Nice article. For me, the major things SteamOS and Steam Machines hinge on for success are as follows (much od it mirroring what Liam wrote):

* Vulkan - SteamOS is extremely dependent on Vulkan to succeed. As we've seen with so many of the games ported from DX to OpenGL, they generally come with a performance hit. Now, I get the argument "the FPS is still good enough as to be smooth and playable even with the performance hit on my machine", sure that works for you, but what about those with lesser hardware, and, more importantly, what's the incentive to switch to SteamOS if the vast majority of the games will run worse than on Windows? Now, I understand that it's possible to have the OpenGL version of a game be optimized just as well as DX, or even better, we've seen a few (sadly very few) such examples, but very few developers or porters have the time, resources, and, quite frankly, know how, to actually do it. Let's face it, OpenGL is a mess. There are a dozen different ways to do everything and it's very difficult to know which way will result in the best performance for a given scenario without EXTENSIVE experience with the API because of how piss poor the documentation and guides are. For SteamOS to become a true competitor to Windows (in terms of gaming), games need to perform AT BARE MINIMUM just as well on it. This is never going to happen with OpenGL, but it hopefully does happen with Vulkan. This, unfortunately, will take time, though, as Vulkan only fully released a few months ago. DX12 has been out for just over a year and we're only just now starting to see games appearing that fully support it. We're at least half a year away from any real influx of Vulkan games. Ideally, if enough developers embrace it, Vulkan has a chance to make DX12 essentially obsolete. If enough major companies get behind it, Microsoft will have no choice but to implement it in XBOX One or whatever the successor is. This would be a major win for us.

* Apps - Steam Machines need to offer a much broader out of the box multimedia experience. Right now in Steam Big Picture Mode you can do far less than you can on a PS4 or a XBOX One. This can't continue. Steam Machines need to not only match, but exceed the experience of the consoles out of the box. I know that you can switch to a desktop session to do all this stuff (and more), but that's not good enough. The desktop environment is a fallback to tinkering and for power users, this stuff needs to be built into Steam Big Picture Mode itself. Music and movies (unfortunately mostly rentals only right now) are a nice start, but we need a lot more than that. Steam needs to integrate a full multimedia experience and, I can't stress this enough, easy, no jumping through rings of fire, recording of gameplay and one or two click streaming and uploading to YouTube and such. This needs to be so simple and seamless that anyone can do it with practically zero effort.

* Day 1 SteamOS supported AAA games - Sadly, these are few and far between. Getting 6 month old or year old games is nice for those of us that are already Linux users, but to get others to adopt SteamOS, these games need to launch alongside the Windows and console versions.

Of course, we're talking about Valve here, so patience is the key. We all know that Valve work on their own time. I'm willing to give them time, but these things have to happen eventually for SteamOS to become anything other than a very niche OS.

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Awesome game. Looks great, plays great (provided you're into turn-based tactics), runs great. Highly recommended.

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Is it Paradox? I bet it's Paradox.

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It looks like a N64 game with higher resolution graphics, which is great since that's exactly what I wanted when I kickstarted this (one of the last bits of crowdfunding I participated in).

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Always online DRM for single player? I'll pass.

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It's a Volition game, so of course I'm interested, provided it ever comes to the penguin.

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I started up Sword Coast Legends: Rage of Demons. It's okay, I guess.

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I've heard good things about the original game. I might scoop it up if it does indeed get ported.

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If we were to believe every gaming website article talking doom and gloom then Nintendo would have gone out of business a thousand times over already. :P

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While I've generally grown tired of the retro 8-bit/16-bit look that 800000000000000000000 games have used over the past 3 or 4 years, I'm willing to make an exception when the retro aesthetic is done really well. There's doing pixel art and then there's doing damn good pixel art. This game seems to definitely fall into the latter category.

I'm also happy they took hit chance out of the equation. Another game that went down that path recently that I THOROUGHLY enjoyed was Invisible Inc and the removal of rng from combat (or any action) made it more a puzzle game than an action game, and I love puzzle games (not to mention it's one of the very few genres I'm legitimately good at).

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