I agree mostly and did the same. At some point when the Steam Deck was new, I really thought about getting a Switch instead alongside my PC. Because the Steam Deck is more like an extension to the eco system I already have with my PC (especially as a Linux user). On the other side, the Switch would widen the the number of games to play. You can’t buy specific games on PC, such as some of the most beloved franchises and games in history.
I went with the Steam Deck, as a fan of Steam, Linux and PC in general. The Switch system is what, 7 years old? 8? Even games from its launch time are still sold very expensive. Plus Nintendo does really bad things to the fan games and such, that I won’t support this company any longer.
The Switch really isn’t that good. It’s just the competition is so bad right now. Nintendo sells so good because they keep making good games and knows how to appeal to the mass market, not just to a specific core audience. I don’t like many things about the Switch and that includes its hardware, software and the shop. But I’m not the core audience of this system either, so fair enough I guess.
Yes and no. The developers mostly still care making good games. Therefore some games are still good. Also we got a few good surprises in the last few years from these companies, so its not all lost.
Edit: ugh, I lost myself in this reply. It’s just geeking about the future what could be possible, mostly not worth reading if you value your time.
This is one of the most exciting developments to me, the actual AI of bots or NPCs. Not only for RPG games, I can also envision multiplayer games to be more fun playing offline with bots. Imagine they act like humans, with their hearings and trying to trick you out in Mario Kart, Street Fighter and Counter Strike. Obviously we are long way from this, but this is very exciting to me.
Also GTA where people act normal and do stuff humans would probably try too is exciting as well. In RPGs imagine you hear about a hero in a village who defends its town and you recruit him, finding out its just a normal NPC for other players, but got strong because it found a holy weapon you dropped near to him in the beginning of the game. Just totally wild idea I know, but what if the future of games (probably 50 years from now… sheesh) is extremely rich and dynamic? I have no idea how this vision could be accomplished without AI and always server connection to power servers…
Activision, Ubisoft, and EA, all multibillion game dev company, said they’ll be using generative AI to make their game
Because these companies don’t care stealing assets and work of others. AI makes it very easy and it won’t be too obvious. Problem with AI is, its trained on data they probably have no rights to use for. But its hard to provide evidence, until its too late and obvious.
The situation is different from the 90s companies not wanting to use computers. Using AI today is a risk of violating copyright. The reason is totally different and is not comparable.
I’m with the stance of Valve here. Don’t use AI, if you didn’t train the data yourself. Generative AI can be useful and safe, if you trained it yourself. Using AI itself is not the problem and even Nintendo can benefit from it.
I don’t agree here. Playing for long time means you get better, more experienced as well. Reaction time is not all. Plus the differences of reaction time we talk about is usually only important for world class players. Normal humans like us are similar in reaction time between the ages we talk about (30 vs 20 in example). Lot of older people are playing and are better than younger people.
Having said this, every human is different and will have different degradation or changes in their body and mind. I am just generalize here, knowing that individuals might differ strongly. Have in mind, I am talking about normal players like us, not professionals or world class players, where differences in weakness are much more amplified.
And off course it depends on the games as well off course and in what rank you are. My point is that age is often an excuse without realizing the real issues, pointing it to reaction times and aging, when maybe something different is the problem.
Maybe look if there are predefined set of user created controls in Steam Deck. Sometimes users create alternative control schemes optimized for controller setup. Or do your own customization with the Steam Input. That won’t make you better at aiming, but maybe you can address some pain points this way.
It’s like coming from gamepad to arcade sticks, when playing fighting games. There is nothing else you can do, other than train and play and git gud. Try the original DOOM, and I mean the first DOOM from the 90s. You don’t have to aim up or down, only left and right and its not precise as todays shooters. Maybe play that on a lower difficulty and see if you can get used to it.
Overwatch 2, which is Free To Play, has a training area and courses for heroes you can try. Take the simple Soldier, which is your average FPS character, and maybe you can get used to the controls. You don’t have to play online, just try it out against bots and do these training courses. Maybe that helps.
If you play such a shooter every day, DOOM, and others, than you will get used to it and build up muscle memory. Actually I find it exciting to learn new stuff like this and am a little bit jealous. ^^ Reminds me back when I came from console to PC and had to learn how to play shooters with mouse and keyboard.
Edit: Your age 30 is fine. Age is always an excuse, but mostly not true. I’m also from the 80s and grew up with 8-bit and 16-bit. Yet I learned how to play with arcade sticks and mouse and keyboard in addition to controllers. I’m 42 now (and proud of it). My biggest advice is, play every sort of game, not only you are comfortable with. And do it every day. git gud is the only way.
I have to run OBS separately, before gaming or when I ant to record something while I am playing already.
Configuration of the settings. While I found good settings, its still complicated for most people. Especially on Wayland (a Linux thing).
When I want to capture a game, I have to specifically run the game and select in OBS to capture this window. Or capture entire screen.
I still can’t use AV1 for recording, but I think that I managed to set VAAPI recording set to my GPU? I am not 100% sure.
The flexibility of recording and organization in the way Steam does it is way superior to any external software and custom configuration of it. With OBS I have to rename files and organize things manually, while these are done automatically for each game in Steam.
Besides Steam has background recording too, not just on demand manual recording on button press. Think of Nividias Shadowplay. With OBS I have to start end end recording manually.
While we play we can add specific markers to the timeline with hotkeys. OBS doesn’t have that.
OBS is clunky and complicated to me. The Canvas and Output resolutions are separate, which confuses me the hell out of it. I only experimented with some settings so far to record gameplay (after my new PC installation) and need to see how this works out. But if I change settings to record something different, then I have to configure it again to record gameplay. Also to use Hotkeys, I have to allow hotkeys to be used globally in my system (which I don’t want to otherwise). Because of Wayland and how it works.
All in all its must simpler and superior to do this in Steam itself now. For other use cases, I will still keep OBS, its not bad, just not straightforward for daily game recordings. But I can add other software and games to Steam and can use it with Steam Recording too (if the overlay works there).
As others noted, this has background recording functionality and manual on demand recording as well. I have used manual recording software and still have OBS installed for any use case. But having Steam Recording builtin is very convenient.
configuration, its much easier to setup than any other solution if you care to get best quality and performance
convenience, integrated makes it easy to setup and use, with additional features, plus its such a fiddling to record specific windows when using external software such as OBS or similar if I don’t want to record entire screen in windowed or fullscreen mode, especially on Wayland
performance, Steam records the raw game footage from your video card and therefore has the best possible quality and performance one can get out of video recording
no overlays, Steam will only capture the game footage without fps indicator or other stats and without overlays or menus from Steam, other software would just record everything visible
timeline, resulting video is raw footage and is not encoded into a video file format for output and not useable before output to video (mp4), we can add timestamps with hotkeys while playing to mark specific points in recording, then we can mark start and end points or select certain parts in the timeline to save or export it
share, it has multiple sharing functionality besides saving to mp4 video file format
All of this is builtin and works the exact same way regardless of operating system and hardware (independent from cpu and gpu and os). No one needs to study hardware and software in order to configure it in the best possible way. If you used this on Windows, its the same on Linux, no dependency of recording software.
This is a much bigger deal than just recording footage with gnome-screenshot.
Its huge for me, because in Linux I can only record through OBS. And OBS is suboptimal, compared to a builtin solution like this. On Steam Deck I used the plugin too, but had to remove it again, because the plugin system stopped working.
Sure, a few more settings wouldn’t be bad, in example for saving as video file. But I think for the sake of simplicity for the end user and also for the devs themselves (I mean Steam devs) they kept it a bit barebones when it comes to codec or resolution settings. This has to work on Windows and on Linux (not sure about Mac) and on the Steam Deck out of the box.
It’s still beta and they already said in the article some features are coming. I’m more than happy with the timeline feature, this is amazing. I set it to 16 hours at highest quality, lol.