I disagree, runbacks are as much difficulty as having to recover your currency after death, or even having to recover your items after dying in Minecraft. It’s a punishment for dying, and a way to make you treat it seriously.

It can incentivise the wrong things, punish experimentation and make players stick with what they know, even if better options exist. You’re free to dislike it, and it has downsides, but dismissing it as “not difficulty” is just dishonest.

I really hope not, that feels like crypto all over again, with inconsistent payouts and varying electricity prices… And on top of that probably awful service since people tend to have the weirdest internet connections.

Though if you remove the part where it’s used to stream games to other players, that sounds too niche to be viable, but could be cool. If going in that direction, I’d imagine it more likely to be gaming servers for businesses, like VR gaming spots, where they have multiple gaming computers hooked up to headsets.

I’m not a soulslike fan myself, but I don’t think hollow knight is very soulslike - the combat is very snappy, avoiding locking you into animations or making you consider your momentum, and I have the impression soulslikes also tend to be way more environmentally lethal, so to speak.

It might have some of that visual/lore/exploration vibe though.

It’s “of out hot” and “eat the food” - if we interpret “of in” (derived from “oven”) to be putting in the food, then “of out” would mean to take the food out, and thus “of out hot” would mean you take it out hot, and eat it

I don’t know about making fun of a dialect, but it’s not quite utter nonsense - “oven” sounds like “of in”, so it can be interpreted to mean that it shouldn’t be called oven, because when you put the food in it’s cold, you only eat it when taking the food out, when it’s hot.

The sentence structure is so absurdly wrong it makes me wonder if somebody was genuinely trying to make a pun and ended up with that, or if it was intentionally butchered.

Having a FP4 myself, I do suspect it’s significantly slower than alternatives at similar prices - not a problem for most uses, only things that would actually stress the CPU, but it could bother some people.

Developers already care about it. Not all of them, not all the way, but many are aiming for steam deck compatibility via proton. It’s not perfect, and some devs are vehemently holding out, but it’s progress!

What? It shows up as a footer under the description, and inside is the game developer’s description of how they used AI. Look at Stellaris for example, I remember they claim to use it minimally (in very vague words), but they certainly get to say their piece.

Sure, but the point is to be realistic and not put undue weight on the developers, right? Binaries can generally be much more permissive than source code when proprietary dependencies are involved, and easier to release “clean” than source code.

I’m not sure which puzzles you’re referring to - do you mean stuff to reach an ending, or the obscure, very much optional, deep secrets?

It’s been a while since I played it, but I don’t remember grindy puzzles in the main content, bar the big one, but that one felt exhilarating to figure out and solve.

As for combat, it is difficult, but I remember beating the whole game without turning down the difficulty (which I remember being a thing), so it seemed fine to me… But yeah, people misrepresenting a game is always a risk.

I will point out that (IIRC) Tunic does have significantly more mechanical progression than some other examples, like Outer Wilds or Toki Tori 2, but they’re all lovely games

Is it? Or did they choose Arch because of the ease of setting it up with all the latest software the community was already packaging?

The steam version of trackmania is quite weird - I looked for a way to pay for it through steam for a while before resignedly going into the Ubisoft payment in the overlay… Only to be directed to steam for payment. I’m not sure if it’s even possible to pay through Ubisoft when launching it from steam.

Outer Wilds. The game isn’t very text-heavy, but what there is feels important and personal. With the way the story is told, it is quite possibly my favorite story overall. I don’t want to say too much, since knowledge is key in that game, but I would highly recommend it.

As for android games… If you like puzzles like sudoku, check out Simon Tatham’s Puzzle collection. Simple ad-free online experience with a varied collection of puzzle games.

Ah, seems you’re partially correct - steam has a command for downloading a specific depot version. You need to know the specific ID to download, and notably games can use multiple depots to form the game files, but I thought you needed to use something like SteamCMD or DepotDownloader for that.

I’m still upholding the fact that it’s not a “proper” feature, while I appreciate having those kind of utilities put in the user’s control, this isn’t something most people could figure out themselves.

It’s not like they have to create the compatibility layers from scratch; Valve did it for them.

I do just want to point out, Valve didn’t do that - Proton is mostly just pre-existing software that they packaged together into an officially supported feature. I love that they did it, and having it in the biggest PC game platform presumably did wonders for Linux gaming, but it was most certainly not made from scratch.

That’s not an official/proper feature on steam, there’s nothing in the interface to select an older version, right? Just the beta system that lets developers have multiple branches available, which is often used to keep a limited number of previous versions available.

I’m not sure, but I think it could be the promotional video for the Cave Johnson announcer pack for Dota, there was a bit where he was goofing around while supervising the recording.

So what you’re saying is, an extraction shooter where you play as a bodyguard for the VIP NPC, with some fun risk reward mechanics related to straying from the NPC for loot, and deciding which items to keep for yourself and which to give to the NPC? Sounds quite novel, could be fun

including Alyx

Huh? Am I missing something? All of Valve’s VR games show up as Windows only, running on proton. I think Deadlock is in the same boat, though maybe they’ll add cross platform support before release.

Can you get the money out on console though? I think that’s what ultimately makes it gambling and why people are giving Valve shit about it, because you can trade in-game items for money using unofficial platforms (that go against the TOS, but are still out there)

While it might not fit the vibe (and you might already know it), I feel like Songs of Conquest needs to be mentioned, being a Heroes spinoff. It’s an interesting twist on the formula, with lovely graphics, some things streamlined and some interesting new mechanics (like the essences for spellcasting).

Thanks! I’m mostly confused by the post not linking anything, not sure if that’s just a posting style I’m unfamiliar with, or if OP forgot to put a link in.

Was there supposed to be a link or something?

I like Valve, but I will point out what’s been said before - Valve has a stake in making Linux gaming better, since it enables the Steam Deck to exist and prosper. They could’ve chosen other options that don’t help the community, but they didn’t choose this entirely selflessly, since they reap the benefits from not just their own work, but also that of the open source developers.

It’s not like Bethesda called their games “Fantasy” - “Civilization” is such a generic name that I respect putting the author’s name before it to avoid any confusion.

Considering they supposedly cited performance as a reason, they might’ve been about to pull a Cities skylines 2 indeed

I generally agree, but I’m not gonna continue buying on steam just because they’re developing new tech - I happily buy games on steam because of the features steam provides.

That said, DRM-free games is something steam does not and probably will not provide - it’s a niche GOG is comfortable with, so many people who value freedom on software will choose it as their first platform of choice.

In that sense, the hardware is completely unrelated - it does nothing towards the goal of DRM-free games, and in case of the index, locks more games behind a platform.

What take even is that? I can understand some complaints about Linux support for how much people praise the deck, but why would they make their own handheld… And VR headset? I feel like hardware shouldn’t be locked to specific platforms, and I would rather blame Valve for not releasing steam-independent software for their headset.

Apple has always been about locking down the system and forcing the user to do things the way Apple wants. Not only within one device, but also in locking down inter-device protocols and removing standard ones, as well as obfuscating information about the hardware, not letting the users make an informed decision. And that’s already after the fact that you aren’t legally allowed to use the system on non-Apple hardware.

Could be because you replied to a random unrelated comment, instead of commenting on the post itself, or because you could’ve just looked it up easily, or maybe people thought you were being snarky somehow (especially since you were replying to somebody)

Well, some games that come to mind are Stellaris, RimWorld, Oxygen Not Included, and I think the upcoming Factorio expansion. And from those, I think it might be possible to buy RimWorld DLC off-steam and install it in a steam copy.

Fun fact, you can check - on steamdb, you can check depots for a game, and see if it has one for a DLC. If it does, then it is downloading extra files for it.

All that said, I wouldn’t say it’s 100% a developer issue. The way I see the accusation, Valve is very comfortable providing convenient libraries for various things, including working with DLC, that only work on their platform, making it hard to release the game elsewhere in the future.

I’m generally fine with that for a simple reason - Steam really does have great features that just work. However, if somebody forced Valve to make features like Steam Input available independent of Steam, it could be a great boon for gaming.

I think the DLC point is the one valid argument, although nontrivial to implement.

How do you think DLC works on DRM-free games works, like GOG? The game is just gonna check if you have the DLC installed, without any real DRM.

The main issue is, this is entirely possible right now for games to do, but it won’t be integrated with steam, and needs to be done by developers themselves. I don’t know how feasible it would be for Steam to realistically do something about it, but it’d definitely be nice if you could buy a game on steam, and later decide you want to buy DLC on another platform and install it onto your steam game.

I think I agree, in a way. I beat the game, played for a bit, then just didn’t pick it back up again. I don’t need to 100% it, I can be satisfied with the fun I had, I don’t need to try to squeeze out every little bit.

I mean, galaxy is a lot about the funky power ups, and odyssey has a lot of cappy-based movement, right? Not that those are bad, I quite enjoyed odyssey’s movement myself.

Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t… But we have definitive proof ARM is, in the form of actual consumer systems on the market.

If apple is viable for consumers, and apple uses ARM, then ARM is viable for consumers.

Windows and Linux being unfortunately behind is not an argument against ARM being viable, it shows it’s not ready - however, apple was in the same situation before they moved to ARM, so theoretically Microsoft could attempt a similar investment and push towards ARM. Apple’s control over both hardware and software certainly helped them, and went well for them.

That said, maybe it’s a disagreement on terminology. When I say that ARM is viable, I mean that it’s ready to create hardware and software that does what people need it to do. Apple clearly succeeded, now it’s a question of if/when manufacturers start making open hardware and software starts compatibility… Or if maybe another option will succeed instead.

Aren’t the new Apple chips ARM? If they are, then ARM is absolutely in the present, and proven viable for consumers by Apple.

They probably already set it up to not happen in Europe