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… You… don’t think they already locked in at least an initial tranch of component supply, retooled their factory and warehousing spaces, and have been churning some number of these things out… for some weeks or months already?
You normally don’t uh, instantly assemble tens or hundreds of thousands of computers, the week before product launch… you work out an entire time line of prep for sourcing, assembly and storage, you do that quarters before hand, and then start doing assembly, and then release when you think you have enough to sate initial demand.
And you’ll even do parts of that before the design spec itself is totally finalzed in all ways, often times.
Also…the Steam Machine uses LPDDR5 RAM, as the Steam Deck does.
Its already, literally physically soldered onto the mainboard.
I… just went to went to Moby and actually ctrl+f searched for the names that Sawyer specifically mentions in his the reddit thread that I linked to.
And I at least already knew Sawyer, Avellone, and Gonzalez, because I’m a pretty big fan of New Vegas.
I’m quite familiar with Sawyer, because…
… Sawyer famously released his own mod for New Vegas, which is basically ‘Hardcore Mode ++’, literally his originally intended design that was not able to be fully stuck to in the main developement cycle of the game.
Other people have since taken his mod further and expanded on it, but you can still find the original though, up on NexusMods.
Just literally named JSawyer mod.
… Hes on Outer Worlds 2.
As basically a design lead, as opposed to total project lead.
Yeah, sure, he could have requested that himself.
It still basically is a demotion, its less responsibilities, not in charge of the whole project.
In fairness, he’s getting pretty old, I don’t blame him.
But the main point here is… its pretty much just Sawyer, out of names people might actually know, who’s the only one from New Vegas, who is on the Outer Worlds 2 team.
Josh Sawyer, Chris Avellone, and John Gonzalez were responsible for disproportionate amounts of New Vegas’s overall design, world building, and writing.
Gonzalez seems to have done a disproportionate amount of the writing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/zohe1a/josh_sawyer_clarifies_who_created_what_in_new/
Of those 3, only Sawyer is on Outer Worlds 2, as the Studio Design Director, a relative demotion from being Project Lead in New Vegas.
Of those Sawyer specifically names… we still have himself, Jesse Farrel, and Jeff Hugses, on the Outer Worlds 2 team.
John Gonzalez, Chris Avellone, Eric Fenstermaker, Akil Hooper, Rob Lee, Charles Staples, Travis Stout, Steph Newland, Mat MacLean, and George Ziets, are all absent.
So basically, almost everyone is gone other than Josh Sawyer and two area designers/writers, who I am guessing wrote the stories and dialogue specific to the areas they designed (for New Vegas).
John Gonzalez was probably the most invovled in actually writing the most important parts of New Vegas, he doesn’t appear to be on the Outer Worlds 2 team.
At one point, Valve accidentally broke blinking in HL2 era versions of the Source engine.
Like uh, there was originally, for all humanoid NPCs with visible eyes, some kind of timer and functionality that would cause NPCs to blink, at semi-random, semi-regular intervals.
Somewhere around approximately 2010-12, I think?.. they broke this, and no NPCs would or could blink anymore, outside of totally scripted sequences involving blinking as or eye movement as a deliberate part of some fully blocked out, pre-scripted skit.
… Last I checked, roughly a decade later… they appear to have fixed it.
But I remember this being broken for like, years.
You may also consider a vertical mouse.
There are cheap but decent ones on Amazon, Kysona and Nulea (I think? sp?) make some, and there are also rather expensive ones.
Basically, you hold the mouse as if you are holding a cup of soda, like you’re pounding your fist on the table, not palming the table.
They were basically mainly marketed as ergonomic, for carpal tunnel sufferers… but when you think about it, a very long gaming session, everyday, all the time, whatever… yeah the ergonomics do actually make more sense, they’re fairly close to the same grip and shape of many trackball mice.
Alternatively, get a new Steam Controller when they come out in a few months.
Its a controller; sticks, buttons, pads triggers, also has two little uh, kinda like laptop track pads.
Its basically a Steam Deck w/o the screen in the middle, but lighter and more ergonomic.
I play older shooters (often emulated) with sticks, newer ones with a pad.
As far as a third person shooter that works well with controllers?
Uh… Splinter Cell Chaos Theory?
You can get that on Steam.
Metal Gear Solid V?
Those are both probably narrative driven though, MGSV has multiple open worlds, basically?
???
To all 3 points: Fair enough!
Yeah, Caravan is the card game from New Vegas, it probably would not be too difficult to replicate its AI for playing against NPCs.
Its… kind of like comepetetive, 2 player Solitaire, if that makes any sense.
Played with standard cards, not like TCG cards, you try to build 3 different ‘caravans’ of between 21 and 26 total… so, sorta like blackjack/21 in that aspect… but, face cards can be played on either your caravans or your opponents, and they do special things.
The other element of Caravan is that you can play with custom decks, but you have to have a card from a different art style of deck to be able to have duplicates.
So… its… played with normal cards, but each player is playing their own deck.
In New Vegas, this integrates with the rest of the game, as it incentivizes exploration.
If you have a decent deck and know how to play Caravan, its basically an infinite money cheat, you can clean out many NPC Caravan players.
For a card game only version… maybe you could make it so that you can just win certain ‘prize pool’ cards, sort of like how Pokemon works.
Maybe instead of anteing up caps, you could mix in anteing up some of your own cards, and the NPC has to match in kind.
TeamSpeak and Ventrilo still exist, Mumble does too, and Tox.
Trade offs for features and functionality with all of those, but I’m fairly sure those do all run on both Windows and Linux, at least, the latter 2 are open source, and the first two, well, you run your own dedi voice server, so that’s at least less bad than Discord.
Hell, back in like, 2009, me and a friend group just had an eternal Skype group call, used that for gaming voice comms and general chat.
EDIT: Also, apropo of nothing… how’s that card game framework going?
This whole year I’ve been mostly doing PT, recovering from injuries, hard to do serious game dev with a torqued up wrist arm and shoulder, but I am finally starting to get decent function back…
… it might be fun to try to basically remake Caravan from New Vegas, you think that would be possible in your framework?
TitanFall 2: Its the Portal 2 engine, but better. Also runs on almost anything these days, looks good, could easily be a basis for a ton of different kind of multiplayer shooters via modding. You could basically rebuild any Source game/mod between 2000 and 2015 ish in it.
Deus Ex (the original): Lower fidelity but that means it can run on more things, is also highly moddable, also has a working multiplayer framework that it’s had since almost day one that I guess everyone forgot about, could also be modded into nearly anything, including lower fidelity than TF|2 multiplayer games of basically any kind.
VintageStory: Minecraft, but better. Also highly moddable. Also networkable.
Fallout Online (2/3): Assuming the likely near apocalyptic setting accompanying this hypothetical, we’re gonna want a 2.5D turn based tactics platform, FOnline is highly detailed and highly moddable, and is networked. You could also basically rebuild nearly any 2D JRPG in this, yes, even Pokemon, if you can handle 2.5D isometric sprites.
(I was originally going to say either Xenonauts 1 or 2, but then realized you could basically build X1 or X2 in Fallout Online, and FOnline is already networked.)
No Mans Sky: Beyond being essentially the most advanced procedural generation game that I am aware of, in breadth and depth, you’re going to want to have all that code to be able to decompile parts of it and thus be able to rebuild other or new digital worlds with it.
I reject the concept that no new games will ever be built.
I’ve been using and making mods since the 90s.
There will be new games, apocalypse be damned.
Also, as much as I love some Bethesda games, their engine is a heap of broken garbage.
Rebuild FONV or Skyrim in TF|2 or Deus Ex instead.
They are entirely capable of being modded into that.
Oh, I mean within the realm / market sector of video games.
Both Meta and Amazon have been uh, extremely expensive failures when it comes to anything other than MTX, game-as-a-job style video games.
Amazon Game Studios proved throwing near infinite money at making games doesn’t work if you have no idea what you are doing. Luna also failed. Lumberyard, essentially a fork of CryEngine, is essentially abadoned and spun off into O3DE.
Facebook literally rebranded to Meta as they were trying to convince everyone they had essentially invented the VR Internet… and to prove this, they gave us essentially an alpha version of some Mii-verse style VR experiences.
Google tried to do Stadia, promised us you would not need a local machine powerful enough to render a high fidelity game, because they had invented negative latency.
Apple fairly recently released $3000k VR goggles that uh… kind of let you do some extremely basic office work, awkwardly.
Etc etc.
All of these very major tech companies that decided they were gonna be video game companies too? Pretty much all their endeavors were total internal failures, net losses for them, but, it doesn’t matter in the long run because they all make so much money from their core business model, which for all but Apple, is spying on consumers and selling them hypertargetted ads.
A lot of people give Valve a lot of shit for MTX in terms of things like tradeable CS2 weapon skins, and a lot of that is deserved.
But they’re forgetting that Facebook actually invented that entire thing, with Farmville.
It was with Farmville that Facebook realized you can gamify anything, and then you can monetize that gamification.
Farmville is what kicked off the transition from MySpace 2.0, into the gamified, data mongering, hypercapitalist hellscape attention based economy.
All mobile gacha games with massive MTX and gambling/loot box/dark pattern style mechanics can basically trace their lineage back to Farmville.
Hey I’m not saying too much money, I’m saying significantly more than what most people spend.
The first is a value/ethical/moral judgement, the second is just numbers, just objective reality.
8 gigs VRAM, 16 system RAM, 15 years ago?
Most GPUs 15 years ago had one or two gigs of VRAM.
As far as I can tell, no consumer grade, 8 gb VRAM gpus even existed in 2010.
(tho, i guess SLI and Crossfire were things people did back then… maybe you had a dual or even quad gpu system?)
The first 8 gig VRAM GPU was, I think, the Radeon 290X VAPOR-X, this thing:
https://videocardz.com/49757/sapphire-launch-radeon-r9-290x-vapor-x-8gb-ram
Launch MSRP of $650.
In 2014 dollars.
That’s roughly $880 in todays dollars.
Thats more expensive than me, right now, getting a 9070 (non xt), those are down to under $600, or not too far off of that, at this very moment.
Meanwhile, most AMD, budget conscious people are probably still gonna find that too pricey, and go for a 9060 XT, 16 gb version, as they’re closer to $350.
Either your specs are wrong, your recollectiom is wrong, or you’re spending a good deal more money on your pc builds than the average person.
A person who is able to save up and buy some.e pretty solid hardware, only occasionally?
That’s a sign of relative wealth, having the ability to save up and plan. Most people don’t have that, at least 25% of the US right now has more debt than wealth, ie negative equity, ie, theyre essentially debt slaves.
Most people are constantly needing to buy new, shitty shoes, that wear out, because they never have the budget margins to have any real savings, but they gotta keep walkin.
Like, I also am a person who will save up a good chunk of change, get a new solid machine that’ll last a while.
But I realize that that is far from common.
I agree with you, but, I also realize that I’ve been building my own PCs and keeping up with the ins and outs of hardware/software design/developments since roughly the age of 14.
Most people don’t do that.
Most people (in the US) read write and think at a 5th or 6th grade level.
They just want box that make play video game go whee!
Here’s another way you can look at Valve.
They are a case study of how a privately held company, a company that does not have a boardroom of investors, demanding maximum possible short term profit, all the time…
Can actually allocate capital more efficiently, and generally more fairly, and innovate better than a ravenous hoard of interest/rent seekers.
You can look at them as essentially a counter argument to the modern American concept of a publically (stock market) traded company.
While what they do, the tech, the platform, the games… while that’s rather cutting edge… the way they do it, that’s actually old school, at the level of how a business fundamentally works, is legally defined.
They are not ‘beholden to capital’ so much as they are … ‘beholden to Gabe.’
You would think business majors and economists could look at this and go… oh, turns out capital markets aren’t efficient, at all, in the long run!
We are at the point now where a privately held, effective monopoly / oligopoly is… actually less evil than basically every other major tech firm that is entirely investor-returns / capital-rent driven… where probably roughly 20%-40% of the people/orgs on all those other boards … are just the same people, forming basically a de facto conspiracy.
Basically, being beholden to a single, publically visible capitalist, who doesn’t have to show you his internal books… appears to be objectively better than being beholden to many, obfuscated, invisible capitalists, despite them actually having to show you their books.
They really did go very in depth to the ‘game controller’, basically its a simulated DM for a TTRPG.
The … constantly on edge thing?
Systems of spawning and nudging AI states of groups of enemies, specifically designed to make you feel that near constant tension.
That, combined with the entire group alerting/hording npc mechanic. Make a little noise? You might be ok. Make too much noise? Prepare to get fucked. Oh also, the threshold between ‘probably safe’ and ‘totally fucked’ is always moving around a bit, so… you don’t really ever know where it is, with certainty.
Its basically an optimal way to induce a stress/panic disorder in a person, its not you watching a horror movie, its… you’re essentially actually in one.
The other element of that is that they’re much better at traditional map design, making choke points mixed with more open spaces, giving you some options to explore/use as cover/retreat to, but also, some of those options are actually traps that will punish you.
Ooops, that’s not safety, its effectively a monster closet!
(Sometimes its an actual monster closet, sometimes its that the closet is actually fairly far away, but there’s a prebaked navmesh path from the actual spawn point that leads directly to thst area you thought was gonna be safe.)
Also uh L4D doesn’t have a 2D minimap.
It uses things like way points and object/objective stencils/borders, and, a lot of the maps are complex vertically, in addition to horizontally, so… just naively moving toward the waypoint?
Probably not gonna work so well in L4D, whereas in most games, that basically will work.
There is also a kind of problem in that a growing number of people cannot navigate their own hometowns without a real life minimap… players generally are getting worse at complex environment navigation overtime, and that’s true in both real and virtual spaces.
100% agree!
Its an outstanding achievement… but it just ain’t affordable, ain’t accessible, not unless they can somehow get a Steam Frame to be more like half the cost of an Index, as opposed to about the same price.
On the other hand…
It would maybe be neat if more just games in general were made with the idea of a/many VR player(s) vs a/many kb+m or controller players.
Make asymetrical gameplay that plays to the strenghts of each set up.
Remember Splinter Cell’s old vs mode?
Two FPS heavies vs two TPS sneakybois?
Something like that, but specialized to different control set ups.
Actually balance around different control schemes, but where each control scheme basically is a base player class, something like that.
There are a few games and modes for games that do something like this, but nothing I am aware of thats like… a whole ass game, not just basically a minigame.
Yeah, thats fair, I’m not trying to personally say HL2 is literally perfect, and I don’t think Valve are either…
But they’re saying that, by the time people really really wanted Half Life 3… they knew they would have to do something so revolutionary, so much better, to top it… that it actually wasn’t possible.
So, think outside the box, innovate elsewhere, all the other shit they’ve done?
Conceptually and practically easier than making a sequel that would live up to HL3 expectations.
Although, there are apparently reports/rumors that they are now actually trying to do HL3.
But that has been the case for almost two decades.
… these things, they take time.
Ok uh, what can you do, in terms of actual gameplay mechanics, in Fallout76, that you can’t do in… basically every multiplayer, survival/craft/open world/fps game?
There are so many of those… and… FO76 basically came out around the tail end of the kind of craze for those kinds of games, they were trend chasing.
Uh lets see, Valve did make Portal, what happened was they saw a demo of a game (Narbacular Drop) being concepted at a nearby gaming college expo, and they basically hired all of them, taught them Source, gave them more team breadth and depth to work with.
Valve has… or had… a track record of doing this, in the 90s / 00s. Oh, thats a neat mod for our game: Hire them.
So yes, Valve did originally make Portal. By seeing a neat concept demo, hiring the people behind it, and then making Portal.
I mean, you can say that after 5 more years of development, F076 became a basically functional open world survival craft fps, sure, but like…
No Mans Sky basically revolutionized the concept of what you can do with procedural generation, oh and, they just kept adding more and more stuff, just to the base game, not as DLC, not as MTX.
CP77? Yeah very rough start, but uh, entirely different scope of production value, being an actually competent RPG that’s practically an ImSim in many ways, all with an absurd level of graphical fidelity.
Like, everyone just expected that game to be Grand Theft Auto 5, Cyberpunk Edition, started their standards there, and then got mad that it wasn’t at parity.
CD Projekt Red was a AA studio when they were making this.
They were not Rockstar. They were not Bethesda.
Ok, I’ll give you that PayDay2 does actually have similar map mutating dynamics, I also have not played Vermintide, we do not speak of Back 4 Blood, what an embarassment, I am also unfamiliar with Remnant.
What I was trying to get at is … map mutations is how you solve the age old FPS team v team problem of… if you just have better map knowledge, you tend to win, so this causes a problem where you either have to keep pumping out new maps to keep things fresh, or you have to have a bunch of other balancing gameplay mechanics to have variety from there.
But the fundamental problem is that vets will clown noobs all the time, often by just simply having the maps memorized, angles and positions figured out, etc.
Also Alien Isolation has pretty good monster AI that works with the rest of the game design, but no, thats not mutating maps.
Open world maps that move objective markers around are not mutating maps.
HellDivers 2 is a good example of doing proc gen maps… but again, thats an extraction shooter, co-op shooter type thing.
Nobody, that I am aware of, has pulled this off for mass PvP battles, like, 16-32+ vs 16-32+ players.
As for Valve not literally, technically, totally inventing VR… sure yeah ok, what I meant was they poured tons of their own resources into doing VR in their own way, they’re one of the only teams that’s made an actual AAA VR game that fully embraces the concept of ‘you are a person in another world, a world that has high graphical realism.’
Virtual reality.
The point there was they turned toward innovating in other areas, that they did more or less start from scratch and invent their own concept of VR.
Your final quip about gacha games is funny.
Just look at the numbers dude, the vast majority of money to be made in gaming is by selling MTX addiction simulators.
That’s not to say there are not still people who really do actually want well crafted, truly innovative or very well put together, fully fledged games… but the way the math of capitalism works on that is uh, those kinds of endeavors are way riskier, and have way worse ROI, than selling waifus to dorks.
I hope that actual games defeat waifu simulators, we are seeing a lot of AAAs crash and burn recently, but uh, I don’t think gacha games are going anywhere… and most of the outfits with the money to be able to undertake a truly groundbreaking project?
Theyre all incompotent morons at the management level, who, after failing hard at their attempts in the last 5 ish years, are now just gonna try and hand that all over to AI, to attempt to further increase ROI.
But, normies love ‘recognizable brand franchise’, normies consistently auto-hypetrain and nostalgia-bate themselves, normies prove that having more than half a game’s budget be marketing does brainwash them very well.
Here, I’ll end with another hot take:
If, after everything that happened with Bethesda, up to the point of Starfield releasing…
You still bought Starfield on day one, or pre-ordered it?
You’re the problem, you’re the normie, you’re the person marketing and nostalgia work on, you didn’t realize your in an abusive, parasocial relationship with Bethesda.
Remember, no pre-orders.
Yeah, people are always like, y no half life 3?
Look at what Valve has said in response to similar questions.
Its basically a polite way of saying ‘yeah there really isn’t a better possible first person shooter, single player experience.’
So they made a reality breaking first person puzzle game, became the de facto overlords of PC gaming platforms, invented VR tech, oh and made linux be able to run every game, oh and we make console-esque PCs now too, I guess.
Hell, I don’t even know of other games that solve the ‘multiplayer fps maps are predictable and boring’ the way L4D did, where the map itself csn basically mutate, have a bunch of semi-procedural preset variants.
Nope, instead, we still have the most popular multiplayer FPS games have basically static, memorizable maps.
Turns out gamers broadly don’t actually seem to want innovation, they seem to want gacha games, as gacha games are now basically more than half of the gaming market.
Example of that: That friend you know who’s still really trying to convince you that Fallout 76 is better now.
GLaDoS may or may not flood your home with neurotoxin if you try this, but uh, you could run a local LLM on it, and thus just have your own AI catgirlfriend or maybe lightweight coding assistant w/e.
I’ve futzed about with OpenLlama on a Bazzite Deck, there aren’t too many models lightweight enough to run, but some of them work!
… Yeah don’t let GLadOs know about that.
Definetly not.
I think you are confusing the concept of ‘new’ and ‘wholly original’/‘totally unique’.
A 2025 Toyota Corrola is a new Toyota Corrola.
Its got updates, changes, differences, from the 2024 model, or the 2012 model.
… It’s still new, though, just because the 1996 Toyota Corolla existed, that doesn’t mean the 2025 Toyota Corolla is not… the new Toyota Corolla.
It just isn’t a wholly original design or product, like when the first Prius came out, or whatever.
Well, basically, I wrote out a whole brainstorming session, but it boils down to this:
The Steam Machine case is way too small to be a general PC case.
Its smaller and more compact than even most small form factor, ITX, homebuilt or custom built PCs, that have actual inbuilt, like fullsize desktop GPU graphics capability.
But!
If Valve, or somebody, reworked the internal MoBo to have more of a pure CPU type onboard chip, with SODIMM sys RAM, not an APU with LPDDR RAMlike what we see here… and then also gave it a Thunderbolt port, or hell, maybe just a second SSD slot, which you could then use an OcuLink with…
Well, now you have roughly a system box, that shunts off the GPU part into an eGPU box, sitting next to it.
That would/could allow you to basically plug in any fullsize desktop GPU you want, down to a a less expensive, laptop grade or whatever.
So thats basically a laptop + eGPU setup, and would allow you to, within the main system, upgrade RAM and storage mem as you please, and that should, theoretically, be able to fit into the Steam Machine case, or something very close to it.
Then you just have a second box next to it with a second power supply, that seats some kind of GPU, and connects via thunder bolt or oculink, which can do data transfer at speeds/bandwidths that you’d normally only see within/on the motherboard itself.
… and this also just is a linux computer.
Just go into desktop mode, plug in a mouse and keyboard, your TV is your monitor.
So, that means it can be a light duty office work type PC, webbrowsing PC, home media center, etc.
Just maybe plug an external hardrive into it, or get some SD cards with a TB of storage, for music and movies.
Oh and of course, it can emulate basically everything that doesn’t already exist as a PC game, via something like EmuDeck or RetroDeck.
But on the other other hand, tariffs, and RAM just doubled in cost in like the last month, because… well this time its not bitcoin miners buying all the GPUs, its… the entire AI industry is a multi trillion dollar scam.
Hilariously, one way to read this announcement is that Valve expects the AI bubble to blow up by ‘early next year’, thus lowering RAM costs, ahahaha!
Holy shit, Valve is clowning on MSFT so fucking hard right now.
At this point, you would think that if they wanted to go with an Occulink/Thunderbolt thing… they’d make it in the Steam Machine, the thing that doesn’t move around as much.
They… the Valve video says the Steam Machine is 6 times as powerful as a Steam Deck.
… I have no idea what that actually means, maybe its TFLOPs, who knows, but uh, yeah, if you’re making a 6x thing thats more stationary, I would think that would be the thing you’d make with an option or variant to just jam more compute into it via modularity.
I dunno. It seems like more news about the Deck 2 or whatever is coming, at some point, Valve’s whole actual video is basically making fun of how its not talking about the Deck… stay tuned, goth gamer nation…???
Either way, we always have this:
Oh god are there going to be some very very salty Nintendo fans, very soon.
The Machine, the desktop/living room console… It has a 300W PSU. GN has the Valve designer saying its generally just a tad over 200W of draw.
So uh… that’s practically nothing, you could probably actually power that out of a homebuilt steam turbine + power station (like for solar panels, home backup power unit type thing).
For reference, an Nvidia 5090 needs 575W… just by itself.
An AMD 9070, non XT, on its own, uses 220W, approximately what the entire Steam Machines uses.
The Steam Machine does not even have a 3 prong connector.
Its just two, like a power brick for a console.
So we have SolarPunk gaming now, I guess?
My guess would be that around $800 sounds roughly right… if you try to approximate a small form factor pc with… roughly those specs?
You’d kinda end up around there, but… the architecture is so nonstandard, its hard to say.
You gotta think of it as an SFF PC not a console.
Because its closer to an SFF PC than it is to a console.
Right like, this thing is also a PC, its a laptop or w/e if you plug a mouse and keyboard into it.
I run desktop mode on my Deck all the time, use it as a laptop/tablet of sorts.
As far as tiers go, GN has said there are plans for a 512 GB and 2TB variant, so, there’s at least two tiers… I would not expect like, more or less GDDR5/6 RAM variants though, the whole thing is built too much around the exact power draw and thermal load.
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In the mean time, while we wait for IP law to fix itself over the course of decades, or probably just never: I have physical copies of most of my games.
… on an SD card, that I bought, formatted, and moved files onto.
Steam lets you make game backups, GOG releases are basically portable… make a backup, compress it, put it on a backup drive.
… and thats all without my pirate hat and pegleg on.