Comparing prices directly like this is almost irrelevant imo. And doesn’t really dictate what the price of games should be.

Reasons old games should be pricier:

• Hardware involved (cartridges/electronics).
• Total number of customers were smaller, you have to subsidize development with less total sales.

Reasons why new games should be pricier:

• Development has inflated to hundreds of people and multiple years (instead of dozens of people and multiple months)

But at the end of the day, business just price what the market will bear. It’s only indirectly related to the cost of production. The margins on some games are insanely high compared to others.

As far as I know, it’s mainly games with DRM that might trigger on multiple installs/computers. So companies will disable family sharing. Not sure how common this is.

Yes to those and the battery is bigger. 50Wh vs 40

I bought it after waiting for the server issues to resolve.

Not surprising since they literally made a game for recruiting in 2002. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/America's_Army

My understanding is the display uses MIPI (not eDP) which doesn’t support VRR.

Pretty sure the tooltip specifically mentions students tho. So it doesn’t seem like it’s working as intended. But ya I’ll just throw them in the shitty parts of town.

Yes maybe. It just felt weird cause my entire city was fine with rent except specifically the low income housing. It might be because I placed it next to a college, but isn’t that kind of the point since the game says students want low income housing.

Performance out of the box was pretty terrible for me. But after a few tweaks the performance is okay. Running 4K with mostly high settings.

On the game side, I think they have a lot of improvements mechanically. I think my biggest gripes come from the lackluster animations and details in the game. For example, every building has a large crane during construction, even tiny suburban homes. The radio loops the same talk-show audio between songs. They need more variety or make just have a cooldown on playing certain clips.

Also there’s a few bugs and weird issues. Some businesses don’t have a road connection (even tho their neighbors do), destroying the building doesn’t fix it. My low income housing complains about rent costs constantly? What was the point of the low income housing.

Still a good game, just half baked.

Specs:

• OS: Fedora 38
• GPU: 6900XT
• CPU: 5900X

I pretty much always use an external mouse with my NexDock, cause the touchpad is pretty unusable imo. The keyboard is… okay. I wouldn’t really have a good place to put an external keyboard without pushing the nexdock screen too far back.

My NexDock doesn’t charge the steamdeck fast enough with the single cable solution, so I end up using a USB-c hub and power it separately which makes it extremely clunky. You end up with: 2x usb-c cables for power, usb-c hub, hdmi cable, usb cable to nexdock<-> steamdeck. You can get it down to 1x usb-c cable for charging if you alternate between the charging the steamdeck and the nexdock.

I use my NexDock + SteamDeck when traveling and LAN parties. It works fine, a little clunky. I haven’t tried resolutions above 1080p, but as long as you’re not trying to play AAA games, I don’t see it being an issue. Personally I would go with the external monitor. The Nexdock keyboard and mouse is horrendous.

It’s confirmed steam deck compatible at launch, so it’ll work fine.

That’s a very good point, but a little misleading. A better number would be to add up all the top tier cards from every generation, not just the past 2. Just because they’re old doesn’t mean they still aren’t relatively inefficient for their generation.

If we kept the generations exactly the same, but got rid of the top 1 or 2 cards. The technological advancement would be happening just as fast. Because really, the top tier cards are about silicon lottery and putting as much power in while keeping stable clocks. They aren’t different from an architecture perspective within the same generation. It’s about being able to sell the best silicon and more VRAM at a premium.

But as you said, it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the overall market.

Higher DPI can improve text rendering. I want this screen specifically for small text. It also doesn’t force you to render everything at 1200p, you can choose to render some games at the old 800p depending on performance or scaling.

I understand the sentiment, but it seems like you’re drawing arbitrary lines in the sand for what is the “correct” amount of power for gaming. Why waste 50 watts of GPU (or more like 150 total system watts) on a game that something like a SteamDeck will draw 15watts to do almost identically. 10 times less power for definitely not 10 times less fidelity. We could all the way back to the original Gameboy for 0.7 watts, the fidelity drops but so does the power. What is the “correct” wattage?

I agree that the top end gpus are shit at efficiency and we should could cut back. But I don’t agree that fidelity and realism should stop advancing. Some type of efficiency requirement would be nice, but every year games should get more advanced and every year gpus should get better (and hopefully stay efficient).

If you like RPGs in general, I think it’s worth playing. No need be a fan of DnD.

Exactly. I should have expanded further, but I was including Forgotten Realms as part of the D&D brand.

It’s a great game, but so was Divinity: Original Sin 2. The main difference, besides the rules swap, is the cutscenes and dialogue animations.

I think BG3 is riding on the D&D brand and marketing campaign. In my mind there isn’t a massive difference between BG3 and D:OS2 (or other titles they’ve done) from a pure gameplay perspective.

Regardless, I’m for it. Hopefully we’ll see more innovative and high budget CRPGs.

I played the enhanced editions on Steam which have a native Linux build. No issues.

Hmm very different experience for me, I don’t have any problems with the native Linux version. Hardly any crashes or performance issues. I don’t use any mods so maybe that’s the reason.