From the press releases at the time, it appears the new owners only have the studio and the Hi-Fi Rush IP, not their other IPs like Ghostwire or Evil Within. If they had to be choosy, Hi-Fi Rush was the one worth getting.
I think I’m kind of done with Supergiant regardless. In both Bastion and Transistor, it felt like they had two out of three components to their gameplay loop but were missing something to prevent it from feeling repetitive; despite short runtimes, both very much did feel repetitive. I didn’t even try Pyre, and I have little faith it would be for me. I do love roguelikes and can enjoy -lites from time to time as well, and Hades got a lot of buzz. However, I actually quite disliked worlds 3 and 4, and the level generation is among the worst I’ve seen in the genre. I get the sense that Hades is probably most responsible for people who claim they want “handcrafted levels” as opposed to procedural generation, because perhaps those people haven’t seen it done well if they’ve only ever played Hades, a game with level generation so monotonous that the voice actor will call out a room we all recognize.
Well, The Witcher 1 and 2 weren’t open world, and those turned out pretty well, especially 2. There’s something to be said about what a game from them might gain by doing more in a smaller world.
There was a podcast that Irrational did before putting out BioShock Infinite that would interview game developers and other creatives, and they had one that interviewed the BioWare doctors. BioWare was always set up to be a multi project studio, and Irrational was a single project studio. At that time in the industry, lots of companies were pivoting from the former to the latter, due to how many more hands on deck a 7th gen console AAA game took to make. BioWare was set up the way it was so that one underperforming game could easily be carried by another reasonably successful one. By the end of that interview, I thought you’d have to be nuts to employ that many people and only work on one game at a time. Sure enough, Irrational buckled under that weight right after shipping BioShock Infinite’s DLC, and modern, single-project BioWare is looking worse for wear.
That led into the used market, I suppose (a boogeyman for the games industry that birthed lots of the worst monetization today). I never really had that problem, outside of outliers like Pokemon Snap that were unusually short. In the 00s, it was pretty common to get 8-15 hours for an action game that you paid $50-$60 for, often times with multiplayer modes alongside the single player modes, and that felt like great value to me at the time.
It’s not speculation with MindsEye. Everywhere was shown off first, and it’s still happening. That studio was funded with VC money, and VCs want “the next big thing”. That thing at the time was “metaverse”. MindsEye seems to be the smaller project they can get out in the meantime and, charitably, is one of a number of things they’ll churn out that all comes from a similar process flow and builds on each other (they hope).
As to boycotts, your individual purchases always matter; not just with what you don’t buy but also what you do buy.
That oxygen is in a different room. The person who only plays Fortnite probably never heard of MindsEye or Concord. At some point, I wonder why games media even covers certain companies anymore. Sure, EA and Ubisoft made games we all liked 20-25 years ago, but they don’t really make games for those same customers anymore, largely.
I think the mismanagement comes from thinking that any fighting game can keep up with the cadence and business model of League of Legends. You’ll see this again with 2XKO, even if they’ve got a year’s worth of character releases already done ahead of time to give them a head start.
GaaS means you have ongoing expenses after launch in a way that normal games do not. The costs are higher, but they keep chasing the much larger reward that only a super small percentage will ever achieve.
Releasing the server code as binary is how it used to work, and there’s no reason it can’t work that way again. It’s one of several ways to satisfy the petition.
There are a lot of edge cases. You have to handle external launchers, external error prompts; basically anything that requires you to Alt+Tab. One of the things Valve did a decade ago was the stuff that got rolled into GameScope that ensures that they never lose focus of the game window. Even with the resources to transform Windows this way, it will still take time.
I don’t know where your preferences lie, but by the numbers, far more games are coming in under the Steam Deck specifications in terms of system requirements than there are games that are stretching them or exceeding them. Very few companies can afford to make a game that runs poorly on it. If we look at the top 12 highest-reviewing games on OpenCritic for 2025 so far, I think only 1 of them (Monster Hunter Wilds) doesn’t meet the spec, and at least 3 or 4 of them are 2D with a retro aesthetic. All that to say, I think the horsepower ought to be enough for most people for a very long time, barring a minimal number of games.
I don’t know how much of that was needing to prove that the market existed rather than the simultaneous development of performant and power efficient x64 APUs suitable for handheld gaming PCs. The 3DS was plenty successful even at the time, but handheld-only games had a reputation for being the B game to the home consoles’ A game. It was a pretty natural conclusion for Nintendo, when their handheld was successful and their home console was not, to combine the two, using the same tech found in cell phones, no less.
Not an adaptation or port, but the Link Between Worlds compared to the console’s Breath of the Wild. Say what you will about the subjective quality of each of those games, but the market at large would prefer Breath of the Wild. Plus Sony’s catalog had this problem even more visibly on Vita.
You’re making an argument that I am not. I never said the 3DS or its games weren’t successful; in fact, I said it was more successful than the Wii U, which likely led to the Switch being a logical thing for Nintendo to do. I never said its biggest games were ports. But while that 4.26M copies is no slouch, it’s in line with how Echoes of Wisdom or the remake of A Link to the Past have performed and not the 30M+ copies that Breath of the Wild sold. The former have smaller budgets and less mass market appeal (though it would be wildly impressive for just about any other series). They are the B games to Breath of the Wild’s or Tears of the Kingdom’s A games. That’s what handheld libraries typically were, especially up until the point that it was clear that the Wii U was a dud.
To use another example that will maybe help convey my point better: The 3DS got Hey! Pikmin. The Wii U got Pikmin 3.
Well, the first GPD Win beat the Switch to market by two years, so I’d be willing to bet it was inevitable. The GPD Win 2 was wildly impressive at the time, coming in at almost Switch level performance, but it could play my Steam games, and I bought one immediately, even at twice the MSRP of the Switch. I’m an earlier adopter for this kind of thing, but I do believe it was just a matter of the tech catching up. Up until that point, the power level of handheld stuff was always woefully behind what home consoles and PCs could do, and now that may still be the case, but we’re still happily playing games that require no more power than what a PS4 can do, which is tech from 12 years ago.
Define “easily”. The Steam Deck doesn’t come with a dock. They’re all just personal computers, and as such, they don’t need to be explicitly designed for certain functionality in many cases. Plus, I’d argue one of the core pillars is that it plays the same games at home and on the go, without having to purchase a second portable version of it.
They’re as good at it as the operating system is, if you think about any time you’ve ever plugged an external monitor into a laptop. There is some Valve special sauce in the software to help with that on Steam Deck, but I don’t think it’s something that would have gone uninvented without the Switch.
I agree. They’ve had time if they cared about making this product before the Steam Deck was a success, but much like with cloud infrastructure, or search engines, or MP3 players, or mobile, or game consoles in general, they only really cared about it after someone else made a great version of what they could have been doing themselves.
The cast is playing high schoolers, right? If they’re re-recording audio at all, wouldn’t it be better to get people in their 20s, at the most, rather than in their 40s?
I mean, if it’s a technical mess, that’s one thing, but I think this looks great. More importantly, we really haven’t gotten many games like this in so, so long, and I’m hungry for it.
Well, after playing Baldur’s Gate 3, I’ve got no shortage of ideas. I really enjoyed Cyberpunk, but “this is the strength option” and “this is the hacker option” are nothing compared to how BG3 lets you come up with your own solutions through its systems.
I don’t know if it’s something that only happened in digital re-releases of Sonic 3 & Knuckles, or if it always did this back in the day, since I no longer have a Genesis, but the music is different in the official modern releases of Sonic 3 & Knuckles compared to original Sonic 3. It’s better in 3.
It might be, but the point of the Microsoft handheld is to grant access to Game Pass and games with lousy anti-cheat on a UI that doesn’t suck like desktop Windows does.
Did you know that Steam’s monthly active user base dwarfs any single console out there? At this point, it’s almost as large as PlayStation and Xbox combined; definitely bigger than the combined install base for each of their current gen consoles. Steam is more mainstream than PlayStation at this point. (However, the caveat is that the Steam Deck can’t be purchased at Walmart.)
Dual booting has existed for a long time. Microsoft keeps making it more annoying to do. For my next PC, I’m not even keeping a dual boot around as a safety net; I’m just doing Linux.
Do you have a source for that? As far as I know, Microsoft never gave much of a damn about making Linux versions of games. They did have an Xbox parity clause for games that came to other consoles, but that’s pretty different than what you’re saying.
I haven’t tracked the performance in Proton for a long time, because I already used that information to make my purchasing decisions, but single digit percentage improvements in performance when running games via Proton has also been the case on desktops for a long time. If there’s any further improvement to be seen from SteamOS’s game mode rather than regular desktop, you should see it in Bazzite as well.
Well, the truth of that is quite a bit different than how you put it, and it’s also more carrot than stick. There were efforts to make Linux versions of games after this adoption of DirectX, and they didn’t take; I have a Linux disc for Unreal Tournament 2004 that came in the same box as the Windows one. What Microsoft did surely sucked for everyone, but fortunately, we live in a world where their recent efforts to do similar things aren’t working. They didn’t manage to siphon PC gaming over the Windows Store, and Windows handhelds are demonstrably worse and sell worse than the Linux ones. Consoles’ walled gardens are slowly crumbling from natural market forces to the openness of PC, and that includes a PC where almost all of those games work on Linux.
Microsoft does not have a position of strength here right now, and they know it, so they instead pivoted to just being an enormous publisher with a subscription service that’s lucrative but has already plateaued.
If it’s the one that got them their recognition, it’s little more than arbitrary; luck, place and time; things that don’t have to do with how good the work is. Some “masterpieces” weren’t considered such until they were exposed to people over and over again, like The Mona Lisa at the Louvre or It’s a Wonderful Life on TBS. I’d have a hard time calling a number of games masterpieces that I didn’t care for, because this isn’t objective.
Some of the best co-op I ever played was in Rainbow Six 3, but I played with 7 players, and I don’t remember if it will let you mix and match humans with bots on your squad. You’ll need a gaming VPN to play co-op, also, since the servers are gone.
Halo is always a good time, as is Gears of War, and it kind of sucks that outside of Borderlands, these are the most recent recommendations I can come up with, but this genre has been left to rot in live service hell.
Your mileage may vary, but there’s a bug on the PC version that causes a boss to regenerate health tied to the frame rate. It happened to a friend and me, and we watched it happen to two other friends. Higher frame rates cause it to regen faster. There’s a way you can cheese the fight to get around this, but maybe the method would be a spoiler.
(Also, I thought this game was bad and not in an interesting way like its successor is, but once again, your mileage may vary.)
We went through this song and dance with Indiana Jones and Avowed, too. If this was a strategy that lost them money, they’d stop doing it. It turns out they’re just fine with having tens of millions of subscribers that like the idea of getting access to games like these for, in plenty of cases, cheaper.
That SteamOS compatible icon came to my Bazzite mini PC just before I brought it along with me for Combo Breaker. I suppose that leads into what I’ve been playing.
I competed in Guilty Gear Strive (0-2, sadly), Street Fighter 6 (2-2, which is better than I should have done given how little I practiced), and Skullgirls (a hard fought 3-2). Unless Street Fighter 6 gets a killer patch in the next few days with Elena’s release, I think this is where I depart the Street Fighter train.
I also played some Devil May Cry 4 on the plane, and I’ll likely do so again on the way back. I would have continued my save of Tales from the Borderlands, but I found out just before leaving that it doesn’t have cloud saves. I’ll continue with that and Kingdom Come: Deliverance back at my desktop at home.
But you’ll see similar rates of players finishing the game that have far shorter runtimes. 100 hours is about how long it takes to finish the game, after all, and that percentage lines up quite well with the achievements for finishing the game. Engagement is a horrible metric for a game like Elden Ring that isn’t trying to keep you hooked with anything except a game you like playing; no battle pass, no dailies, no events, etc. I’ll bet A Dance With Dragons has far better engagement metrics than The Return of the King, but it’s a stupid metric regardless, because they’re books.
Looking for some advice. My Switch Lite is approaching the end of its life and given that a Switch 2 is basically the same price as an OLED Steamdeck I was thinking it might be a good time to jump back to PC gaming....
1/3 sounds high. Just because it isn’t verified doesn’t mean it won’t work, and most of the non-anti-cheat-related compatibility problems are solved by installing Proton GE.
Definitely go Steam Deck then. No question. You’ll have far more to choose from, and the Deck’s suspend and resume is shockingly good considering you’d never expect that feature to work on a Windows PC mid-game.
James Bond Game From Hitman Dev Has a New Title, 007 First Light, Official Reveal This Week (www.ign.com) angielski
Tango Gameworks is back with a new look... and a new website! (tangogameworks.com) angielski
Had a take about Supergiant Games that recieved a lot of pushback fromy teo longest eunning best friends. angielski
“I wish Supergiant would get the roguelite bug out of their system and make sequels to Bastion and then Transistor finally.”...
‘We tried and it didn’t work out’: CDPR co-founder says it shouldn’t stray from AAA open-world RPGs (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
When making lots of small games is more sustainable than making one big one (www.polygon.com) angielski
MultiVersus officially closes down and is delisted today (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
Microsoft Shifts Xbox Gaming Handheld Ambitions to Third-Party Windows Handhelds, Postpones 2027 Launch Plans (www.techpowerup.com) angielski
Persona 4 Remake Is Apparently Happening, As Voice Actor Confirms He's Not Coming Back For It (www.ign.com) angielski
MindsEye boss claims game's negative reaction ahead of release has been paid for in "concerted effort" against studio (www.eurogamer.net) angielski
Cyberpunk 2 is now in preproduction, CD Projekt says (www.videogameschronicle.com) angielski
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SteamOS massively beats Windows on the Legion Go S (www.gamingonlinux.com) angielski
What games are just objective masterpieces? angielski
What are some good cooperative shooters? Hidden gems? angielski
Wondering what the people on Lemmy think :)...
DOOM: The Dark Ages Has Reportedly Sold Less Than 1 Million Copies (80.lv) angielski
Steam Deck / Gaming News #17 angielski
Well, it’s that time again for this last week’s interesting gaming news I’ve spotted!...
Elden Ring's player engagement is through the roof: 45% of its Steam players have played for 100+ hours (alineaanalytics.com) angielski
Steamdeck or.... angielski
Looking for some advice. My Switch Lite is approaching the end of its life and given that a Switch 2 is basically the same price as an OLED Steamdeck I was thinking it might be a good time to jump back to PC gaming....
Report: Marathon Delay Likely as Sony Cancels All Paid Marketing Plans (thegamepost.com) angielski