I hadn't noticed how it was worded, I assumed it was just a free weekend, but looks to be free forever? Seems like a good solution if they are indeed releasing CK3 - make the older one free, but just the base game for now.

People have been speculating about CK3 for a while already, but recent updates really make it seem likely. Holy Fury did a big pass of the game, reviewing a lot of stuff, Iron Century was completely free, and it has been almost a year without a paid DLC... the game was given for free as an experiment a few times already, it had a very complete humble bundle, and so on. I think the only question is whether they will announce/release something else first, but I think it is definitely coming.

And frankly, CK2 has a few things where the engine/the basic game mechanics themselves could use improvements. The UI feels outdated in a way that simple layout changes wouldn't work, and a few systems like minor titles or holdings have moved in a direction very different from where they started - I can't help but wonder how provinces would work if they didn't have to use workarounds to add hospitals, nomad counties, republican palaces and so on.

I'm still hoping the "new grand strategy game" they are going to announce is something new, though, and not just a sequel to a "current gen" game like CK2.

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Just today I finally reached Big Boss 1 on Dota Underlords, which is nice.

I have recently decided to give Pillars of Eternity a try and its really good, but I am not really into RPGs. I'll try to finish this one though.

And I have recently gone back to Crusader Kings 2. I think I'll do a super-religious France roleplay run and maybe get a few achievements.

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Quoting: ShmerlAnother detail was clarified, Stadia is using amdvlk.

I don't plan to use it, but I'm interested in how developers who release for Stadia view their options to release their games for regular desktop Linux in result, since Stadia will bear the heavy lifting of the porting work. Interviewing some developers about this could provide interesting insights.

We can probably dismiss legacy publishers right away. Even with above, they simply don't care about Linux users so I don't expect any of them to change their nasty stance because of Stadia to which they run for Google's money. However other developers (for example Paradox) can be more Linux friendly, and since their concern was expenses (rather than greed for more profits), Stadia can provide them the justification to release for Linux proper.

I think there is a small group of developers that stand in the intersection between "it isn't worth it to port our engine to Linux or move away from D3D" and "we would be willing to support a desktop version of the game for the small Linux user base". Oh, and of course, also those that make heavy enough games to justify using Stadia.

For those that already use Unity or Unreal and still don't release for Linux, this won't matter.

For those that don't release on Linux because the support costs are too big, this won't matter either.

Frankly, I expect that more people are going to just say "if you use Linux, just play on Stadia instead of buying the game" than releasing for Linux. Which is stupid, as there are way too many reasons to not use Stadia, not everyone will have a good enough connection and it won't even be available in every country.

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Quoting: GuestI'll start with this line, quoted from the Steam forum:
"You bought a completed game and that is what you got, it's yours forever!"

The problem I have there is that although not labelled as early access, it's clearly not a completed game. Digital distribution services have made it easy now to release a game for money now, patch in features later to "complete" the game. By and large this is a good thing, but there are some gotchas mostly centered around the game originally bought is no longer the game that is available.
Some of this the digital distribution service could help with. Some of it the developer must directly have a hand in. An update breaks the game? Oh, sorry, we don't support the game (which was paid for) anymore, too bad - and there's no way to obtain the original working game. That's really not customer friendly, even if it's unintentional.

There is a simpler way of putting it: if the game is "completed", why would you ever release an update/patch?

And does any developer actually want a model where the first version they release is definitive, with no chance to ever fix any bugs found? Are they capable of doing enough QA for that to work?

For a long time now, post-release support is an integral part of any software. It is expected and necessary. No, an outdated build of the game is not enough. No, "it works in Proton" is not the same.

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This is particularly bad. If you say you are dropping Linux support because of Apple's policies on their system, you sound ignorant on top of unreliable.

Yes, supporting more platforms can be hard, it's not always worth it. Developers have to decide that before you actually start selling it for that platform, though. An then HopFrog goes on to tell people that developers are leaving Linux en masse because of some bullshit that Apple is doing (which is bullshit alright, but they should have known about that before...).

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Quoting: chr

Quoting: SupayIf the new launcher is there when it updates, I am going to cry.

In the latest EU4 dev diary among the very few things they said was

QuoteSome Linux users find the game failing to start unless they launch the game directly, which is a high priority for us to fix as soon as possible.

Yay! We're a high priority as soon as possible!

Today they released a hotfix for EU4 that supposedly fixes the issue. I won't be able to try for a while (not today, maybe not until Saturday), but I assume it will be fixed for next release.

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Yeah, for SteamPlay the way to go is to treat whitelisted games as "Linux" and non-whitelisted games as... not.

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I don't particularly care about Ashes, and I think they were transparent enough in this case.

But if their next games are indeed built with Linux support (rather than ported afterwards), that would be very exciting. Stardock makes some pretty good strategy games, and are one notorious gap in the otherwise great niche of "Linux strategy gameing".

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Nice. I was a bit afraid that the option to filter by OS was deliberately removed for some reason, but it seems they were at least willing to add it after they noticed we (and I think it was pretty much everyone that uses Linux) missed it. But I wish they did consider the official support even with SteamPlay though (not necessarily native-only, whitelisted games could show up as well).

I also liked the Home button a lot, while not strictly necessary it was very convenient. Hoping they bring it back in some form.

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I didn't quite realize it was this advanced in development. Once in a while I fired it to give it a try (and see if I had any feedback), but I couldn't get to grips with the early-stage builds because they were even less welcoming than usual (since obviously tutorials and such would come later) and clearly unfinished and not very fun. However, it did always work well on Linux (look at that, support even during alpha/beta/early access!) and the improvements were very visible every time I tried.

I'm really looking forward to the "release version" of this game (and whatever happens afterwards as well). It has the potential to fix many issues of the fist AI War, which is a great game already. I hope it can get more traction when it releases, as it has slipped through the radars a bit during crowdfunding and development...

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