Hear me out. A few games have shader installations that will usually apply any new settings you put down AFTER you restart the game, and a lot of other games have graphics settings that will only apply after you’ve rebooted the game....
All fighting games (or anything that runs deterministically on all players’ machines, like fighting games do) should always have a performance test requirement before you hop online. We figured this out over a decade ago, and plenty still don’t do it, resulting in people with weak computers causing matches to appear laggy.
As a society, we should agree on which menu subtitles belong in. Is it language? Audio? Display? Game Settings? Sometimes I’ve seen games put them in multiple menus so that we always find them where we’re looking for them.
I’m no expert on colorblind settings, but I tried playing Monaco with someone who’s red/green colorblind, and that game was nearly impossible for him.
If your game runs online, I should be able to host the server myself, and launching a listen server from within the game ought to be present, too. It might be nice to surface port forward information there as well. LAN is nice; Direct IP connections are better. (Thanks, Larian, for including both!)
I’m generally with you, but there are implications for the online game and matchmaking in the likes of Dark Souls games. By the time they got to Elden Ring, they seemed to care way less about things like invasions.
Monopoly has been one of the most popular board games for about a century, and hardly anyone plays by all of the official rules. Once I buy a game, if I want to play with house rules, I should be able to. Putting the sliders and such in game, even with the warning message mentioned above, just makes it easier to do so without having to rely on the community to make mods.
To be fair to devs, increasing the FOV has a lot of performance implications on how much less they’re culling from the scene as you rotate the camera. In this era of open world games, I suspect it scales very poorly as that FOV increases. Temporarily increasing the FOV is also one of their handy tricks for giving you a sense of speed when you hit a boost button and whatnot, so whatever your FOV is, they need to make it more than that.
Sound test menus are a remnant of arcade design, and when arcades starting dying, this feature made less sense. The OST sale is usually more of a revenue stream for the game’s composer, as I understand it.
An article from this weekend that seemingly got buried by soundbites about the Steam Machine price in the same interview, but given that we have no information on price, this seems way more interesting to me. I mean…I basically self-select games that don’t use these kinds of anti-cheat at all, but this is important...
Some of the biggest games on the planet use anti-cheat that just isn’t compatible with SteamOS or any Linux distro, but lots of those people are looking for a way to play the games they enjoy without Windows.
Interesting. Did this happen recently? When all of the streaming services starting raising prices, I started cancelling. Which ones give you full HD? Do you need to go out of your way to get there, or will regular old Firefox do the trick? Does it need TPM enabled or anything like that? I was looking to re-up Amazon Prime in the very near future, but when watching on my web browser, a show like Vox Machina was just a blur factory, and it was easier to pirate the show than it was to stream it legitimately.
The way that it was enabled under Proton was less secure than it was in Windows because it operated at a higher level; their inability to run it at that lower level is why they disabled it. This article means that Valve is looking at ways to grant them that lower level.
I would not be surprised if the work they’re doing here would be compatible with the Deck. It was just less of a priority for a handheld than a living room machine.
They refused to support the user space anti cheat. The work they’re talking about doing here is aiming to be the same sort of security they get on Windows. Low level. I have no idea how that works with Linux’s software licenses, but they said in the interview that this might be an exception made only for SteamOS.
Perhaps. Of course, if you were able to type that sentence out, it also means you know what to avoid if that’s important to you. I will be, because it’s important to me, too.
I get what drove us here. When you find a game that speaks to you and it’s got a ranked mode with good matchmaking, it’s easy to get lost in match after match, and cheaters can take the wind out of your sails. My competitive games of choice are fighting games, which are mostly free of cheaters and this invasive anti-cheat, but I’ll be bummed if it becomes the norm, because I won’t participate in that.
They’re not just making that up. Cheaters migrated to Linux because it was easier to bypass the anti-cheat protections there. If the anti-cheat is equally effective in both operating systems, they’ll have no reason to cut off a portion of their customer base.
People have all sorts of custom controllers with different button layouts. There are tournament legal requirements, but you’re unlikely to violate them if you don’t know what they are, and it hardly matters if you’re playing from home.
Of course I’m serious. “Not 100% effective” is not the same as “not effective”. And to be clear, I hate it and do not endorse it. I will not buy any game that goes as far as to use that kind of anti-cheat. But developers use it because it’s more effective at catching cheaters than not using it. All downvoting me does is cover your ears to what’s actually going on. There are a number of big live service games that once enabled Proton and have now disabled it after cheaters took advantage of the more lax security. They would not cut off a portion of their customer base if they didn’t have to because user space in Linux was somehow just as effective as the Windows variant that lives at ring 0 in the OS kernel.
I wish you the best in convincing devs with the data in front of them that there’s no difference between the two, but they seem to have data that indicates that they see fewer cheaters with ring 0 anti-cheat than when they let Linux players in with user space anti-cheat. If it were true that there’s no difference, surely Valve’s engineers could convince them of that, too, but that doesn’t seem to be happening.
Please cite sources for any of that. Game companies aren’t in the business of losing money. If they could make more money by supporting Linux customers, they would do so, and I’ve never heard of a gaming company’s executive ever mentioning anything about Linux except for Gabe Newell, openly or behind closed doors. If they wanted to make a big show of getting rid of cheaters, they’d never have enabled cross play between consoles and PC in the first place. They openly tell you why they don’t enable anti-cheat on Linux, in a way that’s beyond just being plausible, and you refuse to believe them. You’re only going to be surprised when this continues to happen even though the answer is right there.
Your explanation is bordering on conspiracy theory, so yes. Rust cited why they cut support, as did Apex Legends, as did GTA Online. The rest often don’t even bother with supporting it in the first place because of how it always plays out. The existence of hackers at all doesn’t mean that Linux anti-cheat is equally effective, and you’d know that if you read the write up from the Rust team.
So the only thing that’s allowed to be speculated is that the companies are perfectly honest and never lie? Yeah, maybe you’re not that reasonable.
A bit of skepticism is healthy, but it’s far more reasonable to assume that independently reporting the same thing from multiple different unaffiliated companies is the truth compared to making up stories about executive meddling or that banning Linux increases the percentage of hackers, based on nothing except your own feelings.
I daily drive Kubuntu. I hate Windows. I have a Windows partition, but I haven’t booted it since December of last year. My next PC won’t have Windows at all. The operating system I use doesn’t change what is actually happening in the real world.
If they can’t stop the hacking on Windows then what the hell is blocking Linux going to do?
It’s going to prevent a more potent vector, which is exactly what they said.
Anti-cheat is not heading toward more support without the intervention described in the article. Whatever that results in. Valve is talking about potentially a SteamOS-specific fix, which I take to mean that they might have to do something at a kernel level that other Linux distros would find unacceptable. “Only” EA, Riot, Epic, Roblox, and Call of Duty is grossly underselling this: that is most of the video game market. It’s not most games, nor is it most publishers, but between those games and publishers, it represents most players, most dollars spent, and most time spent playing video games (at least non-mobile, anyway). It is an enormous hump to get over if you want to make a gaming device appealing to more customers.
The one thing they always say is how few users are on Linux. If that’s true then most of the hackers can’t be. It doesn’t make sense.
Sure it does. As an example, let’s say there are X players for a game in a month, and 3-7% of those are on Linux. If, as Facepunch says, more than half of that 3-7% are cheaters, then including them is doing more harm than good to your cheating problem.
Batman: Arkham Asylum. It doesn’t come up a lot, because only that first game is a metroidvania and Arkham City might be most people’s favorite in the series, but it absolutely counts. I love Arkham combat. It’s better in the sequels due to some slight tweaks in game feel, but that combat in a metroidvania is just excellent, and the game is just so well paced. It’s a shame what WB did to that studio.
Have you played the Metal Gear Solid series? If not, don’t look them up beforehand. And this might seem strange, but for the optimal effect, don’t pirate them either.
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is up for 12 awards, making it the most nominated game in the awards’ history, followed by PlayStation titles Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and Ghost of Yotei with eight nominations each, and Hades 2 with six.
They’re just games that favor those categories. Even if Peak pops off, it’s not going to win a category like art direction or narrative, ever. It was far from a slow year.
After more than a decade of successful collaboration across numerous titles that we’re both immensely proud of, Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order have mutually decided to pursue independent paths....
The only explanation I can come up with is that they’re a studio that reliably ships finished projects, and maybe that was all Paradox was looking for.
Can everyone please stop claiming and speculating that Valve’s new hardware will be loss leaders? If you watch LTT and Gamers Nexus’s first videos on the announcement, they actually spoke with Valve’s engineers. And the Valve representatives already said that the new hardware WILL NOT BE LOSS LEADERS....
Is that part of the quote? Because I just saw “priced like an entry level PC, not like a console”, which was more ambiguous than saying “priced like a console”. One man’s entry level PC is $300, and another’s is $1000. I have a mini PC with the power of a PS4 Pro, which I’d easily consider entry level, and it cost me $530 about a year and a half ago.
Yeah, leaving it ambiguous like this leads to wild speculation, and I think you misquoted that with your own assumptions. You might be right, but Digital Foundry seems to think $400-$500 is possible. Given the cost of my own mini PC, which is older and requires higher margins than Valve can get away with, I would even believe $400-$500. But we just don’t know. Everyone’s best guess for the price of this thing has a low floor and a high ceiling, which will make this all really funny once we know the actual price.
Your entry level PC is what I would have called high end as little as four years ago. I built a machine in 2021 with a Ryzen 5 5600x and an RX 6800 XT; it still runs the latest UE5 games at high settings. I would call that above and beyond entry level.
I liked it a lot. It’s engrossing enough to make you just want to keep going to the next episode, and it’s beautifully animated. Other than the story stuff, the gameplay loop is just This is the Police, and I think this improves both the Telltale design and the design of This is the Police by way of pacing. It did still leave me wanting more as a video game, but as a story and a comedy, I loved it.
The correct lesson to take away from it, that they won’t ever do, is to release multiplayer games in a way where they can live on without constant updates or a central server.
If it costs them nothing, then what does the cost of servers have to do with anything? If someone else wants to run servers at their own expense, that’s their prerogative. Why would you have an issue with a bad game remaining playable? That’s valuable history that everyone can learn from.
Going from YouTube comments on gaming channels that don’t focus on PC gaming or Linux, I don’t think many people remember the first Steam Machines from 10 years ago.
That was a conscious decision they made at the time so that you could browse the web and such with no driver downloads. The full functionality of it is kind of locked behind Steam itself (without community made software), which is its worst quality, for sure.
Settings you believe ANY game should have? (This is me advocating for a restart/reboot button on ALL games) angielski
Hear me out. A few games have shader installations that will usually apply any new settings you put down AFTER you restart the game, and a lot of other games have graphics settings that will only apply after you’ve rebooted the game....
Valve Addresses Steam Machine Anti-Cheat Concerns, Says It's Working Towards Support (thisweekinvideogames.com) angielski
An article from this weekend that seemingly got buried by soundbites about the Steam Machine price in the same interview, but given that we have no information on price, this seems way more interesting to me. I mean…I basically self-select games that don’t use these kinds of anti-cheat at all, but this is important...
Gaming Pet Peeves angielski
What are some things that just get under your skin about games?...
Return to the year 2000 with classic multiplayer DOS games in your browser (arstechnica.com) angielski
What is your favorite Metroidvania? angielski
I haven’t played a Metroidvania in a while and I’m looking for suggestions of some good ones to try. Some I would recommend:...
Preserving code that shaped generations: Zork I, II, and III go Open Source (opensource.microsoft.com) angielski
The Game Awards 2025 Nominees (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is up for 12 awards, making it the most nominated game in the awards’ history, followed by PlayStation titles Death Stranding 2: On the Beach and Ghost of Yotei with eight nominations each, and Hades 2 with six.
An Update on Cities: Skylines II - Development moved to Iceflake Studios (forum.paradoxplaza.com) angielski
After more than a decade of successful collaboration across numerous titles that we’re both immensely proud of, Paradox Interactive and Colossal Order have mutually decided to pursue independent paths....
Valve's new hardware will NOT be loss leaders angielski
Can everyone please stop claiming and speculating that Valve’s new hardware will be loss leaders? If you watch LTT and Gamers Nexus’s first videos on the announcement, they actually spoke with Valve’s engineers. And the Valve representatives already said that the new hardware WILL NOT BE LOSS LEADERS....
The Turbulent, Seven-Year Saga Behind Hit Game ‘Dispatch’ (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
In which Dispatch has a direct lineage to a Splinter Cell game that became XDefiant.
Sony’s Concord Is Playable Again Thanks To Fan-Made Custom Servers (thegamepost.com) angielski
It’s early stages and buggy, but it’s on its way. All games, even bland, boring, or bad ones, deserve to remain playable.
While we eagerly await the second coming of Steam Machines, it's worth remembering what a gloriously awful mess Valve got itself in over a decade ago (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Steam Hardware [new Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and VR headset Steam Frame, coming in 2026] (store.steampowered.com) angielski
No prices yet. I may never financially recover from this.