ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @lemmy.world

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1 yr. ago

I don't put much stock in games from unknown developers ahead of their release, but people who got access to this during the review period have been dying to get to the end of the embargo to talk about it.

There are thousands of games that come out every year, even after filtering out the asset flips and hentai games. A handful of those will have kernel-level anti cheat that make them incompatible by design. Fewer still will be pushing minimum specs that are too hefty for the Steam Deck to handle. So the thousands of remaining games are your use case for the Steam Deck, which tends to be cheaper than its competition and comes with a better OS. A device like those Android ones are fine for emulation, but you're not playing newer releases on it, and newer releases are far, far, far more than just AAA games with hefty system requirements; it's also Mouse: P.I. for Hire, Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, Warside, Descenders Next, Dispatch, and on and on.

I think a huge reason so many people with a Steam Deck also have a Switch is that the Switch had a 5 year head start. Hades did really well on Switch, but I can't imagine anyone choosing that version of the game if they had a Steam Deck, and the same applies to Doom, The Witcher 3, etc. I have a Switch and a Steam Deck, but I haven't used one of those machines in years.

I don't think the people gaming on smart phones are the same demographic that would compete with the Switch 2 or a handheld PC. It's not a lot of data, but take a look at how poorly Apple's initiative for AAA games on iPhone has been going. There are more problems with that market than just library. The PC market has been slowly and steadily growing for decades while the console market has shrunk.

There's a lot here, and yes, the total addressable market for the Steam Deck is currently less than either Switch will sell in a single quarter, but the video game market is a very different thing now than it was in early 2017. The Switch was the only game in town; now it's not. Live service games make up a significant amount of what the average consumer wants, and those customers largely play on PC for all sorts of reasons. The Switch 2 is no longer priced cheaply enough that it's an easy purchase for your child to play with, abuse, and possibly break. The console market in general is in the most visible decline it's ever been in, also for all sorts of reasons, and those handhelds from Sony and, at least, Microsoft are likely to just be handheld PCs as well.

Development on blockbuster system sellers has slowed way down, which comes hand in hand with there just not being as many of them, which makes buying yet another walled garden ecosystem less appealing. This walled garden has Pokemon and Mario Kart, so Nintendo's not about to go bankrupt, but if we smash cut to 8 years from now and the Switch 2 sold more units than the Switch 1, I'd have to ask how on earth that happened, because it's looking like just about an impossible outcome from where we stand now.

Also, there's this quote:

But, although Microsoft has now been making Xbox consoles for over 20 years, it has consistently struggled to use that experience to make PC gaming more seamless, despite repeated attempts

Look, I'm no Microsoft fanboy. Windows 10 was an abomination that got me to switch to Linux, and Windows 11 is somehow even worse. The combination of Teams and Windows 11 has made my experience at work significantly worse than in years prior. However, credit where credit is due: Microsoft standardized controller inputs and glyphs in PC games about 20 years ago and created an incentive for it to be the same game that was made on consoles. It married more complex PC gaming designs with intuitive console gaming designs, and we no longer got bespoke "PC versions" and "console versions" of the same title that were actually dramatically different games. PC gaming today is better because of efforts taken from Microsoft, and that's to say nothing of what other software solutions like DirectX have done before that.

Still, the reason a Microsoft handheld might succeed is because it does what the Steam Deck does without the limitations of incompatibility with kernel level anti cheat or bleeding edge software features like ray tracing (EDIT: also, Game Pass, the thing Microsoft is surely going to hammer home most). Personally, I don't see a path for a Sony handheld to compete.

Don't bemoan this just yet. Ubisoft's name on the game is a red flag as always, but they made a pretty sick turn-based tactics game in the Ghost Recon universe on the 3DS, from designer Julian Gollup, formerly of original XCOM fame, now working on a game called Chip 'n Clawz vs. the Brainioids.

Besides, I don't want a single player Rainbow Six. I want a Rainbow Six that's either single player or co-op, with a proper planning phase. I'm about halfway there with the Door Kickers games.

I don't really have it in me to hold enough of a grudge against a YouTuber to be one of their "haters", but even I'm not a fan of Pirate Software due to the Stop Killing Games mess he put out. Still, the comment I responded to seemed completely disconnected from the video linked here.

Did you watch a different video than I did?

Take advantage of your store's refund policy as needed, but I can count the games I've had compatibility problems with on one hand, and one of them is because Indiana Jones is pushing ray tracing as mandatory.

Thanks. That seems like a good jumping off point.

Does Debian have the same update woes I ran into with Fedora? Or if there was a way to tweak that in Fedora, I couldn't find the option, and it was several years ago besides.

Viewtiful Joe is a good one.

I think I have an inordinate amount of nostalgia for Metal Arms: Glitch in the System and 007: Agent Under Fire. Both are locked to consoles. The campaign and multiplayer of Metal Arms are all-timers, and while the campaign is fairly basic for Agent Under Fire, the multiplayer, especially with all of the modifiers turned on, is some of my favorite FPS multiplayer ever.

I'd also like a PC version of Soul Calibur II with rollback, please, Bandai-Namco. I don't care if the series stops there; this is really all I want or need from this franchise. Especially if you can just reskin Link and put his functionality in the game alongside Heihachi and Spawn.

I sampled Fedora a few years back, but, much like Windows, when it installs updates for certain core components, on shutdown and boot-up, it will have a "Please wait while we install updates" screen. Meanwhile, in Kubuntu, it installs everything in the background while I'm using my computer normally, and the change takes place on next restart, when I'm good and ready, with no additional time waiting at that update screen.

I've been on Kubuntu for a while, but snaps are starting to bug me. When I build a new PC, I'm in the market for a new distro. Do you have a solid recommendation for a KDE-based distro that doesn't have a Windows-esque update step during shutdown and restart?

Print out stickers of Trump pointing to the price with a speech bubble saying, "I did that."

The Steam Deck has touch controls.

I haven't seen confirmation that this is what Ubisoft has been doing, but given how many studios they have and how quickly they turn games around, it wouldn't surprise me if they used the "chase the sun" method of development, where as one team signs off, they hand development over to the next team, where it's morning, and their work day is just starting. So it would just be very likely that every Ubisoft studio touches many games that Ubisoft works on. From the credits on their games, this is certainly what it appears to be. This is the same development method that Larian used to make a game as large as Baldur's Gate 3 in only 6 years.

Digital Foundry has been looking at what tech could feasibly be in this thing for a long time now. They're going to be very comparable in performance.

I believe it has a direct lineage from a game based on The Hulk called Ultimate Destruction, and you can feel that. You're super jumping, gliding, and sort of like Venom, consuming people to pose as them. There are missions with a stealth element, but other times you're throwing tanks at helicopters. Holding the run button will have you effortlessly doing cartwheels off the tops of cars and wall running straight up skyscrapers.

I haven't played the PC version, but I expect it's the same as the console version: Prototype (from Activision in 2009; there's another game listed with the same title). The story is utter garbage, but everything about the moment to moment gameplay is great, and it definitely checks the boxes you're looking for. I never played the sequel, because it re-used the same map, and that's a lot like playing a Mario game with all of the same levels as the one before it, but this first game rules.

If you have access to something that can play Xbox 360 games, I'd also highly recommend the first Crackdown.