Ars Technica is a pretty well respected tech news site, which is basically the only reason I considered sharing this to begin with. They cite that we know a new Half Life game is in development, and the critical role that half life played in the foundation of steam as a game platform in general.

Overall it’s a much better article than the title would otherwise suggest.

I think it would be cool as a freebie to steamOS users. Would encourage people to try out installing steamOS to get the game for free.

Could either be that they just need to try it once to claim the game, or the game is free to play as long as they stay on Linux/steamOS to encourage them to use it long enough to finish the game.

AI upscaling is cool when it lets older and weaker hardware play modern games, but I don’t like the wave of modern poorly optimized games that use it as a crutch to be playable at all.

It’s mostly UE5 games, but now we also have RE engine performing terribly on MH Wilds. There’s also games like Indiana Jones that now have mandatory ray tracing for all the lighting.

What mods are you using?

Some games when installed with heroic will need additional windows components installed before they work. When you select a game in heroic, it has an option to use winetricks to install missing components, but the trick is figuring out what it is you need to install. Unfortunately I don’t have a perfect method for this, checking protonDB and searching google are the best ways I know of to identify what missing package is needed.

Recently played through Little Kitty Big City and Thank Goodness You’re Here from a recent fanatical bundle, and both were a joy to play.

Currently I’m starting to play through Psychonauts 2. It’s been a long time since I played the first one. I love some of the surreal level design, but some other parts of the design feel dated. I think playing 3D platformers like Mario Odyssey have set a really high bar for the genre, and Psychonauts 2’s gameplay feels a bit dated at times.

Awesome, thanks!

This is a pretty good writeup, would you consider cross-posting it to !steamdeck@sopuli.xyz?

It Takes Two was definitely worth it, so I’m hoping this game will be too.

Yeah, it doesn’t make any sense for repairs when you can buy a new 256GB for just $50.

The stock comes and goes, but you can also buy the 64GB refurbished model for $279 as well.

I want a real remastered version of Mario 64 DS. I loved it a lot as a kid, and it was absolutely packed with extra content.

When ifixit originally leaked repair part prices, they actually did have a motherboard listed as a replacement part that was intended to be purchasable. However, it was priced at $350, which obviously isn’t worth it compared to the price of a full deck (especially when on sale).

It’s possible they could sell it for cheaper now that the Deck’s production volume is higher, but basically with the normal Deck’s being originally priced to sell at a loss, major repair parts like the motherboard cost too much individually to be worth buying at standard price + ifixit markup.

I just remember that when the steam deck was announced in 2021, I was excited for it, but I was extremely skeptical of their claims that most steam games would run on it. Linux game compatibility was really hit or miss at the time, and it didn’t seem possible that it would improve that much by the release date. I know the groundwork was already in place for a lot of the foundational projects, but those months before the release were absolutely incredible for seeing proton mature and actually start working on most everything.

Hopefully wine would have gotten here eventually, but I really think that valve funding the development of stuff like DXVK and proton was absolutely key for the fantastic state of Linux gaming now. The big question is how much of valve funding development of those projects was with the steam deck in mind, or if they had something else in mind.

The original DXVK is mostly thanks to one guys obsession with nier automata, but after his initial work on it, it was valve who hired him and has funded it’s development.

So a lot of DXVK working as well as it does was in preparation for the Steam Deck.

I’ve been a Linux PC gamer for 10+ years now, and the months between the steam deck being announced and released saw a huge improvement in game compatibility.

The only catch there is that installing mods can be tricky depending on the game and method. Steam workshop mods and games with integrated mod support (BG3, DRG, etc) are super easy to install mods for, but the mod installation process for many other games can vary on difficulty.

Hopefully this will all change with with the rise of more official Linux mod loaders like the new Nexus mods app.

Their big thing is that the new steam deck 2 has to be a significant performance increase over the existing steam deck, and that’s not really an option yet

Unfortunate. I really enjoyed MH Rise on my deck. My desktop can run it, so I could stream it, but I don’t really feel like paying full price for a game that won’t run fully portable.

Agreed, the industry has lots of tricks for doing authentic looking lighting and reflection, that can be done at a fraction of the performance impact. One day we’ll be at a point where hardware raytracing makes sense, but I don’t think we’re there yet.

most of the time turning on the AI upscaling makes things run worse and I don’t even understand that

My understanding is that DLSS/FSR are usually converting GPU load into a lesser CPU load. But if you’re already bottlenecked by your CPU, using the upscalers will hurt your performance instead.

Generally in arch you can set Arabic keyboard layout with the command setxkbmap ara,us. If you’re wanting to change the keyboard layout in game mode though that will probably require something else.