Quoting: TheSHEEEPIf a game makes you think "this would be so much easier if I was just using a mouse", you know something's fishy.

This makes no sense.

Obviously, reloading a weapon is so much easier if you just press a button instead of ejecting the clip, taking another one and inserting it. If only soldiers on the battlefield could do that.

REVIII is obviously so much easier with a pad or k/m than in VR. You just press buttons and your character does things automatically. Still, the VR version exists and has very different mechanics and is great. If you want to just sit on the couch and press buttons go right ahead, don’t diss people who enjoy doing something else.

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPBut playing the VR-free version is just going to make you feel bad about it, VR and non-VR games are just made differently and you'll lose so much while not gaining anything, really.

What people are gaining is the ability to play the latest (and let's face it, quite possibly the last) chapter in only the best game series ever. Apart from being willing/able to shell out money for a VR kit, lots of people are simply unable to use it, because glasses or nausea or other problems.

I fully agree Alyx without VR is bound to be a fraction of its glorious self, but if the choice is to never experience the brilliance or to experience its shadow on a cave wall, I'll say go for it and kudos to these guys for making it happen.

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That’s great, more people should play it. I wonder if it holds up without VR, however.

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Well, Microsoft did a ton of heavy lifting with Windows starting with 95 to convince devs to make games for it, including making some, apparently, excellent tools. There was no such push for Linux, and frankly no one to make it, until Valve decided they’d be the ones. Windows had no competition, Linux has a huge entrenched competitor that seems impossible to uproot.

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I bought their dock and all was fine, for whatever it's worth.

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Quoting: mr-victoryXbox & Playstation release a new console every 6-7 years with usually one hardware refresh in between. These refreshes do not increase performance but usually make the console smaller and decrease power draw by using smaller nm chips. We could see a "Steam Deck Slim" with same horsepower and chassis but longer battery life.

Last console gen had a performance-increasing hardware refresh. I wasn't happy about this development, I hope this gen doesn't continue the trend. PS3 had 3 versions, each mostly smaller and more power efficient than the last, but no speed improvements. Now even the Switch had a small performance/battery life improvement with the OLED version.

Better screen (same res)/longer battery life on the Steam Deck is definitely what should happen as early as late this year. Then everyone can make the decision whether to upgrade or not.

Ideally, Valve have enough clout in the PC game market to convince game makers they need to make their new releases run fine (40 fps, please) on the SD for at least a couple of years. Either way, I'll be fine getting an SD2 with significant improvements come late 2024/2025.

If the screen is bigger, 1200p can make sense provided the hardware is good enough to run current (current current, not necessarily when SD2 comes out current) games mostly at native res. If the screen is the same size, 800p will be fine (though Youtube will explode with rage and Valve probably need to take it into account). Perhaps something like 1600x1000 can be a middle ground for a slightly bigger screen?

Going for more power without ensuring at least a little better battery life is a no-no, so that's definitely a requirement.

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Those TDK CDs were (are?) very HQ. The last time I tried reading a few from 20 years ago they were all fine.

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Yeah, that was weird. For a second I thought it was a subtitle and the paragraph below was missing.

After the patch I just went to the place with the most slowdown (Mining Floor 2 looking back towards the elevator) where fps goes down to around 10 for me. No improvement there, so I'm guessing perf isn't any better than it was. It was already perfectly playable if far from perfect.

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It worked for me. With both devices on wifi, it was slower than just downloading off Valve’s servers.

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Quoting: Purple Library GuyIs is just me, or does the phrase

Quoteloading throbber

sound kind of rude?

It doesn't sound rude, it sounds enticing.

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