The situation is different from the 90s companies not wanting to use computers. Using AI today is a risk of violating copyright. The reason is totally different and is not comparable.
I’m with the stance of Valve here. Don’t use AI, if you didn’t train the data yourself. Generative AI can be useful and safe, if you trained it yourself. Using AI itself is not the problem and even Nintendo can benefit from it.
I don’t agree here. Playing for long time means you get better, more experienced as well. Reaction time is not all. Plus the differences of reaction time we talk about is usually only important for world class players. Normal humans like us are similar in reaction time between the ages we talk about (30 vs 20 in example). Lot of older people are playing and are better than younger people.
Having said this, every human is different and will have different degradation or changes in their body and mind. I am just generalize here, knowing that individuals might differ strongly. Have in mind, I am talking about normal players like us, not professionals or world class players, where differences in weakness are much more amplified.
And off course it depends on the games as well off course and in what rank you are. My point is that age is often an excuse without realizing the real issues, pointing it to reaction times and aging, when maybe something different is the problem.
Maybe look if there are predefined set of user created controls in Steam Deck. Sometimes users create alternative control schemes optimized for controller setup. Or do your own customization with the Steam Input. That won’t make you better at aiming, but maybe you can address some pain points this way.
It’s like coming from gamepad to arcade sticks, when playing fighting games. There is nothing else you can do, other than train and play and git gud. Try the original DOOM, and I mean the first DOOM from the 90s. You don’t have to aim up or down, only left and right and its not precise as todays shooters. Maybe play that on a lower difficulty and see if you can get used to it.
Overwatch 2, which is Free To Play, has a training area and courses for heroes you can try. Take the simple Soldier, which is your average FPS character, and maybe you can get used to the controls. You don’t have to play online, just try it out against bots and do these training courses. Maybe that helps.
If you play such a shooter every day, DOOM, and others, than you will get used to it and build up muscle memory. Actually I find it exciting to learn new stuff like this and am a little bit jealous. ^^ Reminds me back when I came from console to PC and had to learn how to play shooters with mouse and keyboard.
Edit: Your age 30 is fine. Age is always an excuse, but mostly not true. I’m also from the 80s and grew up with 8-bit and 16-bit. Yet I learned how to play with arcade sticks and mouse and keyboard in addition to controllers. I’m 42 now (and proud of it). My biggest advice is, play every sort of game, not only you are comfortable with. And do it every day. git gud is the only way.
I have to run OBS separately, before gaming or when I ant to record something while I am playing already.
Configuration of the settings. While I found good settings, its still complicated for most people. Especially on Wayland (a Linux thing).
When I want to capture a game, I have to specifically run the game and select in OBS to capture this window. Or capture entire screen.
I still can’t use AV1 for recording, but I think that I managed to set VAAPI recording set to my GPU? I am not 100% sure.
The flexibility of recording and organization in the way Steam does it is way superior to any external software and custom configuration of it. With OBS I have to rename files and organize things manually, while these are done automatically for each game in Steam.
Besides Steam has background recording too, not just on demand manual recording on button press. Think of Nividias Shadowplay. With OBS I have to start end end recording manually.
While we play we can add specific markers to the timeline with hotkeys. OBS doesn’t have that.
OBS is clunky and complicated to me. The Canvas and Output resolutions are separate, which confuses me the hell out of it. I only experimented with some settings so far to record gameplay (after my new PC installation) and need to see how this works out. But if I change settings to record something different, then I have to configure it again to record gameplay. Also to use Hotkeys, I have to allow hotkeys to be used globally in my system (which I don’t want to otherwise). Because of Wayland and how it works.
All in all its must simpler and superior to do this in Steam itself now. For other use cases, I will still keep OBS, its not bad, just not straightforward for daily game recordings. But I can add other software and games to Steam and can use it with Steam Recording too (if the overlay works there).
As others noted, this has background recording functionality and manual on demand recording as well. I have used manual recording software and still have OBS installed for any use case. But having Steam Recording builtin is very convenient.
configuration, its much easier to setup than any other solution if you care to get best quality and performance
convenience, integrated makes it easy to setup and use, with additional features, plus its such a fiddling to record specific windows when using external software such as OBS or similar if I don’t want to record entire screen in windowed or fullscreen mode, especially on Wayland
performance, Steam records the raw game footage from your video card and therefore has the best possible quality and performance one can get out of video recording
no overlays, Steam will only capture the game footage without fps indicator or other stats and without overlays or menus from Steam, other software would just record everything visible
timeline, resulting video is raw footage and is not encoded into a video file format for output and not useable before output to video (mp4), we can add timestamps with hotkeys while playing to mark specific points in recording, then we can mark start and end points or select certain parts in the timeline to save or export it
share, it has multiple sharing functionality besides saving to mp4 video file format
All of this is builtin and works the exact same way regardless of operating system and hardware (independent from cpu and gpu and os). No one needs to study hardware and software in order to configure it in the best possible way. If you used this on Windows, its the same on Linux, no dependency of recording software.
This is a much bigger deal than just recording footage with gnome-screenshot.
Its huge for me, because in Linux I can only record through OBS. And OBS is suboptimal, compared to a builtin solution like this. On Steam Deck I used the plugin too, but had to remove it again, because the plugin system stopped working.
Sure, a few more settings wouldn’t be bad, in example for saving as video file. But I think for the sake of simplicity for the end user and also for the devs themselves (I mean Steam devs) they kept it a bit barebones when it comes to codec or resolution settings. This has to work on Windows and on Linux (not sure about Mac) and on the Steam Deck out of the box.
It’s still beta and they already said in the article some features are coming. I’m more than happy with the timeline feature, this is amazing. I set it to 16 hours at highest quality, lol.
Its built-in and therefore independent from gpu and driver or additional software, and independent of the operating system, it even works on the Steam Deck out of the box. This is a feature I waited long time for.
Always sad to see a game getting delisted. But props to the devs to notify us about half a year in advance. Usually these delistings are instant without notification and then its too late for people who want to buy it. Now the game is at a good discount, 80%. If I had interest into the game and there was no FH5 on Steam, then I’d buy it.
Licensing issues with music can easily be patched out and replaced by other music. But what can they do about the cars? I guess a lifetime license for the games is too expensive, so it will be a limited license and then the delisting is only matter of time. Man this sucks.
I was a console player, now I am on PC. And I harvest the power of emulation alongside playing modern games.
Long Version
I’m an 80s guy and was fortunate enough to experience the 90s in its full glory; from Snes Jrpgs to the transitioning to 3D to the first consoles with internet connection. Nowadays I am a PC player and play ton of games through emulation. And the little cute Steam Deck on my side is the extra fun.
I played this year Breath of the Wild from the Switch, but through emulation on my PC in 60 fps, higher resolution and with my Xbox gamepad. Got all or almost all shrines in the game with over 130 hours playtime (Edit: Played it this year on Yuzu BTW. They started suing while I was playing.)! And besides that, I play old Romhacks and mods of old console games for the SNES, in example translations, bug fixes or just new stages (like DLCs from the community!). Or play games to beat highscores and times from your friends or other players in the community. There is so much to explore through emulation.
If you have a good PC and the patience, then I recommend you to get into emulation a little bit. Maybe not as hardcore as I do, but for your favorite consoles and games. You can play games that you missed back in the day in example, or just waste 20 minutes testing old games and then go back to modern games. It’s such a fun experience.
Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, and Jeff Braun in Kyoto in 1989. (Image credit: Courtesy of Jeff Braun)
After all the years, i finally see Will Wright as a real person. I only knew his avatar from the SNES game itself, back in the 90s. He looks a bit different than I had in mind. Oh and while I researched a bit, found this one:
I think we’re missing out by not having this as an option. Modding can provide a good stepping stone into full game development, and if people can earn money for their work, they can justify spending more time on it or potentially even doing it full time.
Yes. Those who don’t want to monetize their work (which is actually respectable) would standout even more. In example there could be two versions, one free version and one paid version with a few little extras to support the developers. This is a way to handle paid software even in Open Source, in example on Android where such a payment system is integrated.
There is no need to have an account on a different platform, so I can support the developer, and another account for another platform that wants my bank accounts. I speak about patreon and and the likes. It’s all here, with my Steam account and money from Steam.