Plume, miesiąc temu

I could come up with a thousand reasons as to why this would never happen. Hell, I could even argue that the whole Steam Deck’s existence comes from a series of decisions that Valve made out of hatred for Microsoft. So, yeah, it’s not happening.

Still though, as a thought experiment, imagining a world where tomorrow, Steam is owned by Microsoft, it’s… interesting, to say the least. In the most horrifying way possible, but interesting nonetheless. Quite frankly, I can’t imagine anything worse happening for video games. Like to me, this is what a video game apocalypse sounds like.

Plume, 5 miesięcy temu

Scamming a charity? :|

Plume, 6 miesięcy temu

That was me. 🐣

Plume, 6 miesięcy temu

Well, my thinking was that I wasn’t sure, actually. I just liked their proportion better. They were nice looking. It was almost a running gag for me and my friends that I would always play women.

There were exceptions, like if it was a character that was speaking it would depend on the voice, for example in Far Cry 6. I picked the male model because I preferred his voice over her. Or if the female model is like overly sexualized with over the top sized ass, ridiculous sized boobs, a distinct lack of clothing compared to men… No thanks. I want to play as a woman, not play as a “made for horny 14 years old by horny men-children” version of women. No thanks. That kinda thing. But that’s about the only exceptions.

If I have the option in an RPG, it will be female. I’m gonna play Cyberpunk soon, you can bet your ass it will be a feminine type character. I played Mass Effect, Fem Shepard all the way. That GTA 6, for as little as I am excited by it for many reasons, I’m still very excited that one of the main characters is a woman.

I’ve always had a preference for playing women. I don’t have a problem playing any character at all. I can always immerse myself in them. It’s rarely an issue. But if I can, I like to play something that I identify myself with more, qnd that’s always been more the case with characters that are fem coded.

They are usually smaller. Usually thinner than male models. They have a more rounded face. And they tend to have long hair. All of this always fitted much more with who and what I was. I never had much muscle. I was never that tall. My voice, even as I grew into an adult, was never the typical male voice. It always had a bit of femininity in it. I have long hair. I have a more rounded face compared to most men. It always clicked more with me.

So yeah, there have always been lots of reasons, but it’s always been kind of nebulous as to why I just preferred it, you know? But then I figured out I was trans, so…

Plume, 6 miesięcy temu

I think it is impossible to properly state how damaging his existence was to gaming as a whole.

I would gladly say good fucking riddance, as if it was a victory, if it weren’t for the fact that he is going away with a fuck ton of money. He didn’t lose anything, he just won. And the whole gaming industry, hell, the whlole world suffers because of it. Because this isn’t just about video gamse. The man is a vile piece of shit. And he just gets to walk away and get away with it. Because money is power. The whole thing is just sickening.

Plume, 6 miesięcy temu

And if you’re on PC, it’s more like 2027. :D

Plume, 7 miesięcy temu

And you wanna know why? :)

divulgâcheIt’s because they’re not public. So investors can’t ruin everything like they always do.

Plume, 7 miesięcy temu

Some tips.

• Always do your research about a game, always check what people are saying on the website before you buy it. Do not trust the rating system. We’ve had too many cases of game being labeled as verified that couldn’t even reach 30 FPS.

• Do not install Windows on it. Just don’t. You got a Steam Deck. Not a Ayaneo, not a ROG ALLY. You got a Steam Deck. The strength of this machine is entirely in its software. It’s why in my opinion there has never been any real competition to the Steam Deck as most of these rely on Windows which is awful and not made for this purpose at all.

• If you ever get a dock and plug it in your TV, do not change the resolution of the game. Let it run at 720p. The upscaler will do its job. Just turn on FSR in the Steam Deck setting for the game with the free dots button (or Xbox + B, if you are using an Xbox Controller). In my experience, you tend to get quite good results, and I’m doing it on a 4K TV.

• The case that the Deck that comes with is amazing, but it’s a bit fat. It may be an issue if you plan on taking it with you on trips or whatever. So here’s a good alternative made by the company TomToc. I have one, and I love it. It’s thinner and will fit into more backpacks while taking less space. However, know that if you’re using a case around your Steam Deck, like let’s say you got a Killswitch from Dbrand, it won’t fit. Also, if you pick this up, don’t throw the original carrying case away. Keep it, you never know.

• I never really cared for emulation in the past. However, EmuDeck is the shit. It is so good, so stupidly easy to set up. You can’t pass on it. It’s a must have. If you grew up on consoles, it’s a great way to revisit the past and also a great way to play older games which got stuck on their consoles generation, forever lost to time and eBay scalpers.

Some games.

As for good games to get you started on the Steam Deck, first:

• Aperture Desk Job is an absoute must. I am pretty sure it should be included with the Steam Deck, but I don’t remember if it was, but it’s a free, short, and unique game made by Valve specifically for this machine. It will show you everything this machine can do and familiarize yourself with every aspect of controls from the small trackpads to the gyro controls.

• If you want good examples of good optimization, I strongly recommend you get the https://store.steampowered.com/app/1817070/Marvels_SpiderMan_Remastered/. I will also strongly recommend you to buy its “sequel” (it’s more of an expansion standalone game), Miles Morales, which to me, while shorter, improves on basically every aspect of the base game.

• The Steam Deck is also perfect for playing older games which you may have never got around the playing. I played BioShock on it for the first time this year entirely on the Steam Deck from beginning to end. It can feel a bit dated here and there, but I can also tell you that its reputation is well earned.

• Speaking of all the games you’d never played before, I doubt you haven’t played them. For some reason I feel like you probably did, but if you haven’t, I strongly recommend you to play the entirety of the Half-Life 2 Trilogy on this thing. It’s been optimized for it with new menus and everything.

• A Short Hike is as short as it sounds like, but it is a really memorable title. It’s relaxing, it’s hilarious and it’s simply adorable. It’s a gem.

• Terraria may not look like it at first, but it is surprisingly well optimized for the Steam Deck. It’s amazing, and if you haven’t played it, you will probably figure out eventually why this game has such a cult following. There are really good reasons as to why this is one of the highest-rated games on Steam.

• Vampire Survivor. Because of course. I feel like at this point, it’s practically illegal to own a Steam Deck and not have this game on it.

• Reventure is a fun and creative title. I honestly don’t have much to say about it. It’s really fun, really creative, really cheap. Quite funny. I loved it, and I can only recommend it. Don’t try and look up guides for this game. That would be ruining the fun.

• I haven’t finished it. But Spiritfarer It is a beautiful game, not only visually, but in its theme too. It’s a game about death and moving on from past traumas. It’s emotional, it’s funny, it’s creative, it’s just full of heart. I can promise that you will get attached to every character, but I can guarantee you that you will get attached to some, and that you will promise yourself that you won’t cry, but you fucking will! And you will love it.

• There is nothing quite like The Long Dark. You may believe you played survival games before, but this one is entirely different. I cannot recommend this enough. You really have to play it to get it. In a sea of bad and generic survival games, this one stands out as being serene to the point of being therapeutic while also being able to be ruthless and terrifying. This game isn’t particularly hard to run, but however, it doesn’t seem to like the Steam Deck very much? The frame rate is oddly unstable so I would recommend you to lock it at 30, then it won’t move at all it will be perfectly locked. It’s an issue that needs fixing.

---

I will conclude with this, the Steam Deck is not your PC with a 4090 in it. This is a low powered handheld machine. If I were you, I wouldn’t expect it to be reliable when it comes to newer AAA games. And that’s not only due to the power these game demands, but also to the absolutely dog shit optimization we seem to get with them nowadays.

I found that the Steam Deck is a perfect machine for me to expand my horizons. So my final recommendation would be for you to look towards indie games in general. These will be the best for the Steam Deck, but you may also find that these will be the best in general.

Have fun! :3

Plume, 7 miesięcy temu

If you haven’t played Miles, then skip the original on the Steam Deck and go straight for that one. It’s shorter and denser, but also, I think it improves on everything the first game did.

Plume, 7 miesięcy temu

I am not interested in the slightest into this game. If you’re waiting for a proper GTA game, you probably won’t be getting it. This is GTA Online 2.0 and nothing else. Don’t be fooled. This is the only thing that Take-Two cares about now and this is what it will be.

You will get your single player because of course but I wouldn’t be expecting much from it. I’m expecting something that probably won’t hit as hard as previous entries did. GTA V was already large step down from GTA IV. I’m expecting a very basic single player game with very basic lukewarm social satire.

This game will be primarily focused on GTA Online, and I know you’re going to tell me that GTA 5 was like that, but I don’t think they expected to make as much money as they did from it. This one though, they know they will and therefore they will have focused everything on it to make it an even larger money maker.

If you don’t believe me, I invite you to take a look at Red Dead Redemption 2, which was an amazing game with an amazing single player, but they tried to make money from the online component and didn’t manage to do so, and therefore look at what happened to that game. The online component and therefore its community has been completely abandoned, and that game is now buried in the older generations of console, forever stuck at 30 FPS with medium to lox textures.

We will never get a next-gen update of RDR2 and we will never get another game like GTA 4. GTA 6 will be the absolute final boss of live service games. And even with a stick, I’m not touching that one.

Plume, 7 miesięcy temu

So, I haven’t watched this yet but I just wanted to say this. I opened this video in an isolated, private tab. I’m not logged in, this is the algorithm in it’s default state. And litteraly the first video YouTube recommends me on the right of this one is a one hour and twenty-one minutes video called “Spider-Man 2 is Disgusting, Woke Propaganda”. YouTube’s default recommandation are still horrendously fucked and immediatly sends you to far right content…

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

Oh! Yes! That’s one thing that’s been driving me nuts too. Games are getting larger and larger but there’s no actual good reasons as to why. >.<

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

The ability to wear a cosmetic armor over your actual armor in RPGs and the like is on my wish list as well. Terraria does it quite well. :)

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

Custom difficulty mode in general. The Long Dark does exactly what you described. :)

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

Games needs to take into consideration people who are not used to playing. Games telling you “Press L3/R3” are the worst especially, most new player don’t even know that the sticks can click!

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

And let us skip the damn hour long tutorial on replays, while you’re at it!

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

It’s a thing… here and there. Far Cry 6 by default has voice reader accessibility feature turned on, which is nice. Say what you will about Ubisoft, they’re good with accessibility stuff.

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

The fact that you can’t is a feature… just not for you.

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

Apex nailed the communication aspect. It’s the gold standard as far as I am concerned.

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

That reminds me:

If there is split screen on console…

…why the fuck do I need to mod it into the PC version?!

It’s already there, leave it in! ;_;

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

Just letting people pause cutscenes to access the menus would be a huge start.

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

Sounds quite specific but I can see it. A “turn off gore” feature could help?

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

Hell yeah. I didn’t put this in my post because I didn’t want it to turn into a debate about the validity and viability of gyro controls (it is, if you don’t think so, you’re just wrong). So thanks for putting it.

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

So this is my own post, but I’m still gonna comment on it because I have something else.

AI Bots support for multiplayer games.

It’s become quite a rarity but it used to be… I wouldn’t say standard, but common in older games and I really miss it.

Sometimes I really enjoy the gameplay loop of a multiplayer game but I just don’t want to play it in multiplayer. There is too much pressure. Counter-Strike is a good example of that. I like the gameplay loop. I like the game but I spent a ton of my time playing it offline against bots on custom maps.

It’s not exactly the same as playing with real players. I know they don’t behave the same. But speaking of not behaving the same, at least I don’t have to be worried of being insulted or anything if I make a mistake. There is much less pressure to succeed in games like this which I find fun. It’s often hard to play online because it’s all pressure and no fun for me.

Programming decent AI bots is complicated I know that which is why it’s probably as rare as it is nowadays but I still miss it there has been too many games that I loved that simply died and I can’t play anymore because there is no bot supports on it. I would love to be able to play my favorite game like for example, a Battlefield 1 game with 63 other bots that can pilot vehicles and do all of the things that real players would do.

That’s why I love Ravenfield. But yeah, how many games have died and how many gameplay loop do we miss and can never play again because it would require actual players and there was never any proper bot support implemented?

I can think of a few and actually one of them is Star Wars Battlefront 2015 which had some sort of AI bot implemented but it used a very different kind of AI. They don’t move like actual players. They have completely different animations and behaviors and what’s worse is that they have a really nasty tendency to focus on the player. Which means that on some maps and some difficulty you come out of a hallway, out on the outside part of the map, and all of a sudden every bottom of the map, every starship is firing at you. Because you’re the priority target.

Battlefront 2 2017 eventually implemented instant action and did it much better. Sadly I prefer the gameplay loop of the 2015 game by a lot. Oh well.

If you like me, buy Ravenfield on Steam. It’s not a game that happens to have bot support. It’s actually a game that is completely built around this. It’s not just a feature, it’s the point of the game, and I love it for it.

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

I’m gonna be honest, I never really understood what it did. The difference between fullscreen and windowed mode is kind of obvious, but borderless? I get what it does, it’s like windowed mode but borderless and it can take the whole screen. But then why not just make it fullscreen? I don’t understand it.

And especially when apparently some games run better with it? Which… I don’t know, I just don’t understand it.

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

Fuck redemptions anyway. It’s time to make some examples out of some games. I’m sick and tired of games launching as broken and empty pieces of shit, only for them to finally become somewhat playable months or even years later and have the internet call it a “Redemption Arc”. It’s becoming a standard.

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

I play a lot of FPS games and I’ve always been a PC player come up playing with keyboard and mouse. However, I tend to find controllers to just be more ergonomic and more comfortable. To me, the best way to play is simply controller with gyro aim.

I love my Steam Deck for this and I also love my Steam Controller, however I find it to be a bit too big for my small hands, which is a big problem that I have with it, because this thing is so innovative, it’s just so good!

I played Battlefield 1 on my Xbox today. And aiming with just a joystick is horrendous. God I miss the gyroscope every time I can’t have it.

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

It used to exist, but not so much anymore. I miss heavily community based FPS multiplayer games. With custom servers and so on. I played Counter-Strike: Source last night, what a breath of fresh air!

Same, I played some Day Of Defeat: Source also a while back. I got onto a server, people were talking about random things and seemed to know each other, there was a sense of community, it felt like a local bar.

It’s 3am and I’m chilling and talking with strangers while surfing on CS:S. God, I miss this.

I miss that in newer games. It’s all matchmaking, all competitive and in many ways, modern games like this feels “no fun allowed”.

Plume, 8 miesięcy temu

Pretty much. It’s always competitive. Always on the grind. You can’t just play for fun, no. You have to be at your best every time, because now, there is this skill-based matchmaking algorithm watching your every move in game and so on.

I feel like I’m starting to get old when I say this, but every time I go back to play one of those old games, I get reinforced in this idea… so many games feel like jobs nowadays. It’s just like the real world, it’s all so competitive. No fun allowed. You can’t ever be goofing around, you have your rank to worry about… every shooter now keeps on getting updated, the meta keeps on changing, and you have to keep up with it constantly otherwise you’ll get left behind.

I can’t put it into words exactly, so excuse me if what I’m going to say sounds odd… But I feel like most of the modern entertainment available to me is really stressful and I can’t explain it. To be honest, it’s the first time I’m voicing this feeling, but I find it really distressing…

Plume, 9 miesięcy temu

Usually. This time, I think it might be different. Starfield is coming out in a time of live service games, and the way they talk about it, they are going for a really long-term support with plans for contents over years and everything. So this time, it could be different. Maybe.

Plume, 10 miesięcy temu

I mean, it’s hard to ignore the “Shoddy PC ports” when it’s your main platform and if that applies to you, and you mostly play big budget games, well so far, this year has mostly been fucking awful.

Plume, 10 miesięcy temu

And like every other DRM, it’s just going to be something that the people who bought the game and play it unaltered will be forced to deal with in one way or another… while those who modify the game, emulate or pirate it, won’t. I love DRMs. Nothing like feeling like a sucker for actually buying the game and not cracking it.

Plume, 10 miesięcy temu

Yeah, personally, I’d recommend to keep in mind that this probably won’t be as much of a GTA 6 as much as it’ll be just GTA Online 2…

Plume, 11 miesięcy temu

Well, fuck you and your shitty game then. Wasn’t interested in the first place, but this kills any possibility of that ever changing.

Plume, 11 miesięcy temu

Last game I played on it, yesterday, was Just Cause 3. It’s… not great. The game just doesn’t run consistently enough and is too CPU heavy.

I recently played Red Dead Redemption 2 on it, that was great. Surprisingly so. I’m playing Skyrim now. I’ve had the game for years but never took the time to properly get into it. I beat the main quest and messed with mods back in the day but that’s it.

Now, I’m playing it vanilla and I want to just go deep into the game, completely ignoring the main quest, I don’t want to be the hero, if the universe needs saving, it can find someone else. Khajiit have caves to explore and stuff. Oh and the new Survival Mode is neat!