I’m pretty sure they’ve spent every cent, considering how much they have in fact produced.
The part that boggles me to this day, is that they spend the money on making a litany of insanely high quality assets and features, with seemingly no plan for how they’ll fit together.
And then they proceed to spend even more money, and time, on trying to fit it all together into something that functions like a complete system.
And that’s before you discuss their obsession with “realism”. What there is to play, is marred with balancing issues. Better ships are just… Better. Because they insist on weapons and ships functioning “logically” within the game universe, rather than in whatever way is the most fun.
Fighters beat bigger ships because equipping the same weapons, a fighter can hit every shot it takes at a slow moving giant. Meanwhile the travel-time of weapons make the fighter completely unkillable for the big ship, because the fighter can land shots from a range where its own speed allows it to dodge literally everything the big ship might send its way.
They’ve been buffing the shields and ammo counts on bigger ships, but all that does is make the fight last longer.
The project is real, but it’s a mismanaged catastrophe.
But the “playable” rating does not require full steamdeck support, it just means the game runs. A “verified” rating means a game is a fully seamless experience on the deck.
Do you know about co-optimus.com? Is that the “third party” you mentioned?
I don’t know of anything better. Setting your filter and sorting by user rating is pretty effective. Aside from that I sort by release date and check back every now and then.
With a duo, if the second player is walking around the ship/not aboard, Buddy will man the guns. If the second player is manning the guns, it will reload the guns (even crafting the required supplies when doing so). It does not seem like it will put out fires, or do repairs.
In solo, he will use the sensors, he will man the guns, perform repairs, empty the materia collectors, accompany you on space walks, carry items back to the ship for you… Basically a ton of stuff.
What I was really impressed with is that Buddy still helps out in a duo. We would have been in trouble otherwise. Keeping the ship together during a big fight is a full-time task, so when a fire starts up, mines grab onto the hull, or repairs become necessary, the second player can hop off the guns and Buddy will take over while you put out fires, fight off boarders, etc. It’s great.
And reloading the guns just means a duo can keep fighting as long as nothing is going wrong with the ship.
Essentially, you get to do the fun and chaotic parts, while Buddy picks up any slack when too many things need doing at the same time.
Played this too on the weekend, aside from clearly unfinished stuff, I was thoroughly impressed.
They even thought of solo/two player cases, with a robot crewmember that helps out with more stuff the fewer human players are on-board.
A whoo boy, the sound design is delicious. The first person guns, the ship weapons and engines both when flying/using them, and hearing them when running around the ship. The jumpdrive. The MUSIC.
The team is clearly pouring their souls into the game and it shows. The vibes are excellent.
It makes sense though. Xbox games don’t have the bult-in configurability to run at lower settings and resolutions. So to run all the Xbox games, they’d all have needed an update to add a “handheld mode”.
It’s not like the backwards compatibility, where you are running previous games on more powerful hardware.
It’s especially funny in RE6, because it contrasts with how all the other campaigns had playable, in-universe, part-of-the-story characters for player 2 to control. To the point that playing single player they’re still there as dumb NPCs.
And then when Ada is supposed to be solo, everything feels funnier with the bolted-on co-op.
5 and 6 are a BLAST with a buddy. Throughout 5, we kept randomly asking each other, “oh hey, this is a horror game, right” as the latest ridiculous action bullshit was happening on-screen, and laughing our asses off.
In 6 in particular, in Ada’s campaign, she is alone… But since everything had to support co-op, for her missions a character called “agent” shows up. He’s just a faceless soldier for player 2 to play as, and every time he disappeared for the duration of a cutscene, and re-appeared for gamplay, it absolutely destroyed us.
Stuff like Ada clearly going through a door, alone, but then him somehow showing up on the other side the second the animation is over, happens CONSTANTLY.
We had this whole head-canon about how he’s an Ada simp that’s always there, just out of frame, and invisible to all the characters. A mysterius man even more unexplained than Ada.
They’re absolutely atrocious RE games, but some of the best fun you can have with a friend.