There should be exactly the toggle that the article asks for given this criticism. I don’t know how likely it is, because it seems like whatever engine they fed this game into just handles lighting very differently. Deus Ex is a great game, but I’m personally of the opinion that it’s quite ugly, and just about anything you do to the graphics are an improvement. The mod that the article compares it to doesn’t look better, just slightly different. In either case, the reason that both look better than the original, and why we pulled out the year 2003, is that the technology in cutting edge graphics didn’t really change until mid-to-late 2004, and the advancements in between were basically just more polygons and better textures, which is all you can reasonably expect in a remaster. More than that is a lot more work and gets you into remake territory.
The fan mods aren’t exactly accessible to PlayStation players. What would you want to see in a Deus Ex remaster that a mod couldn’t do? Mods are capable of a great deal, but there’s a lot of value to having things preconfigured to modern standards out of the box.
The PS2 version is surely severely compromised compared to the PC version. Even the sequel designed with the Xbox in mind had to cut back on a lot of things to make it fit on a more powerful console.
I never played this game back in the day, but in a world where it has voice acting and a PC port, this is the one I’ll likely try. I have no idea when that might be, since it’s already a struggle to keep up with game releases, but someday, for sure.
Reporting from outside sources has covered what Steam’s vetting process is. They check to see if the game runs, if it has the features that the publishers/developers claim it has on the side bar, and they check for malware. Often times this is outsourced, but the buck does stop with Valve. The thing with any security measure though is that anything can be circumvented, and preventing the same vector of attack in the future is an arms race. And another way to read what you said about how many instances of malware there are is that it affects 0.02% of games released this year so far, and they’re not the games that customers are most likely to buy in the first place like your Borderlands or Battlefields.
Fascinating story. The narrative at the time was that casual games were just too lucrative to bother with SiN sequels after Emergence, but of course, the truth has a lot more nuance.
Marketing cycles are short now. This will be the show aligned with Tokyo Games Show to show off games releasing in the last part of the year and maybe teasing a few high-profile games for next year.
The kinds of games Sony makes have gotten bigger and taken longer to make. Taking longer to make means you get fewer of them. There were three Uncharted games and The Last of Us between 2007 and 2013. Naughty Dog today hasn’t put out a new game since the PS4. When Sony spends $300M on Spider-Man 2 but they’ve actually sold fewer PS5s than they sold PS4s at the same point in the console lifecycle, you need to start getting your money back in other ways, like porting the game to PC. Helldivers II is a Sony joint, but the vast, vast majority of its sales came from PC, not PlayStation, and now it’s even on Xbox.
Exclusives are just going to be less and less of a going concern as time goes on. As for what Sony’s studios are cooking, Sucker Punch has a game this year, Intergalactic from Naughty Dog is at least a year away (but probably more), Sony Santa Monica still has their sci-fi project that Alanah Pearce wrote for that still hasn’t been announced (so likely at least a year away), Guerilla “just” put out Horizon: Forbidden West in 2022 (meaning at least another year on their next game), etc. At this point, all of the pent up projects from these studios are looking like they’re going to attempt to sell a PS6, with the same cross-gen situation we got for the PS5, where it comes out on both. Combine that with the talk about there being two SKUs of PS6, one of which being a handheld, acting as a Series S to the regular PS6’s Series X, and that’s what Sony’s output looks like to me. That, plus the collapse of Bungie following Marathon’s release and the collapse of Haven Studios regardless of whether or not Fairgames even comes out.
This headline feels like a trap. Yes, Valve is the arbiter of what passes through the Steam store. Part of that involves checking for malware which, while their record isn’t flawless, they’ve let very little of it through given the sheer volume of games published to Steam every year. The consequences were terrible here, and I hope that can be rectified somehow. But the implication of this is that Valve makes this sort of error all the time through their “incompetence”, which they don’t, and the point of phrasing it this way seems to be to call anyone stating otherwise some kind of defender of a multibillion dollar company. It seems like a far better use of everyone’s time to be mad at the scammer here. Supporting and profiting from child gambling via Counter-Strike is a much better reason to be mad at Valve than the mistakes or other gaps in their vetting process that will be slightly tighter as a result of this mishap.
There are tons of scenarios where I can see it being useful, and I can often see a clear difference between it and release, but the problem I’ve got now is that there are so many finished games I could be spending my time and money on right now that it’s hard to justify buying an early access game. I think the last one I bought was Palworld, which I played for about 20 hours right when it came out, and now I’m waiting for 1.0 rather than the iterative feedback that early access thrives on. They’ve still got plenty of people to get that feedback from, but that’s the biggest early access release since Minecraft, so it’s an outlier.
I did not mean to imply that the architecture changed in PS2 slim compared to the original PS2, only that were able to make better, cheaper, cooler, smaller versions of that same architecture.