How are they a gatekeeper? Near monopoly sure. But they don’t force companies to only publish on Steam. They don’t have restrictive rules. I’m not sure what gate they are keeping.

They were released everywhere in the US for a similar reason. Towns wanted squirrels for the furry aesthetic. Before squirrels just hung out in the forest.

Fire up some Pick Axe Pete

As someone who owns an LG C1, not a single DP in sight.

As others have mentioned, there are two schools of thought.

Crisp 4K rendering, no jagged lines, higher details added in textures, etc

Or emulating the look of a CRT by using high density displays to create the same look.

https://youtu.be/-B5ebucZ69s?si=0lDLAWdMlN77VQen goes into it a bit. This shows off a device for actual consoles. But the same principal applies when doing it in software for emulators.

“Sure, you can do everything it does with a phone”

No, you can’t do everything with a phone. A phone doesn’t have the same radios, GPIO for expandability, IR transceiver, etc. Not to mention the radios a phone does have doesn’t like it when you start forcing it to do fun things.

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.

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.

Dang, I’ve only had one crash.

Yes which is why I chose Vulkan over DX11. But depending on the Vulkan implementation for a specific game, sometimes converting DX to Vulkan might function better.

That’s weird, I do get the black boxes as well, but a much smaller portion of my screen. What resolution are you running? I’m at 4K.

I’ve been using Vulkan in Linux with an AMD card. Seems mostly fine except the occasional black boxes during cut scenes (about 15% of the edge of the screen). I haven’t tried DX11 yet.

I think we’ll be in bad shape when you can’t trust any opinions about products, media, politics, etc. Sure, shills currently exists, so everything you read already needs skepticism. But at some point bots will be able to flood very high quality posts. But these will of course be lies to push a product or ideology. The truth will be noise.

I do think this is inevitable, and the only real guard would be to move back to smaller social circles.

The Longing is great! Very unique game.