New games pushing technology features will always lag slightly before they make it to Proton. It’s the nature of reverse engineering. On Kubuntu, on AMD, the only crashes I can name are for The Alters, which I knew from Proton DB ahead of time to expect some chop.

The gaming experience on Windows is to get interrupted by updates constantly, less gracefully handle sleep and resume, and sometimes lose control over the game window when popups come up such that you need to be rescued by a keyboard or the touch screen. Those aren’t just my experiences but also captured in the reviews for this very device. What you gain is compatibility with live service games with invasive anti-cheat and Game Pass. For some people that will be enough, but this isn’t even the first handheld gaming device to show a performance delta in Linux’s favor when tested. I don’t think many people are experiencing this stability problem you are, as it doesn’t reflect in many reviews, and a two year old forum post for a game running on technology that moves this fast doesn’t mean that it’s still happening.

Your source is from a game from two years ago when it was new; not only does Proton get big updates all the time, but it’s far more mature in general now than it was two years ago. You lose access to Windows store, but Amazon, Epic, and GOG work through Heroic. Maybe EA and Ubisoft are a problem for some people, but those also might work through Lutris. I haven’t shopped with either in over a decade, so I’m not the best candidate to check.

I started a new run of Baldur’s Gate II to see if I can actually be good at it this time.

Of more recent releases, I’ve also been going through Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector and The Alters, both being very good resource management games in space.

The major difference being how many recurring costs you incur for chasing live services rather than just making Diablo or Doom clones.

It’s only the campaign, despite the fact that the competitive multiplayer was just as responsible for this game’s success back in the day. Split-screen is only supported on consoles and not on PC for some reason that I definitely cannot understand. And while it’s got online play, it surely won’t support LAN…in Halo…a game known for LAN parties.

Its a non functioning product at launch, something that should be called out in a review.

It literally functions. I’ve played it at launch and will continue playing it. Watch Austin’s review on SkillUp, who had the benefit of releasing his review some time after launch but started during the embargo period, to see why a reviewer would not call it out.

The Suicide Squad was a bad game, someone liking it does not justify a dishonest or lazy review

The quality of a game, and the evaluation of it in a review, is entirely subjective.

Neither of which are true is a bold statement that needs more then a “trust me” level of response.

Try looking right under the comment where someone who has been a paid reviewer called it out as nonsense. Or ask literally anyone in the industry. It’s come up on podcasts like Friends Per Second and Giant Bomb over the years enough times. If this was all a big marketing stunt where reviews were bought and paid for, someone would have blown the whistle by now.

You seem to be pushing the idea that its the audience is wrong and desperately assuming that people don’t like the media state due to an inability to reconcile their own preferences with the articles (wild and odd).

And yet you’re doing it right now. I can see why you would distrust a review if you don’t understand what a review is.

Take the reviews for example, VGC’s coverage on Borderlands 4 Does not even address the games broken state but gives it 4/5 stars

That’s because it’s not broken; it performs poorly relative to its visuals. It’s an excellent game.

You’ve done little to convince me that “mistrust” of games media is any more than people getting upset that reviewers have different opinions than they do. I can tell you right now, for instance, that Jordan Middler loves Pokemon, so it’s no surprise to me when VGC gives good reviews to Pokemon games. I’ve got a friend who really gelled with Suicide Squad as well, so I know it’s possible for people to really enjoy that game. In this very thread, you can see people who are convinced that reviewers are paid off or playing difficult games on extra easy modes, neither of which are true, because they just can’t reconcile that anyone could possibly enjoy a game that they didn’t enjoy or weren’t interested in.

I know you were talking about another part of the article, but you had a similarly uncited reason for the shrinking games media work force. I don’t care if you don’t like VGC, but I really don’t see a time when the writing was better, and I wanted to see what you were expecting.

Is it? How do you know?

Also, they may not have hard quotas there but the writers are paid to make articles and content to fill the site (it is like how best buy did not do commission vs future shop but where both the same company and fired those that did not make sales regardless).

The incentives are very different when the writers own the company and are largely paid by monthly subscribers.

There is also a big “citation needed” part that should have set off a editor.

How would you have cited “declining quality of writing” as an inciting factor? How would you measure it? And why did it just become a problem in the past few years rather than any of the problems that are listed in the article?

Those same outlets still review Nintendo games. They just review them late.

What would the “good version” of this article look like in your opinion? VGC doesn’t have quotas, btw.

The real joke is that the article does not even touch on the degrading quality of the writing and experience

I’ll say that you state that as fact, but it’s a perception that not everyone shares.

Do you feel that way about the site reporting the linked article?

And I know the likes of IGN have been a mess for far longer than 2012.

I gotta say, I don’t see it. I did start reading the NY Times toward the end of the election cycle, but it seems to me that hardly a day goes by without showing the awful things Israel’s doing; Bret Stephens has his own opinions, but they’re in the opinion column. Of what I’ve seen, I think they reported Biden’s administration accurately, and if that fucked him over, it’s not really their job to withhold that. That’s how I see it, anyway.

Why do you feel they suck?

I don’t know if they couldn’t figure it out or if they intended it this way, but I like the look. The 3D environments look like the bottom-most layer of an old-fashioned cartoon, where it’s painted and clearly not going to move.

Hi-Fi Rush 2 is so screwed.

That’s often a matter of resources. Staff sizes are only getting smaller at these outlets, and there are more games released each year than ever before; and they’re trending toward being longer on top of that. Being able to get multiple people to review a single game is a luxury, one that Digital Foundry can afford when they just need to benchmark a typical scene in the game.

Reviews will typically mention which version they were, but in general, there are very few differences between them these days, unlike back in the 6th gen or early 7th gen. Games like Cyberpunk are outliers.

Starfield is not a bad game. In a lot of ways, it’s a very good one. My biggest complaints with it, personally, are all the ways that it should have been modernized but refused to, falling back on what worked over a decade before it came out without turning an eye toward its contemporaries and the improvements they’ve made to the same formula. I find Steam reviews to be a valuable data point among plenty of other data points, but user reviews being that much lower than the critic average doesn’t mean the critic score is a problem.

For an example of a game where critics reviewed it less favorably than the user score, see Mad Max or Days Gone, which might be explained as games where the initial sales weren’t strong, and people who found it later, often at a discounted price, were pleasantly surprised compared to its reputation. There’s also the likes of SkillUp’s review of Ghost of Yotei. That game has largely reviewed very well by other outlets, but he found his review to be out of sync with his audience. If you’re a reviewer who plays dozens of games per year, your opinion of a formulaic open world game might be very different from someone who plays 3 games per year and hasn’t gotten sick of it. Both are valid points of view.

Dragon Age was last year. Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Citizen Sleeper 2: Starward Vector, and Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves are all great. Avowed kind of counts, and I’d recommend that one, too. I didn’t like Hades, but Hades fans sure are enjoying Hades II. And maybe I’ll get to Hollow Knight: Silksong before the end of the year, which people seem to largely be into.