The king is tired and must be taken to his chambers.

Running Ubuntu 25.04 with Wayland plasma so it’ll play nice with my rig, really happy so far. My login screen doesn’t display properly for some reason but it’s the last in a list of minor problems I’ve been getting through.

Big issue for me is the direction towards incentivised exclusivity. I can tolerate it on consoles (barely nowdays) because you’re paying someone to use your hardware instead of another, and you have to specifically develop for console hardware. That takes time and effort.

Different distribution platforms do not have such issues, and I don’t want exclusivity anywhere near PC gaming, unless you’re self publishing. Frankly if they weren’t banging on about steam using the industry standard % take, while they themselves are trying to undercut and use garbage tactics, I would have absolutely no problem with them, same as Ubisoft and EA’s garbage store.

I would say something like elden ring might be worth that price point given the breadth of the experience. Thing is, Elden ring is actually kinda too big. I like it, but a run through is like a multi week commitment, and I definitely don’t want that to be the norm, especially for fromsoft.

Ah yeah then that’s Vulkan

Hope you’re running on Vulkan, for me it went from 30ish fps to an illegally high number for some ungodly reason.

Prey 2018, when you break through the glass. The whole game was good, but that first bit was stellar.

Mostly due to lack of support from the developers, but that often reaches into willful obstruction. People are stubborn and clever, if it can run on windows it can likely run on Linux, but the devs will sometimes put willful roadblocks against things running on Linux. Allegedly to stop cheats, though since most anti cheat software does support Linux I think they just don’t want to deal with the OS.

It’s because of gear ratios. For each movement of the first gear , the second only moves a fraction of that, let’s say 1/20th. If the first gear moves at 1 full rotation a second, the next gear moves 1 rotation every 20 seconds, the next 1 every 400 seconds, and so forth. It adds up quite quickly, the tenth gear would take 16,235 years to make a full rotation in my example.

The picture above may or may not need more time than could exist in the universe to see any moment in that last gear.

Oh I completely get you, on a rail is a famously difficult spot for a lot of people. I think the lack of landmarks and long duration really hurts that chapter. If it’s any consolation it’s mostly a one off situation, and yeah black mesa doesn’t really have an equivalent.

Don’t feel too bad about it, the best bits are the first half or so I’d argue.

Which bits in particular? Because on one hand it’s a fairly linear design, but on the other there are some bits that can loop around themselves and objectives aren’t always obvious.

Oof yep I feel that one. I love the wheel and spoke moderately open world level design, but if you actually need to move the story it can be very difficult to find where the next bits are.

This was a roller coaster and I was engrossed the entire time.

So I’ve been playing Tropico 4 for a bit, and it looks pretty good. You’re always zoomed out, so you don’t need to have more than like 8 polygons for a limb.

I literally could not run cities Skylines 2 or KSP 2 at a good frame rate. Everything was modelled incredibly well and looks great, but that doesn’t mean shit if I can’t run the game. I strongly suspect that’s a big contributing factor.

In addition to this, they’re going to against their biggest competitors: the previous game. It’s literally the same game with more content, runs incredibly well by comparison, has a huge mod library, and is much cheaper to boot. Might not be as pretty, but it actually might not matter given what you’re playing.

I think there’s probably a lot of issues that contribute to this to be honest, but it feels like at it’s core it’s a fools errand to begin with.

I feel that, it was drilled into me in the 90s and I just it for most people as well.

It’s a little inconsistent, but don’t beat yourself up too much. Language is complicated and slow to change, same as our usage of it.

You know that’s not too unreasonable thinking about it, I’m pretty sure their proton setup works in a similar way

Exactly, on a steam deck a little software and firmware tinkering and you’re done. This is the good stuff, the stuff that shouldn’t work but you say “how about I do anyway”.

You know you’re actually right on the money, and it’s a little startling that it never occurred to me before. Shit.