Yup. Proton’s been around for 5 years but it’s just a fork of Wine which has existed since 1993.
The Steam Deck is going to be huge; I don’t think people were waiting half a year after release to get their Steam Machine pre-orders. Absolute game-changer. Brilliant move from Valve.
The Switch is still cute, tho.
rei
4054
LOL the Nintendo Online Individual membership + Tetris 99 DLC bundle costs 39.99 CAD vs 37.58 CAD separately.
Same here. I was so sad when the 3DS’ life came to an end as that meant there would no longer be a dedicated Nintendo handheld, but the Switch Lite has been a fantastic follow-up for me.
Being able to play some of the “big boy” games on a handheld (Skyrim, Diablo 3, Dragon’s Dogma, Xenoblade Chronicles), even if they’re a few gens old, has been so much fun. My only problem with the system is that some developers don’t scale text correctly for handheld mode and my aging eyes have caused me to set aside a few games that I foolishly hope will be patched eventually.
Not just text, either - I fell in love with Hades, and I wanted to love Transistor, but the super zoomed out view makes the characters and objects (and text) look a bit too tiny on the Switch Lite, so for now I am enjoying Hades much more on the Xbox (reminds me I need to see if Transistor is available on Xbox).
I’ve used Steam Controller for couple of years but it was totally lacking support. When I started having issues with it I discovered that no one in the whole world repairs it, and there are no spare parts unless you’re willing to look for used controllers for a lot of money. Most of devs don’t add proper control schemes to it. Valve never made using it outside of Steam not a pain in the ass - that includes Steam games that launch 3rd party launcher.
I totally expect that at the start of sales I’d be able to launch certified games on Deck and the system will use recommended graphical and control options. Some of those will be provided by a community. But after a while I’ll have to spend an hour with a game yo configure it for Steam Deck so that performance and controls are right. It’s an adventure I could tolerate on my big stationary PC but handheld assumes plug and play.
Trying to understand pros and cons of the family plan, and any clarity would be helpful.
Let’s say I decide to do a family plan with my kid. As I currently understand it, this unlocks online features for all our collective games. In addition, I can then share my digital library of downloaded games with my kid as long as I am the primary account holder.
Now let’s imagine my kid gets given a digital license to a game from a friend as a birthday gift. Would the game be attached to my account even though it was gifted to my kid? And if so, let’s say my kid decides to disown me; would they lose access to the gifted digital license by no longer being on the family plan?
Well… CONSOLE assumes plug and play. PC has not, until now. Steam Deck’s aim is to be the most plug-and-play PC on the market. And, while it’s supported, I have no doubt it will be. You’re absolutely right that when support ends, it will be JUST a PC, with as much tinkering as that entails.
I suspect Steam Deck is going to be a massive hit and support will last longer than the 5 years you can expect for a console, but that’s just a guess! I could be wrong! In which case, I’m still delighted to have a powerful gaming PC in a handheld format.
Thraeg
4059
You’re conflating two different things here. Sharing your digital purchase library is not tied to the online subscription.
The way digital sharing works is that each Nintendo account has one Home system. While on your home system, you can play your downloaded games freely, and it doesn’t need to check with Nintendos servers so you don’t need Internet access.
If you log in your Nintendo account on someone else’s home system, you can download your purchases, but every time you play one, it goes online to authorize and confirm that your account isn’t playing somewhere else.
So to share games, you each have to create a profile on each other’s systems. Then, if you want to play a game that belongs to your kid, you use their profile on your system, your system must be online, and your kid’s system must not be online (can always use airplane mode if you want to play at the same time).
You can do this now, without the online subscription. The subscription, and being part of a designated family, doesn’t affect it except for enabling cloud saves, which is useful if playing on multiple systems.
As for getting a new digital game, it can be tied to either your account or your kid’s. Just log into the appropriate one when purchasing or redeeming.
Awesome - thanks for that explanation!
I’ve played some Civ6 on Switch and I’m a little disappointed.
I know CPU-heavy strategy game is not the best fit for the system but it feels like more could be done for adapting the game. Maybe some sort of dynamic resolution other games use for when you zoom out, cause the framerate becomes quite low. Smoother UI. In my 100+ turns on a small map I even had a crash, though restoring autosave helped. Maybe it’s better in docked mode but it kinda defeats the purpose.
Obligatory “you should play a good strategy game instead” ;)
Is there a good 4X on the Switch?
There’s Thea and Thea 2, but I don’t have them.
And yes, I’m not a big fan of Civ6, but the idea of portable Civ is attracting.
To me, that sentence exactly points out what Valve, and PC gamers at large, don’t get about the Switch’s success, in the same way they didn’t get it from all the successful consoles before.
There are periods in life when you don’t want to have to work to get something to work.
CraigM
4066
Jesus I have been mired in some deep ‘fuck EA’ nonsense the last day, on top of trying to recover my old Mincraft login for my son, and boy howdy is this true.
I think you can try https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/login and click on old Mojang account. I did this last year and it worked.
everything changed yet, yet again last month or something.
I just gave up on Minecraft.
CraigM
4069
Oh I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying. Thing is I had it under an e-mail address I have not had access to for a decade now. At some point I had transferred the login, I thought, to a newer one. But turns out, either I didn’t or it lost my account. I did get signed in on the website, but it says I don’t have it.
At this point it is lost to time.
That’s annoying, but that’s a service problem, not a PC problem. Good luck downloading a 10+ year old game purchase on a console.
Funnily enough, Minecraft works fine on consoles without jumping through those hoops.
Same could be said of Uplay, which has made me boycott Ubi Soft game for 10 years. I got the delightful surprise that it’s barely a thing on consoles, and just an opt-in one.
