I think Titanfall 2 is still on sale on steam for uh… 5 dollars.
Its got Northstar, a custom client that allows for private multiplayer servers… also works on linux, literally has its own custom proton version.
Oh and there are mods as well, guided installers, mod managers, etc, for windows and linux.
Runs great on a steam deck!
… and looks … basically the same as a shooter from 10 years later, at least at 1280 x 800?
(its built on a custom forked version of the portal 2 source engine, so it actually runs efficiently and looks good =D)
Doesn’t have a huge playerbase, but it is decent enough that you can probably find a few well populated servers, at least in NA region.
… looks like titanfall 3 got turned into an extraction shooter and then cancelled.
So anyway yeah, hilariously its time to return to tradition for enthusiasts of many old school competetive games from before the bullshit of endless battlepasses and MTX kicked into high gear… and as others have pointed out, the indie scene is full of gems.
… Untill Florida gets absolutely wiped out by a combo of its housing market and tourism economy simultaneously eating shit (this is currently occuring), and then also gets slammed by a, oh i dunno, a series of near record breaking hurricanes … in a record breaking short amount of time, and then can’t rebuild because FEMA either doesn’t exist or is massively underfunded.
Oh and way more people will die, and there will be way more property damage than there otherwise would be… becauase all the agencies and funding that went into tracking hurricanes just got cut to almoat nothing.
Its been … what, over a decade, between GTA V and 6’s planned releaae date?
I’d say that chances are actually quite good that within 10 years after 2026, Florida becomes essentially a mostly destroyed disaster zone, with maybe a few parts of semi-civilization… like a swampy version of the first Mad Max movie.
(For reference, GTA V is based on an amalgamation of LA, San Fran, San Diego, out into the sticks… oh and while we are in thr GTA V to GTA VI gap, a huge chunk of LA got burned to the ground, yay climate change!)
(To me, the challenge of GTA VI would be… how do you even fucking do parody anymore? The country has gone batshit insane during the game’s development, I will be amazed if they actually manage to work in the biting and underhanded social commentary that previous GTA games had… because it would be essentially impossible. My guess is it’ll have some parody and satire, but nowhere near as much as 4 or 5… and the story will basically just be about some cool badasses who are cool and badass and are getting their bag however they can because YOLO)
My guess would be they’ll do some kind of tiered release strucructure, and/or have already finished or mostly finished 2 years+ worth of major updates, including new ‘chapters’ of the main single player story… and basically, you’ll have to subscribe.
Like … $160 for whole game, major expansion 1, 2 and 3, $120 for game + 1st expansion… Or your baseline $100, and then a subscription battlepass mmo monthly charge, or you can pay more for expansions in chunks, seperately.
There’s been quite a bit of…unsettlement (totally a word) regarding the news that Discord has a new CEO and the company is going public (typically a sign of things going shittier than before)....
You can tweak and (hard and soft) mod a Steam Deck as well.
… Your starting point is just more powerful hardware, and a much more permissive software system that basically begs you to do whatever you want to it, compared to a Switch.
I get that this level of modding if a Switch is an accomplishment, because it is more challenging… that the modding itself is what is enjoyable for many people.
But many other people enjoy a different proportion of ‘tinkering’ to ‘actually using it’. Or different kinds of tinkering.
Like… I have an OLED Deck. For me, running RPCS3 is… well, I could either dl the flatpak of it and configure it myself, or let Emu/RetroDeck take care of that, or switch over from SteamOS 3 to Bazzite, set up a distrobox instance of Fedora (what Bazzite is built off of), then just literally download all the source code and required libraries… and completely compile the entire emulator myself, on the Steam Deck itself.
I actually did this with O3DE and Godot a few times… a bit buggy, but hey, its a fun way for me to get more familiar with just… how compiling works, as well as the Fedora ecosystem… most of my previous experience with compiling/development is within Debian based distros.
You can literally develop a game, in Godot, or Unity, or many 2D only/mostly FOSS engines… on a Steam Deck.
As far as hard modding?
A year (or two?) back now… somebody figured out that you can actually take the SSD out of a Steam Deck, run the OS from the microSD card… add an adapter to the SSD slot, and then connect that to a full, PC grade eGPU with its own power supply… and this requires you to actually physically cut out (or I guess remove the entire) a part of the back exterior housing.
But, if you can do all this, you now have basically a hyper charged Steam Deck with waaay more rendering power you can basically use as a decently powerful desktop PC…
But, this only works with Windows (running off of the microSD card), and your Deck is… no longer really portable, unless you consider detaching the eGPU and SSD adapter thingy, putting the SSD back in, and put a standard backplate back on the thing… as an acceptable level of portability, lol.
Less … nearly insane … degrees of hardware modding are things like swapping out the joycons with halleffect sticks, custom body shells (the translucent atomic purple n64 style ones are quite popular, and the translucence actually helps a bit with heat dissipation),
…custom colored button and dpads… sort of … skin like wraps for the touchpads, or whole bodyshell… semi squishy grip style wraps that can help if you have larger, or injured hands/wrists…
…oh right, the LCD variants have some fairly popular entire screen replacements that give you a higher resolution than the native screen… not sure if anything like that exists for the OLED variants yet.
I think its awesome that someone modded a Switch this hard, I think its awesome the person I replied to loves their modded handhelds, and I am just sharing my own tales of modding and tinkering with the Deck to show what you can do with it as well, and how I angle my goals of modding a bit differently than the person I’m replying to, so its a better fit for me.
I did not at any point state that their approach to modding is any kind of wrong or inferior.
So, I’ve spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it’s all junk, as far as I’m fed with Steam recommendations. I liked ksp2 1, cities skylines 1, age of empires 2, baldurs gate 3 a lot, I just finished Divinity original sin 2. I like rpgs and management / factory games like workers and resources,...
If you can get past the kind of… weird control scheme…
The game is basically a single player mmorpg.
You start off as an absolute weakling, and there is no … scaling, the way most other rpgs either generally have certain levelled enemies in certain areas, that you progress through linearly or unlock sequentially, or just an outright whole world spanning dynamic level matching kind of system.
You can be battling a small beast… and then a herd of very, very much more dangerous beasts, or slavers, will just happen to pass by, and royally fuck up your day.
Every character in the game, including you, plays by the same rules.
All major NPCs can be killed, the game is also full of varying factions with varying alignments towars other factions, and they will treat your character differently based on your race, the kinds of actio s you do, your reputation with other factions.
The storytelling is … a sandbox/emergent approach. Not in the sense of ‘there are no story lines or quests’… but in the sense of… a whole lot of stuff is out there, but you have to self direct yourself to go out and find it, or randomly encounter it.
Also, you can gain allies, make your own faction, and control a small army… and you can even build your own settlement, and economically interact with the rest of the world.
… Its… kind of hard to describe.
There really aren’t any other games quite like Kenshi.
Its got a good sized modding scene, and it incorperates at least some elemenrs of… every game you mentioned.
If you use a mod to up your max follower/faction member count… you can basically play the game as an RTS (with pause). Build a settlement, recruit followers (or enslave them), arm them, fees them, train them up, and go take over a city if you want.
… Or play basically solo, just you and your bonedog, maybe as a bounty hunter for hire, or a hashish smuggler, or get a pack animal and run a trade caravan.
Hopefully people can stop with the “I bet Bethesda will take down skyblivion!1!!” comments now. It’s very clear there’s good will between modders and the devs.
Oh, well, ‘Bethesda apprectiating what the Skyblivion people are doing’ would look something like hiring the mod team to complete their work in house, as an actual official product.
… So that they could be, you know, paid for their passionate work.
Passion doesn’t pay bills.
Does… did everyone just now not remember how that was a thing that used to happen? Mod teams actually getting hired, paid?
Particularly with Valve, back in the late 90s through 00’s?
Yeah they spent years working on a remaster just to dunk on a small mod team.
Yes, that literally is what they did.
If Skyblivion had released first, even for free, far more people would be going… wait, why would I pay for yet another Bethesda remaster… when a free one already exists?
This is the company that routinely releases broken buggy games, because they can’t figure out how to actually fix their engine, their games routinely have to be fixed and patched by modders… who keep trying to figure out how to monetize mods or any kind of additional content the way record labels monetize artists.
At this point, it is difficult for me to think of a game company that is more absuive and exploitative of its most truly dedicated fans… aside from Roblox.
None of that changes or even addresses what I said in the comment you are replying to.
Yes, a corpo flex often involves throwing a ton of money and manpower at something…
Yes, Skyblivion development will probably continue… doesn’t change the fact that Bethesda just did a giant corpo flex on them.
The… whole … point of a corpo flex … is to showcase that you have a disproportionate amount of legal and monetary power, and you can use that to humiliate upstarts, show others how insignificant they are.
Have… you never worked in a large corp? Or… studied how they make business decisions?
Have you ever worked in software development?
… never even picked the corpo background for cyberpunk 2077?
If I was on the Bethesda team, I would actually be very interested in trying to get feedback from the only other group of devs that remotely know what it’s like to do something similar. What approaches did they take? What’s similar? What’s different? Did the choices that other team make lead to a better product? How much more elegant is their code?
… And why didn’t Bethesda do this with the Skyblivion team?
Why didn’t they offer to at least pay them temporarily as contracted consultants?
Because management is full of themselves and maniacally, socio/psychopathically profit driven.
You can’t say they weren’t aware of the Skyblivion project, they literally coordinated a publicized action with them as part of their release schedule.
…
Game dev in particular, and even software dev generally, in America, at least… is absolutely chalk full of situations where one person or team or whatever’s work is either stolen, or fought over, or someone claims credit for a whole bunch of stuff they didn’t actually contribute nearly anything to, or make a whole big show of some streamlining effort that actually just cripples or eliminates the proverbial one dinky jenga block from the xkcd comic, and then all the blame for a whole bunch of other idiots’ plans, who never even consulted with the jenga block maintainer, well that guy or gal gets utterly blamed for all of it.
As well as of course all the NDAs and IP type bullshit where nothing even resembling what you did as a contractor or for another company can be used elsewhere, and become massively succesful, without a massive legal and financial threat.
… The actual devs, yes, did their work most likely without ‘lol lets fuck over these upstarts’ in mind.
That was in the mind of upper management and c suite though, guaranteed.
They don’t talk about that infront of the servants, I mean employees, I mean, who cares really, we’ll drive them nuts with crunch OT and then lay them off anyway, gaslighting them for the entire development cycle that that won’t happen.
…
Your instinct as a senior dev to reach out comes from a reasonable and good place.
But upper management and c suite is concerned with maximizing profit and business strategy, and in game dev, these folks have a long, stories history of routinely being as ruthless, cutthroat, duplicitous as possible.
It is warfare to them.
…
And I am not just pulling my credential check out of my ass here as some kind of gotcha style rhetoric, I also have worked in game dev, in software dev, in db admin and data analyst roles, for large corporations.
Though I do truly appreciate that you actually have the relevant credentials, and are talking from your own actually relevant experience, so I want to thank you for that, for actually having the conversation.
My experience has been almost entirely upper managers and VPs and the Board consistently doing the exact opposite of what actual developers suggest, request, or warn about, and then just slyly or sometimes quite brashly blame everyone else for causing the fuckups they were warned their plans would cause.
They think they are Gods and everyone else is a contemptible, digusting, unfortunately unavoidable part of doing business… and if a truly royal fuckup happens, they’ll turn on the people that built the corporate ladder they climbed without even a blink.
Ah ok, so you were even earlier to the Deck modding scene than me, and it has evolved toward being even easier since.
Whew!
I appreciate your pointing this out and explanation, I wouldn’t want to have been unintentionally spreading misinfo.
… Nor would I have wanted to get my own Hall Effect ‘no soldering’ kit and then learned… actually there still is soldering in some other step or on some other component, that the ‘no soldering’ kits actually just mean ‘less soldering’.
Also a surprisingly advanced and customizable… ‘class’ system, which was really more like a whole bunch of branching skill trees you could mix and match basically various ranks of… allowing many weird, but often effective, hyrbrids of ‘classes’ that… could either focus on one main ‘class’, but augment it with certain abilities from other ‘classes’…
And then the Combat Upgrade happened, and everything got streamlined.
Also… being a Jedi/Sith used to be… exceptionally rare and difficult to pull off.
IIRC, basically, some kind of insane random seed type thing gave each of your characters a very, very tiny chance of being force sensitive… but you wouldn’t even know this unless you also found basically a hidden event/questline, and then that would unlock a whole set of force skill trees, allowing for a range of jedi to sith abilities, with some kind of mix effectively being a ‘gray’ jedi.
Finally… SWG … still appears to me to be the only MMO that actually attempted to implement a working, player vs player, bounty hunting and tracking system, within an mmo… as a core game mechanic of a player ‘class’.
Though I haven’t played all mmos, so I may be wrong about that.
… Also an entire skill tree for basically being a mayor and running your own player built town. A whole skill tree dedicated to like… administrative capacity and zoning laws.
Do MMOs even… do player built cities anymore? Or did they just mostly switch over to ‘you have a house in the set aside ‘suburb’ instance’?
Full title: Ubisoft says you “cannot complain” it shut down The Crew because you never actually owned it, and you weren’t “deceived” by the lack of an offline version “to access a decade-old, discontinued video game”...
Every AAA game company’s have been for 30 years and still currently are arguing this in courts all the time.
The actual public facing employees don’t have to, but sometimes still do, though usually in an unofficial capacity these days.
AA / indie devs are more of a mixed bag. A few will openly say ‘fuck it, pirate it if you can’t afford it, idgaf’, but the majority will denounce piracy if its relevant or if prompted.
copyright infringent is commonly also referred to as IP theft, theft of intellectual property.
unauthorized use, sale, or distribution of ip is ip theft.
when it comes to software, basically , unless your software is distributed under some kind MIT or GPL or other copyleft liscense… all of the software legally is ip, and using it in an unauthorized manner is copyright infringement… which is also referred to as ip theft.
so yes, ip theft is a form of theft, and gaming companies and lawyers and other lawyers have been successfully suing other people and other companies into oblivion over this basically since the industry began.
The entire original comment chain that lead to what I replied to … was all about playing word games with slogans, progoganda, public relations.
The law may be ‘clear’, but it is clearly bullshit.
It is absurdly deferential toward the rights of megacorps and hostile to the rights of consumers.
Laws are supposed to reflect and codify morals and ethics, arise from them… not determine them.
But, as we slip more and more into a cyberpunk dystopia of hypercapitalist megacorps being able to basically just buy legislators, judges and laws, it will become more evident that the government is just entirely a facade directed by them.
This whole article is about a lawsuit in America, you know, the land of the fee, home of the early and very expensive grave?
The place with the ongoing fascist coup that’s dismantling all the government agencies that regulate corporations, after the richest man in the world just bought an election, and more recently openly tried to buy a state judge, and though he didn’t succeed, will likely face no penalty for doing that very obviously illegal thing?
Also, as far as at least acquring a pirated game?
Its not that hard.
Now hosting them? Sharing them?
Yep, you’re right, that’s a bit more difficult… but hey, be clever enough to not get caught, and thats the same as being rich enough to write your own laws.
I mean, I can be as much of a pedant as you and post an unsourced definition of ‘ip theft’ … or maybe you could just admit you’d never heard of the term ‘ip theft’, or are unaware of its use.
Its a pretty commonly used term, especially amongst government regulatory and business organizations, as well as academics who study policy, in the US.
The term itself, its phrasing, is intentionally constructed to frame copyright infringement as a form of theft, stealing something that doesn’t belong to you.
The psychological framing of the term is meant to frame losses from someone committing copyright infringement against you as equivalent to losses from being robbed.
The entire point of the usage of this term is to mold public perception.
Here’s some examples where very prominent US institutions/organizations use some construction or variation of ‘ip theft’ as an umbrella term to refer to all kinds of copyright, trademark and/or patent infringement:
And finally, literally IPTheft.org, which basically functions as an all-in-one training/resource hub that connects business people to all kinds of resources to report when they have suffered… IP theft.
Players Have Too Many Options to Spend $80 on a Video Game (www.bloomberg.com) angielski
Grand Theft Auto 6 release date has been announced, but the game has been delayed to 2026 | VGC (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
May 26, 2026
Reminder if you're leaving Discord for this Revolt server ( Linux + Steam Deck devs / creators) angielski
There’s been quite a bit of…unsettlement (totally a word) regarding the news that Discord has a new CEO and the company is going public (typically a sign of things going shittier than before)....
Overclocked Nintendo Switch Modded With 8 GB RAM Is Capable Of Running PlayStation 3 Games via RPCS3 Emulator Surprisingly Well (wccftech.com) angielski
I'm bored and desperately search for a proper game angielski
So, I’ve spent over 2 hours on Steam searching for a nice game to play. But it’s all junk, as far as I’m fed with Steam recommendations. I liked ksp2 1, cities skylines 1, age of empires 2, baldurs gate 3 a lot, I just finished Divinity original sin 2. I like rpgs and management / factory games like workers and resources,...
Bethesda Gifts Everybody in the Skyblivion Mod Team a Copy of Oblivion Remastered (www.thegamer.com) angielski
Hopefully people can stop with the “I bet Bethesda will take down skyblivion!1!!” comments now. It’s very clear there’s good will between modders and the devs.
The steam deck is just great angielski
What's a cancelled game you really miss? angielski
Ubisoft says you "cannot complain" it shut down The Crew because you never actually owned it, and you weren't "deceived" by the lack of an offline version (www.gamesradar.com) angielski
Full title: Ubisoft says you “cannot complain” it shut down The Crew because you never actually owned it, and you weren’t “deceived” by the lack of an offline version “to access a decade-old, discontinued video game”...