HL2 is more than just the gravity gun. The art style, the open levels on the beaches, the facial animations, the improved storytelling from HL1, the antlion army, game was so much more than just an updated half life. Without HL2, portal wouldn’t have any legs to stand on, valve took on narbacular drop, hired the team and put them to work on the source engine to make portal. Counter strike source was the defacto mp shooter for years if not decades, hell even the portal 2 goo came from half life 2 ep 3 just like they mention in the documentary. Saying they ignored all other aspects of the game for the gravity gun does half life 2 a disservice to what it accomplished.

HL2 still did more for the industry than probably any other game on the market. Also, Minerva is a must to play, one of the best HL2 mods.

Knee jerk reaction based on OEM feedback for a built in handheld interface for the OEM handhelds like the rog ally. Steam deck clearly caused a disruption in the market that Microsoft simply cannot stop. It’ll probably have alps joysticks that drift, they’ll slap an over powered AMD apu in it with a shit battery that it’ll chew through in an hour like every other handheld PC. Valve hit the sweet spot with the deck, and there’s no real reason to upgrade it, sure you have more powerful apu’s but battery tech hasn’t caught up yet and the only way to counteract it is slap a bigger battery on the device. At that point what’s the point of putting a power hungry apu in a handheld?

It looked good, but the gyro is apparently awful and the trigger travel is basically non-existent.

You know, I was honestly going to give you some credit for trying, but then you edited your post and decided to turn the conversation political. Your entire argument has lost all credibility, these are video games, please try not to take them so seriously, have a nice day.

There have been more positive reviews so far than negative, and not a single post has shown any proof that EA is manipulating reviews and cherry picking. The only thing we’ve seen is one guy at fextralife throwing out conspiracy theories about how EA hates him, another guy who’s apparently a racist and sexist asshat, and that’s pretty much it. Mortismal has even stated he wasn’t paid off or anything by EA and would be fined and his account deleted if he was and didn’t disclose that fact, which he didn’t.

Bioware has made two bad games, Andromeda and Anthem, two. One is objectively not that bad, the other is a game in a genre they’ve never dipped their toes into, and the biggest issue is that those two releases were back to back, so that apparently means they’ve gone to shit now and everything else they’ve created means nothing. It’s really sad how petty and ridiculous some people are over bioware. As for the EA hate that’s been around forever, but God forbid someone say something positive about a bioware game.

Do you have proof that EA is forcing reviewers to use catchphrases as you’ve said? I get it, we all have our hate boners, we all have our pet peeves, but damn son…the conspiracy theories and review embargo nonsense is just stupid at this point. Like you said let’s just wait for the objective reviews but how about we simply don’t write the game off because bioware apparently murdered our puppies.

Yet mortismal gaming says it’s his persona goty

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCz1ITSy2O8

I don’t really know what to say about it at this point, but as I loved inquisition I’ll probably love this one. The best thing to do is wait for release and make your own opinion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Age_II lots of good information in the wiki page, of which none of your claims are accurate except for maybe the polarizing views on reused assets but that’s literally by design, not crunch. It sold more than origins and sold over a million copies in two weeks, that’s pretty damn good. Nice rage baiting though.

You have your opinion but it’s definitely in the vocal minority.

No idea why there are so many people who want this game to fail. Bioware has realistically made two bad games, Andromeda and Anthem, and for me Andromeda has the best gameplay in the entire series, not necessarily the best story and anthem is just not great. It’s crazy the amount of bioware hate that exists that’s completely unwarranted.

There are a ton of PC gamers who think the only way to play a video game is 1440p 60-144fps and anything below that is unplayable. The reality is the steam deck is a 720p 30fps handheld device that can occasionally make it to 60fps if pushed far enough.

IMHO a device that can run a game like God of war Ragnarok at 30fps in handheld mode and still play fine when docked is succeeding on the performance front in several aspects. In comparison, the switch version of Wolfenstein the new Colossus had to remove entire sets of geometry to even hit 30fps where the deck can hit that easily with the same settings without removing geometry and using AMD FSR. I think the deck has at least 3 more years in it before we even start to see any needed upgrades at that performance. Only time will tell.

So that’s great, but halo IMO is the least FOMO inducing mp game on the market with battle passes. You can actually “equip” the season pass you want to level and work on it, the best thing is they never go away so there’s literally not a single bit of FOMO, only the illusion. Regardless, I see your point for the other games and I commend you for making the change.

Is you need one with a track pad get a dualsense, otherwise 8bitdo all the way. Best third party controllers I’ve ever used.

My theory has always been they wanted to keep the door open for Microsoft if things just go under. When you think about it, they were struggling quite a bit in the early 2000’s until gears. Microsoft really propped them up with that franchise, then they made fortnite, lost a lot of money until they pivoted to the BR mode and now they make millions every damn day.

With the recent crowdstrike nonsense and Microsoft reviewing their kernel access policies, it may be a non-issue in the future, but we just have to see what happens. I do wish valve would start really pushing these companies with kernel anticheat solutions to support proton and steam deck. It’s like they pushed for the first 6 months of the steam deck’s life and then gave up. They are really on the cusp of something truly disruptive in the pc gaming space with the steam deck, getting those last few games like cod, fortnite and valorant would really push that momentum away from Windows. Maybe they simply don’t want to pick a fight with the 1000lbs gorilla that is Microsoft, only gaben knows.

Yep, every competing product, whether it’s the rog ally or legion go had to compromise on something and it’s usually battery life, which defeats the purpose of having a handheld. I can get close to 4 hours in some games, you can’t say the same for the competition putting 1080p VRR panels with high nit values and more powerful GPUs when the SoC itself hasn’t reduced in power consumption. I just don’t see any compelling reason why valve would make an incremental product like a steam deck pro.

https://www.eurogamer.net/more-evidence-of-fully-fledged-half-life-game-revealed-by-valve-dataminer

It’s called HLX, and it’s apparently a traditional non-vr game. Robin Walker was leading the Alyx team, it’s a safe bet he’s leading this team or working with this team on the sequel.

For what it’s worth, Robin Walker and his team are working on the next half life after Alyx. Will that ever come out? I have no idea and I’m not expecting anything. Deadlock however is a game designed by one of the grandfathers of the moba genre, and has had over 20k concurrent players at any given time, and it wasn’t even announced with it’s existence only known through word of mouth. That’s insanely impressive and shows how huge the moba genre really is and how those players are thirsty for a new game from a big company. It sucks and I wish we had more sp valve games but I’m content with the work they’ve done on proton, steamos, the steam deck, steam itself, and half life alyx. They haven’t been sitting on their hands not doing anything, they’ve been putting their focus on more technical areas versus making games and that’s ok.

You really have no idea how intellectual property works do you? The reason they’ve gone after emulation and rom hosting sites is pretty obvious, they have to protect their IP.

Why they’ve waited so long only to do it now? I honestly don’t have an answer for you on that one, but if I were to guess it’s because retro gaming has been going through somewhat of a renaissance as of late due to shitty AAA games and indie devs gaining so much popularity.

The bottom line is Nintendo lost the emulation battle once, and they don’t want to lose a second time. They’re more experienced and understand the risks of letting emulation replace services like Nintendo switch online, and so do publishers that own intellectual property from retro consoles. It sucks, but that’s corporate life, and you can’t really get around it without jumping through hoops or doing something illegal.