This game is in dire need of some good news. I'm still waiting for the announcement of a "We fixed all the things" patch, followed by a "and here's the details on the expansion, also here's a dozen free DLC quests you can play through right now, also we added a barber shop".

The company couldn’t bump the game too much more without potentially being forced to send out refunds and risking that fans wouldn’t buy the game again.

"We have their money, giving it back is a non-starter. SHIP IT!"

Thinking about picking this up closer to when my Steam Deck shipping date is known as it looks like the perfect game for a handheld platform without paying the Switch tax!

Mr. Tact wrote on Jul 19, 2021, 08:07:
I'd rather game on my PC, thanks. That said, after it is out, if there are abundant rave reviews I'll give it due consideration.

This device is going to BE my PC. I'm planning to run my current PC with RTX2060 headless and stream "heavier" games to my Deck, otherwise the Deck can handle most of my indie games and emulated titles. Then once the dock comes along this will be my new primary machine, one I can take with me when I lie on the couch, or go to the in-laws, or sit at the desk with mouse+keyboard.

RedEye9 wrote on Jul 16, 2021, 13:24:

jacobvandy wrote on Jul 16, 2021, 13:12:

HorrorScope wrote on Jul 16, 2021, 11:31:
I wonder what availability is going to be like since like nothing new is just available these days.

Just placing the $5 reservations has pretty much shut down the Steam store for 10 minutes so far, lol.

This is the message i got.
Your account is too new to reserve early.
Guess I'll wait for the OLED version with larger battery and faster apu. Oh wait, this is valve, they'll never have a ver. 2.0

My attempts took a while but I managed to place my 512gb reservation about 15 minutes after they went live. First the website was unreachable, then the Reserve button was a dead link, then Visa couldn't be contacted, then the purchase went through. I think waiting a couple minutes in between attempts might be better than spamming the buttons.

Quinn wrote on Jul 16, 2021, 11:12:
This is one of those things that I want, and probably will get...

But definitely do not need.

Same. I've been in the market for a slin/light gaming laptop for a while now, not that I need one, but that I simply want one. This product is replacing the laptop desire. Heck, this could become my primary device once the dock releases or once I buy a USB C dock for it. It's running a full featured Linux OS on it, and all I use my computer for is browsing, email, watching movies, and playing games. This can do all those things and it can be picked up and carried with me when I want to go elsewhere.
I still want my gaming PC for playing RDR2 and Witcher 3 (especially the upcoming next gen patch) at high fidelity, obviously this device has some tradeoffs. If they announce that we could hook an eGPU up to this device, even better.

Kxmode wrote on Jul 7, 2021, 14:12:
Games-as-a-Service has never been a successful venture. Perhaps for software, but not for video games. People expect a feature-complete product at launch and especially so in a big, open-world established IP like Assassin's Creed.

Rockstar believes otherwise. From a Google search of "GTA V online lifetime revenue": "It is the second best-selling video game of all time with over 145 million copies shipped, and as of April 2018, the most financially successful entertainment product of all time, with about $6 billion in worldwide revenue."
We don't have to like it, but damn is GTA V Online successful. Warframe, Fortnite, World of Tanks, MWO, there's loads of GAAS that have been incredibly successful and continue to thrive. This is not a dying industry, in fact it could be the opposite, it could become the dominant form of online game. Fortunately we'll always have indie games.

That's a dark future. Also, I like how EA responded to a PC-focused magazine with a comment about "console games". Thanks, EA.
I suppose in a matter of years we will be configuring our Pi Holes to block ad server requests from our video games as well.

I hope that they come up with a way to present the game world as part of a larger land mass with immersive barriers. RDR2's map was good in this regard - the world was not a bizarre island like GTA V's.

Last good summer sale was 2015 Monster Summer Sale, with the clicker game. I think the game discounts and deals have been very steady for the last 5 years, so there's really no rush to take advantage of any Steam sale event when you can find the same discount scattered across all the game stores online all year round. Highest discount on my wishlist is 50%, and that game has sold at a 50% discount countless times since release.

Looking forward to playing this update! My spouse and I are a breath away from becoming Pirate Legends after 149 hours of play. Yes, we play very slowly. It's been quite a lot of fun, but you kind of have to make your own fun and enjoy the gameplay loop. There's absolutely no vertical progression, so there's no equipment or skill unlocks, and you don't get more powerful the longer you play. Playing unlocks cosmetics to purchase with in-game gold, and there are about a dozen story missions to do. One of my friends gave it a go and flatly declared it did nothing for him, but another tried it out and quite liked it.
Definitely worth checking out on GamePass.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Jun 23, 2021, 13:16:
This game needs to come out and it needs to have an uncompromising, unsanitized representation of war. It needs to show how soul crushing, torturous, and ruinous war is to those who fight it and the survivors of it.

Let kids see how war really is to the best of the medium's ability. Let them be horrified and disgusted by what they see. Strip away all the "rah rah rah USA RED WHITE AND BLUE" and meaningless "Thank you for your service" bullshit so they can see what combat is like from those who have been in it.

Let them explicitly know what they sign up for is absolutely nothing like what the flat out lies the recruiter told them.

Absolutely release this game and commemorate what the Iraq war and all wars have been like.

I support this sentiment, and so long as the game does a good job of portraying the caught-in-the-middle citizens and doesn't glorify violence against Muslims, it could tell a good story to the player and show the player the ugly side of a vicious conflict which had very morally ambiguous outcomes.

Really hope this isn't an EGS Exclusive. I prefer to buy my games from Steam (for linux support) and GOG (for the installation file backups). If it's exclusive, I may wait for a Steam release as I don't want to reward Epic's exclusivity agreements. If it launches on both, I'd buy it on Steam where my library is. If it's $10 cheaper on EGS... I'd have to think about that I guess. $10 is $10. But then I haven't been making use of their $10 sale event coupons, and those help to bring some games like Metro Exodus down to as low as $6.99. That's a very good sale price!
It's mostly just the exclusivity thing that bothers me here. If I can have the choice of where to buy the game, awesome. If I can only buy it from EGS because they wrote a fat $20M cheque to Sony, it just rubs me the wrong way. I dunno - maybe it is a little bit fickle? It's just my (silly or not) principles. As PCGamer said in the 90s, "Vote with your wallet."

Bodolza wrote on Jun 11, 2021, 12:46:
I refunded Control after trying it last year. I was pretty disappointed to discover it was a rogue-like with some brutal difficulty scaling. I personally don't enjoy repeatedly banging my head against a wall. Does it really get substantially better after a couple hours?

I don't think it gets a lot better. Late game is the same: shooting at hordes of enemies, trying to precision land headshots to make the fight go quicker. The story just kinds "ends" as well, with a pretty lame conclusion. If you didn't enjoy the early game you won't enjoy later game until you adjust to the difficulty.

I'm simply not rich enough for these cards, damn. I keep thinking the day may come when I switch to console gaming for good, but then I remind myself anything over the '60 series is "enthusiast grade" and anyways I have neither the monitor nor CPU to take advantage of 4k or 300FPS. Hell I still play a lot of games at 1080p 60 on a 42" TV from the couch. My 2060 is gonna be good for several years yet.

Five years from now when raytracing is much more mainstream, we have proper support for HDR on PC, and we have affordable OLED panels (or better), it'll be worth it shelling out for higher end cards. Til then I'm gonna stay in budget territory.

They're gonna make a mint off of children buying cosmetics. They just need to release a "Valorant Lite" version for mobile which is less competitive to attract even more players and even more money.

Valve should have just paid the licensing fee, but fuck SCUF. Their patent on rear buttons is bogus and should never have been awarded.

All they had to do was capture the gritty scrappy Mech 2 Mercs feeling in a modern engine. From the reviews I've read, it doesn't sound like they managed to do that. If the mod tools allowed players to craft story content perhaps the playerbase could write the kind of campaign I had been dreaming of...

My money is on Apple mostly winning but having to give some ground, like allowing apps to provide a link to their website for subscription sign ups. I'm not sure I like that though. The case showed that Epic wants to let users pay for Fortnite coins on their website or through Epic, but then spend them in-game on whichever platform they wish to play on, meaning the platform who hosts the game service may get 0% share of the revenue generated if players can avoid buying coins from the platform and instead buy them through Epic. Spotify also has a case against Apple doesn't it? Apparently 99% of Spotify's subscribers don't pay through Apple - so Spotify wants their app on the App Store, they want the sponsored position, the app ranking, the visibility, the hosting etc, but don't want to pay for that service.
Anyway, Fuck Epic - I hope they lose this case. Their argument boils down to "Apple is very successful and 30% is mean and greedy and we don't like that please lower it to 12% like we did because reasons". The judge even stated she doesn't understand how Epic wants to resolve the problem.

Agent.X7 wrote on May 26, 2021, 11:13:
Every other STEAM hardware release though. Steam Link was such a fail. The controller, ugh. Steam Box needed to be a an actual, made for Valve console but it was instead just mostly a marketing term. Now they want to make a Switch. Uh...I'm struggling to think of why I would want to play my PC games on a tiny screen. Yay, Among Us portable! Oh wait, that's on phones. As is COD, PUBG, Fortnite, etc.

Valve's hardware is all about options. I love my Steam Controller and fanboy about it every chance I get. Sure it wasn't commercially successful but that's because people like their twin stick controllers and want primarily plug and play experiences, and that's fine. My wife cannot be bothered to tweak Steam Input settings to customize her controller experience, but I'll spend hours perfecting a game's controller config so I can do very precise actions that would otherwise be impossible on an Xbox pad. It's fun. I don't see the controller as a failure, and it has continued to receive steady updates since release. We just had an update about a week ago.
Steam Link depends of course on the vagueries of your home network, and to me it's not useful in a 1 bedroom apartment. Later on with a more powerful router in a larger home, it will be an excellent tool for sending my games to whichever device I'm using at the time. Again this device didn't fail, Valve moved to the Steam Link app instead and phased out the hardware solution.
Naturally I'm stoked on this handheld idea. The Aya Neo looks great right now, but I want to see what Valve come up with. Rumors suggest it's using an unreleased RDNA2 9W Ryzen Van Gogh chip which may be as powerful as an Xbox SX / PS5, and if we get close to that - heck if we can get PS4 or better performance - we'll be looking at 60fps in a great number of titles in handheld form factor, and network streaming of heavier titles. Again it's all about options. Valve sees an opportunity in those of us who want to play their PC games away from their desks and they're making a device for that use case. Don't like it, or don't want one? Don't buy it. Spend your money elsewhere. For me it's right up my alley.