morrowind and Skyrim, but Oblivion…yeah. I love it, it was what Skyrim was to many players, but yeah it can be rough in a lot of aspects. Sometimes even more so than Morrowind (YMMV. I could easily get used to Morrowind, even vanilla. Everytime i go back to Oblivion, I have to make myself look past the roughness to see the good stuff).
IDK, i see this as a great second chance for the game…and, foolish it may be but, I’m also hoping they restore Cyrodiil to the jungle it was hyped up to be in Morrowind and the pocket guides since the tech is there now, plus they no longer have to cash in on the Lord of the Rings movies. They won’t. But i can dream.
It’s not so much the dice rolls that are the problem…but, they kinda are…let me try and explain what i mean
It isn’t so much that going back to Morrowind’s style of gameplay is a bad thing. Like you said, a lot of games do that and do it well, even today (Baldur’s Gate 3 does Dice Rolls for everything too, and its great) it’s more of is Bethesda going to keep it intact (either completely or modernize it) and risk potentially alienating the part of the fans that have only played Skyrim (A large part of players, at least from what I’ve seen) or are they going to scrap it and replace it with a more Oblivion/Skyrim system, thus potentially alienating the ones that are wanting an Elder Scrolls game to go back to when there were tangiable RPG mechanics in there (and that’s not assuming they don’t try and have it both ways…IDK how that’d look, but if you try pleasing everyone, well…).
Did that make sense? I’m kinda running on an energy drink and a dream atm
But really, i think it’s more of they looked at Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, and just went “out of those 3, Oblivion’s the one that could use the tuneup the most” (again, it’s the redhead middle child, sandwiched between the much more universally loved Skyrim and respected older Morrowind).
My big point here is that Bethesda isn’t aware of what their fan base enjoys. There are plenty of people who have played their games who are not fans. When I say fan what I’m talking about is the kind of people who play all of their games throughout history. You garner good will with your community by catering to the desires of the fan base itself. that said even if they wanted to do the most money grabbiest thing they could it would still make more sense to start with 3 and work their way toward 5 again. It would give them more games to monotize and would also let them build hype for the games that did penetrate the general audience
I don't think they're interested in gatekeeping which group of their customers are considered "fans", nor do I think it's them that's out of touch. I know Morrowind is the cult classic, but Oblivion just does better numbers.
What’s most disappointing about this aside from the negative impacts it has on consumers with no benefits is how it shows what a grip Microsoft has on uk entities. This has been a problem for decades. Microsoft is one of those companies that has its tendrils all throughout the uk, and they can get whatever they want. Even when what they want is in opposition to decisions made by authorities specifically designed to block this kind of thing.
It sounds like the issue the regulator had was something specific to cloud game streaming, and Microsoft addressed that.
The CMA had originally blocked the acquisition over cloud gaming concerns, but Microsoft recently restructured the deal to transfer cloud gaming rights for current and new Activision Blizzard games to Ubisoft.
yes that’s mechanism where you see microsoft get what they want. they do a platitude that doesn’t affect them, that they generally won’t even bother to enforce. because the regulatory body can’t just say “they made us do this by talking to someone higher up that said we had to do this”
the CMA never goes back on decisions like this, their decision is final and you can only fight it by going to the courts and the courts will only rule on if it was legal for the CMA to make the decision, not on the validity of the decision.
Curious to see the differences between the "real" plans and the leaked ones. Obviously, some of the dates are off since some of those games haven't been released yet and I have a hard time believing Elder Scrolls 6 is coming out next year. I could see some of those games being canceled, but it's hard to see plans around the midgen refresh changing up too much. It makes sense to have something to compete with the PS5 Pro that Sony is probably going to release next year and an all-digital Series X would be a good way to test the waters for going completely digital next generation.
A lot of the planned release dates got pushed back a year or two because of covid, so add a year to each date to get closer to when things are probably going to actually come out, I reckon.
I haven’t heard about any plans for PS5 Pro, but all that leaks have said what’s coming out is more like a Slim, since it’s going to be smaller, and not have a built-in disk drive. We’ll see, tho.
Not very. Negotiating and executing a deal of that size and complexity cross cutting major national, cultural, and business universes would be extremely difficult
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Aktywne