Good recommendations so I’ll just add some specifics.
For whatever emulation route you choose, I recommend using a separate SD card just for emulation. Makes it really easy to just get it set up on an SD card, the games appear and they are ready. No SD card, no emulation finagling. Keeps your ROMs off main deck storage which even 512gb fills up fast.
I like emudeck, some don’t, ymmv.
I don’t think I saw SSH recommended. I use FileZilla to transfer files between my PC and steam deck - handy for emulation files, small-medium sized games. It makes the process of transferring and setup so much easier. I like FZ cause once it’s set up there’s a quick connect so you don’t have to remember the details.
Hardware accessory: I highly recommend the Deckmate, it’s basically a VESA mount for the Deck. I attached a battery pack, mini dock, and have mounted the Deck to VESA stands. Seriously, it’s worth it.
For me it would be Spider-Man, Cyberpunk 2077, and anything VR.
The polish of a Sony game, something I haven’t had since the PS2, on PC was refreshing. The absolute insanity of pushing the scale of a rendered world to make Night City something that feels genuinely huge. And expanding that into real-world space is something that I had dreams about as a child.
However the 3rd is a bit different for realism, as VR done well doesn’t need graphical fidelity (=/= resolution). Games that require it, like a painting simulator, sure, but there are games like Moose Life which just recreate the old arcade style of game. No realism needed. And this is where I begin to ramble some!
If I were to go back a generation, I’d say the list is much stronger in art-directed styles. The watercolor of Okami, the cel-shading of Borderlands - now timeless classics sheerly due to their artistic direction while other games of the same era are the subject of title. Opposed to Call of Duty or Battlefield, it’s clear that each generation with some stagnation “looks” better than those before it.
But again, what exactly is it that makes current day CoD or BF “different” from something like say, 2007 Crysis?
Crysis has a bit more aliasing. That’s pretty much it? This whole idea of “realism” in video games is just preposterous to me because there are so many examples of amazing art, and then there are drab games aiming for “visual realism” which could have been something much more impressive. Crysis not only pushed the hardware of its time but it also made stylistic choices which have kept the game visually relevant.
I think another example somewhat fitting into this is games like Horizon Zero Dawn and Death Stranding - clearly more cartoonized games that are surrounded by a world influenced by realism, but rather than focusing in on what visually is most realistic they aim for stylistic choices. I would say that GTA 5’s story somewhat falls in here as well, but it’s something that RDR2 fails at exceptionally for me. On the flip side, the Darksiders series just doesn’t mesh with me stylistically, while Elden Ring is everything that I felt Darksiders could have been (visually). But even Elden Ring is just a few lines more detailed than a game like Dragon’s Dogma: Dark Arisen - render distance taking away from DD:DA’s “realism”, something that Elden Ring particularly shines at.
Ultimately I think this sort of thing comes down to our subjective perceptions. When I was a kid I played a lot of 2D side scrollers and pixel art games, I got a PS2 and experienced a lot of 3D and 2D platformers, and then the PS2 was stolen and I was relegated to flash games until the Wii. I experienced such a wide range of games before the age of 10 that now as an adult I find the aesthetic of a game to be just as important as the gameplay or its story. Quite frankly, I don’t really care if a game looks like Heavenly Sword or Darksiders or some abstract blobs and hitboxes. If it’s designed well, I’m interested, although I do have a harder time with 2D pixel games these days (the Steam Deck helps! It’s the feeling of the right console for the right game that usually prevents me from playing them on PC)
It seems a shame that even today this discourse of “best graphics or bust” is still around. It’s always been surrounding the console war culture and invades games that it had never been an issue for before, but seems nonexistent when realism actually fits a genre. For example, the graphical fidelity of Monster Hunter: World is beautiful but very out of place for the MH series, aiming for “realism”. They did a great job stylizing the game but it doesn’t detract from the more animated MH games.
Now, almost any horror game ever. So many of them push for visual realism because that’s how to get the most effective shock from gore, meanwhile there are some games that are clever about their horror, like Outlast using the perspective of a camera with night vision. Realistically, I think a game like this, or Phasmophobia, or Hellblade Senuas Sacrifice show that horror games don’t entirely need realism and too many use it as a crutch.
I don’t really think realism is “necessary” for any game with a strong art direction, and more often than not the art direction is what keeps the visual strength of a game relevant. That said, I think there are good examples of realism that have existed, but ultimately they seem likely to fade away until a remaster comes to remind a new generation of gamers that it exists, whereas a game with strong art direction seems to tend to have more staying power.
Finally - what is realism, anyway? Photorealism? And how much does realism affect immersion, since that seems to be a component?
RDR2?
Mirrors Edge?
Horizon Zero Dawn/Spider-Man?
Hitman 3?
Call of Duty?
Crysis?
Fallout/Outer Wilds?
Ace Combat?
Counter Strike?
Far Cry?
Alien Isolation?
To me, all of these stray pretty far from “realism” if the definition is avoiding things that look animated? Like the character models or aspects of the surrounding world. I feel like if I were so focused on realism then I would be distracted by the foliage of RDR2 or the animated models of Fallout/Cyberpunk 2077. However other aspects of those games look absolutely incredible, but don’t always mesh with the rest of what’s going on. This is why I feel that art direction is just more important than “realism” - because photos in 2077 just look better with the character models and the world matching than RDR2 does with it’s semi-realistic but still animated human characters in a semi-photorealistic world but it’s still pixelated grass and dirt so there’s obvious spots where a screenshot is a video game, not a photo. Sorry, that was a mouthful!
I guess what I’m getting at is what exactly does attempting visual realism bring to a game that proper art direction wouldn’t do just as well?
Is it just the innate desire to get movies as playable games?
I remember seeing those articles. It was just tough putting together a life and stacked character and complete quests to throw it away for my experience which was another normal boring one (clarify, only boring because it was all exactly the same, I liked my first playthrough).
I like the game, it has a strong message behind it. It’s tough rebuilding your mantis ship decked with other quest ship materials and your alignments when you get a not crazy NG+
The side quests really make the game. My issue came down to after that first playthrough I did all the quests… So in ng+ what do I do, different choices?
500 not even on sale. It often goes for $350 these days.
Honestly, it’s a steal. The reverb G2 is really good, easily used with Valve Index controllers.
In the long run though, anyone currently interested should probably wait for Valves next release. Then you can decide if MS-lock is worth it, it can certainly be frustrating at times being locked to Windows.
A fake meta profile for your games attached to it. Meta also has asked for ID confirmations, so you better either be okay with risking it or losing access to your account and your investment.
The game shut down after the play test. There was nothing they had the opportunity to change.
If you’re talking about systemic issues with the games design, that I will agree with. From my understanding it’s a 5 team of three PvP/E heisting game in space.
That means that there’s zero gravity sections, maps large enough to have heists, and, again, 5 teams of 3. It’s not so much that the game itself has any specific issue, the issue the game has was sheerly its scope and ambition. It seems like it could have had a lot of potential if it just weren’t so many systems being combined.
Mindset. In a way the defeatism is what allows it to happen as everybody else begins to feel the same way.
In other words, stay optimistic and speak positively towards your hopes. It’s true that the sad reality is that many people don’t care, but as long as we continue to let corps get away with it and not speak out about our passion for this then the chances of it actually happening dwindle more and more.
Warframe is popular as hell. It seems likely a game like that will continue. Planetside 2 as well.
A game like nexons Ghost in the Shell hero shooter, by the book but fun as hell, that game seems like it would be truly gone forever sadly. Except even the likes of Nexon’s rehashing of games gets private server emulation treatments!
The thing about our work is that we are quite literally going against the massive corporations so a lot of these projects either stay low key or risk getting shut down.
So yeah, it’s true that not everyone feels how we do. That doesn’t change the fact that if we stop talking about it and doing what we can the corps get exactly what they want and the efforts fade away forever. I think another good example is the ElDewrito Halo 3 rewrite which was effectively Halo PC until MCC finally released. The likelihood of MCC coming to PC was really high already but with all the reception it got over the years I really feel like ElDewrito pushed MCC to fruition sooner