ampersandrew @ ampersandrew @lemmy.world

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1 yr. ago

There are actually thousands of games that run on Steam Deck with no additional configuration that aren't even available on Switch, and conservatively, hundreds of those are extremely popular. Plus a lot of Switch's library is on Steam Deck, where it tends to be a better version of the game for one reason or another, not the least of which is free online play.

But even that is a mess of causality for blame. EA wants to save money and mandates a nightmare of an engine for development; managers get incentives from EA to build a type of game that their studio doesn't usually make; etc.

A good portion of that comes from how the teams are treated by EA and how many resources they're granted though. I'm not about to assign a percentage to the blame, but of course the DA folks will be resentful of the ME folks if EA listens to one of them and gives them the time and money they ask for at the expense of the other. "Knowing how to negotiate" can often just come down to how much one game sold versus another, which isn't really something the developers are responsible for.

Looking through each series' Wikipedia articles, it looks like Mass Effect sold about 50% more than Dragon Age 1 and 2. And that tracks with my experience. I know far more people who've played Mass Effect than Dragon Age, and I've never played Dragon Age myself.

How do you figure? That's not what I got out of this article.

Matt Piscatella pointed out on Bluesky that a launch like this is only a function of how much inventory they made available. The Xbox One had the third most successful US launch of a console.

Nah, I loved The Outer Worlds. It gave me exactly what I wanted from the setting, it made me laugh, and it wasn't bogged down in bloat by trying to be any bigger than it ought to have been.

The Outer Worlds 1 was a fantastic palate cleanser after Starfield.

That’s a lot of money for any game, let alone one that will also be launching on Game Pass and, like its progenitor, is smaller scale than other open world RPGs of this ilk.

It's this thinking that led to Starfield and Redfall being priced at $70 and Hi-Fi Rush priced at $30.

I could bitterly rationalise it if this were the release date trailer for the next Fable and I discovered Playground Games was charging me $80

Why? Playground hasn't even made a game in this genre before. Why do you expect that to be more worth $80 than the company that's been making acclaimed RPGs since its inception?

That's a bummer. There was a lot that looked great to me, though most of it was for 2026. Given how much good stuff there is in 2025 that I still have to get through, that's a-okay by me.

I hate live service games and Windows, so no, this device is not for me, but those are also the most popular games on the market by a wide margin. Despite how awful the Windows experience is today, there's still one Windows handheld sold for every two Steam Decks. That situation can only improve with a version of Windows designed for handhelds.

For the fighting game nerds out there: an interview on IGN confirmed that there are KI breakers during active tags, and combos will be limited in similar ways to Killer Instinct, meaning a combo meter rather than hitstun decay. If you don't know what that means, don't worry about it; this comment wasn't for you. These were the answers I was looking for, and now this is my most anticipated fighting game despite having no familiarity with the source material.

i just wish Xbox came out swinging with a compatibility layer for the Xbox game library

Though not officially announced, signs of that are appearing already, including a hint or two in the speech of the conference.

And for plenty of people, being able to play live service games that don't work on SteamOS, with a UI that's almost as good finally, will be enough.

At least at first, it will be the only handheld running this version of Windows. So maybe after a year or two, it won't be all that unique, true, but a year or two is a long time at the rate these handhelds are advancing.

They have given up on their own handheld. And why wouldn't you prefer the PC library when it's so much larger? The appeal to this device at this point is that the new UI is better for the handheld use case than desktop Windows.

I sincerely doubt that this device will satisfy criteria #1 or #2, unless you've got a generous definition for #2.

This machine will be the same desktop-mode-not-required-but-allows-for-more-functionality thing that the Steam Deck is, but it will chew through battery faster in exchange for more compatibility.

I use backloggery.com, but I see a lot of people using backloggd.com these days. Backloggery is a bit more old school and relies a lot on manual entry, so I'm sure some of its competitors are better about linking up to things like your Steam account. You can also track a lot of this stuff on HowLongToBeat.com, which is mostly seeking to answer the question in the URL but also lets you log a review of the game, etc.

or making a real case why it’s beneficial

To which I said:

quickly conveying to your audience where your inspirations came from so that they know what type of game it is

In a lot of ways, "they don't make 'em like they used to", so in addition to that art style helping to convey what kind of game they made, it also comes along with cost reductions for their art pipeline in a lot of cases. It doesn't really make them "stuck in the past" when there were real advantages to how things used to get done.

I've been looking forward to this one. So much of this genre is going live service and online-only, and these people are some of the few making just a video game. I'm pretty new to this genre, but I liked that last Titan Quest quite a bit, and I'm looking forward to a lot of the modern sensibilities the genre acquired in the past 20 years, like dodge rolls and perhaps WASD/left-stick movement.