I’ve been replaying Dragon Quest 8 (PS2) on my Steam Deck, and it just fills me with joy. Except for the absolutely bonkers choices they hardcoded for buttons and camera movement. Ah, good times.
I’ve been suspicious that newer production lines for joysticks have been cutting costs in cheaper materials for a while now. I usually replace the joysticks when they drift, but I’m also quite comfortable to taking things apart and fixing them.
I remember my old PS2 controllers never drifted and that was back when I played hard on them every day after school. These days I hardly have time to play during the week, and they regularly go bad within a year or two.
It was even better before they ditched streaming through GeForce Experience or whatever. Moonlight + Sunshine work, but I’ve never felt like there was a good Sunshine configuration tool, and adding games manually has always been too much of a pain for me to bother with.
As long as the younger generation taking over are well versed in the history of the series and in touch with what people have loved over the years to not run off into another FF13 or FF15 (before they started damage control before release to shoehorn in a single “moogle”)?
That said, I think what I really want is a game run by someone at the top with an epic vision for the experience who can make sure everything from combat to mini games are feeding into the grand scheme of the game.
I work at a company which doesn’t make games, but interacts with a lot of game devs, and employs a lot of ex-game devs; and everyone I work with is either glad they got out of game dev or glad they skipped it altogether.
I used to work for a very reasonable (smaller) game studio, and while it was fun, I still got a massive pay and quality-of-life improvement by changing careers away from making games.