Valve has announced some more updates to Steam Labs, their new testing area for features that may make it into Steam officially at some point.
Firstly, there's something entirely new. You can opt-in to the new Search experiment which will tweak the way you see and interact with lists across the entire Steam store, as opposed to being limited to the Labs area. It adds in: infinite scroll; price and sale filters; the ability to hide items on your wishlist or items you already own or you've ignored and multiple updates to the way tag filtering works.
I actually really like what they've done with the search, it's quite handy and should make finding games you want a lot easier.
The Micro Trailers experiment also saw a big update, which has enabled it for all Steam games. On top of that, it will also let you now pick a tag to view these 6 second trailers. It's a pretty heavy page though and it even crashed my Firefox tab when turning on Auto Play, although a refresh seemed to work. Once these make it onto store pages, I can imagine them being quite useful to get a quick glance.
Valve have also now formally announced the new Deep Dive experiment being made by game developer Lars Doucet, based on his Diving Bell prototype which is actually really cool. You click a game, it then highlights that and surrounds it with other possible games you might be interested in. A really sweet idea! I spoke to Doucet on Twitter (see the replies to this), where they confirmed they will be speaking to Valve about making sure it respects your Steam platform preferences so hopefully those who only want to see Linux titles can have that.
See all on Steam Labs, with the update blog post here.
The fact that Valve are actually bringing in game developers and others who've made interesting tools, goes to show how they're changing and trying to react quicker to the needs of both users and developers. It's good to see, hopefully more improvements to come.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I hate when I see a new game which looks interesting in the picture, only to go to youtube and see that's another top view strategy game or something like this.
Quoting: BielFPsI wish Valve could force developers to put at least one actual image/video of the gameplay in the store page.Hmm? Got an example of this? All Steam games pictures needs to be from gameplay.
I hate when I see a new game which looks interesting in the picture, only to go to youtube and see that's another top view strategy game or something like this.
Quoting: Liam DaweHmm? Got an example of this? All Steam games pictures needs to be from gameplay.
XCOM 2 it's a good example.
By just looking at the pictures, I could think that's a third person shooter game (Like Mass Effect for example) but watching a gameplay it shows that's a top view turn-based game. Same case with some MMORPGs that by pictures look like Black Desert, but gameplay show it's another top view like some Diablo clones.
In my opinion, those 6 seconds MicroTrailers could be used to show actual gameplay footage (with ingame Hud, combat system, etc), then avoiding this situation.
offtopic: I think this is the first time you answer/quote me here :P
Last edited by 14 on 6 September 2019 at 4:54 pm UTC
Philadelphus Sep 7, 2019
Quoting: BielFPsI wish Valve could force developers to put at least one actual image/video of the gameplay in the store page.I have to quibble on a technicality: of the sixteen pictures there, if we discount the ones without any HUD, there's still eight showing gameplay. The other eight still look like they're from the game—they look like the enemy reveal animations or action cam shots when your soldier goes to shoot—though it's possible they might have the HUD turned off, I'm not sure. So technically at least half the pictures show actual gameplay situations, if not all of them. :)
[…]
XCOM 2 it's a good example.
Quoting: BielFPsBy just looking at the pictures, I could think that's a third person shooter game (Like Mass Effect for example) but watching a gameplay it shows that's a top view turn-based game.That said, you do have a point: the actual selection is pretty atrocious. Only two shots show the strategic view, and barely anything (three shots) is shown of the base-building and management portion of the game (which altogether make up at least a third of the game). There are two shots of the HUD from when about to shoot an enemy (a big part of the game, as any player can attest!), but—and I agree this is a problem—there's no shot of the standard view of a random turn with soldiers and aliens scattered about the map.
My guess is Firaxis picked the shots for players of the first XCOM who were following the pre-release news, already knew what the game would be like generally, and wanted to see the cool new looks…which, of course, leaves it pretty poor at intimating the actual nature of the game for someone who isn't familiar with it.
On another note, that new search looks great—finally I can simply sort by "games which have on-line co-op on Linux" when looking for a new game for me and a friend to play. :D
ProfessorKaos64 Sep 7, 2019
Quoting: 14My gut reaction to Micro Trailers: they will continue the shrinking of attention spans of entertainment consumers.While true, Valve are just like any other company, they need to go with what's going to help them pull in the sales so it does make sense.
Quoting: Liam DaweI wasn't trying to blame Valve exclusively. It's a cultural + social observation. Must be an age thing.Quoting: 14My gut reaction to Micro Trailers: they will continue the shrinking of attention spans of entertainment consumers.While true, Valve are just like any other company, they need to go with what's going to help them pull in the sales so it does make sense.
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