Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Hey Folks! This week we are down a Thalen which bumps a topic that we bumped last week, but whatever we have more! Bel starts off the show with a discussion about Blaugust coming soon and how the changes in the social media landscape are introducing it to more people. From there we talk about the One of One Ring search being over, which dives into a discussion about whether or not the Sol Ring being an auto-include is good or not. Kodra has been using the SteamDeck as a primary travel computer and this works shockingly well. We talk about the weird game that is Dave the Diver and then branch off into a discussion about whether or not Pizza Tower is actually good. Tam shares some nostalgia of revisiting the Battlezone ‘98 Remaster and how it is a type of RTS that never really had its day. Finally, Kodra and Ash share some of their progress in Four Job Fiesta as it is nearing the end of that event.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! This week Bel has been playing Last Epoch quite a bit of late and has roped both Grace and Tam into it. We talk a bit about how the game has improved over time and how it compares to Diablo III and Path of Exile. From there Thalen and Tam talk a bit about their further experiences with Lord of the Rings Online. Kodra talks about his adventures in watching a live stage production of Bluey, and we talk a bit about the show in general. Tam shares his thoughts on Hi-Fi Rush and dives into a topic about the oddities of Steam Deck Compatibility.
Something that has been floating around the social networks this week is the Steam Replay. I do not remember this existing in past years, so it seems like this is something brand new for Steam and they appear to be taking a page from Spotify which has a similar practice. If you are curious you can look at my full replay here, but this morning I figured I would talk about it a bit. I do my own tracking thing that I am currently working on, but I do appreciate Steam handing me so much information on a platter. I tend to devote a certain amount of time in the last few posts of the year to reviewing the year as a whole and this flows right into that pattern. Steam creates a number of handy infographics ready for you to download and share on social media. The above image is “formatted for Twitter” but they also have a square format for Instagram if that is more your thing.
The first tidbit that I find interesting is just how high my session count is. I think this can be accounted for by two different behaviors that happen to me a lot. Firstly I often get into a game and then something comes up… cat knocks something over… wife needs my help… and I have to bail out of the game quickly. This is entirely why I bounced off Deathloop because that game refuses to let me save out quickly and return just as quickly to what I was doing. After failing to complete a stage three times because I kept getting interrupted I uninstalled the game and move on with my life. The other part of this is that I boot up a lot of games… and then do nothing with them. Sometimes I suffer from the “I have nothing to wear” syndrome where I have so many games but nothing quite sounds right. So before I settle in on something and hyper-focus for several days, I will often flail about trying to find the “right” game to play.
The thing that honestly shocks me with this one is the number of achievements. I realize in January and February I did burn through like twelve games in rapid fire, and honestly, that is probably why that number is so high. That is not exactly my normal pattern because in general, I do not give a fuck about achievements. I say that… but I am now going after a truly stupid achievement in Path of Exile that involves me playing a character up to Hillock and then logging out, and coming back and trying it again after the map resets all for the purpose of attempting to get a unique drop in that first map. I am not shocked that I spent most of my time playing either New World or Path of Exile because those really were the games of “this” year for me. Witcher 3 is so high because I poured into doing as close to 100% of the content run as I could when I was doing my “play everything to completion” thing at the start of the year.
I knew I was somewhat “out of band” in the sheer number of games I play in a given year… but I did not realize I was that far off. If I take this statement as evidence of how most people consume games, it would make me believe that the average gamer just plays a handful of games. The streak is interesting because I am almost certain that is New World, and it in truth should be longer because Steam tracks the Live client and the PTR client as separate games. There was a period of time when I was playing the PTR client every single day, and then when Brimstone Sands launched I switched over to playing Live again. The achievement count again I am certain is because in Dec/Jan/Feb I burned through a lot of single-player games.
This graphic shows how my gameplay stacks up as compared to new releases, recent releases, and what it calls a classic game… aka anything that is more than eight years old. I am sure some folks would bicker about the definition of “classic games” there, but I guess for me it makes sense. I do spend a lot of time jumping on the bandwagon of a brand-new game as it launches, but apparently only about a third of my gameplay is spent in that manner. I would have thought it was higher, to be honest. It does make sense that the bulk of my time is spent on games that release in the last few years because I often miss the launch and eventually get around to checking out the game a few years later. I think this is a side effect of how hyper-focused I can get on a single game and how I mostly push everything else aside when I am in that mode. Then there are just so damned many games coming out each year that it takes me a while to digest that they came out and get around to playing them.
This one confuses me quite a bit. Usually, when I see a graph like this, it denotes something like quadrants that are universal for everyone. This is clearly chosen from the games that I actually played during the year because no one would lay out a personality matrix based on these traits. It makes a lot of sense that MMORPG, Looter Shooter, and Medieval are so high on the list. That little corner seems to be my sweet spot. What I am shocked about is how high the Souls-like games are showing up on the list, but I guess that makes sense as well because I keep trying them… and then bouncing off them. Cyberpunk would be a much larger segment if I actually had bought Cyberpunk 2077 on Steam. I own it on GOG instead which means none of my playtimes is getting logged here. Dark Comedy though… no clue where that one is coming from because while yes I do love that genre I am not sure which games that I played this last year are contributing to that.
I am still working on my larger “Grand Experiment” post that I make each year, in which I have been tracking monthly play patterns since 2012. I thought it would be fun to talk through some of the things on my Steam Replay this year in the meantime. Valve has this bad habit of starting things and not necessarily carrying through with them, but I am hoping that this becomes a yearly tradition. I personally find evaluating my habits interesting, and it has been really cool to see some of the Replays of my friends. What are your thoughts? Did you enjoy the Steam Replay as a concept? Feel free to drop me a line below. I am not exactly sure WHEN I will make my big post, but given the trajectory, it is likely on Friday.
The post Steam Replay 2022 appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends! I have to admit I have slowed down a bit on my whole “Steam Deck Nonsense” largely because I will not get my upgraded storage until early October. After reviewing my options I decided to go with an OEM drive originally designed for the Microsoft Surface, but provides 1TB of storage and fits the 2230 single-sided form factor required by the Steam Deck. This seemed to provide the most bang for the buck as 2TB drives are a wee bit out of my price range for the moment sitting around $600. Over time it is a certainty that the price will go down, but 1TB appears to be the largest reasonable option for the 2230 form factor. If you ONLY care about parity with the highest stock Steam Deck unit… you can pick up the 512GB for around $20.
So let’s play a game and talk about the total cost of what my unit is going to ultimately be versus the highest stock model. We know that the premium version comes with a special anti-glare screen treatment and 512 GB of internal storage. My unit will have 1TB of internal storage, so roughly twice the space but for sake of this experiment we are only going to see if my upgraded version could beat the price of the stock premium version. Let’s add up the components that I have added or will be adding to my unit.
Base 64GB eMMC Steam Deck – $399.00
WD PC SN530 M.2 2230 SSD 1TB NVMe – $134.60
Anti-Glare Screen Protector – $3.33 ($9.99 in a 3 pack)
So my finished unit is going to be $536.93 and will have a similar anti-glare screen with the benefit of it being a screen protector and having twice the internal storage and still come in $112.07 cheaper than the deluxe model. If you add in the 512 GB SD card I am also using with the unit, and the 20,000mAh power bank that I am using with the unit, you end up around price parity. However, you end up with a package that allows me to recharge the Steam Deck three times and have three times the storage capacity. Basically, I still think it is well worth the investment of time, to go with that base model and upgrade yourself and the pricing for storage will only get cheaper over time.
Installing Decky and Power Tools
Like I said before, I have slowed down configuring items on the Steam Deck that require a novel application of my time. My theory is that I should be able to clone my existing hard drive onto the much larger 1TB model when it comes in, but in case that fails… I don’t want to get too deep into the woods that it will be a challenge to bring my unit back up to where I am currently. If I have to wipe and start from scratch, I have a relatively minimal investment timewise currently. There is one thing however that I have been using quite a bit and have not really talked about and that is Power Tools. Essentially Decky is a plugin manager, and Power Tools is the default plugin that installs which allows you to modify various system settings on a game-by-game basis. This is terribly useful especially when it comes to emulation because it seems if you throttle the total core count it increases the speed that each individual core runs at.
Unlike most mods we might add to the Steam Deck, we are actually going to begin in Game Mode. The first step is that we need to go into Settings and the System menu and enable Developer Mode. Be very careful when you are in this menu because Format SD Card is located precariously below the option we need to toggle on shown in the screenshot above. Enabling Developer Mode is different from say unlocking your file system, and is a relatively safe operation.
Once enabled, you will now have a new option in the settings menu all the way at the bottom labeled Developer. In this screen, you are going to specifically toggle on something labeled “CEF Remote Debugging”. This is what allows Decky to install plugins from the storefront. Incidentally, while you are in this menu, you might also want to untick “Enable Wifi Power Management” because one of the problems with the Steam Deck is that in order to save battery life, it often drastically reduces WiFi transmit strength.
Next up we need to actually install Decky. In order to install this, we are going to need our old friend the console app, which means you will need to boot into Desktop Mode. As always you will have needed to set a password with the “passwd” command that I covered in a previous article. Next up we are going to get the install command for Decky from the project GitHub page. You are going to paste the following command into Konsole:
curl -L https://github.com/SteamDeckHomebrew/decky-loader/raw/main/dist/install_prerelease.sh | sh
This will install Decky to your steam deck. You will be prompted to enter the password that you set previously with the passwd command. Once everything finishes, reboot your device which will load into Game Mode by default. You have to reboot in order for the plugin to take effect, so simply returning to Game Mode is not sufficient.
If everything went as expected, you should see a new menu icon at the bottom of the menu when you click the “…” button. This will be where all Decky plugins can be located, and by default, you will have a single plugin loaded called PowerTools.
At the top of this menu on the right hand side next to the name Decky, you will now also have a storefront page that allows you to browse and install plugins. The storefront will allow you to install an addon or select a previous version if for some reason something is not supported in the most current version. I’ve never had to do this and for the most part, just install the latest version of everything. I guess let’s talk a bit about the plugins that I personally find useful.
vibrantDeck
VibrantDeck is essentially a very rudimentary version of a tool like ReShade for the Steam Deck. You can configure it globally like I have, just to increase the color saturation a bit, or enable per-game profiles for more granular control. While you can’t do some of the crazy screen effects like you can with ReShade, you can steak the settings to make the Steam Deck image a little more pleasing to your preferences. I personally feel like by default the Steam Deck is a little bit desaturated, and this can resolve that easily.
CSS Loader
CSS Loader essentially allows you to style the theme elements of the Deck as well as configure various visual tweaks. For example, if you scroll back up to the first image in this post, you will notice that all of my Deck icons have a slightly rounded edge to them. I achieved this by installing the Round theme element which allows you to control the curve intensity on most images. I also have one that similarly applies a rounded effect to the virtual keyboard that overrides my existing rainbow keyboard theme. There are a bunch of themes that folks have created that do various things, so it is well worth spending some time browsing. I personally landed on Obsidian because it is essentially the default theme of the Steam Deck with the ability to change the background colors.
DeckFAQs
This one is admittedly a bit frivolous, but I come from an era when GameFAQs mattered. This essentially gives you rapid access to text-based game guides from within steam. By default, it will take whatever game you are playing as the search parameter, but you can also submit your own queries. Ultimately if you click through to a guide it will load the full text-based guide in an overlay window on the deck. Admittedly you could do ALL of this on your phone, and would probably have a better experience but I mostly installed the plugin for nostalgia sake and for those rare times when I am playing something that I want a walkthrough on like FFV for tidbits of information I might not remember when doing a playthrough.
ProtonDB Badges
This one is pretty straightforward, but it allows you to apply the compatibility information to your hover-over effect on Steam games. This will tell you quickly if a game is fully compatible, works with issues, or is not supported at all. Steam maintains a list of games that are completely verified to work with the Deck, but often times most of your library has some support that might require something as simple as occasionally doing mouse input with the trackpad. What you really care about however is how well the game might run, and there is an external resource called ProtonDB that does this.
If you look at 7 Days to Die in your library you see the standard information icon, that you can click through and get additional information.
If you click through to the game profile, you can now see a ProtonDB badge in the top left corner of the profile indicating that the game has been platinum certified to run under proton.
If you want even MORE information, you can click on the badge and it will bring up the full game profile on ProtonDB. In this case for example it shows that 7 Days to Die not only runs under Proton, but it actually natively supports Linux, so the game should run excellently.
The Steam Deck continues to be a phenomenal piece of hardware that walks that line between ease of use and enthusiast shenanigans. Like I said I am mostly in a holding pattern as I wait for storage before I go too much deeper down this rabbit hole. Probably my next wave of modifications will be to get specific games working on the deck. I want to try and get Final Fantasy XIV, GW2, and World of Warcraft Dragonflight Alpha running. All of those will require a specific brand of nonsense that I do not relish doing a second time if my clone disk idea does not work as intended.
The post Installing Steam Deck Plugins appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
