Cheers, glad you’ve found it enjoyable again! I think they have found a good balance for the ritual activities, and just ‘progression’ in general - though that’s actually a little bit up in the air, the question of how far the level cap increases each season. It was a lesser bump this time around, only ten levels (as…

Yeah, I don’t think it’s impossible at all; I just think that it’s Valve, wandering into waters that are a lot closer to ‘console’ territory, and that console adjacency is naturally going to invite ease of use comparisons that I’m not sure they’re ready for.

Yeah, I noticed those eventually - still find it a little odd Valve didn’t put any of them in the ‘official diagram of the buttons’, though. (But a lot of their rollout here has been very... Valve, in that almost Microsoft level of ‘we refuse to hire an actual marketing firm to do this kind of thing for us because of…

I get what you’re going for here, but - admittedly, just anecdotally - I feel like you’re kind of in the minority: most people I’ve talked to or read about, even when they do ‘switch’ from handheld to docked with their Switch, they also switch from using the handheld inputs to a Pro controller, especially when playing…

As a primarily console gamer who has yet to purchase a Switch, this is exactly what’s kept me from picking one up - it’s the same way I felt about the Nintendo Wii, and I haven’t bought a Nintendo console since. The Switch definitely has more appeal than the Wii U did, and I’ve been on the fence, but assuming the…

Yeah, I’ve considered it myself, but I’m not in any huge rush... primarily because I’m in the minority that thinks From games have gotten better as they go along, for the most part. Some of that’s just because of the order I played them in - Dark Souls 3 was my first Dark Souls since that brief, abortive attempt a…

Yeah, I phrased that poorly; I meant more ‘how will the gaming experience of your average PC game translate to being played on a television’, which isn’t just a question of ‘does it have controller support’.

I think it depends on what you read ‘competing’ to mean. My read on the Steam Deck is that it’s not really meant to be anyone’s primary game console; more that it wants to be everyone’s secondary console.

I mean, I definitely think this is a situation where Valve is selling it at a loss (Newell’s said as much himself, calling the price ‘painful’ for Valve). But I was using ‘low cost’ less as a comparison to a Switch, and more as a comparison to a PC/laptop - the benefit over the Switch, to me, would be that you weren’t…

Yeah... not so much a selling point for me. (I wasn’t wild about the Steam Controllers at all, because they were trying so hard to be ‘every possible input method under the sun’ all jammed into one controller.)

Could be, but unless you mean actually ambidextrous people - which... doesn’t seem like a large enough portion of the market to justify basing the entire design around - I feel like most lefties learned long ago how to ‘mouse’ with their right hand*, so it seems weird to base the entire design around just the handful t…

Fair enough; I should probably add the addendum, then, to ‘what is ease of use like in general’. Because just porting the Steam marketplace to a handheld and calling it a day probably isn’t going to cut it with an audience of console/tablet gamers; if there’s a significant amount of ‘fiddling’ required in order to get…

Yep. My number one interest in this is less ‘how well does it function as a handheld’ and more ‘is this a (relatively) low-cost, low-effort way to get PC games to run on my TV?’ And a lot of that is going to depend on ease of use, I think. Just slapping the Steam marketplace onto a handheld and calling it a day isn’t…

Yeah, I think you’re definitely right on both cases there - I think ‘ease of use’ is absolutely going to be the make-or-break on this thing. And, as we’ve said, it’s someplace Valve has definitely stumbled in the past, just because jumping from ‘easy to use from a PC player’s perspective’ and ‘easy to use from a…

I think you’re absolutely right... but I think - again, despite the fact that the handheld angle doesn’t interest me at all - there are also a whole lot of people who game on a Switch or a tablet that don’t game on a PC or a laptop. (Or even another console, like me; I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to learn that…

That’s a detailed analysis, thank you!

I currently do all of my PC gaming from a laptop (which isn’t saying much; I’d say it was my third-most used platform, after Xbox and PS), but the distinction I’d make there is that a) laptops are more expensive, just in general, and b) if you’re doing HDMI out from a laptop to a TV, it feels like... why not just save…

Yeah, and Nintendo’s always been really, really good at ‘ease of use’ in general - I mean, ‘Wii Sports’, regardless of how fun it is as a collection of minigames (for the record: quite fun, I think!), is a perfect introduction to ‘here’s a really easy introduction to how the motion controls work, and the limits of…

I tend to assume (like with a lot of lower priced models) that’s there just so they can say ‘starting at $400!!!!’. Again, I just feel like if you’re planning on installing 70 GB games onto this thing... chances are you’re going to pony up for the more expensive versions anyway.

See, I’ve heard that before, but the one time I tried - bought a ‘console-price’ PC and hooked it up to my TV - it was both a) incredibly awkward and b) didn’t run nearly as many games as I wanted it to, even not looking at particularly resource-intensive games. Now, maybe that’s changed - that was about the same time…