One of the bigger issues about PC gaming these days is the shader compilation stutter. Valve is able to precompile and upload these for SteamDeck, so a fixed hardware “console” from them will solve this problem too.
SteamDeck is pretty weak but games are still sort of optimised for it. Same would be true for such a console, making devs focus on a target platform directly.
Assembling PC yourself can have its own issues. You may not get all the ROPs, or a new Windows update may break your games, or you may occasionally update drivers to make a game more playable without black screens, or wouldn’t turn on with a controller when set up as a “console”. I’m not saying it isn’t doable, but there is an audience for consoles who would love whatever SteamDeck has done for handheld but in console form, and may not want to bother with setting everything up. Valve can disrupt that
I mean Skyrim is kinda cool. In similar vain I really really enjoyed Kingdom Come Deliverance 1, waiting for KCD2 to get all its DLCs before I jump into it. Grand Theft Auto San Andreas was also pretty good considering its age. I found Control to have a very addictive and unique gameplay. Special mention to The Last of Us part 1 and 2, as they had really seamless integration of gameplay, narrative and atmosphere.
Mafia 1 DE and 2 both were largely linear and didn’t waste your time with fluff. I really enjoyed those two. Mafia 3 on the other hand had good story drip fed to you after hours of grind.
Ubisoft like mechanics:
Each area has wiretaps that help a lot, but are very much like liberating radio towers, less grand.
Once you open up a district, you’ve to do a checklist of repetitive missions, x2, and then go back to one of the areas from the already done missions to kill the underboss. Rinse and repeat 9 times. So that becomes more like (6 missions + 1) x 2 x 9. Some missions are optional. But it’s quite a lot. There’s some variety and some interesting story beats, but when it’s given in such grindy manner you have to have a lot of patience to enjoy it.
A lot of the missions are set up like far cry outposts or assassinate a target style. In fact you are incentivised to play stealth, to the point you start feeling like an assassin or hitman.
Mafia 3. I’m probably half way through and starting to get burnt out by the grind and the buggy nature of the game. It is infected by Ubisoft formula, but it’s much more notorious and less fluid. Glad they are going a different route for Mafia 4
Pretty cool that AMD stuck the landing, rather exceeding the expectations by beating DLSS CNN. Sure transformer model is better but it is slightly more costly too, and this is effectively v1 of FSR with ML. This is especially great coming off of shimmering woes of PSSR.
Now the competitive edge moves from DLSS and RT to Multi Frame Gen and Path Tracing. I find the newer goal post to be less exciting for sub $500 GPUs as the added latency or lower base frame rate isn’t justified, so in a way AMD is genuinely a better choice this time around for the price range.
Let’s hope the $200-400 segment also sees such competition thanks to Intel.
Sounds good. I really like changes that just flow from start to end, though they’re rare. It’s easy to forget about collectibles if they’re too annoying, so that’s that.
That sounds great! I’ll be playing it on Series X, should be okay.