Quoting: scaineThis looks really, really like Islanders [External Link] - which is a good thing. Think I actually prefer this approach, where the tiles dictate placement, instead of trying to position stuff to pixel-perfect precision for maximum effect.

Having played both, you're not wrong. :smile: Dorfromantik is definitely its own thing, though, with the unlimited tile placement on an infinite canvas vs. constrained "levels" (islands) where the challenge lies in packing ever-more things in.

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I'm not planning to open mine up*, but I'm glad the option exists!

*I've reserved the 512 GB one, and most of my games are smaller than a few GB in size, and the really big ones tend to be ones I'll probably still be playing on my desktop rather than the Deck, so if I really need more size I'll just buy a hefty microSD card. It's nice to know I could replace parts if they fail or break, though.

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Quoting: anewsonwait XCOM2 had a multiplayer mode? I have 100 hours in it and I had no idea... has anyone here actually played it multiplayer?

A few posts earlier in the thread:

Quoting: headless_cyborgThis time it was. I played it with a Windows friend years ago.

Quoting: PhiladelphusYeah, can confirm, I played with my brother on Windows some years ago as well.

:wink:

I remember reading about a funny exploit someone found some years ago, where you make a team consisting of a high-level Specialist and a bunch of Codices. First turn, you grenade all the Codices to make them all split (while not actually dealing much damage to any individual one). Next turn, the Specialist uses the move where the Gremlin flies around and heals every unit on the team to bring your doubled army of Codices back to full health. :grin: That got patched out by the time the article I saw about it came out, though.

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Quoting: GuestIt was Greg Coomer in an interview (RockPaperShotgun iirc) who said valve had only tested a thousand to date. I'm not assuming anything.

Ah, thanks, I found it [External Link]. Hadn't seen that interview.

Relevant section:

Game compatibility checks: Valve has said it would check every game in the Steam game library (50,000+ games and counting), to see if it will run well on the Deck. So far, it's only managed to check about 1,000 games.

• “It’s a daunting task,” Coomer says of the hand-checked process, which assesses things like text readability. Valve prioritized checking games that were popular among people who pre-ordered the Deck.


• The company will review whether it is going too slow or needs to "invent some other way of evaluating games.”

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Quoting: headless_cyborg

Quoting: Liam Dawe

Quoting: EhvisYou'd expect this to happen because the servers would be closed down. But if that was the case, then why would Linux no be affected? Is MP not shared with Windows for this one either and my just using Steam? Strange separation in any case.

Like a lot of Feral ports, multiplayer I believe was not cross-platform with Windows.

This time it was. I played it with a Windows friend years ago.

Yeah, can confirm, I played with my brother on Windows some years ago as well. So I suspect that multiplayer will be going away for Mac and Linux as well, just that those versions won't be patched (to do…something. Remove the multiplayer button, maybe?).

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Thanks Liam for testing some of these Unsupported titles. I suppose from Valve's point of view it's probably better to err on the side of caution and mark something as Unsupported rather than risk marking something as Verified or Playable that doesn't work, but still, it's weird that so many games that run fine are being marked Unsupported instead of Playable. I really wonder what's going on.

Quoting: dibzI guess I remember reading somewhere that Verified required more then the game to just work and that there were other requirements like fonts and interface elements not being too small. I have a strong feeling that rather then tagging games into the playable category that hit those problems, they put them under Unsupported.

It would make sense really, they probably want to distance themselves from games that they see as "a bad experience" by just straight out saying they're not supported.

Yes, there are certain criteria [External Link] that must be met in addition to a game running flawlessly in order to be marked Verified (having to do with font size, correct controller glyphs being shown, and other things to ensure a good experience). Games that run flawlessly (or at least as good as they do on the desktop, no game truly runs flawlessly after all) but don't meet those criteria go in the Playable category, at least according to what Valve has said. Unsupported is specifically for games that flat-out don't work, due to e.g. anti-cheat, or are not, well, supported, like VR titles. So if they're putting "games that run but aren't Verified" in Unsupported, then they've either deliberately muddled up their own (nice and simple) system or someone is doing it mistakenly. (Hopefully it's the latter, and will be fixed soon.)

Quoting: GuestBefore the 25th of February, Valve were claiming they'd tested "thousands of games" and people assumed what was visible via SteamDB was because of data mining.

However, it's since emerged Valve have only tested 1,000 since the Deck's announcement

You're assuming they've released information on every game they've tested. Now that's not necessarily a bad assumption (I'm inclined to agree with it), but it's also possible that releasing this information is more complicated than "check a radio box on a web form somewhere and have it automatically update", and that Valve actually do have hundreds of thousands of ratings pending that they're still processing. "Never attribute to malice, etc.," and even the most ardent Valve defender would have to concede that they can be, on occasion, a bit incompetent. :smile:

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Quoting: eldarionOnly time will tell. It's just that recently the news here looked too much as a Valve PR satalite then a Linux gaming news site. More about steam deck itself and less about actual games.

Take heart, then, because the Deck just launched, so this is the biggest it will ever be and the highest concentration of articles you'll ever see about it. As more and more people actually get their hands on one the cachet of exclusivity will wear off, and apart from some big articles I foresee in the future along the lines of "Epic Games caves and ports Fortnite to Linux due to demand from millions of Deck owners" it'll gradually fade into the background fabric of people's lives as everyone who wants one just…has one.

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To everyone claiming* that "Actually, 'tens of thousands' could mean 10k + 1!", I'd like to point out that "tens of thousands" could also technically mean 100k − 1 and "hundreds of thousands" could also mean 1M − 1, so if we run those numbers instead, we get 2,099,997 Steam Decks produced by the end of June. :happy:
(And of course, that's not taking into account the "beyond that it'll grow even quicker" comment after the end of May.)

*Debatably; that's the level of pedantry I'd expect out of Microsoft lawyers fighting a billion-dollar anti-trust fine, and I don't agree that anyone using "tens of thousands" colloquially—as Yang is clearly doing here—would agree that it could be interpreted that way.

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he Korean fan translation worked on by Gemini

As an employee of the Gemini Observatory, this is news to me! :wink:

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This might be an odd request, but could you try running a game which has a native Linux version that works perfectly fine on desktop but is listed as Unsupported? I'm seeing some really surprising ones pop up from my library (e.g. Surviving Mars, or Ultimate Chicken Horse, which I'd've thought would be a shoe-in for the Deck). Do they run on the Deck (and just have such a crappy experience, for whatever reason, that Valve marked them Unsupported)? Or do they really not run? (If so, well…that's that I suppose, it just seems weird that Linux-native games that probably aren't using some sort of anti-cheat or anything wouldn't run on the Deck). Thanks.

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