Kobolds with a keyboard.

  • 1 Post
  • 145 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 5th, 2023

help-circle






  • The only things I’ve found that just straight up don’t work on the deck are things with draconian anti-cheat (which don’t work on Linux in general, not just the deck), and very old titles that have weirdly restrictive resolutions or control schemes or whathaveyou. Some games require some tweaking (mostly around controls, occasionally changing the Proton version, which is very easy to do within Steam), but generally that’s been minor. The things that don’t work well are typically things you wouldn’t expect to work anyway.

    It’s worth noting that it makes it very easy to remap controls, even for games that don’t natively support controllers or don’t let you remap the controls at all normally. You can also invoke an onscreen keyboard as needed (for e.g. typing names). The controller mapping is very strong; it’s not limited only to single buttons; you can create custom contextual radial menus, for instance, so even games that need many more unique controls than the Deck has buttons work fine with some tweaking. You can also view / download / rate other users’ control mappings for any game that has them, so you don’t even need to do the work yourself.

    It’s a fantastic piece of hardware for gaming. Looks great, feels great. It’s a bit large (won’t fit in a pocket, obviously), but that shouldn’t be a problem for anyone who would reasonably want a handheld gaming PC. It’s not a phone or a Gameboy.

    I was without a desktop PC for a week or so due to a hardware failure, and was able to do everything I needed to do on the Steam Deck (with a USB mouse/keyboard, plugged into a monitor via a dock). So it’s a great piece of hardware even for that.


  • I want a FO or TES game that’s just a modder playground.

    • Build the world, don’t populate it with anything.
    • Divide the world into a grid, let modders submit mods to a central database and register them with the grid squares they alter.
    • Let the game download an assortment of mods (maybe using user-defined tags to preference certain content) that fills out the world, using their grid square registration system to ensure no overlapping / conflicting content.)
    • Let players rate content they play.
    • Reward the modders who made popular content in some way.

    Obviously there’s a lot of glaring problems with this, but in my head, it’d be awesome.





  • The problem with cosmetic microtransactions is that it gives the creators a monetary incentive to make sure nothing you can earn in the game is as appealing as the microtransaction items, or that their availability (in cases where you can earn the same items in-game) are low enough that you’ll never reasonably earn what you want.

    You can say ‘Cosmetics don’t matter!’ but the astronomical sales of cosmetic items pretty much proves that to the majority of players, that is not the case.

    They also often intentionally create game mechanics specifically to ensure that players who aren’t paying see the better-looking players who did pay.




  • Did you play Dark Messiah of Might and Magic? This looks very reminiscent of that; the trailer looked very similar in style, lots of focus on the first-person animations, physics manipulation (e.g. kicking enemies off cliffs), the same sort of combat style.

    It played more or less exactly like it looked, and for its time, it was fantastic - truly innovative and fresh feeling. With that in mind, I really hope that’s what they’re using as inspiration here, and that they capture that same game feel.



  • That being said, creating a private instance is a relatively difficult hurdle. By providing private communities, an admin can take care of the hosting, along with all of the other communities, while those who want something more controlled and closed can have an easily accessible option.

    That’s fair, and I’m honestly probably just thinking about worst-case scenarios that won’t actually happen. There’s plenty of ways malicious actors could already be doing some pretty bad things and they don’t seem to be, so it’s probably fine.


  • Eh, we already have private communities.

    I did mention further down the comment chain the one use case for this I can think of - communities for info and feedback about the specific instance to / from its members; things like donations, financial disclosures, etc. - that you wouldn’t want participation in from anyone not actually using the instance. It has its place; I’m more afraid of seeing popular communities going instance-only for whatever reason, with it being used solely to drive signups on a specific instance.


  • I mean it’s fine on paper. But like… imagine that a popular instance - lemmy.world, let’s say - has a community that’s very popular and, for whatever motivation, decides they want to push people to move to their instance (or at least create accounts there), so they change one or more of those popular communities to be local-only.

    Best case, they fracture the community. Worse case, a very large number of users start making accounts there to use those communities, and abandon other instances. Worst case, they use the large influx of signups they get from such a move to promote themselves, grow even further, and eventually do something malicious.

    We can already create private instances that don’t federate for those niche communities; I don’t really see what this feature is adding other than specifically having communities dedicated to that specific instance (With instance-specific information like donations, financials, outage notices, that sort of thing.)