Steam News & Updates

[DjchunKfunK]

I've played a few demos.

El Paso, Elswhere: (video on my channel) is aping Max Payne but I think the combat needs work. Worth a look at least.

A Tiny Sticker Tale: a neat little puzzle game where you use stickers to solve puzzles, reminds me a bit of Scribblenauts.

Hammerwatch II: a really fun ARPG recommend you check it out if you have any interest in the genre.

Ebernezer and the Invisible World: a castlevania with some great art that really leans into the Dickenisan aesthetic.

Cyberknights: Flashpoint: a little rough around the edges, it's a very early build, but a fun tactical game where your are planning heists and carrying them out. Emphasis is on steal whilst playing the missions with enemies only attacking when they are alerted to your presence. It's a really cool idea and I had fun playing it.

Testament: The Order of High Human: kind of a more linear Skyrim with some light puzzling and platforming. The combat is decent and it looks quite pretty. I was surprised at how well put together this was considering it's from a team of 15 people.

[Achtung Englander]

El Paso Elsewhere is a perfect Max Payne mod.

[Alan]

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steamdeck_2023

Bigger battery, wifi6 and oled

[Mantis]

Nice. That might be what makes me take the plunge.

[Alan]

The DF quick review was hugely positive. Amazing screen, cyberpunk battery life increasing by nearly an hour and around a 7% fps bump.

I wonder if the oled+front shell is something you could install on a gen 1 if you buy the parts.

[Mantis]

As far as I can see it's only currently available in the US and Canada. The older models are reduced whilst stocks last though, so hopefully that's indicative that they're phasing them out ready to roll out the new model as the standard one worldwide.

[eny]

I thought that too, but it looks like it is the special edition that is limited, the others will be available on the 16th.

[Alan]

SE looks nice too!

[Alan]

Theres some nice start up animations. Hades, Vamp Surv and Elden Ring ones are real nice. Quite like the minimalism of the Dead Cells one.

This lead me to have a look at the other profile customisation on their little store with optimism but its 90% anime girls that may or may not be getting shagged from just off screen.

[eny]

Lol:


https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/3 ... le_Bundle/

[Alan]

Valve banning Dota cheaters and smurfers by sending them a lump of coal for christmas

[Alan]

Family sharing now lets you play games on an account even if the owner of the account is currently playing something. It won’t let you play the same game they are but thats a massive improvement. Family groups are 4 people and the number of people that own a game is the number that can play at the same time. If 2 of the 4 own BG3 any two in the group can play BG3 at the same time.

Neat!

[Alan]

New Valve VR headset. Most interesting is that it’s a stand alone ARM based headset that runs x86 games. If any of you have used winlator (or gamehub etc..) you’ll know how impressive it is that hobby coders have managed to run Steam games on android (with achievements and cloud saves! I was in considering getting rid of my Deck, it’s that promising). The fact valve are doing this in house is making an arm steam deck tantalizing! Arm is just better than x86 for heat and power efficiency so it could be smaller and lighter which would be amazing!

[Raid]

I would much rather have a Steam-branded VR headset than the Meta-branded Quest 3 I've been using for the last couple of years. I hate Meta's interface, and I don't think it's worth repeating what a detestable company they are here, we all know it by now. But this thing is basically a Quest 3 with eye-tracking. I think it's a little more powerful, but they said in the Tested interview that it's about half the power of the Steam Deck (in terms of game performance, they specifically said that all of the system overheads are separate to that figure), so all of the talk about it being capable of running standalone PC games on the headset itself doesn't feel like much of a draw if the games they're talking about are more Stardew Valley than Cyberpunk. But the resolution, lenses, FOV, all sound to be basically the same as the Quest, and it only has monochrome passthrough cameras. The only advantage on the hardware side is the eye-tracking, which enables both foveated rendering on the game side, and foveated streaming on the hardware side - that last one's supposedly a big deal, but I haven't ever noticed any hitches with my Quest connected to a dedicated wifi 6 router.

But the kicker is that they're saying they're targeting the price as being a little below the Index (they're not announcing the pricing today). The Index is £919. The high-end Quest 3 is less than half that. People are going to slum it with Meta if their offering is £400-500 cheaper, and just use it as a Steam VR app launcher like I do. I really hope they're just being coy about the price, because I don't think eye-tracking is worth that much of a price increase.

In other news, they've also unveiled a new Steam Machine and Steam Controller 2. The former looks to be a perfectly nice little living-room console for PC games, but without pricing information it's hard to get excited for it. The Steam Controller 2 is... interesting. I really don't know about the touchpad placement, that doesn't look remotely comfortable, but really is anyone using those on their Steam Decks? I like that Valve has stuck with the concept, but I've just never seen much of a use case for them. I think I only ever use mine when I boot my Deck into Linux mode.

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/hardware

[Mantis]

The Steam Machine revival is the most interesting thing to me. Depending on price it could be a very tempting living room rig over bothering to upgrade the GPU on my main tower.