@BruceCM Yeah, definitely not that kind of computer. Built to a pretty tight budget many years ago and never with gaming in mind. Fine for indies and stuff around PS3 era mostly - Arkham Origins ran 'ok' for example, but anything newer and it's pretty dire even on lowest settings. I think LEGO Ninjago Movie was running at around 15fps according to Steam and AC Black Flag was unplayable too. I never really buy anything on PC anyway - the stuff I do have is mostly stuff picked up in Humble Bundles or freebies from Epic store etc.
Steamdeck ETA still says "After Q2". Some users set up a data driven estimator tool to predict when you'll get your Deck based on time of order and place in queue. It told me September 30th, the very last day of Q3 lol.
Go figure.
So, I guess it's gonna be a while. But that's OK. Give it 6 months to iron out the kinks and get the majority of games added that can potentially run, let users figure out the tricks needed to get games to run best and conserve as much battery as possible, etc.
I need that Steamdeck though. I NEED it.
Switch has an astronomically packed lineup to the extent I likely won't have time for much else, and yet... I'm greedy. I want more.... More, more, moooore! Give me Horizon ZD on the Deck! Give me Elden Ring on the Deck! Give me Soul Hackers 2 on the Deck! Give me Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (One Vision mod)! I really hope PPSSPP works well, cause Triangle Strategy has me desperate for more SRPG classics.
Psalms 22:16 (1,000 yrs before Christ)
They pierced My hands and feet
Isaiah 53:5 (700 yrs before Christ)
He was pierced for our transgressions
@BruceCM
It's basically the recommended way to play the game.
It doesn't drastically alter the game into something else, but it does balance the game. Long time fans are keenly aware of all the ways in which the game is unbalanced or where its lacking. This mod on its latest version .985 is heralded as the best yet.
It's such an amazing and special game. Those two demos blindsided me with how good it is. Way better than Octopath or Bravely Default 2.
And yet, I have a feeling it'll get overlooked because 1) It's a Tactics game, which isn't as popular, and 2) Ppl will likely judge it based on Team Asano's previous two Switch games, 3) Reviews will likely complain about the lengthy dialog and turn ppl away
Psalms 22:16 (1,000 yrs before Christ)
They pierced My hands and feet
Isaiah 53:5 (700 yrs before Christ)
He was pierced for our transgressions
Yeah, @JaxonH .... Although the reception here has been mostly positive, so I'm hopeful! If SE have realistic expectations, it'll still probably do well enough
@JaxonH I said it before but I'll say it again: SE are morphing into the new Capcom with how much they want their games to sell. It's a niche series and yet they're saying it undersold? NO S***!
Mario Maker 2 Maker ID: YT1-0Q2-YFF
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@Fizza
They just expect every game to do monstrous numbers. And with Octopath breaking 2m on Switch, that will be the expectation of Triangle Strategy. And if it fails to break 2m, they’ll say it “underperformed expectations” and hesitate green lighting another game in the series.
Psalms 22:16 (1,000 yrs before Christ)
They pierced My hands and feet
Isaiah 53:5 (700 yrs before Christ)
He was pierced for our transgressions
You guys talking about GOTG? The person who started the conversation must have me ignored/blocked so I can't see, but I remember recently seeing some articles about how they claimed it didn't meet expectations. That was another game I avoided because the combat seemed very unappealing, I picked it up when it went into a deep sale briefly and was very impressed (although the combat is about as messy as I thought it would be, thankfully you can just turn the difficulty right down to effectively skip those sections and enjoy the other parts). Oh and Kassandra has always been my biggest videogame crush ever and the fact lady Hellbender is just a big blue Kassandra awoke something within me. I only got like an hour or two though in before I got the itch for more Cyberpunk and started trying out Elden Ring. Will go back to the game though and finish it eventually, for sure.
Steamdeck ETA still says "After Q2". Some users set up a data driven estimator tool to predict when you'll get your Deck based on time of order and place in queue. It told me September 30th, the very last day of Q3 lol.
Meanwhile in Australia it's not even available for pre-order. I think by the time this thing is readily available for me there will be other options on the table. Valve doesn't exist in a bubble, this thing runs custom silicon and has an aggressive price point but they're not the only ones who have access to better silicon.
I mean this thing is visually competitive with the PS4 with full x86, games not optimised for the specific hardware and often ontop of a compatibility layer. There's also no sneaky tricks here, no AI upscaling, no variable refresh rates. Just brute forcing PS4-like visuals and performance (although usually at a lower resolution) by having a higher spec.
If people thought a PS4-spec Switch hardware revision was not possible? I think Steam Deck should open their eyes. Because as people such as myself have been saying for a bit now, we're pretty close to that being possible. And if Valve can do it? Then there's nothing really stopping other companies. I wouldn't be surprised if demand for Steam Deck opens up this form factor. A couple of years from now we'll probably see companies like Asus and Dell giving it a spin
I think we're entering an entirely new era for portable gaming
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An opinion is only respectable if it can be defended. Respect people, not opinions
I do think Valve has a distinct advantage though. Steamdeck is 1.8x as performant as Aya Neo Next, and that thing costs $1,500. Deck starts at $399. That said, Gabe Newell said that lower tier price was extremely painful, and they were absolutely determined to hit that price due to handheld market being more price sensitive. So I imagine they're taking a loss, and more or less breaking even on the mid tier model, and pocketing a small profit on the 512gb.
The fact they're a multibillion dollar business allows them to do that, whereas Aya and GPD can't. They'll be lucky to even price at $1,000 for comparable hardware.
That said, other larger businesses could perhaps hit lower price points, and that will become easier with each passing year as technology marches on.
But SteamOS is what gives this thing a fighting chance at reasonable battery life. The system level frame limiter and FSR option so players can render at 540p and upscale. And not having Windows bloat in the background. There may be some efficiency lost in the compatibility layer but, at least from what we've seen, it's not much.
Either way, we are entering a new era. Switch 2 will be out in about 24 months by my estimation, and should hit right around the ballpark of base PS4 graphics at 720p like Steamdeck (it likely won't be quite as powerful, but thanks to being a closed system games will run more efficiently, as they do on Switch).
And at that point, Deck 2 should be releasing as well, shrinking the size a bit, increasing the battery life a bit, juicing a little more power from newer chips...
With or without other companies, that alone is enough to excite me.
Psalms 22:16 (1,000 yrs before Christ)
They pierced My hands and feet
Isaiah 53:5 (700 yrs before Christ)
He was pierced for our transgressions
Hmm, well, I remember them saying Bravely Default 2 had surpassed 1m, @JaxonH ..... It'd very nearly reached that on Switch before they did the Steam version, iirc We'll have to see about Triangle Strategy but I'll remain hopeful for now! Almost anything sells pretty well on Switch, though
Since I am almost done with Cyberpunk 2077 and have a few weeks until Wonderlands, I have been looking around for something to fill the gap. I started playing Elex as the sequel came out recently and man, that is like the Eurojank Elden Ring, before Elden Ring even existed.
If you love Elden Ring, you'll love Elex.
It has quests like "just speak to people in town, they'll give you a quest eventually and if you eventually do enough quests we'll let you progress the story I guess".
And then when you finally get an actual quest marked on the map and go there, for some reason every enemy is way above your level, you can literally do no damage to them at all and they can all two hit you.
Never have I felt so lost, right at the start of a game before.
So I rolled credits on Cyberpunk 2077. Think it took me around 60 hours. Probably closer to 90 when you cover this playthrough and the playthrough I started around launch when the game was so bad I abandoned it, but still not so bad I didn't end up playing over 20 hours.
I hadn't finished everything, but most stuff. Went for the Panam Temperance ending, even though it kinda pushes against the way the game is trying to naturally go. I was still mostly happy with where everything landed. And honestly, I enjoyed my time overall.
The game reminds me a lot of last year's Biomutant. I regard Biomutant as one of the best games of 2021, while also recognising that by conventional metrics, Biomutant is not what you'd classically call a "good game".
Biomutant was carried mostly by it's world, it's loot and it's crafting system. But in reality it was a static, cardboard, game. Reused assets and barely realised loops, held together by duck tape. The plastic backdrop to a chain of unfinished questlines that felt like placeholders.
That is Cyberpunk 2077, too. Even all these years later, all these patches later, Cyberpunk 2077 still feels more like an early access title, than something truly finished. Especially if you have the context of all the things the game was promised to be. Especially if you regard the sheer amount of bugs and glitches the game still has today.
Night City is a drug. Whenever I stopped playing Cyberpunk 2077. It was like I was on a comedown. I was always chasing my next escape from reality, back to Night City. From a visual standpoint I think it is one of the greatest achievements in gaming. Despite being a few years on now, I still think it is one of the few games that looks truly next gen. Helped especially I think by a lighting engine, which even without raytracing, feels years ahead of itself.
But the reality is that Night City is a movie set. Like one of those old western towns where you'd walk around the back and everything is a cut out. Get up close and Night City is a space of locked doors, inaccessible areas and broken promises. Plenty to admire from afar, but get in too close, and all the corners cut, all the unrealised ideas and unfinished concepts stand out centre stage.
Even now, the cities inhabitants barely function, too. Bumbling around before you, trapped in endless pathing circles, looking for life.
Whereas you might argue the best open world games allow you to pick a point on a horizon, say "I want to go there" and then you can, in Cyberpunk half the time you can't even get there and even if you can... you'll find a space still waiting to be fully programmed and maybe some sort of awful hat, that buffs your stats and makes you look like a clown. Thankfully you never see your character outside of menus, photo mode and one cut scene at the end...
Yet as you constantly bang head first against code that feels practically duck taped together and the overwhelming disappointment of just how far short this game falls from the game it was hyped to be, magic happens. It isn't the next evolution of the open world, it isn't the next evolution of RPGs... hell, it is barely an RPG at all. It is a Eurojank Far Cry and it's a damn fun Eurojank Far Cry.
Filled to the brim with awesome vehicles - that still all mostly handle like ass, even with the improved driving physics. And a surprisingly large arsenal of weapons across ranged, melee, novel and cybernetic enhancements. The weapons all follow a fairly narrow template of archetypes, but almost everything just feels so ***** good to use. From insanely overpowered katanas, to pistols shooting around walls, to meaty point blank to shotguns, to tossing poison daggers with stylish flourishes, to crazy cybernetic wire to beating a guy to death with a... pleasure wand.... ahem, I looked forward to every new combat encounter and all the various options I had to cause utter ***** mayhem.
Is the game ***** busted from a stealth perspective? Yup. They counteract the terrible AI by giving them effectively superhuman senses, but it is just way more fun to kick down the door and come blasting through as a God of Death, anyway. And this is all supported from a still somewhat wonkily balanced and oddly placed skill system, to really finetune how you want to murder lots of people as V preaches about how killing is bad or whatever with no control over it.
While the story is this confused, fragmented, convoluted mess, bending to present a story that is both time sensitive without making the player feel like they have to make any real meaningful choices at all, it is carried so utterly by the voice acting and animation. You may be constantly enraged at all of the smoke and mirror dialogue choices, the fact that V seems to be stuck in this weird in between dead zone between being their own defined character and an agent for the player. Like they designed a Mass Effect style balance of giving you distinct versions of the protagonist you could choose to play as, but they simply didn't finish anything but the neutral options. But the characters are just so well performed, so well written, so well realised, you mostly mourn your lack of agency because it is so good you want to be able to engage with these characters on a deeper level.
I dunno how to end this long rambly post. I guess I'm just gonna have to go back and take on last ride one Jackie's Arch. Uninstall the game and try and find something to fill this Cyberpunk 2077 shaped void that is now in my life.
Picked up WWE 2K22 on Friday for a bit of a laugh. Ironically, it might be my favourite game of the year so far. It is undeniably niche, and in some regards even maybe slightly crude and dated feeling. Like I dunno, it just all has a very double AA Euroness to it, with polish not being consistent across the board. However, as someone who grew up with late 90s/early 00s wrestling games, this just really hits right for me.
I think what really helps the game - and here he goes again - it has this super granular difficulty suite. When I first started playing, I didn't really know how I felt about the game. Mostly just shocked at how ***** terrible I was at it. The game exists in a sort of weird space between out and out arcade and something more simulated.
This resulted in some honestly kinda clunky, kinda awkward, controls.
Like this weird guess the input minigame or the incredibly sensitive finisher system, which requires you to be in exactly the right place. Even on easy, I initially found I would dominate the first half of the match, but then the computer would trap me in these endless strings of combos I was just never able to get out of and I would lose, like fighting a 14 year old on an online fighting game who would just stun lock you in the corner. Very frustrating.
But as I have gone through my career mode, I have been tweaking all the various values so the game feels balanced, fair, fun and challenging for my skill level. Things like giving me more opportunities to counter, turning down the amount of damage the enemies moves do, turning down how long I stay on the mat before I can get back up etc I am still very much still going through tweaking everything, it is probably more on the easy end, but God do I wish every game was like this.
The career mode is honestly a real surprise, too. Again, while still very much like the career modes from the early 00s WWE games, with very little innovation at all (in fact, in some regards, maybe even some regression with how so much of the career mode takes place over this weird like internal social network between the wrestlers) but the tone of the career mode is really what surprised me. WWE is notorious for being this sort of weird, gated, cult where it seems like it is kind of ashamed of itself. But here the campaign really embraces like indie wrestling, a promotion that seems very akin to New Japan, you get to wrestle in like Mexico, wrestling is talked about as wrestling. This feels more like a proper fan made game than I really expected. This isn't some sanitised, WWE SUPERSTARS ARE THE KING OF SPORTS ENTERTAINMENT *****.
Oh and blood is back too, and I guess if wrestlers have low resilience, they bust open very easy. I picked the technician class, but actually ended up really making more of a striker moveset. Lots of knee strikes and roaring elbows, and ***** I bust open almost every person I face lol. It is cool too, because at least to some degree, I think the bleeding is contextual - like in one match when I smashed someone with a chair, the blood was coming directly from the centre of their forehead, however, when I stomped a guy, it seemed to be coming to the side, from above their eye. Just a nice little touch.
Oh and the commentary seems better than I remember, too. I guess because a lot of the story lines are heavily scripted with you required to do certain things in matches to trigger cut scenes and events, this allows them to record more stuff, as the events are fixed. But even when it comes to just generally giving like a play by play, the commentary is surprisingly great.
My maybe one big warning right now outside of the general nicheness, is that right now there is an absolutely mind blowing level of customisation just included within the game. From your appearance, gear, move set (and like there are like 100 different contextual changes you can make), entrance, body language, victory stuff - it is ***** amazing, to be honest.
The problem is, at least right now on PC, the game seems to hard crash quite regularly for seemingly no reason at all. A couple of hard crashes I lost nothing at all, but twice I have lost about an hour plus of customisation with the game just hard crashing and nothing being saved. I have since learned to save with every change and since I enjoy this stuff, I kinda just rolled with it - the second time is obviously much faster - but I have hard crashed maybe six times in eight hours? That suggests the game is seriously unstable. So maybe wait for a patch if you are thinking about it.
Is it a lot better than WWE2k2020, @Pizzamorg ....? Which I only got when the ultimate or whatever it was called version was about 80% off, so I certainly won't get the latest 1 until it's discounted a lot
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