I might if I didn't just get BG3. I'll still get it pretty close to launch barring serious issues, though. Everything I've seen about the scale and what the game is is what I've been waiting for for a while.
I know Bethesda isn't perfect and I didn't love FO4, but it's in large part because of the reliance on VATS for combat instead of making guns feel OK. Gunplay looks a lot better and more dynamic and just that combined with Bethesda's world building/sense of exploration (which exists in Fallout, too; it's just overshadowed to me by the mechanics) are super promising. There are always bugs with anything as ambitious as Bethesda makes, because it takes dozens of hours of testing per 10 minute encounter to comprehensively test one, and you can't exactly unit test video games (though we might not be super far off from training AI to supplement human testing), but I rarely experience anything near as annoying as the vitriol implies and I just don't care.
I get the don't preorder principle, but it's on steam. I get to have it downloaded ahead of time and ready for launch, and if there actually are issues it's extremely simple to get my cash back. Refunds make as much (or more) impact as waiting to buy it, so if a game is actually broken my voice is theoretically louder anyways.
It's the core because they spend a sizable portion of their resources on making it that way. Every line of code that doesn't explicitly keep interoperability in mind is a line of code with the potential to catastrophically break it.
It's not something you can do, then you have it. It's like exercise. The day you stop it starts to fall away.
They are reworking their tooling and engine constantly.
If they weren't making a deliberate point of making extensibility a priority, it would disappear on its own as development that didn't make it a focus left it behind. It doesn't just magically happen. It's because of good process.
You're conflating two things. This isn't developers. It's Microsoft.
If Valve was in charge of bans, a literal lifetime ban for you as a human being would be entirely justifiable and fair as a punishment for inappropriate conduct in interactions with other players.
ziabice about 3 hours ago
The game's great, but they should fix the inventory (is a complete mess, seems one from a game in the '90), the font size of the UI and they should let me see the cards/stats of every member of my party, even the ones which are in my camp, so I can decide what items or enhancements are best suited for them.
This is basically my only nitpick, too, playing with a controller. D:OS2 was better. I don't need the character stuff taking up half the screen of inventory management, especially when it isn't done in a way that really enhances your information on the utility of equipment to your character.
Inventory should be its own section, so you can use the triggers to hop between tabs of different types of gear. I'd also like it if they took inspiration from Elden Ring for what it does display on the characters. It's also not perfect, but letting you cycle which info sheets show in the extra panes provides a good balance between making a lot of information readily accessible without making it a chore to find.
Imagine a game banning you for being toxic and then steam banning you from all multiplayer games. Boggles the mind.
If Valve had the staff and Valve was the one handling bans from games, that's exactly how it should work.
People who aren't consistently making the experience of everyone around them worse don't routinely get banned, and a proper appeals system is more than enough. Being online doesn't mean that there aren't real people on the other end that you're harassing and treating like shit and ruining their gaming experience. "If you make an alt and go online, you lose offline access too" wouldn't be an overreach. It would just be good policy. You don't have a right to harass people with impunity.
They have it recorded. If they're repeatedly upholding reports through appeals, you probably deserve to be reported.
And yes, you absolutely should lose access to multiplayer period if they're forced to ban you. The idea that just losing chat access is a suitable punishment for repeatedly being a shitbag is fucking absurd.
I don't see what's objectionable here. This isn't them saying they're going to start scanning every private chat you have to look for anything mildly controversial to take action against. This is saying that when you use their public-facing service and get reported for being an obnoxious douche to other users who are matched with you when trying to play their games, they have a standardized process so you know where you stand.
I have not played it, but people rave about The Outer Wilds and it sounds like it fits your needs.
It's not at all my thing, but search the term "walking simulator" to find stuff like that.
Have you tried some of the games you're talking about on the "story" difficulty modes? Most have moved to calling it something like that instead of "easy", and I'm at the opposite extreme, but a lot of them are designed to let you experience the world and story without the pressures of combat.
If you have access to a switch, Mario Odyssey or Kirby and the Forgotten Land have some "combat" but you can skip a lot of it, and they're made to be beatable by kids. Other 3D platformers exist in similar veins as well.
But I definitely wouldn't swap it straight up for any of the rest.
The Deck is big and heavy compared to the field, but it uses the size for a couple of purposes:
It has full controller sized everything (this is without measuring; it feels extremely comparable to the Xbox controller, though), plus the touchpads that are IMO an absolute requirement for interacting with the OS at all. Using any joystick to move a mouse cursor is terrible, and you will have to interact with the OS. You can work around this by only managing stuff at home with a mouse and keyboard plugged in and launching everything through a controller friendly launcher, but it's a headache.
The Ally has the same 40WH battery the Steam Deck does (per a 30 second search), but if you go smaller you almost definitely have to go smaller. On a similar note, much of the rest of the space is cooling. If something is advertising comparable specs in a meaningfully smaller package, they're sacrificing one or the other. It's just physics. The Ally can kick up the power to higher top end performance, but it's at a higher power draw and you can get down to ~2 hours battery life on the deck. Again, the basic limitations of physics say that's going to make a dent in the already tight battery life constraints if you use the power. (Yes, having it while plugged in is still nice.)
The shape is really comfortable. It does take some awareness to avoid resting the weight on your elbows, but once you recognize that you can comfortably play long sessions (compared to the switch, but a lot of the slightly smaller ones have very comparable designs because they're the only way to make a real dent without shrinking the screen).
You can also install Windows without major issue if that's your preference, though if you don't play games that choose to block you out for anticheat you probably don't need to.
Ultimately, all of these devices have to make compromises. It's a handheld and there's only one real supplier for chips to make it with (unless you go the basically Android only ARM route). Steam chose an extremely balanced approach such that you don't really feel any of them. Others chose to push harder to one metric or another, but because of the bottom line constraints of the form factor, they had to sacrifice something else to do it. It's possible you prefer the other approaches better, and that's fine. Valve will be perfectly happy if enough good options become available that there's no need for a second deck. Their goal was to make handheld PC gaming a thing (and cut down their reliance on windows), and they were extremely successful at both.