Hey sucks for her, but remember to run this one by people next time you’re in a fight with anti-science crackpots. You could set the entire history of maths into a bonfire and some random nutritionist could rebuild it all tomorrow. Epistemology, man.
I guess “every new game” is more accurate. I don’t know if they are in much of a hurry to go back to the old catalogue. Also, pretty sure by now that there’s a bunch of contract blockers in the FromSoft deal preventing the ports. That’s not to say they won’t eventually sort them out, but that’s clearly not a Sony-only thing. For the same reason I wonder if they can get Astro Bot out of the PS5, given all the third party IP thrown all around that game. We’ll see, I guess.
I think it’s telling that you’re still thinking back to ME2 when this comes up. It’s such a stale debate, but people who got into PC gaming in the aughts seem to be a bit stuck in a talking point that never made sense in the first place. It’s even weirder these days, given how much everybody is struggling with accessing high end GPUs and feeding absolutely insane high refresh/high res monitors with the stuff that’s available and with maximum settings going all the way to real time path-tracing. Not only are consoles not holding back the high end of PC, the high end of PC is apparently not holding back the high end of PC, and it kinda sucks.
Every game is Crysis now and nobody will praise me when I go “I told you so”. It kinda sucks.
And right there you’ve shown a better understanding of the incentive system driving the Internet than most of these executives ever have.
I guess mining endless nerdrage for useful content it is.
Thanks for the encouragement, though. Like, sincerely. No snark in that one.
Hah. I feel extremely attacked.
I was going to say I wouldn’t do that if you paid me, but… no, yeah, I’ll do it if you pay me.
Certainly not for free, though. It’s mind-numbing in the worst possible way.
They are putting everything on PC and they claim they will keep doing that, so… ideal outcome it is, I suppose.
I do think that’s better news. PC master race bros typically say consoles are holding PC gaming back, but this is the opposite of reality. PC gaming has benefitted a lot from having a set target hardware spec inherited from consoles. From controller standardization to performance optimizations, PC gaming would be much worse off without a console fixed target.
In unexpected ways, too. If you remember the bad old days of PC exclusive games they either targeted unattainable hardware as a tech demo or they aimed at the garbage tier lowest common denominator, which is how you ended up with games looking like World of Warcraft and The Sims for decades.
I love PC handhelds, but I certainly would hate for every PC release to be built primarily for those and laptops with mediocre iGPUs.
The honest answer is that word is “middle class”, but you’ll all be mad at me for saying it out loud.
That’s… an interesting use case.
Since we’re hijacking the thread to explain the weird reasons to own a Go, I have some egonomic requirements that make large and heavy handhelds a bit or a problem. I’m also the one person in the universe that thinks the Switch Joycon are fantastic and wishes more split controllers were available, for that same reason.
Unfortunately the Go controllers are… exactly what I want botched beyond recognition, is the best way to put it. They’re too large, you just can’t grip them correctly without accidentally pressing a bunch of buttons, the d-pad is mediocre at best… definitely not it.
I hate that I’m with you in kinda wanting to give them another chance with the Go 2, but man, is that a lot of money to sink into something that isn’t that much of a performance upgrade.
Frankly, for your use case I don’t know that the Legion Go would be my pick. There are a bunch of laptops I’d rather use instead, and compact mouse options aren’t that rare. That said, a tiny Linux tablet is a pretty unique proposition. If you’re thinking of an upgrade I’d still give some thought to the ASUS ROG Flow Z13 2025 edition, which has the newer Strix Halo AMD APU and Bazzite has started supporting explicitly (still in Beta, but hey). Definitely not the previous Z13s with dedicated Nvidia GPUs, but with explicit support it may be an interesting (if VERY expensive) choice for gaming and editing workloads. They also support the Minisforum V3, but that’s not that much more powerful than the Go. They seem to be heavily discounted now, though, so maybe there’s a next-gen incoming?
And that’s my surprising takeaway for Bazzite: They seem to be the only distro doing the legwork for these dedicated portable form factors. Not just handhelds but tablets and laptops, too. It’s a bit of a shame that it’s a bit of a quirky distro to daily drive. I think it shows that there is a bit of an untapped market for something like this that the mainstream desktop distros are not targeting well. I don’t necessarily need to go to Fedora’s page and pick between twenty versions with slightly different DEs, but it’d be nice to punch in the model of my old ASUS gaming laptop and get a download that I know will support my dGPU and do proper power management out of the box the way Bazzite does with its supported devices.
Oh, hey, a unicorn. I say to you, neigh.
I’ll be honest, the eGPU thing is a step too far for me, but I’m mildly impressed to learn it works. AMD, I presume? As fas as I know Bazzite don’t even provide a build with the Nvidia drivers on top of the Legion Go customizations, right?
I think Bazzite, at least dual booting, is a bit of a no-brainer for the Go because man, is Lenovo’s Windows software frustrating to use. I don’t understand why Lenovo decided to have two separate dedicated buttons for it, neither of which is a Home button. Whatever money they got from their stupid game launcher app serving you ads and sponsored links (I have to assume somewhere between 50 and 75 cents, given their market share) is not worth how frustrating that is.
Bazzite’s customizations are faster, more flexible and more convenient… and you get to use the other button to open your launcher’s menu, as nature intended.
I’ll say that less bonkers handhelds are much better to use even on full fat Windows. If you own a Go, though, you can absolutely see how Lenovo were first in line to tell Valve “just hook us up, we suck at doing this on Windows ourselves”.
It HAS been posted a bunch. Unfortunately I haven’t seen more thorough testing from more technical outlets since (all of those seem to be too busy with the Switch 2 to spend time in the Go S).
I did see a much smaller channel do a three way comparison between Windows, Linux and Bazzite on the Legion Go 1 and claim some better performance, but in normal use definitely not the 2x battery life Dave2D is reporting, which is consistent with my own experience owning a Legion Go 1 with the Z1 extreme and dual booting Windows and Bazzite since pretty much day one. From that experience I’d say performance is also heavily game-dependent. Gonna guess it has more to do with hitting memory limitations than anything else (incidentally, if you happen to own a non-Deck handheld, particularly one of the more niche ones built from laptop parts with a bunch of RAM, make sure to check how much VRAM is being allocated, it can make a big difference).
It’ll be interesting to re-run some of those checks more rigorously when the ASUS Ally with the trimmed-down Windows build drops.
It’s an interesting talking point to me because I suspect this has much bigger reach than the devices themselves. I wonder if anybody here owns a non-Deck device, and how many Decks are even owned. The Switch 2 ended up outselling the Deck in like a week, and best guess it’ll have outsold the entirety of the PC handheld segment by the end of the summer, definitely before the holidays.
I have lots of thoughts on where PC handhelds are at the moment, many of them not particularly positive, but it really feels like at this point in time nobody is talking about them as real products you may want to use and instead more as some proxy in online debate about PC software and hardware opinions.
No, it is not!
Helldivers is fun enough, and I agree with you that the base game content is solid enough to sustain the experience.
That doesn’t make it any more valuable or engaging to spend money on more cape textures through a battlepass grind.
I would much rather pay for actual content than hope that whales and subscriptions subsidize it. Granted, I also see next to no appeal on grinding Helldivers’ missions and volatile metagame progression, so the entire design is not for me.
But for as long as you can make increasingly cheaper content to keep extracting ten bucks a month from people you will get companies trying to extract a hundred. You’re… you know, ruining it for the rest of us, please stop.
I would much rather pay 90 bucks for Donkey Kong than 45 for Helldivers 2 on account on a subset of whales subsidizing the rest of the package.
My one exception is fighting games, where I find paying for more characters down the line is flexible enough and has enough connection between meaningful content and investment that it supports a very long additional content tail. But pure cosmetics in a battlepass? Yeah, no, I’d rather not.
Man, I’m always surprised by the crap ragebait peddlers latch on to with these boring-ass investor presentations.
And I always feel the need to correct the record, which only pisses me off further.
So, for anybody interested, this is an investor scripted thing, they mostly are deflecting questions from investors that they don’t have answers to. At one point they say the Switch 2 won’t eat into their business because they have a different controller. It’s all filler nonsense.
The quote is somewhat out of context, in that they say there was an overly competitive market, but also that Concord didn’t stand out enough to compete. As much of a non-statement as that is, it’s not wrong.
Surprisingly, the ragemongers gloss over much more worrying stuff in there, like the confirmation that despite increasing subscription prices they are seeing more people buy into the expensive tier, not less (and you’re all ruining it for the rest of us, please stop). And they imply they will keep increasing prices, too.
They also point out that more than 50 percent of Helldivers’ revenue came from microtransactions now. Again, you’re all ruining it for the rest of us, please stop. They also confirm they will conitnue to milk that and “maximize revenue”.
On better news, they pretty much confirm they are making a PS6 when somebody suggests they should go PC and cloud only, so there’s that. They also confirm they want to keep making at least one big single player game per year and that they are actively looking into new IP.
If you read between the lines of investor presentation, they also kind of acknowledge that Marathon got bad feedback from playtesting and they’re trying to salvage it. Although, of course, they never say that outright.
This article sucks, and it made me listen to half an hour of investor executive nonsense and that makes whoever linked it not my friend, either. On this, too, you’re ruining it for the rest of us. Please stop.
I guess it depends on how much you do your homework. I just spent a while listening to Satya Nadella regurgitate self-congratulatory CEO-speak just to verify that yes, indeed, this link is gargbage. I feel entitled to at least a bit of resentment for that.
Ironically, the time I spent doing this was much shorter because the podcast that originates the blatant misquote has an AI-generated searchable transcript.
He doesn’t. He says he cares more about generating growth (and thus presumably revenue) than about AGI.
Also, this thing is from February.
Social media sucks. Reporting on reporting sucks. News aggregators suck.
AI may suck, but it’s definitely not alone in being shitty. We’re all clearly very good at tool-less, artisanal misinformation.
You can’t hear it from there, but I am screaming in non-native English speaker.
Or, to put it another way, every single song you know released before 1995.
For reference on how this is different (and how it’s not) to previous instances, here’s mainstream-AF PC World magazine in February 2020:
Windows 7 was understandable before; now it’s a liability. With no security updates and a still-vast market share, Microsoft’s operating system will be a big, juicy target for hackers.
We recommend migrating to Windows 10 if you’re able to, and have a guide explaining your Windows 10 upgrade options (go.pcworld.com/10up) . If you perform only basic tasks on your PC—email, web surfing, and documents—then Linux is a viable, user-friendly option these days. We’ve got a Linux beginner’s guide (go. pcworld.com/lnxg), too, and better yet you can try it for free with no risk to your main Windows 7 installation.
You can probably still upgrade to Windows 10 for free (see page 103), too.
I don’t have APC’s issue on hand, but if anybody wants to share how that compares, do go ahead.
For some additional reference: https://vivaldi.com/blog/replace-windows-7-with-linux/ https://www.ghacks.net/2020/01/14/windows-7-support-ends-today-here-are-your-options/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/why-and-how-to-replace-windows-7-with-linux-mint/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFHBBN0CqXk
Short term history is so fun and so weird.
Yep. Definitely falls into this category. The roguelite stuff is a fun quirk, and I do enjoy unraveling the steps metagame more than I enjoy the “find a clue in a piece of paper and remember it for the next run” or the “doesn’t look like a puzzle but it is” bits.
Guys, I’ve been around a while. You’re probably not gonna recommend the game I accidentally missed that changes my mind.
Oooh, Outer Wilds. Did a couple of puzzles, I think I got around the loop once or twice, bounced right off.
I swear, I don’t know what it is. The sense of wonder just isn’t there. Maybe I’m too aware that all the pieces are put in by the designers and that withholding some pieces doesn’t inherently make the puzzle more interesting or even harder. I guess I find myself tapping my foot playing first person Lunar Lander while I wait for the thing to get around to the real game while I do rolling ball puzzles or whatnot.
Hah. Wasn’t into the “multimedia” era as much, either.
But still, I’d say context is important in that distinction. Old point and click was a AAA genre, through and through. Big, cinematic visuals and storytelling were at the core of that.
I’m not saying that’s better or that I like it more. In fact, I’d say I’m less into that kind of thing these days. But it was a different moment in time to get hold of one of those compared to an indie release overcomplicating the self-revealing world concept from Myst.
Why I haven’t been into that idea since all the way back in Myst is harder to parse for me. Maybe I’m just less metatextually enamoured with the idea of self-revealing games as a flourish than I am about having the reveal be a fully functional narrative? As I said above I adore Obra Dinn. There’s a lot of the same connective tissue there, but maybe I’m just more in touch with it when it’s a medium for a good, old-timey gothic horror story than when it’s this abstract world-in-code thing.
I don’t pretend to know what people mean by “AAA” these days. I’m going to assume if AAA doesn’t matter, then consoles being less performant than PCs doesn’t matter, either, so the end result is pretty much the same.