Quoting: ElamanOpiskelija

Quoting: GuestFrom a couple of months ago on an AMA:

From that wording, GNU/Linux won't have a native release (no surprises there).

It's a bit of a surprise there, or should I say disappointment, since Northgard did have a Linux native version, in which one could play-through the whole campaign, and also multiplayer, in what seems, from my own experience, fully cross-platform multiplayer, with pretty decent amount of players online to play with.

And there are not many other games out there, which check all those points.

Yes, Northgard works perfectly natively (and it is ridiculously light - look at the requirements, 1GB of RAM). Multiplayer works cross-platform with Windows, but not with console or mobile afaik. And they are using the same engine, which they make, so they have the know-how and at least some old code they could use.

Honestly, considering how they were willing to port Northgard to absolutely every platform they could, how they work hard on keeping system reqs low, how they open-sourced their engine and created their own language, and how chill they seem to be... I think they will at least give some actual, serious consideration to the native port in the future. (As opposed to the canned, non-committal response most studios give). No surprise that Linux native isn't available during Early Access, and with Proton how it is might not be worth their time to do a whole new version for such an ambitious project... but then, if/when they are working on other ports it might just be worth it anyway.

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Very nice, I hoped it would work but great to have confirmation.

Quoting: CsokisI don't understand why they still use OpenGL instead of Vulkan?! Why? :unsure:

Because for this kind of game, it doesn't make a big difference? Graphics are rarely the performance bottleneck for strategy games, OpenGL is often more than good enough. Considering they maintain their own engine (and their own language, it's pretty cool), over using Unity or Unreal or an engine that has built-in Vulkan support, porting everything over might be quite a lot of work with little impact.

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Quoting: ExpandingManYikes. It's pretty hard for me to imagine this doing anything other than making it more difficult to fix things.

I guess I do not envy the people who are responsible for marketing and distributing this stuff to the general public. I failed even to get a non-technical family member to use a password manager that she had to unlock.

If you plan on using the defaults for most things, it just means it is harder to screw up something important. For a device that is somewhat specialized, this isn't that big of a restriction - for most consoles, people aren't even _allowed_ to change much. The important things, installing games and changing game-related configurations, aren't affected.

I don't know if for my usecase that would be too annoying, but I don't think most people would care that much.

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Quoting: denyasisAs someone who is also really really bad at these types of games, I feel you guys's pain. I've honestly held off on buying this because of the hype around the difficultly. Maybe we're not the target audience.
On the other hand I really liked Hollow Knight and it was stupid hard for me. Part of it was that it was so hard. I felt really accomplished when I finally beat it. I don't always get that feeling when I complete a game nowadays so maybe there is a place for supper hard games like this, just gotta be in the right mood for some frustration.

Well, I do like Dead Cells a lot despite parts of it being inaccessible to me. Part of it is how the roguelite loop makes death less punishing and unfun - what I hate the most, especially in action games, is to keep doing the same thing over and over. By having a small level of progression with cell unlocks and making each run mildly different, Dead Cells already improves on that so that being bad doesn't mean getting bored.

But I still think more granularity in difficulty would be good.

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Quoting: M@GOidI wished they made available a easier difficulty for those games. I managed to finish it twice, but comes a time it gets old dying over and over again just to see the "real ending", so I ditched it. After playing this and Cyber Shadow back to back, I got burned out of games with masochistic levels of difficulty.

The older I get, less patience I have with excessive difficulty in games. Not going to buy new DLCs for this one or any other game of this type from now forward. Life is too short to expand on games like this. Which is too bad, because it is a good game.

Yeah, I feel you. I'm really bad at this kind of game, so when I got it I was dubious if I was going to even get to the "normal" ending. I did, and even beat the game at 1 boss cell, but the true ending is only with 5 boss cells so I didn't even consider it. There are also enemies and game mechanics I didn't even get to see on those lower difficulties.

I am happy enough playing only this much, but still it is stupid that you can't adjust the difficulty other than by stopping early and missing stuff.

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Quoting: CatKiller

Quoting: eldakingBut I must say I find these expensive devices kind of a dead end.

It's a question of scale. The price per unit is vastly different if you're buying a thousand compared to if you're buying ten million, multiplied out by every component in your device.

Yeah, it's not like any company can make a large "print run" to get cheaper costs (and dilute the costs of development, customized parts, and so on). But then you also need higher margins due to selling fewer units, and since it is going to be expensive anyway those companies just go all in and make it a high-end device, since they are going to market mostly to a small niche of people with a lot of money. There is a market for that, but it is severely limited.

I'm looking more for the equivalent of chromebooks for this form factor than for the equivalents of Alienware.

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I'm happy that Steam's tech is being adopted by other handheld manufacturers - reaping the benefits of FOSS, so to speak.

But I must say I find these expensive devices kind of a dead end. At that price point you are more or less competing with actual gaming PCs, that have a plethora of conveniences to offset not being portable - with the line a bit blurred for laptops, which are kind of portable. And also competing with phones/tablets, that are the mainstream portable devices, with lots of support, and have a lot of benefits to compensate not having access to x86 applications (i.e., Windows games). The subset of games that people would rather play on portable than on a full PC, but can't get (or a similar game) on a tablet, and that require such high-end hardware, might not justify the cost.

A cheaper device might not run _all_ the games or have the bestest quality, but it just doesn't need to compete in the same way. It could appeal to all the people that don't know or don't care about the hardware differences, and be cheap enough that people can just get it in addition to their main gaming PC. There is a reason Valve and Nintendo made sacrifices to reach the more moderate price points.

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Urgh, when they start having to decide what technically counts as DRM-free to justify themselves things are pretty fucked.

To be fair, it is a non-trivial matter. Not all restrictions are created equal; while some are explicitly labeled as DRM, and fit a strict definition, some are more subtle about their control but accomplish similar goals. Hitman was one such case - "it is totally not always-online DRM, it is just a system to offer additional features!" and clearly lots of people saw it as equivalent to DRM. Or Steam's "you need the client to get the first copy of the DRM-free game" and "you need the Steam API and workshop for some features" - it is clearly not DRM from any rigorous definition, but for some people it hardly matters. Multiplayer is another big one, as the statements make clear, because usually publishers have so much control over multiplayer that it doesn't make much sense to talk about DRM.

But GOG advertised themselves as a DRM-free store. They don't get to wriggle out and exploit technicalities, not without severely undermining their claims. "We stand against DRM because we need to, but keep trying to find loopholes to allow it" is not a good selling point. Yeah, this means refusing precisely the super popular AAA games, that is the trade-off they were making since the beginning.

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Quoting: EikeI wonder what I would want to play with 15 fps though.
Not even a point and click, right?

Turn-based 4X games, where you don't really care about what little animation there is... but other aspects of performance are super important, like the time between turns or how big you can make the map.

Visual novels, abstract games like chess or sudoku or solitaire, and other games where there just isn't that much happening in the screen, especially not super fast. Maybe there is some eyecandy effects, but it has little impact in the "gameplay".

And, of course, there is the use case of "I know this sucks but I just don't care". Some people (like me :P) are perfectly willing to put up with big annoyances and low-quality experiences.

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