I’m visiting my home country on the other side of the world in a few months and I want to load up my steamdeck.

I’m thinking of getting deus ex but the collection is just a bit more. Are these games good?

What other games do you recommended for 55 hours of traveling?

Source.

Just published a deep-dive on Stellar Blade's toughest boss fights — including builds, skill paths, and hidden upgrade spots that actually help.

🔍 Covered in the guide:

How to beat bosses like Providence & Raven with perfect timing

Best SP combat builds (offense/defense balance)

[...]there's another story to be told here — and it's older and, if possible, even sadder. Microsoft has simply never been any good at running game studios.

The waste — of time, money, and human potential — is incalculable. And it's a sadly familiar story. In 2006, Microsoft acquired the legendary British developer Lionhead, only to close it ten years later after forcing the studio to chase fads it was ill-suited to, like motion control and live-service games. Rare, acquired for a then-record-breaking $375 million in 2002, has seemed to skirt close to a similar fate several times as it searched for a place within the Xbox family that made sense and played to its strengths. Pirate game Sea of Thieves has kept the developer afloat in recent years, but how much longer can that last?

Microsoft's original sin in this arena was its handling of Bungie. The studio was an inspired early acquisition that almost single-handedly made Xbox's reputation among gamers with its Halo series. But Microsoft responded to this success by stifling Bungie's creativity with a forced march of sequel production that ultimately drove the studio away: It bought itself out in 2007. The Halo brand never recovered from the loss, and the mismanagement of the caretaker studio founded to take it over, 343 Industries (now Halo Studios), was arguably even worse. It was never allowed to develop its own identity, and saddled with tasks — including maintaining its own game engine, and turning Halo into an ill-defined forever game — that were clearly beyond its capabilities.

The truth is that much of Microsoft's decision-making as a publisher seems to come from a place of insecurity. Burned by its experiences with Bungie, Lionhead, and Rare, the company began a partial retreat from first-party development under previous Xbox boss Don Mattrick. When the resulting weakness of its slate of games became all too apparent, Mattrick's successor Phil Spencer began a massive overcorrection, buying studios left, right, and center.

If the goal of the spending spree was to turn Xbox into a first-party powerhouse with system-selling exclusives to rival Nintendo and Sony, Microsoft has failed — or, arguably, overshot the mark. The acquisitions of Bethesda and Activision Blizzard brought it properties like Call of Duty, Warcraft, and The Elder Scrolls that were too big to make exclusive. Combined with a strategic shift away from consoles and toward PC, subscriptions, and cloud gaming, Microsoft has become something quite different: the biggest game publisher the world has ever seen, bigger than any platform. In that context, nurturing vanity projects like Everwild or resuscitating old IP like Perfect Dark simply isn't a priority.

Some notable quotes below:

Now, IGN has learned that the entire team for the MMO, codenamed "Blackbird," has been cut, amid layoffs that impacted several hundred individuals across the Cockeysville, MD-based ZeniMax Online Studios.

Speaking to multiple sources familiar with the project, IGN has learned that Blackbird was to be a new, sci-fi IP. Though it had been in development since 2018, the length of time it was taking to make the game was expected, as ZeniMax was building an entirely new game engine for it.

In the last year, sources tell IGN that pre-production was going well, and the team was actively ramping up in the hope of moving into full production soon. Xbox had approved the scaling up, and some individuals were being moved onto the project from other teams such as The Elder Scrolls Online, as well as some people absorbed from the shuttering last year of Arkane Austin.

At this point, I don't even know what Xbox is trying to do anymore. An MMO made by the team who made ESO and pre-production seemed to do well? Cancel that yeah!!!

cross-posted from: https://feddit.org/post/15197104

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

Stop Killing Games is an European Citizens Initiative aiming to keep games playable even after their developers and publishers have stopped supporting it.

To get the initiative onto the EUs agenda so it has the chance to become EU law, it has to both reach 1 million signatures total and minimum thresholds in at least 7 countries. Now both of those goals have been reached. But that's no reason to stop signing! Some signatures will get thrown out in the validation phase because the signee made a mistake. So keep signing and show the world just how many people are in favour of saving videogames.

This is more for my console friends out there; maybe even Playstation specific because I haven't so much as touched an Xbox since the 360.

Do you prefer Performance Mode or Quality Mode? I'm really curious to know if anyone even uses Quality Mode. Whatever you use, what kinds of games are you usually playing, and why do you prefer the mode you prefer?

I am 100℅ Performance Mode, personally. The only thing I could really play in Quality Mode without being bothered by the low FPS is like Civilization or a card game. If I have to actually move a character around, I can not stand for less than 60fps. I will happily sacrifice everything that makes a game look good to make it run smooth as butter. But I do tend to like action games and especially PVP. Every millisecond matters.

Doesn't this run counter to EU's rule that all small electronic devices - which the Switch 2 falls under - need to have USB-C chargers? In the sense that even though the plug is USB-C shaped, it's not compliant to the standard?

Curious about Death Stranding 2? What's really going on with Higgs, Fragile, and that eerie doll? Join the discussion — theories, leaks, and chaos await.

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

Stop Killing Games is an European Citizens Initiative aiming to keep games playable even after their developers and publishers have stopped supporting it.

To get the initiative onto the EUs agenda so it has the chance to become EU law, it has to both reach 1 million signatures total and minimum thresholds in at least 7 countries. Those national thresholds have been thresholds have been reached. Now it's all about getting to 1 million signatures total.

Even if you are from a country that already reached the threshold you can still sign. Your signature counts to the 1 million goal.

The Steam Sale started a few days ago and people have been doing their recommendations. The Adventure Games Podcast has a nice page with their recommendations, Miri Teixeiri has a good recommendation thread on bluesky, but now I want to do one because that’s what blogs are for. As usual, I also think you should consider buying games on Itch.io but they’re not doing a sale right now. I’m also missing a ton of stuff because I can only write so much, so if you enjoy these then keep looking around. Despite the occasional discourse about it being dead, there’s constantly new games coming out and I even wrote a post a few weeks ago about all the releases this year. So in no order really, here’s a list of recommendations that are more focused on recent releases.