I was never keen on the "re-imagining" of Half-Life that the Black Mesa project ended up being, and Half-Life: Source just felt off, so this is an extremely welcome update.

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This one looks interesting, provided it doesn't contain any invasive client-side Anti-Cheat like EAC, and also provided it doesn't contain Epic Online Services. The former is plausible, but the latter "cross-platform multiplayer" has me concerned. Several developers have accomplished cross-platform multiplayer with Azure PlayFAB (Street Fighter 6) or AWS (Guilty Gear -Strive-).

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Since the power brick has been updated to accommodate the bigger battery (and 2.5m in length instead of 1.5m), is the cable removable? Even though any brick can be used, it would be nice for longevity if the cable was removable. :smile:

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Much like my Switch before I replaced it with my Steam Deck, I primarily use my Deck docked, so an improved battery life and wake from Bluetooth are very welcome additions. OLED will be superb, and a slightly better screen (probably from reduced bezels) is awesome. Don't care much about the whole HDR or 60hz+ thing though.

Even though I don't need a new Steam Deck, I do kinda want one... If they release a Steam Controller 2 to go with it I would be sold, that would be the perfect docked experience.

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A couple of buyer-bewares:
- "Hot Wheels Unleashed 2 - Turbocharged" contains Easy Anti-Cheat and, to my understanding, also uses Epic Online Services. This means you're at the whims of Epic Games in two ways, and also that the online could possibly break with an update (or if Epic shuts down EOS).
- "Salt and Sacrifice" was an Epic Games Store timed exclusive.

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Quoting: AdutchmanI mean, KDE and Gnome (mostly Gnome) were the torchbearers of Wayland, so a lot of things needed to be implemented for the first time or even necesitated a new Wayland extention. Now that that work is nearing the end, Linux Mint can piggy back of of a lot of work from Gnome (see Marlocks comment) and look at other programs as an example, so it should be way less work.

Exactly this. GNOME were around before per-window screen capture was viable on Wayland. KDE had to push for (with support from Valve) fractional scaling and tearing extensions. GNOME, KDE, and Valve are also making big developments in the realm of proofing out colour management and HDR on Wayland, as well as VRR.

Wayland today is much different than it was 2 or 3 years ago, and is continuing to get the extensions that once received vehement pushback (such as fractional scaling). The work that GNOME and KDE have done have, for the most part, matured Wayland to a point where other desktops can now comfortably see their future on Wayland. We also shouldn't forget the excellent Wayland compositors such as Hyprland which proofed out Wayland-only applications as viable, and less relevant for GTK/Qt-based desktops, wlroots which provides common code to develop a Wayland compositor from.

The point I'm making is, Wayland isn't as much of an unknown as it was 2 years ago, thanks to the work of many to bring it up to scratch where there is no longer need for private protocols, and work can now begin on porting desktops, because the trail has been blazed by others willing to spend the last 5+ years pushing for improvements to Wayland.

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Happens frequently on Windows, had a friend get banned for about a month after setting up a virtual machine. Other times it just doesn't work and another friend didn't get it fixed until he got a new PC.

I just avoid games with this garbage altogether. If it has EAC, battlEye, EOS, or similar, I steer clear.

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But, either way, if they do manage to finish up their Vulkan work, it will make running it on Linux hopefully better with Proton since there will be less translation that needs to be done which means it should hopefully be smoother.

Vulkan is direct passthrough with Proton for what it's worth, but other calls will indeed need translation.

I think outside of translation though, the absolute biggest benefit that no one ever mentions with native ports, is that start-up times are faster because there is no need to create, update, or repair a Wine prefix, on top of Wine just generally needing to start itself up.

Star Citizen unfortunately incorporates Easy Anti-Cheat nowadays, so I cannot say I will ever go back to it, but it would be great to see a big release like this with native support. I believe it would set a good precedent.

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Quoting: devlandIf not for the quality of the games then just because most others require an internet connection to servers that will eventually be closed.

An excellent point I never even considered, but something which I am wholeheartedly in agreement with. ARPGs are meant to be played solo, they should not require an Internet connection.

Both are also available on GOG, so not only can they be played entirely offline, but also DRM free. I personally prefer the convenience of Steam, but I do occasionally buy games on GOG afterwards and hoard them across a couple of devices, and I may consider doing so particularly for Torchlight II. As far as I'm aware, Steam Workshop content can be loaded onto the GOG release as well by manually grabbing the files (and Torchlight II mods are available elsewhere of course).

In the spirit of offline, DRM-free ARPGs that could be brought to a desert island: Diablo 1 is also on GOG, and is compatible with the various FOSS Diablo engine reimplementations (which also allows for modding support). Fiddling with finding which reimplementation to go with and which mods/tweaks I should use has always been a tad too much work for me so I've never delved too deep, but it's a classic I figured I also ought to mention as it fits this category you brought up well :-)

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Refunded this one last year, it didn't work properly with native or with Proton. Last I heard both are quite rough. They also enforced some very cumbersome setup to make an account with their online service. I think I spent about an hour in-game with most of that being an attempt to set up an account.

Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but I'll stick with Torchlight II for my ARPG fix. Grim Dawn, while not native, also sates the urge for something a bit meatier in terms of story.

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