I’ve got a bit of a VR library, but the new ease of setup with this one does have me considering how I’d use the virtual display features. Even with trackpads, a lot of mouse-driven games aren’t great on Steam Deck, but I’m replaying Baldur’s Gate 2 right now and wondering how the mouse controls might work out in VR.

Thank you. Didn’t notice I screwed that up.

friends/chat was offline for literally months

Friends lists didn’t work reliably for years.

I’m sure there are vast swaths of older games that will hit 4k60 though. Me, personally, my TV is still 1080p, so I’m confident I’ll hit my full resolution without breaking a sweat, haha.

Digital Foundry’s guess is somewhere between $400 and $500, and they think it will be a harder sell at $500 for the power it’s offering.

Digital Foundry’s analysis of it is that it could retail for somewhere between $400 and $500, but it will be slightly less powerful than a PS5, and therefore, it wouldn’t be as attractive at $500 retail. Valve probably knows that, too.

The part where they have to install the OS itself is going to be a major deal breaker for mass market.

I don’t know if consumers would go out of their way to buy a steam PC box

There could never be a better test for the hypothesis than this critical moment where people are fucking pissed at Microsoft.

To be fair, they say they made a lot of tradeoffs in the name of being price conscious, but they haven’t put a price on it yet.

Right, there is little difference between them because they had the prior game in the series to build off of, but don’t just gloss over “and graphics”. The fidelity that we expect today is why you can’t just make the next Morrowind with 50 people, because people expect it to be better than Morrowind now that we’re 20 years removed from it. A smaller team than that made Dread Delusion; a larger one made Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon. From those, if they’re fortunate enough to have financial success, they can build on it just like Bethesda built on Morrowind’s bones. What Obsidian made with a similar team was The Outer Worlds, which kept the fidelity up but the scope small, and I think it was the right decision, because otherwise, you end up taking 7 years per game like Kingdom Come. Those are great games, but it took 15 years to get two of them, and the first one was rough.

There is, because we expect more fidelity now than we did in 2011, and Skyrim was built on some existing bones. When you’re trying to make a game like that in Unreal that you haven’t done in that engine before, it’s going to be smaller (if you’re smart). Baldur’s Gate 3 didn’t get to be that big without building on Original Sin 2, and the same can be said for Elden Ring; perhaps without a pandemic in the middle, those games might have even been made in more reasonable time frames than 5 or 6 years.

Not me, sorry. On desktop Linux, I’m always wired, and the bluetooth always just worked when I needed it on Bazzite or Steam Deck, connecting via the controller setup in the Steam menu, but maybe someone else here will know.

Yeah, Xbox controllers are pretty much standard. Comfortable, not overpriced, great compatibility with everything, no fuss. Newer ones, from the past several years now, will have Nintendo-style d pads, now that the patent has expired, and connect via bluetooth for wireless play or with a USB C cable to save on batteries. Speaking of batteries, it uses AAs, which means that you can actually swap them when they get low, as opposed to PlayStation controllers where batteries don’t last long and they aren’t really exposed for you to access them. I’m not going to tell you Xbox controllers are the be-all, end-all, but there’s a high chance it’s all you need.

EDIT: Even though I use Xbox controllers all the time, I forgot that the newest Xbox pads actually have d pads that are even better than Nintendo’s design. They look funky, but for my money, it’s the best d pad out there.

Well, I’d argue if there was no money to be made, then CNET wouldn’t have purchased GameFAQs.

I’ve heard lots about acquisitions of games media as they’ve nearly all gone independent lately, especially Giant Bomb, who was part of this family. CNET certainly believed it could make them money, but hardly any of this stuff made anyone any money as they changed hands multiple times. At the very least, it could benefit from economies of scale around securing ads in one deal and displaying them in multiple places, but advertisers paid out less for traditional ads on static web pages at the same time that video ad spending was increasing.

But the clean break idea that print guides existed and then GameFAQs came along and killed guides just doesn’t fit the timeline at all. It’s off by 5-10 years, at least.

It didn’t happen overnight, much like GameStop.

Alright, sure, a pivot to the collector’s market makes sense, but it makes sense in the same way that GameStop pivoted to Funko Pops, you know? Neither GameStop nor Funko is bankrupt yet, but it’s pretty clear what caused their decline.

FWIW, guides going back to paid professionals wasn’t as much due to video. Video is still crowdsourced for that stuff. It was visual guides in html with a bunch of images and reference, I think.

Emphasis mine, that’s exactly my point. Video is crowdsourced and leads to revenue, while GameFAQs crowdsourced guides don’t. When I look up a YouTube answer to a question about the game I’m playing, and they have 4 minutes of preamble describing the problem before they show me the solution so that advertisers like their video better, it sure seems to explain the A->B. Speaking for myself, embedding images in guides never made them that much more useful to me, and the era we’re in now where the likes of IGN are taking over text based guides just leads to far more of them being incomplete and never finished.

I’m not convinced the market for strategy guides was “booming” by the time we got to 360, even if some existed. That was the same time manuals started to disappear, and it was even the generation before that that the obtuse moon logic of older games was discarded, I’d wager due to GameFAQs.

I’d imagine the reason we went back around to gaming outlets handling guides again is that there’s still a desire for text-based guides, but video guides have a monetary compensation to them that text-based guides on GameFAQs don’t when they’re crowdsourced. I sure miss being able to go to GameFAQs whenever I need to look up anything for a game in the past ~7 years or so.

No one wants to scope their games back down either, especially when they’re met with complaints like The Outer Worlds.

I’m sure there were other sources before it ended up on GameFAQs, but it was a one-stop shop for all the stuff you would have found in magazines and strategy guides, and it was free. And that was the difference. The one kid on the playground who knew about GameFAQs would share, and internet adoption only went up over time. GameFAQs is almost solely responsible for strategy guides and hint hotlines becoming obsolete.

GameFAQs was definitely responsible for anyone knowing the fatalities in Mortal Kombat games for a while. I was using it plenty in the mid 90s.

I had a great time with that game with the difficulty turned up a few notches. It really makes you use the tools in your tool belt, plan ahead for weaknesses, and lay traps. Without that stuff, I likely would have found it to be a generic open world, too. The story will always be ridiculous, but even taking itself seriously, there’s a payoff toward the end of the game where taking itself so seriously is still satisfying and makes sense, even with a world filled with absurd robot dinosaurs.