Quoting: AussieEevee

Quoting: EhvisThis storage manager thing looks like it was created with the Steam Deck in mind.

I was thinking that too. But it's very fast and responsive, at least on Windows (don't judge me!).

Cast 'im out! Tar! Feathers! Wailing! Gnashing of Teeth!!!

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Quoting: PhiladelphusI'm sure that can be balanced with feedback in the future if they're not amazing at launch. I'm just looking forward to no longer being forced to take Subjugation and Domination for my Fanatic Xenophile Pacifist species. :grin:

It might let them tweak the Subjugation tree to actually be about that, too. Like, as things stand, it's actually surprisingly generally useful even if you've only ever had one species in your empire and never conquered anyone, because it gives you stuff like better law and order, higher leader level caps and stuff. They couldn't make it too specialized or everyone would be really annoyed at being forced to take it. But now, if there end up being some decent choices, they could make the Subjugation tree be about, like, subjugating people, and then if you don't want to do that you can take something else instead.

Off top of head, I was thinking I wouldn't mind seeing a tree about mobility/logistics. Easier/faster Gate building, maybe the ability to tie natural wormholes into your artificial gate network, better trade protection and other trade perks, faster strategic movement, stuff like that.

I'd take that before I took a tree about making lots of star fortresses, which I see as basically a loser strategy. The other guys should be building star fortresses to try and fail to stop my mighty fleets, not the other way around. I do use the things, but mostly for trade--one big star fortress with a stack of trade module thingies, to collect the trade out a massive number of jumps. And next to it, another big star fortress with a ton of hangar bays, to keep down pirates. I've never had more than one or two of the things per empire dedicated to actual defence.

The espionage tree is probably fine if you're really into that. Frankly though I've never seen a 4X game, whether Civ-like or MOO-like, where it seemed to me it was worth putting much extra effort into espionage. Sure, if the game gives you some spies, use them. But if it's a choice between specializing in spies or specializing in being awesome in some other way . . . taking the real stuff always seems to give better bang for the buck.

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Hmmm . . . the overall concept of Tradition tree selectability seems pretty cool. The specific ones they've introduced on the other hand seem . . . kinda sucky compared to the existing ones.

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I see in the description no reference to an orchestra. And here I was expecting some sort of vast expansion of the Muppaphone concept.

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Quoting: 0aTT

"Something that we said earlier on is that we really want the entire library to work," developer, Lawrence Yang told us, "and if it doesn't work we see that as a bug and we want to fix it."

https://www.pcgamer.com/if-the-steam-deck-doesnt-run-your-entire-library-at-launch-valve-sees-that-as-a-bug/ [External Link]

Yes. Mind you, plenty of things ship with lots of bugs . . .

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Quoting: whizse

Quoting: Purple Library GuyA quick google suggests that there are around 50,000 games

That's an interesting tidbit.

Which, just so we're clear, I do not stand behind in any way. :grin:

Quoting: whizseThere's about 5000 (open and closed) game specific issues on the Proton bug tracker, and around 20 000 game reports on ProtonDB. So half the games on Steam have never been put through the ringer?

Well, yeah, but specifically the games nobody cares about.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: andregregorherrmannI wonder why all the news sites jump on...

Because they want the clicks.

The Steam Deck is a hot topic, but there's no actual news till December, when it's in testers' hands. Maybe Valve will release SteamOS 3, or a significant update for Proton, before then, for early testing, but they might not. Maybe a game dev will show their game running on a dev kit, but they'll probably keep that internal. Websites want to say something.

Misleadingly overhyping something, and then tearing it down later through something else misleading gives them controversy and drama, which they can turn into clicks. I'm really not surprised that it was the NME that was one of the first outlets to jump on a not-particularly-groundbreaking interview on a small Steam-enthusiast website: that cycle was NME's Standard Operating Practice back in the day.

All of which is probably fine from a Steam Deck marketing perspective. I mean, what do these two article topics have in common?
1. There's a shiny new thing coming that might be great!
2. There's a shiny new thing coming that might have problems!

--> There's a shiny new thing coming!
Win.

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So this is very popular. Can someone explain to me the appeal of a game where you drive trucks around, much the way real people only do when they're being paid and have few options?

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So, four categories of games not working:
1. Anti-cheat
2. Microsoft Media Foundation video bits
3. Old DRM, particularly Valve's own CEG, and launchers
4. Games that just have problems--various odds and ends and weirdities

Of those,
1. Is plausibly going to be fixed by launch. It better be. Time is running a bit short though, so they'd better have some internal stuff happening that they're not releasing yet.
2. Depends how fast their procedure is. A quick google suggests that there are around 50,000 games currently being sold on Steam. Let's imagine that 20,000 of those have MMF clips. If they can do their thing with 100 games per day, that's 200 days to fix them all. But probably only 50 days to fix the ones more than a handful of people ever currently play. That's pretty workable. If they can only fix 10 games per day, that's not so great. Mind you I suspect this vastly overestimates the amount of MMF clips or Proton would work on far fewer games than it already does.
3. You'd think Valve can fix letting its own technology work on Proton. So like, CEG, plausibly will work by launch. But there's a cluster of other technologies here, each pretty small, and the chance they'll get them all seems slim. But it may not matter that much if it's all old stuff that few people play.
4. Obviously they're not going to be able to fix all the little corner case problems by launch. If they can clean up the popular stuff that'll probably be good enough.

What I'm thinking is that some of the posts are a bit too pessimistic. Sure, I don't see Valve getting all games working on Proton by launch. But what we're ignoring is the vast gulf between the sales of Cyberpunk 2077 and the sales of Shovelware 0.8. There are masses of games on Steam that hardly anyone ever bought, or which are old and not one of the relatively few considered classics, that hardly anyone ever plays any more. Even games that are in their Indie way solid little successes, or were that three years ago, are nonexistent in terms of market share. It is plausible that 90% of people could find all the games they want to play on a Steam Deck work perfectly even if Valve fixed less than the top half of games on Steam, especially since a whole lot of games do already just work.

Bottom line: If they have anti-cheat nailed and do the videos for a lot of games including all the most popular and squash a good amount of general bugs, particularly in top-tier games, most people may not notice a problem even if technically there are still a lot of games that don't work well in Proton.

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Quoting: Supay

Quoting: FergleFergleson

it's come with plenty of bugs across all platforms

This is something I was especially concerned about for this release. Paradox has had a lot of quality problems in the last few years and IIRC this is the first update for Surviving Mars not being done by the original SM team. All of the good SM work up to this point was done by Haemiont Games but for whatever reason they're out and someone called Abstraction is in.

This is definitely a release I was excited for but also definitely one I'm waiting on. :(

Paradox sacked their entire publishing QA department last year with very little warning and didn't even tell their other departments. They outsourced the work instead. They kept their own development QA who I believe work on their own PDS titles but there seems to have been some overlap on work and overall Paradox release quality has really suffered since then with significant bugs in most titles.

EDIT: There have also been issues reported with interal problems including bullying and harassment, and their CEO just suddenly quit citing irreconcilable differences with the board over the company strategy. Seems their incredible growth over the last few years is resulting in some issues, along with similar abuse and discrimination coming out of most game companies.

It's so often trouble when some good outfit grows big enough that the suits come along and start making it over into a "proper" corporation (which is to say, a bunch of aggressive, short-sighted greedhead assholes).

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