This is done all the time to sell games that aren’t available as CD keys, against TOS.
The seller usually gives you a login to a webmail they control, and the account is tied to that email. You can then change the email on the account and you have access to the original email to confirm the move.
Game servers are incredibly expensive, and server side anticheat is more costs.
Whether or not the studios can afford it (they can.) is irrelevant, it’s simply cheaper to go for flawed client side because the client will do most of the processing.
Any software developer worth their salt simply does not trust the client, but management is gonna manage and the engineers have to come up with a solution to “we must have anticheat because we said so, and you must keep server costs per user below x”. It’s easy to forget that most implementation choices in video games aren’t made by developers who like games, they’re made by middle managers who view games as a money-generaring industry.
The steam deck can drain that fast (for example when I played H:zd I basically had to be plugged in the whole time) but I doubt you’d even hit the same performance per watt with an Intel part. You’re essentially paying 20% more for a worse product, and I’m not even gonna get into MSI support, especially given how nice valve support is.
Yes (since the latest DLC), yes (the thargoids mystery), and yes (carriers have been here for a few years).
Of course it’s not exactly what you would get in SC because they’re ultimately different games. But you do have all of that and more, E:D has massively improved since it came out.
horizon zero dawn i finished recently on my steam deck while travelling, it’s great and you basically can pause at any time except in cutscenes, which is a bit annoying when something comes up during important story points.
bioshock i guess is not really my cup of tea, but i didn’t find that i was able to put it down and pick it back up. the game overall is quite slow, and all the branching paths means you can easily waste a lot of time.
The extreme is already a hard sell over the deck. It is barely more powerful for much larger price, and it is considerably less frame-time consistent than the deck. Buying anything less powerful is a waste.
Tbh, a large part of payday2’s problems stem from being built on a racing game engine. Redoing pd2 on unreal straight would be of course a lot of work, but the end result would be a better product that I would pay for. Payday3 on the other hand doesn’t look like something that I would enjoy based on the fact unlike pd2.
It is basically impossible to be banned at all from playing payday 2. The worst you can do is equip invalid stuff, which marks you as a cheater and most people kick marked cheaters.