Nah, I loved The Outer Worlds. It gave me exactly what I wanted from the setting, it made me laugh, and it wasn’t bogged down in bloat by trying to be any bigger than it ought to have been.
That’s a lot of money for any game, let alone one that will also be launching on Game Pass and, like its progenitor, is smaller scale than other open world RPGs of this ilk.
It’s this thinking that led to Starfield and Redfall being priced at $70 and Hi-Fi Rush priced at $30.
I could bitterly rationalise it if this were the release date trailer for the next Fable and I discovered Playground Games was charging me $80
Why? Playground hasn’t even made a game in this genre before. Why do you expect that to be more worth $80 than the company that’s been making acclaimed RPGs since its inception?
That’s a bummer. There was a lot that looked great to me, though most of it was for 2026. Given how much good stuff there is in 2025 that I still have to get through, that’s a-okay by me.
We very much do need GOG to be competitive with the market leader but with the primary selling point of DRM-free, yes. And is it a coincidence that the beginning of your username is the same as that awful YouTuber?
I hate live service games and Windows, so no, this device is not for me, but those are also the most popular games on the market by a wide margin. Despite how awful the Windows experience is today, there’s still one Windows handheld sold for every two Steam Decks. That situation can only improve with a version of Windows designed for handhelds.
For the fighting game nerds out there: an interview on IGN confirmed that there are KI breakers during active tags, and combos will be limited in similar ways to Killer Instinct, meaning a combo meter rather than hitstun decay. If you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it; this comment wasn’t for you. These were the answers I was looking for, and now this is my most anticipated fighting game despite having no familiarity with the source material.
The audience has very much expanded since covid. Around that same time is when fighting games (at large) finally got the good netcode, because they finally realized they could no longer get away with the easier, cheaper, bad netcode. You might not know what the word “rollback” means, and probably most players don’t either, but I think everyone intuitively understands that it feels better to play these games online and that they’re getting better matches. This also came along with a few new ways to shed motion inputs, or at least make them optional, in many big releases, and a renewed focus on trying to invent good new single player offerings. Fighting game majors are breaking attendance records every year, and in a world where the e-sports bubble has burst, the fighting game scene is the only one growing organically from grass roots without spending money it doesn’t actually make (Fatal Fury might be the exception here, due to ties to the Saudi family).
At least at first, it will be the only handheld running this version of Windows. So maybe after a year or two, it won’t be all that unique, true, but a year or two is a long time at the rate these handhelds are advancing.
They have given up on their own handheld. And why wouldn’t you prefer the PC library when it’s so much larger? The appeal to this device at this point is that the new UI is better for the handheld use case than desktop Windows.
This machine will be the same desktop-mode-not-required-but-allows-for-more-functionality thing that the Steam Deck is, but it will chew through battery faster in exchange for more compatibility.
I use backloggery.com, but I see a lot of people using backloggd.com these days. Backloggery is a bit more old school and relies a lot on manual entry, so I’m sure some of its competitors are better about linking up to things like your Steam account. You can also track a lot of this stuff on HowLongToBeat.com, which is mostly seeking to answer the question in the URL but also lets you log a review of the game, etc.
quickly conveying to your audience where your inspirations came from so that they know what type of game it is
In a lot of ways, “they don’t make 'em like they used to”, so in addition to that art style helping to convey what kind of game they made, it also comes along with cost reductions for their art pipeline in a lot of cases. It doesn’t really make them “stuck in the past” when there were real advantages to how things used to get done.