ampersandrew

I didn't personally care for it, but I know I'm in the minority. In fact, one of the reasons I didn't care for it is because it felt far less replayable than many of its peers. Even Zagreus will call out "the butterfly room", because there are so few permutations to see.

Tons. There's an entire roguelike genre built around this; some of my favorites are Vagante and Streets of Rogue. There are games with procedurally generated worlds like Terraria, RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, and Factorio. There are RPGs like Baldur's Gate 3 that have so many ways to spec your characters and so many permutations of how events could unfold based on what you did that you're unlikely to see them all.

That line about "only 20% stick around for the multiplayer" isn't exclusive to RTS. Usually I hear a number like 30%, even for other RTS games, but that's the case across every genre, even for games like fighting games that you think are only there for multiplayer. Only about 30% of people of any game's player base will stick around to play online matches against other people.

StarCraft II is one of my favorite games, but to get back into RTSes, for me personally, I'm looking for two solutions: I want it to work well with a controller, and I think I want to get rid of the fog of war. The controller thing, done well, solves the APM complaint already, since there's usually a speed limit on it. Tooth & Tail, Cannon Brawl, Brutal Legend, etc. give you a "cursor" character such that it doesn't matter what input device you're on, since that character can only move at a set speed. This isn't the only way to do it though; it isn't coded to use controllers, but Northgard operates on distinct tiles and things move at a slower pace such that a game like it could work on a controller without compromise. One of those compromises that games like Halo Wars or Battle Aces have made is that you can't really place buildings strategically, and that feels like they've gone too far. As for the fog of war, I recognize its strategic value, but it wrecks me mentally and emotionally. It's just so stress-inducing, even when I understand how to thoroughly scout. Cannon Brawl does without it entirely, and I can enjoy that game in a way that I can't other RTSes. You still have to split your attention paying attention to all of the different attacks in motion that your opponent has thrown at you, and so it doesn't feel like it's missing something. I'm the star of my own story, so these things definitely feel important to me, but I do feel like both of these things would do wonders for making the genre feel more approachable.

And of course, for me, it's a non-starter if the game is online-only. The two big RTS revivals with the most marketing right now are Stormforge and Battle Aces, and both are online-only, as is that Beyond All Reason game right now. These games have been cooking for a long time, and they're going to be launching into a live service game crash. Their lead developers may take away the lesson that the genre can't be saved when I hope that the actual reason is that customers hate putting time and money into a game that will likely be deleted off the face of the earth in a matter of months, not even years.

Microsoft is a wrench in the works, but they're not building a game any larger than they've been doing for some years now. This is still a game that is scoped so that it doesn't need to sell 10 million copies to break even.

Thus far, Obsidian has been very good at creating games within reasonable constraints, which means they're typically not overscoped relative to the size of the game's actual audience. And they do all of this while being a multi project studio that's allegedly good to its employees.

Worth a shot. I'm on Proton Experimental. But the other major differences between our systems are OS and GPU. I'm on Kubuntu 24.04 and an RX 6800 XT with mesa drivers.

Ah, sorry, you didn't specify. I did just test it out on my machine, and main menu and fatal blows were basically just locked at 30. If that's not what you're seeing, I guess I'd try verifying game files next.

I believe those cut-scenes are locked to a lower frame rate for performance and storage space reasons, on consoles especially. In other words, I don't believe it's a problem with your system, and it's likely working as intended.

Man, that was it; or at least, it doesn't complain about IPX not being installed anymore. I didn't know you could just make up a name for any library not listed and it would still know to override it. Thanks! I'll run a LAN test between my desktop and Steam Deck, and if it's all working, I'll document it on PC Gaming Wiki and update this thread.

This is exactly what I thought was happening, and theoretically, it's exactly what I recreated in Heroic, give or take the frame rate limit. However, while things like the controller remapping config files are clearly working, the IPX networking fix is not. For one, things like wsock32, verbatim anyway, aren't present in the list of library overrides at all, and that list of libraries I put in the original post, that appear in the Lutris install, don't appear in the Lutris script. I looked for some extra scripts in the github directories to see if there were other instructions that were being run outside of this script (that's what you told me to look for, right?), but the only thing I found in there seemed to be a copy of part of this same Lutris script.

Thanks. For some reason it occurred to me to hit up the Heroic Discord but not the Lutris one.

I think enough people have been exposed to enough subscription services that customers have started taking inventory of what they're paying per month that they didn't used to do, which means often signing up for a month and then quitting. I'm simultaneously surprised and not surprised that the access to online multiplayer only accounts for about 30% of the reason people subscribe to these things, but then those same customers doing that same accounting of their personal finances have probably done the math to realize that, long term, it's cheaper to just play games online on PC, which is leading to consoles performing the way they're performing lately.