For me the game still isn’t “fine.” It’s a lot more stable now but even with a completely fresh install and save I’m still running into a lot of the problems that was present during launch like all the civilians looking the same regardless of the setting you’re on, NPCs running into each other and then choking up sections of the map. I just keep running into these NPC blobs where they just stand there and do nothing. There’s still things they said they fixed like npcs materializing out of nowhere.

I’ve gotten away with even harder to run games on a HDD but even if it is on an SSD, I’ve found it to be inconsistent plus only BG3 acts up compared to everything else I have going.

The biggest requirement, imo, is probably just having an SSD for the game. There’s a LOT of pop ins and textures that just don’t load until a few minutes later. It does have a “slow HDD mode” but it hasn’t really done much from what I can see.

It’s not just Roblox allowing casino sites and running unregulated markets. They allow for porn on their platform and also allowing child predators and child exploitation on their platforms. I’m not sure why parents even allow their kids to go on the platform since Roblox doesn’t care about it.

People Makes Games did 2 videos a year ago digging deeper into it.

1. Predatory Actions
2. Exploitation

A modern alternative is Songs of Conquest. It has a pretty active community but it’s always good to have more players.

Trials of Mana. Actually the whole Mana series were completely unique and very innovative when they first released. But the combination of story telling, party building, and combat system still hasn’t been topped for me. The games are something I always have ready to emulate at all times. Fingers crossed they decide to remake the rest of the Mana series. Legend of Mana needs some love even though I remember most people weren’t really keen on building their own world.

The Tales series was probably the closest before the switched from 2D to 3D. The switch, I thought, took away a lot of what made them stand out from other jrpgs in the market.

My close 2nd is Legend of Dragoon since it actually changed the combat system in a really meaningful way. Legend of Legaia also did something similar but I thought the storytelling was better in Legend of Dragoon.

Soul Sacrifice still needs some love. It’s only downfall was releasing on such a niche system like the Vita. It actually moves the MH formula forward in a really interesting manner by forcing you to make really interesting choices in the story.

The anti-glare is definitely worth it and it’s also very noticeable outside. The other option is that you could just upgrade the screen from ifixit if you’re also going to be upgrading your storage anyways.

All versions of the deck allow you to upgrade the SSD. There’s actually a lot more vendors selling 2230 nvme drives now. I’d recommend staying away from SABRENT Rocket since their support is nonexistent and they also have a high failure rate. The Corsair MP600 mini and Micron 2400 is a better option.

Soul Sacrifice had a system where you had to pick between 3 types of stats to build around which affects which spells you could use. After each mission you would have to pick between saving someone or sacrificing them which affects your stats.

If you chose power, you end up becoming a glass cannon with spells that drain your own hp
if you chose def, you end up with spells that supported you and the higher your hp the more damage you did. The trade off is your damage is mostly low.
if you chose neutral then you were pretty balanced.

All of these were affected also by the factions you were part of and which spells you have access to.

just gotta understand if u do get battlebit, itll only work until the next major patch when they implement faceit anti cheat

It’s only if they opt in and also only if you’re ok with not being able to save or keep your progress.

In the servers browser I’ve noticed some community ones but there are only a few and mostly in different regions. Hopefully they will open it up for more players to host soon.

With open world games, I don’t care where I go or what I do most of the time because it’s just a giant sandbox for me. My issue though is when I return to something so vast, like in Pillars of Eternity, after a while I don’t know what to do and I’m overwhelmed by all these quests to keep track of. Even with games like Subnautica I need to focus on just beating it in a few weeks. Then theres Factorio… I’ll never understand what I was previously up to because suddenly all my previously laid out plans seemed so dumb.

For anyone playing it on Steam Deck, the devs are going to be adding Face It Anti Cheat which is incompatible with linux devices. And for anyone who needs virtualization for work and other activities, Face It Anti Cheat forces you to turn it off from bios before playing the game.

It’s a great game but there IS a catch that wasn’t mentioned.

The devs plan on implementing one of the more intrusive Anti-Cheats (Face It Anti Cheat) which doesn’t work on Linux which also stops all Steam Deck users from playing. It also forces you to disable virtualization on windows. I can’t recall the last time I had to go into bios to disable an option to turn off important windows features.

According to their stream, it’s non-negotiable and will be added regardless of what the community wants. But they did mention that community servers would be able to pick which Anti Cheat they wanted to use?

It’s the one device where it’s a joy to use the dpad. After using it I’m still trying to find one that comes close to how good the dpad functions.

I dunno wot else to say lol I have a 5800x3D with the 6800.

I think you mightve misread some stuff because they mention directly that even if you disable that feature through group policy it won’t work.

"However, now it seems the company is taking this a bit further and is forcing driver updates for Nvidia and AMD graphics cards, even if you have this feature disabled via Group Policy Editor. "

"A Twitter account named @ghost_motely posted screenshots showing a Windows 11 machine’s Group Policy Editor with driver updates disabled and a fresh Nvidia driver installed recently, seemingly ignoring this setting. "

I do know how to fix these problems myself. It’s just a bad experience since Adrenaline refuses to even boot unless you reinstall the drivers yourself manually.

There’s 10 campaigns and each campaign has it’s own unique events that will always occur alongside the random events. The random ones helps with replayability and it allows you to explore ways to create a specific character because it can drop extremely strong weapons or give you unique traits. A lot of the replayability comes from creating and building unique characters. Some events could technically hinder you but it gives you choices. There’s also modding which could add longevity to the game.

Co-op is fine for the most part. It’s really simple, you can either drop into an existing game or create a new run with new characters or import characters from previous campaigns. It’s a bit similar to For the King if you’re familiar with it. The host keeps all the progress in their machine and no one else can access it unless the host is around.

The Maps, Events, and Relationships are all randomized so lot of the same events might pop up. They’ve added more events but you still see a lot of the same pop up every run. It’s just one of those games where you can’t take it too seriously because RNG can really screw around if you’re trying to roleplay. We’ve had a few guys find a character they wanted to start a relationship with but cuz of RNG, the same two guys ended up married to each other which was pretty hilarious.

We had a lot of stutters in the main hub and throughout the missions with a lot of nasty screen tearing in DRG unfortunately. Not sure what’s going on there since we both have pretty decent rigs. I’m hitting over 244fps on it consistently except for when the strange stuttering happens with vsync off.

There were reports that Group Policy didn’t prevent Win 11 from overriding your drivers just last week.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/windows-10-and-11-are-ignoring-update-settings-and-installing-gpu-drivers
It’s been a frustrating experience overall in regards to drivers.

The F2P stuff rarely if ever get me but some of the premium games are very nice. Teeny Titans, Rebuild, Dungeon Maker, Dungeon Princess, Dungeon Squad, Pocket City, and Monument Valley are all very good games, especially on mobile.

The only F2P game that is keeping my interest is Marvel Snap but the monetization is really pushing me off.