Good luck, and let me know how it goes, it should be just that really, just don’t touch the controller until you’re through

That’s weird, that’s the solution, does your controller has some drift that could cause it to still be firing some thrusters?

Obvious spoiler ahead is obvious: Just let go of the controller when you enter that area, you’ll float peacefully (albeit very close to them) until the exit portal.

Honestly, I’m absolutely happy with my Steam Deck, I think it ticks most of your boxes (it even runs Linux, so it’s essentially a portable Linux computer designed for gaming), so I think it’s the better option that you’re looking gor. To your points specifically:

it’s really geared towards family/party gaming

There are plenty of party games on Steam.

it’s Nintendo, so you get the whole usual games (Mario Kart, Zelda, etc.)

This is the only reason to get a switch, if you want a Nintendo console and Nintendo games this is the way. Everyone who gets a switch understand this is the reason they’re getting it. If this is as strong a point to you that it makes you overlook everything else, then get the switch.

like most consoles, it’s plug and play and can be enjoyed in the living room (I kind of gave up trying to set up a proper gaming experience with my Linux PCs, given that I don’t have the hardware for it)

Steam Deck also has a Dock that you can plug to your TV, you’ll need controllers but even so it should be much cheaper in the long run since games are extremely affordable compared to Nintendo.

the battery life is not great to say the least (2.5 hours takes me back of the Game Gear in early 90s!)

Haven’t seen many benchmarks of the switch to be honest, but that does sound bad, the Deck only gets that bad battery life if you’re playing Cyberpunk or something, for more casual games it can get upwards of 6h. Plus you can get power banks that fast large it while playing, which I assume is also possible on the switch although the switch 1 used to have some issues with power banks.

the screen seems to be pretty bad too (at least it’s a step back from the OLED one of the Switch)

All but the cheapest Deck models now use a 90Hz OLED panel

the joycons are still not using a Hall effect sensor, meaning they might still be prone to drifting

While the Deck’s default sticks are not hall effect, they are easily replaceable and Valve sells hall effect replacements on ifixit, so if you ever get drift in your sticks it’s fixable.

most of the games will not be sold as proper cartridges but as download codes

If you’re going down this rote Steam sells download codes for much cheaper

the whole thing (console, additional gamepads, games) is quite pricey

The Deck is about the same price, but like I said you’ll end up saving in games since you start with your whole Steam Library and can get more games much cheaper.

it’s Nintendo, famous for their anti-everything (anti-homebrew, anti-emulation, anti-piracy)

The Deck is by far the most open console you can get, you can even replace the entire OS if you want to, but StramOS is great and you shouldn’t need to.

Both are good games, but they’re very different from each other. Also neither is made by Bethesda.

You probably missed one entry that told you they were blind but not deaf

I have been using Nova for a LONG time, and wasn’t aware of them getting bought, what nefarious thing is it doing now? Do you have some reports on it? Although I can imagine the sort of things analytic companies are doing.

Oops, thanks for the correction I’ll update the post

The reality is that mostly people aren’t going to leave Windows, so if Valve and Linux force Windows to improve it’s still a win.

While I mostly agree with this, every time I see this mentioned it reminds me that MS-DOS Windows was not very popular, until a Microsoft employee offered to port Doom to DOS Windows, because he saw that if games ran on a platform people would use it and migrate naturally, that employee was called Gabe Newell. So I do have some hope that there’s some bigger migration, and in fact we’ve seen the numbers steadily rising, and these sort of things tend to be exponential, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it picks up speed.

• It lacks a d-pad
• It lacks a right thumb stick
• The thumb stick it has is not capacitive nor drift free
• It only has one back paddle for each side
• Ergonomics of the deck are way better, at least for me
• It lacks the ... button (although this is minor because Steam+a opens the same menu)

Don’t get me wrong, the SC 1 is a great controller, but the Steam deck is better, getting a Steam deck like controller would be awesome.

Me too, didn’t even know people thought it was a bad game until recently. Honestly I don’t get why, I wasn’t expecting anything different from what I got, there were definitely some dialogues that made me chuckle, and a lot of storylines were very tongue in cheek, and while gameplay was nothing to write home about neither is fallout and this was sold as “fallout in space”, and definitely delivered on that.

Dead cells, there are people out there with hours of gameplay that haven’t completed the tutorial.

You should definitely play it, it’s a cool game.

I get what you meant but a couple means 2, so someone uploading once a week for a couple of weeks means he uploaded 2 videos, which could just be coincidence, not a pattern.

One of my favorite games to play with my SO is Out of Space the vibe is very similar to Overcooked but it’s procedurally generated and a lot more chilled out, i.e. less chaos.

• Factorio, I know you said you couldn’t get into it, but try peaceful mode, it’s a great game even without enemies
• RimWorld, it’s an excellent colony management game
• Dwarf Fortress, this is the big boss, it’s really hard to start, but it’s the most complex simulation game out there. If you can get into it, it’s infinite hours of fun.

I agree with most of what you said, I don’t think the price is as high as people make it out to be, but:

So if it will be the cheapest console of its generation

Cheapest version of the Steam Deck is still cheaper for very comparable hardware, and while generations don’t align I think the Deck is closer to the Switch 2 than to the switch 1, and a Deck 2 would be miles ahead of a switch 2.

Not always, they only started to offer Linux support after Steam, and even then it’s just a very small part of their catalog and none of their own games/products, so I think it’s fair to say they don’t offer Linux support but sell some products that do.

It is still being released but they had the designer/writer from the 1st one leading the writing team, but fired him due to “creative differences” so don’t expect anything similar.

This one gets me as well, Paradox had a great history of maintaining and upgrading the base game with money made from DLCs, some of which are content/feature related and others are way cheaper and are cosmetics, all of that while providing mod support. And that model would have been awesome in a sims like game.

Then why are you getting angry while checking this sub and this post? Seems like you’re also getting worked up over it.

I’m sorry you’re in a bad situation, I get it, I’m also not in a situation where I could even buy the switch 2 even if I wanted to. But this is a big deal, the USA have fucked themselves up in the ass so hard that people outside of it might get hit with it. The price of the switch 2 is just one of the tips of this iceberg, the price of the PS5 is another, but in a short while the same thing will start to happen to lots of electronics, including hospital ones, which could increase the price for everyone depending on how this plays out.

Unfortunately for the rest of us the US is a BIG extremely consumer market, and if they get taken off the picture the profit margin decreases and prices need to hike to keep up.

I have also recently been playing Mini Motorways and found it more fun than Mini Metro (too bad it’s not available on Android, since mini metro is one of my favorite phone games)

CK can be daunting, I recommend you choose which time period you like best and go with that game, e.g. if you like sci-fi go with Stellaris, if you like WWII go with Hearts of Iron 4, etc. liking the time period where the game is set can make a huge difference in you willingness to learn it. For example if you don’t like medieval it might be daunting to track lineages and hereditary traits and how the ownership of land works (I once lost an entire kingdom because of it on CK2), but if you like WWII maybe seeing historical facts reflected on mechanics or learning military tactics is more interesting to you. All of those games are very different from one another, but they’re also very alike, starting with one that’s just the right one can help you pass the steep learning curve.

Whoosh?

They can even call them something cool like Steam Machines

I can beat anyone now because I’m not matched with or against people who are better than me, I don’t learn anything.

I call bullshit on that. If that were the case your skill would be considered higher and you would be matched against ever higher skilled players until you’re not able to win that much. If you can beat anyone in a SBMM system, you would absolutely obliterate every single match in a non-SBMM. You might think you’re bad at those games, but this is what’s happening to you: https://xkcd.com/2501/ i.e. You think the average player is winning most matches, but the truth is that the average player wins around 50% of the mathes. If you win significantly more than 50% of the games you’re placed in then you’re among the top players and just aren’t enough skilled people online to match up with you, which means that if you were to be put in a non-SBMM lobby you would be MVP 99.999% of times and win the match solo. Think about it this way, imagine there are 1000 people searching for matches in your area, and for ease let’s also asume their number also represents their skill level compared to the other, i.e. 1 is a total noob, 1000 is a pro, in this scenario on a SBMM you’re likely in the top 995 so you get paired with the top 10 and according to you you still win that match, on a non-SBMM your average enemy would be 400 skill levels below your current enemies.

I want to jump into a game and have fun, I want to lose some, I want to win some, I want to try in some, I want to goof around in others.

I’m sorry, but that will never happen, you’re just too good at the game, you win most matches when paired against people of your relative skills, which means there aren’t people with your skill around, pairing you with random people will just result in even more frustrating matches for you. You’re like a martial artist who goes on dojos fighting the black belts and winning and think that it would be more fun if you were allowed to fight a random belt color.

I can’t join a lobby of people, lose to them and then try to beat them in the next game, because they reset the lobby after every match.

According to a quick Google search that has nothing to do with SBMM but it’s because different maps and different modes have different number of players. Not to mention that just thinking about it real quick I realized that probably lots of people just play a match and leave, so your lobby would get smaller and smaller unless you allowed it to be refilled after every round. Not that any of this matters, because that scenario won’t happen to you, because you don’t lose matches, remember?

Cod is also a lot less social because of this, you can’t make friends or enemies across matches anymore.

That’s a bummer, but seems related to the topic of lobby reset, not SBMM.

These big multiplayer games have dropped fun, instead they want people to win win win so they keep playing and buy skins. That’s why people don’t improve anymore, there’s no challenge, every game is the same thing, same strategy required.

Have you considered that maybe you’re so good at these games that YOU keep winning but that the same is not true for 90% of people? These are multiplayer games, it’s literally impossible for everyone to win all the time, it’s a zero sum game, for someone to win, someone has to lose, and if you’re winning more than 50% of the time it means you’re an above average player.

I played some mainstream games recently and they put you against bots and stuff for like 10 of your first games

That sounds ridiculous, but with the amount of people playing CoD I don’t think they need bots. At least for me every time I play I get matched against people, but realistically I don’t play that much.

If they want “fair” games against players, they can play ranked. Just give us our casual lobbies back.

You are looking for a mystical fun of being able to play against people more skilled than you, that won’t happen, because casual players are in general terms much worse than you, you’re like a pro NBA basketball player wanting to go back to play in the yard against kids, you have good memories of that time, but your skill level would make those matches extremely boring for you and unfair for others.

First of all SBMM has been going in for WAY longer than that, at least going back to 2007 on CoD according to google. If it wasn’t a problem before, it shouldn’t be now, it’s just that now you’re aware so you’re salty about it. And may I ask, what’s the problem with it? You don’t like playing with people you might lose to? What’s the reasoning behind not liking it?

Also you’re assuming a uniform distribution of skill level, which doesn’t make sense, i.e. for every person who’s playing CoD for the first time there are multiple people with at least some experience, and the more experienced the more the person plays so the more likely they’ll be put in a match. This means that for people in the bottom, probably closer to bottom 10% they’re likely to be the only bottom player in the whole match, so the game for them would be spawn, die, wait over and over, which will be frustrating and so they’ll quit, and now the same will happen to the next bottom 10%, so on and so forth until no one else is left playing.

Random matchmaking is not a thing, it hasn’t been a thing for a LONG time, any match that you found online and had fun had SBMM. Small games can get away with it because the distribution is more even, but in huge titles with millions of people it’s not feasible. You know why this began to annoy you 6 years ago? Because 6 years ago you became good enough to jump from the bottom to the midrange level, and now you’re matched with people you can’t so easily beat all of the time.

I do think games should allow you to do fully random matchmaking, although I have a strong suspicion it would be lots of work to set up for a feature that almost no one will use, because you think you want that, but if you got it you will always be the worst player in the match, and if you aren’t people who’re worse than you will eventually get frustrated and quit until you’re the bottom player and get frustrated and leave.

Strongly disagree, I’m a weak player, this means that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the game as I would get destroyed on all my matches.

In my personal opinion people who complain about this are mid level players. Noobs like it because it means they get to win some, experience players like it because it means they get non trivial matches. But these people want to pwn noobs and are frustrated because they’re getting owned half of the time. There’s no reason to be against skill level matchmaking other than “I want to play against people who are worse than me so I can look good”.

I mean, Factorio’s early access is the middle point between now and when God of War 2 was released. Meaning that when Factorio was on early access God of War 2 was as old then as Factorio is now.

At least in 2013 when I started using Steam more seriously if your connection dropped it would prompt you asking if you wanted to switch to offline mode. And I know this because I had Steam on a laptop that I carried in my bag hibernating and I didn’t had internet in some places I went to. So that has been fixed for over a decade.

But that is an apples to oranges comparison, just because you personally don’t care about those features doesn’t mean others don’t care either. For games without those features mentioned in the original comment (like Baldur’s Gate 3) not having join by IP is ridiculous we agree there. But for games that do it’s just not feasible, there’s too much of what makes the game the game in those features. Don’t get me wrong, I personally think that companies should not just kill the game and should provide ways to make their game playable offline after closing the servers, but it’s not as simple as allowing you to join by IP for the games being discussed here. What level would your character be? What load out would it have set? Which items would be unblocked? Etc, etc, etc, the servers that control all of that are too engrained into the fabric of the game, and that’s something that happened organically because people liked those features and wanted cross-progression, security, etc. Can all of that be removed? Sure but then you’re left with a shell of what the game is/was, still I believe companies should make such a release before closing the servers, but again this has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with direct join by IP.

You’re again mixing the point, your friends IP doesn’t have authentication, progress, chat, etc, etc, etc. You’re talking about a different kind of server.

This is the relevant bit of what you’re replying to:

I don’t see how modern games would function without that service running. Who am I playing against? What’s their name? How did I get my account progress?

None of that comes from the game-server but rather from the service-server. Even if social games that have those features allowed you to connect to a server directly, you would still need to connect to their servers for all of that stuff.

Direct IP connection has nothing to do with authentication and social flows (e.g. names and progress like the comment you’re replying to mentioned) and would not help in the slightest with it.

You’re mixing stuff up, the direct connect for multiplayer where you put the IP has nothing to do with authentication that he’s talking about. Whenever you open up a multiplayer game it will authenticate yourself with PSN using the account you have on the playstation, then if your authentication succeeded it will authenticate with the game service-servers which will reply with stuff like your progression in the game, whether someone has sent you a message or a friend request, etc. Modern games are a platform in and of themselves, essentially they have an entire Discord on steroids internally which you’re using before, during and after playing online matches. If the PSN is down you can’t authenticate with those servers… I mean, they could allow you to login using username and password, but that’s: 1 not needed since the PSN is almost never down and 2 probably against some TOS from Sony for you to release games on their platform. So if the PSN is down you would not be able to get into the main screen for multiplayer anyways, so there’s no place where you could input the IP for the game-server you want to connect to.

I’m not defending the system, but it is what it is, games have organically evolved to have all of these social features which people do use and like, it makes sense that Sony won’t allow you to go over them and authenticate directly with the game specific service-servers and it makes sense that if you’re relying on all of that for login you also rely on it for matchmaking (which is where the IP would come in place). Could it be better? Sure, but there’s no incentive for it to be, PSN is rarely down and games (at least large ones) take forever to be sunset, and by that time there are almost no people playing them anyways.

I don’t disagree completely, but it’s not as easy as you think. We’re not talking about server in the sense of a headless game client that will coordinate a match, we’re talking about a whole infrastructure of micro services and a web of communications and APIs just to get a basic authentication working. Not to mention possibly encrypted hard coded addresses to contact. That being said I 100% agree that before a game is abandoned a plan should be put in place to allow people to keep playing it, even if it’s complicated and cumbersome to setup, or even if it’s as crude as removing authentication entirely.

https://xkcd.com/606/

By that definition Minecraft also doesn’t have PvE. Factions are not required for a PvE, and lots of PvE games don’t have them.

You could say that you wanted the PvE to be harder, or more unforgiven, or even more complex with factions. But to say the game has no PvE is just wrong.

And that’s assuming just toggles, if each parameter has 10 levels you only need 12, then add one toggle and you get trillions. Heck, I can name 12 parameters that have at least 10 different values off the top of my head:

1. Amount of water overall (oceans and lakes)
2. Amount of mountains
3. Amount of Forrest on the land
4. Amount of life forms
5. Temperature
6. Amount of moons/rings
7. Size
8. Amount of rivers
9. Whether the landmass is one big continent or multiple small islands
10. Amount of volcanoes
11. Amount of caves
12. Amount of iron (or any other resource)

Congrats, if you now add a does the planet rotate toggle you’ve created trillions of planets.

Were they interesting? Or at least enough of a change to make them significant? Or are we talking random rock model here?