Sad, really sad. I bought Sword Coast Legends on day 1 due to its day 1 Linux support. I liked the game - it wasn't the most optimized Linux port, but it also never crashed on me. I thought it was a pretty good action RPG, not the best that ever was, but definitely still fun to play through - I had no regrets paying full price for it.

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Quoting: richipNeedless to say, I quickly asked how to cancel my order and promptly cancelled. I have to say, I'm really disappointed with HTC for not supporting SteamOS or for having a customer support group that is misinformed:

Even if the Vive supports SteamOS, which it looks like it will, the Vive compatible VR games *also* have to support SteamOS. I'm waiting until I start to see Linux games support Vive, then I'll get interested.

Quoting: stssI'd agree that the visual aspect of VR is something that would just be a fad normally.
But when people say VR they're not just talking about the visual device right? Isn't there a whole different set of game control mechanics?

I would definitely not say it's just a fad. I've played and tinkered around with a lot of the current VR content in both the DK1 and DK2. Saying "the visual aspect of VR" doesn't really cover the experience of it. Having new game control methods is a part of it, but not required, but you can have a mind blowing VR experience with just a standard gamepad.

And new control methods are risky. I've played VR HL2 with some of the weirder control methods. Like your head just becomes the mouse and you play with both hands on the keyboard. It totally works! (Arrow keys spin you around for larger 180's, and your head does all the actual gun aiming and freelooking up/down.) After about an hour of that, you have a very sore neck and definitely want your mouse back.

Same thing with motion controlling nun-chucks. I used the Hyrda as a mouse/keyboard replacement for about a year in standard FPS and Action games. It's pretty cool, but I only got it to work for that long because I developed an aiming technique where my arm was resting on the armchair side and I would just waggle it around with the wrist using as little motion as possible.

Basically, I was using it as much like a mouse as possible. These VR demos where you're moving your arms all over in front of you doing motion controlled stuff can be cool, but not for any kind of extended gaming session. It gets old *fast* if you try and keep doing it.

The O.R. and Vive nun-chuck controllers will only enjoy real adoption if they have games use them resting more or less on your lap like a standard controller with just waving them around for more involved stuff once in a while. Standing and moving around VR games will be the fad. Any real VR "killer title", like VR WoW or something, will not be that. It'll be a VR title that plops your lazy gamer a$$ right down on the couch and makes the controls as effort free as possible, like any other really good video game would do.

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Quoting: edddeduckferal

Quoting: PeciskEdwin, I will just say that I will buy Shadow Of Mordor (has been eyeing it for some time now) just because of community support and communication like this. Thanks. Keep being awesome.

Thanks :)

I totally bought Mordor due to the Feral port to Linux - I've learned to trust Feral ports. Trust me when I say this, many of us here want to see you get a LOT more business - I just hope there's enough of us for that to matter :-)

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I ran into this Shadow of Mordor rendering bug on nVidia 364 drivers just last night in Ubuntu 15.10, also! Glad to see it made the news here on GoL, so it's not just me that is having some arcane problem only happening with my Linux PC. Which probably means all I'll have to do to fix it is wait for a patch from Feral - which sounds better than having to roll back my nVidia driver.

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Quoting: tuubiThat's big budget, hollywood-style, marketing-driven design for you. I'm sure Rhianna Pratchett is quite competent as a writer, but big business doesn't like taking risks.

Agreed, and I'm not saying Rhianna is a bad writer, by any means. It's more like, this game series used to have a rock and roll sound track, and now it's country. I don't care if it's good country, that's not the point. She writes a story my wife would love to watch if it was a movie for rent - but my wife doesn't play these video games, who do they think they're marketing to?

But the game itself was very good, and at least it does let you skip out of all the cutscenes - all props to Feral for porting it, I wish I had not played it in Wine now - which was not that good of an experience on my PC.

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Quoting: rustybroomhandle

Quoting: HalifaxGo ahead and start with the down-voting now, this is my give-a-sh** face.

Might I suggest a good proctologist to help with all that butthurt?

There you go, right off the bat, you'd make a better writer for the game than the ones they used. Yeah, I was overly concerned about it after one or three too many beers last night - but wow was that game's story insanely boring. A great game that I had to give up on all the cut-scenes.

It's like they brought in the the Lifetime Channel to write the script that had to be approved by a moral majority conservative Mormon panel. I don't need my video games taking themselves soooo seriously.

It's not like I'm so predictably boring I *just* want her to be a bigger breasted shallow sex symbol like she basically was before - reinvent her in some interesting flawed way, then - but don't make her a boring Lifetime channel movie paragon of good wholesome virtues and politically correct messages.

Make her a drunken slut that can't make a good decision to save her life. Make her find out she's actually adopted trailer trash who's not actually from her British parents. Make her a trainwreck where you just can't wait to get to the next video flashback log from an old friend to find out even more screwed up stuff she's done. "Yeah! This is Sarah.... Thanks Laura, so you had to sleep with both my sister and my husband, on Valentines day - at the SAME time? If I ever see you again (etc etc)".

But I guess there's a lot of neutered dudes in the world that just can't wait to lap up the next Lifetime movie their PTA approved panel spits out. Different strokes for different folks, I guess.

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Here's the part where I get ostracized for being politically incorrect.

1)

I played Tomb Raider, it's a great game. Needs to go back to its roots where Laura Croft is basically a shallow sex symbol that provides great eye candy while you play a fun game.

I'm totally fine with girl power, my mom has a PHD and I have no problem with 100% supporting women equality in the workforce etc etc. But the need to go revisionist history and "politically correct" / change what an existing franchise stood for? No. The franchise was fine for what it was - we're just talking a video game here.

Just make a new politically correct franchise then, don't go revisionist history on an existing franchise that was never about what they made it. IOW: advanced tesselated graphics options for hair vs boobs? Nope, that's not what the orig T.R. would have focused on.

2)

If you ARE going to go all politically correct / revisionist history on an existing franchise that wasn't meant for that path, have some balls and don't go all *fake hollywood* girl power on it. You know what I'm talking about? No? Let me edify you so you see one facet of the ridiculousness going on in this modern age of bologna:

Yes, there are women who can kick a lot of ass. No, they do not look like the petite chick who was used in the game (or movie of the innumerable girl power movies coming out of Hollywood these days). It's like Hollywood wants to have their cake and eat it too. Any woman who can actually take on hordes of buff guys is FAR FAR FAR more likely to look like a Broom Hilda Russian deadlift gal than the petite sex-pot types they actually use in these girl power movies and games.

But nope! Broom-Hilda deadlift gal doesn't sell movie tickets or game titles - so we'll use the petite sexpot gal and just pretend she's as physically robust as the 260+ lbs Broom Hilda gal who can take out hordes of huge dudes like it's nothing. Yeah.. Riiiiight. At least when they make it a male toon who can take on these crazy odds ---> he's generally huge, muscle-bound, and looks the f***ing part <---

Go ahead and start with the down-voting now, this is my give-a-sh** face.

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Screw the rest of these jokers, I'm the one you want. Other than money, fame, girls, looks, fitness and talent, I'm the spitin' image of Tom Cruise. All of the crazy, none of the "makes him 'eccentric' qualities" to temper it.

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A Valley Without Wind. Retroactively, now let's call it 1. Since Arcen games released AVWW 2 as a free update to all owners of AVWW(1).

A Valley Without Wind fascinated me.

But then Arcen games took almost everything that fascinated me with AVWW and threw it out the Window with AVWW2. I tried hard to love AVWW2, but it just wasn't the same. Better art assets, far less intriguing / way toned back procedural 2D platformer gameplay, mostly replaced with a largely unremarkable and uninteresting grid/turn based strat game now, ok :-/

Skyward Rogue looks completely uninteresting to me. Last Federation looks like I could appreciate it - but mainly for me, I wanted to see them continue their thought line with AVWW1 - which they *completely* abandoned for other game ideas after a strong initial start that was in need of fine tuning / version 2 polish.

The only vindication I have for my thoughts on this one, since no one in this limited user base will agree with me is hey! Look at how things went for Terraria and Starbound... Those were also procedural gen 2D platformer RPGs with Linux support. And they followed through on a more complete procedural gen 2D platformer RPG experiences instead of abandoning that theme for other formats, and both of those dev houses are now multi-millionaire successes with some of the highest performance games Steam has ever had. *Maybe* you should have just concentrated on making AVWW more polished and continuing it's great ideas instead of abandoning it for a slew of other less compelling game themes?

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Quoting: KeyrockThis doesn't surprise me one bit. This is the latest in a string of articles from Ars centered around gaming where it was readily apparent the person writing said article was woefully underqualified/underinformed and they've been dipping into click-bait territory with their article titles.

Dude, I'll tell you one thing, you've got the most legitimately disturbing user icon I've seen in a while. a weird looking man-ape with a thick black mane and a 1980's "brick" cell phone, what the f******... ;-) It gets your attention though!

This ars article is a joke. I'm on a low end Alienware Steam Machine, the i3, with SteamOS as my main distro for months now. After running the Professor Kaos scripts that add the full Debian repos and a few other hacks, SteamOS makes a fine Linux gaming desktop OS. There's not a single app that I can run in Ubuntu that hasn't also loaded just fine in SteamOS. But I'm on a 1080p monitor, maybe there are issues with 4K, since I've never owned a 4K monitor yet, I wouldn't know.

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