Graphics card drivers aren't usually a thing one should get excited over, but Nvidia's latest release, 572.16, is worth celebrating. Specifically, Nvidia is now pushing out official support for its Transformer-based DLSS4 upscaler, which comes with a massive suite of visual and performance improvements by default.

There are two main reasons you'd want to update to driver 572.16, and they're both vast boons from a utility point of view. Firstly, you're getting ready access to Transformer-based upscaling via DLSS4, which provides a huge uplift in the supported games' visual quality. The second reason is related to DLSS4, though it is a tad more technical: you get to update old games' crummy DLSS versions to the latest build. Exciting, right?

Nvidia's DLSS4 Driver, version 572.16, is now available for download

The DLSS Override feature is one of those things that really should've been implemented from day one of Nvidia's foray into super-sampling, but here we are. It is basically a new utility screen available via the Nvidia App that lets you replace old DLSS versions with the latest Transformer-based model. Any DLSS2+ game should be able to support DLSS4 super-sampling, though I am sad to report that the UI doesn't seem to be working fully just yet. Some users claim that a restart following the drivers' installation helps, but that hasn't been the case on my end.

On a similar note, I'd like to add that there's still some weirdness with how the official Nvidia App is handling this rollout. A significant number of games don't yet support the override UI for some reason, so it may be a good idea to wait for a few more client updates until everything's cleared up. In the interim, I recommend the excellent unofficial DLSS Swapper utility. This handy little tool lets you fine-tune exactly which version of DLSS and its respective presets you wish to use in a given game, and it already has the DLSS4 configuration file ready to go. Nothing beats a good community tool, right?

As one might expect from Nvidia's corpo-garble, DLSS4 is actually a whole clown car's worth of utilities bundled together under the super-sampler's name. While the new RTX 5000 GPUs can access all of these utilities, older cards won't be able to use Multi-Frame Generation, for example. It is what it is, though, and the important bit is that Frame Generation itself isn't the reason to update your Nvidia driver anyway. Instead, you want the ability to switch DLSS upscaler version to the latest version in any supported game, and this feature goes back all the way to RTX 2000 series. That's a big deal right there, no matter how you flip it, and Nvidia can only build upon this feature as we go on.

The post Update your Nvidia GPU driver, because Transformer-based DLSS4 is here appeared first on Destructoid.

Hogwarts Legacy, folks! Remember that big ol' AAA Wizarding World RPG from early 2023? Though it's been mostly out of the headlines for a little while now, the developer Avalanche Software is looking to change that through the official implementation of mods. A striking development, this, but it gets better.

Specifically, Hogwarts Legacy is due to receive official PC modding support via CurseForge on January 30, opening the more-or-less literal floodgates for community-made content. I'm not saying it's a huge improvement compared to the strangely humble Summer 2024 update, but it is a pretty darn big deal if we're being honest. The fact that it's all being accomplished via CurseForge, specifically, means modding will be easy and snappy, to boot, and content development will be driven through the fancy new Hogwarts Legacy creator kit. Nice!

Enjoy official Hogwarts Legacy mods via CurseForge, coming very soon

Anyone interested in actually producing mods for Hogwarts Legacy will be able to grab its accompanying Creator Kit via the Epic Games Store at no additional charge. "The creator kit provides powerful tools right at your fingertips, allowing you to flex your inner developer like the ones here at Avalanche and conjure the magic with custom mods that other players can enjoy, too," said Avalanche Software's community manager via IGN.

This is some very exciting stuff, to be sure. While I don't anticipate Hogwarts Legacy's modding scene to reach the ridiculous heights of, say, a mainline Bethesda Softworks RPG, there's immense potential here. And hey, Avalanche is eager to show off just how powerful Hogwarts Legacy's mod kit is by offering a whole suite of accompanying content for players to peruse. Some examples include a fancy new magical creature fetch-quest, some cool new cosmetics, and an honest-to-goodness endless dungeon to fight your way through. That certainly wasn't on my list of things to expect out of Hogwarts Legacy, I can tell you that much.

The game itself is a compelling enough product, though I do have to admit I never got around to finishing it.

Modding support might make Hogwarts Legacy more intriguing over time, and I do think most players will be interested in the prospect of enjoying community-made mods now that the feature is finally coming out. At the same time, the core Hogwarts Legacy experience is pretty far from perfect. Its gameplay systems can come apart at the seams and the drudgery of traditional open-world fetch-questing doesn't take long to set in.

The fact that mods will be handled via CurseForge implies that truly meaningful gameplay revamps might be impossible, but take this claim with a pinch of salt: we just don't know how powerful the official modkit actually is. The good news, then, is that we won't have to wait long before we get to test it out, so stay tuned.

The post Hogwarts Legacy’s biggest-yet PC update is almost here, featuring mods, new content, and more appeared first on Destructoid.

Through all of its many ups and downs, Helldivers 2 has remained steadfast in its insistence on being the go-to tactical horde shooter. That's in no small part due to its singular vision, which the former CEO and CCO Johan Pilestedt maintained. Now, though, he's off the project.

The silver lining is that Pilestedt isn't suddenly the centerpiece of a workplace drama. Instead, he's simply decided to take a sabbatical and do his own thing for a while. This may come as a big surprise to Pilestedt's many fans, as the CCO had grown very popular with the game's community, even when the going was tough. With that in mind, while it's plainly obvious that Helldivers 2 has been a team project from the very start, it was people such as Johan Pilestedt who brought the player base together, helping them weather whatever storm might've been cooking at any given time.

Johan Pilestedt is leaving Helldivers 2 for a sabbatical, moving onto other projects

"11 years of working "around the clock" on the same IP has made me set aside family, friends, and my lovely wife... and myself," said Pilestedt in his recent Tweet. "I am going to take some time now to redeem what was lost from all of those that supported me over a decade."

Pilestedt hasn't revealed how long his sabbatical might take, but he has confirmed in no uncertain terms that his work on Helldivers 2, specifically, is done: "When I'm back - I will start working on the next Arrowhead game," he said. If you were hoping he'd take over from whoever the acting CCO might be in the interim, it doesn't seem this will be the case at all.

Considering just how eventful things have been for Arrowhead from the day of Helldivers 2's release, it shouldn't come as too big of a surprise that Pilestedt might wish to leave the project behind. And on that note, while it's certainly easy to forget that Arrowhead's got a bunch of other IPs in tow, that is very much the case. I myself am hoping to see a revival of Magicka, for one, though the title itself is probably going to be a no-go, as it's now under Paradox Interactive's control.

It should come as no surprise that there's some uncertainty in the Helldivers 2 community over this decision:

Pilestedt has been very clear in his post that he's got no intention of coming back to Helldivers 2, and so the community is bound to be particularly mindful of that fact moving forward. Arrowhead might be hard-pressed to find someone else to fill Pilestedt's shoes as far as how personable the man's been, but it is what it is.

For what it's worth, after Pilestedt left the position of Arrowhead CEO to take the reigns as Helldivers 2 CCO, specifically, the new CEO Shams Jorjani found his footing reasonably quickly. He's not quite as popular with the community as Pilestedt has been, of course, but it's entirely possible he might choose to position himself as the next public Arrowhead personality that players can rally behind.

The post Helldivers 2’s beloved CCO, Pilestedt, is leaving the franchise appeared first on Destructoid.

Destiny 2's Raids sure are cool. Predictably enough, Bungie's decision to port Raids from Destiny to its sequel was extremely popular, though one of the most notable old Destiny Raids is nowhere to be seen. As it turns out, the Wrath of the Machine isn't even on the docket.

This information comes from Destiny 2's Global Community Lead, Dylan Gafner, who is also known by his dmg04 moniker. As seen via the XCancelled web app, Gafner posted a cheeky call for fans to ask him anything with the caveat that he wouldn't respond to any of the questions. It didn't take long for Gafner to respond to one particular comment from comedian2008, who tried to get some information on the potential launch window for the Wrath of the Machine Raid from the original Destiny. According to Gafner, the port isn't happening "any time soon," which isn't great news for series veterans.

Destiny 2's next Raid is a mystery, but we do know it's not Wrath of the Machine

As you may already know, the original Destiny only had four Raids in total: Vault of Glass, Crota's End, King's Fall, and the Wrath of the Machine. It just so happens that all of them bar Wrath of the Machine have already been ported over to Destiny 2 to immense satisfaction from the community. All three returns have been widely acclaimed by virtually everyone, and served as excellent pit-stops in between entirely new and original Destiny 2 Raid content.

To provide more context to Gafner's partially off-hand comment, Bungie is currently working on new Destiny 2 Raid content. We've known that there's something cooking in the oven for a while now, since at least August 2024, though we obviously don't have any details on the what, why, and how of this mysterious new Raid. The obvious expectation was that Bungie might wish to once again tide the community over by porting Wrath of the Machine, but that's not the case.

One of the main reasons why the Destiny community has historically rallied around Raids is that their respective releases are celebrated with competitive racing events. Those have instead been relegated to the new Dungeons, such as 2024's Vesper's Host and the upcoming Sundered Doctrine. This isn't a bad approach, but Dungeons are obviously smaller-scale and substantially less complex than full-fledged Raids.

With all of that in mind, even though we do know that Bungie is working on all-new Raids, we don't have the faintest idea of how and when they might be coming out. Presumably, they'll be released as part of the new Destiny 2: Frontiers content pipeline, but the whole thing is a real mystery beyond that. The fact of the matter, though, is that Destiny lives and dies by its endgame content, and it'd be downright blasphemous if Bungie just gave up on Raids as a concept. Guess we'll just have to stay tuned, at least for the time being.

The post Destiny 2’s not getting the Wrath of the Machine Raid anytime soon appeared first on Destructoid.

As my exploration of Frame Generation explains, I'm quite skeevy of Nvidia's all-in approach to AI-based performance modifiers. Baseline DLSS is solid, especially now that DLSS4 is here, but the rest I'm iffy on. What about features such as Nvidia Reflex, then, where the boons are even harder to spot?

Nvidia Reflex has felt oblique to me from day one. Whereas the actual super-sampling part of DLSS has always been rather easy to identify through the use of one's eyes, this has never been the case with Reflex. Heck, even the infamous Frame Generation component of Nvidia's DLSS package is easy to notice when you crank it up to eleven. As far as Reflex goes, though, the situation is meaningfully different.

As one of our readers suggested a little while ago (thanks, Icy!), a feature explaining the ins, the outs, and the what-ifs of Nvidia Reflex has been a long time coming, and this is precisely what I've set out to cook up here. If you, too, are having trouble figuring out what on earth Reflex is even doing, this is the place to be.

What is latency, and how does Nvidia Reflex affect it?

In the simplest terms possible, Nvidia Reflex is a feature suite designed specifically to combat click-to-display system latency. Latency is the exact delay between your input and the appearance of its effects on-screen, and the higher it gets, the less responsive your game will feel. If you're looking for a handy little cheat sheet to keep track of, that's easy:

• High frame rate and low latency are good.
• Low frame rate and high latency are bad.
• A low frame rate can lead to high latency, but it's usually just one of its notable components. You can have a high frame rate with high latency (i.e., Frame Generation usage).

Older gamers may also know latency under its funnier-sounding moniker of "ping," and this, too, may help you start connecting the dots in real time. Remember playing Modern Warfare on a shoddy Internet connection back in 2008? Yeah, not the kind of thing you just forget, is it now? Back on track, though.

Once upon a time, frame rate was the go-to performance quantifier for video games. The higher the number, the better your FPS, and the better your FPS, the more responsive your games felt. Easy, right? The thing is, we've since complicated things a fair bit by driving home the fact that, no, FPS isn't the only thing we should be looking at in this context. Instead, we've got the frame rate itself, frame rate consistency, and input latency to take into account.

The overall perceived performance of a game (how it both looks and feels to play in action) is a combination of its FPS and input latency, among other things, and Nvidia Reflex attempts to reduce the latter part of the equation as much as possible. Sometimes, it is to the user's detriment, but more on that later.

How does Nvidia Reflex work?

Nvidia Reflex sets out to "optimize every aspect of the rendering pipeline for latency using a combination of SDKs and driver optimizations," as per Nvidia's blog post from a few years back. For maximum effect, Reflex needs to be implemented into games on a per-project basis for it to work, and that's because it's egregiously difficult to reduce input latency otherwise.

The Reflex Software Development Kit (SDK) fine-tunes a game engine to achieve just-in-time rendering: as soon as a frame is rendered, it gets pushed straight to the screen to reduce the CPU's render queue for the GPU. The traditional rendering pipeline works by having the CPU queue up frames for the GPU to render, and Reflex effectively shortens this window as much as it possibly can.

"When developers integrate the Reflex SDK, they are able to effectively delay the sampling of input and game simulation by dynamically adjusting the submission timing of rendering work to the GPU so that they are processed just-in-time," Nvidia explains. And oh, hey, it usually works out just fine.

On a practical level, Nvidia Reflex makes it so that your GPU always stays under 100% usage, which leads to a slight potential reduction in frame rate while massively reducing input delay. If your GPU gets choked up, you'll get extreme stuttering and other performance problems, which then leads to a greater latency than you get by keeping your GPU under its maximum load capacity.

In traditionally rendered games with the Reflex SDK fully enabled, you will get measurable input latency improvements, and that genuinely is what it's all about. As a result, you get a game that's substantially more responsive and feels better to play, which is a huge deal. Nvidia Reflex isn't a silver bullet of any kind, though.

Problems with Nvidia Reflex and its use cases

Even though it can seem like magic, Nvidia DLSS as a feature-suite is anything but. I already mentioned the importance of keeping system latency in mind when optimizing video games, but there's one more thing that we need to drive home here: latency cannot be entirely nullified. Processing takes time as a fact, and the more stuff you pile into the rendering pipeline, the more latency you are adding to the render equation. With that in mind, it rubs me the wrong way that Nvidia is kinda-sorta pitching Frame Generation as the ultimate solution to the games' performance problems.

Frame generation of any sort improves the perceived visual smoothness of a game: its frames-per-second. It does absolutely nothing as far as latency is concerned. No, actually, scratch that: frame generation has a rendering cost attached to it, which means it adds a few milliseconds to your rendering pipeline as a rule. There's no getting around that, though Nvidia Reflex certainly attempts to do so.

Make no mistake: using Nvidia Reflex alongside Nvidia Frame-Gen is a huge help for input latency, but you're still getting 60 FPS' worth of ping at 200 FPS' worth of perceived smoothness. If that sounds like a bit of a mismatch, you're on the right track.

Aside from that, Nvidia Reflex can generally break down at times. In some games, it very well will lead to reduced performance, unstable frame-pacing (a huge no-no in my book), and even visible stuttering. There's a reason why you don't want to just enable Reflex at a driver level and go with it and why Nvidia recommends that the developers use Reflex SDK for proper implementation.

How to use Nvidia Reflex properly?

Even though Nvidia Reflex is a complicated beast in its own right, using it is quite the opposite: just enable the Nvidia Reflex Low-Latency Mode option in your game's graphics settings, and you're golden. Once again, note that this incurs a performance penalty by default, though this will be a net positive for your input latency in the vast majority of cases.

Nvidia Reflex On vs On + Boost

The more complicated question concerns the fact that there are usually two different versions of Nvidia Reflex to enable in games: Reflex On and On + Boost. There is a meaningful difference between the two, too.

The baseline Reflex essentially maintains a dynamic frame-rate cap that keeps your GPU under 100% load to improve input latency. The On + Boost option, on the other hand, attempts to crank your GPU's core frequency to improve your 1% lows.

If you're unfamiliar with the verbiage, 1% lows are an extremely important frame-rate statistic that has to do with that third element of video game performance I had previously only glossed over: consistency. 1% lows are the worst, slowest frames your GPU can render, and in a perfect scenario, they'd be as close to your actual average FPS as possible. The bigger the delta between your average FPS and your 1% lows, the worse your frame-pacing will be.

With this information in tow, Nvidia Reflex On + Boost tries its darndest to boost your 1% lows by forcing your GPU to run at a high frequency. When your GPU runs fast, however, it heats up more quickly as well. What happens when your GPU overheats? It drops frequency to cool off. You can see now why On + Boost can lead to some performance problems that don't seem obvious at a glance.

It's a great idea, to be sure, but whereas I'm happy to recommend you keep Reflex enabled wherever possible, I would advise testing for the On + Boost option just to be safe.

Nvidia Reflex is a good feature, but keep its caveats in mind

There's an awful lot to keep in mind about Nvidia Reflex because it's a complex technology that attempts to solve a complex problem. The bottom line is thankfully rather simple, though: if a game has the option for you to enable it, you should do so.

The flip side of this particular coin is that Reflex will most certainly not help Multi-Frame Generation feel like you're getting a native 400 FPS' worth of performance. It feels to me like Nvidia is trying to prime people to think that Reflex is something it's really not. Reflex 2, the upgraded version of the stuff I've discussed above, looks great as well, but it won't be the magical solution to the hard problem of latency. Latency is here to stay, and Frame Generation only adds to it.

The post Nvidia Reflex explained: Why it’s important, and why you too should use it appeared first on Destructoid.

Things are a-changing, now that Nintendo's finally officially revealed its Switch 2 console. Even though we don't yet know how powerful, exactly, Switch 2 might be, it's absolutely going to be miles ahead of the original Switch. What does that mean for the Steam Deck and its ilk, though?

At face value, it shouldn't mean diddly squat. The Deck, the ROG Ally, the Legion Go... these devices aren't consoles as such: they're handheld gaming PCs and laptops from a mechanical and functional point of view. Even the most popular of them all, the Steam Deck, doesn't come even close to competing with Nintendo's flagship device. To that end, comparing the two may well seem like a fool's errand. Yet, the bit that has me a tad concerned, specifically, is that the perceived performance baseline of these low-spec devices is about to get turned upside down.

Here's the jig: the original Nintendo Switch, and even its OLED refresh, came about when the video game industry was in a vastly different spot. The Switch is effectively the final surviving relic of a time when hardware requirements stayed the same for over half a decade: the eighth generation of game consoles. This includes the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One, most prominently, as well as the aforementioned Nintendo handheld.

During that time, PC hardware pushed onwards to a ridiculous degree while console stayed the same. Heck, the Switch itself was painfully underpowered basically on launch day, but it still could somewhat reasonably keep up with the likes of PS4 thanks to extreme optimization efforts. Sony moved on to PlayStation 5 since, and Xbox did much the same with Series devices, and it's entirely possible and even likely we'll see a whole new generation of consoles by 2026-2027. In the interim, Nintendo Switch 2 is coming out this year, in 2025, and that is going to reverbate through the industry for sure.

This has two major implications in my mind. Firstly, it's a given that Switch 2 will have a ridiculously large audience no matter what. Secondly, such a massive audience is something that many gaming companies will want to target by default. See where the potential new performance baseline comes into the picture?

If Nintendo releases its fancy new console on the tail end of the current generation, this means Switch 2 will remain relevant through much of Sony and Xbox's next offerings' life-span. Further, it also means that regardless of the home consoles' respective hardware specs, a huge number of game developers will have Nintendo Switch 2 builds ready regardless.

Alright, that's about all the context I need to make my actual argument: depending on how powerful the Nintendo Switch 2 may or many not be, it may actually cause developers to start more-or-less ignoring the current-day PC gaming handhelds in lieu of it.

I see no feasible way for the Switch to be less powerful than the Steam Deck, just to make things as obvious as possible. Leaks (which I recommend considering with a whole chunk of Himalayan salt in hand) put it at right about PlayStation 4 Pro level in handheld mode, and that's without taking Nvidia's DLSS supersampler into account. Now, we don't know whether the Switch 2 will actually ship with some manner of DLSS included, but it's virtually impossible that it won't, given Nvidia's not-so-recent track record.

Combine all of the bits and bobs I've outlined above with the fact that Valve isn't about to release a Steam Deck 2 anytime soon, and you've got a potential storm cooking. What I mean by this is that since the Switch 2 will inevitably be used as a "low-spec" baseline for many game developers, the likes of the Steam Deck are very possibly going to be left out of the performance considerations.

We've got to face the facts here: the entire PC gaming handheld niche is precisely just that: a niche. Even though hardware companies have taken after Valve to deliver a whole host of devices targeting this audience, this is still a very small subsection of a subsection of the gaming industry. One that pales in comparison to the massive audience chasing after the next flagship Nintendo console.

The Steam Deck is already struggling to run modern AAA games, just to be perfectly clear, and it's entirely possible that the Switch 2 won't be able to do so either. Yet, the original Switch is at its core a severely underpowered Android tablet that held on through sheer force of will. Even if Switch 2 is "merely" at the rough performance level of the Steam Deck, you can bet that game developers will squeeze every single teraflop of power out of it in due time.

Reducing or even inverting the performance delta between the Steam Deck and Nintendo's flagship device is the kind of precedent-setting development that could either help or diminish the current PC gaming handhelds. Up until now, it's been very possible to competently emulate the Switch on the Steam Deck, but that won't be the case at all with Switch 2.

It's possible that the optimizations made for Switch 2 will end up helping our Decks, ROG Allies, and Legion devices to some extent. Yet, the relatively small number of people using these things may also preclude these optimizations from being worth porting back. If the vast majority of the gaming audience is on the Switch 2, after all, why bother with the small portion that's sticking it out on lower-spec devices?

Am I being all doom-and-gloom well ahead of time? Oh, yes, certainly. As I outlined above, this whole situation could go either way for the PC gaming handheld scene, and there's simply no way of knowing how the tides may turn just yet.

It's worth being prepared for the eventuality that the Switch 2 will overtake a huge chunk of public gaming discourse in 2025 and beyond, however. There's also the distinctive possibility that it overshadows much of the progress Valve is making in the PC handheld scene for a while, which could cause ripples for the niche later down the line.

In summary, then, this is a very exciting time for the gaming industry that's going to inform much of its focus for years to come. Nintendo's April Direct should give us more context as to what to expect out of this device, though I don't expect true performance benchmarks until actual gamers get to test Switch 2 properly. The bits and bobs I'm concerned about won't unravel until well after that happens, so we've got to stay tuned until then.

The post With Switch 2 on the horizon, where does that leave the Steam Deck? appeared first on Destructoid.

There's a subreddit for everything, so it shouldn't surprise that there's one dedicated specifically to hating on Temporal Anti-Aliasing. The bit that should surprise, instead, is that these folks agree that DLSS4 is a real showstopper in terms of image quality and a big win for Nvidia.

I'm not completely sold on AI-based thingamajigs just yet, but when the good folks from r/FuckTAA say DLSS4 is good, you know you need to stop and hear what they've got to say. Context first, though: this particular subreddit is unified behind a singular and somewhat reasonable purpose: the users' extreme dislike of Temporal Anti-Aliasing. This dislike of TAA stems from various sensible arguments: TAA is blurry, reduces motion clarity, and makes things look like absolute mush on lower resolutions. And, since DLSS is at its core a kind of TAA, it's a given that these same problems would extend to it, too. Can DLSS4 be such a big deal regardless of these concerns, then? As it turns out, the answer is a yes.

Even people who dislike TAA like what DLSS4 is doing

Even though Cyberpunk 2077 is the only game that officially supports DLSS4 at this time, extracting the pertinent upscaler files from its installation folder is beyond simple nowadays. This is important because you can then use the pertinent DLSS.dll file to replace old, outdated versions of DLSS in virtually any other game that supports DLSS 2.0 or newer. Testing stuff out at your own pace, then, is totally trivial, and you can inject the fancy new DLSS4 into a game such as Red Dead Redemption 2, which suffers from excessively blurry TAA by default.

There's some fiddling about to be done with all the different DLSS rendering presets, but Nvidia's latest version of the upscaler is a success almost across the board. In games tested by the r/FuckTAA audiences (Red Dead Redemption 2, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, and Cyberpunk 2077, for the most part), DLSS4 is showing massively improved motion clarity and a reduced inclination for oversharpening. There is a performance cost attached to it, but even DLSS Performance now looks downright excellent compared to what older builds of DLSS looked like.

One huge caveat is that DLSS4 appears to dislike vegetation for whatever reason. Since it is kind of important in video games, this will likely be resolved as Nvidia continues updating and optimizing the tech. Still, it's worth remembering that it's not quite perfect just yet.

In terms of AMD's response to what Nvidia's been doing as of late, stuff's happening on that front as well. Last year's FSR 3.1 updates have been followed by semi-cheeky hints as to what FSR 4.0 may or may not be. Honestly, it's looking very good indeed, but even FSR 4 will be playing second fiddle to DLSS at this point, all the while having to rely on AI cores all of its own. In an ideal world, AMD would be parrying Nvidia's cutting-edge stuff left and right, but it is what it is, and it's good to see FSR trucking along no matter what state it's in.

The post Even the biggest naysayers agree: Transformer-based DLSS4 is a huge win for game upscaling appeared first on Destructoid.

The Steam Deck is a neat piece of kit, but it's not perfect. Slowly but surely, Valve has been iterating on its hardware and software since its 2022 inception, yet there's lots more to be done. The Deck's battery, for example, is seemingly about to receive a Battery Charge Limit.

Battery Charge Limit is one of the more important and forward-looking techniques that help keep modern mobile devices' batteries healthy for long periods. Though it may be surprising to hear that the Steam Deck didn't have this in place already, the good news is that Valve didn't just leave all those poor lithium-ion units to the mercy of Linux/SteamOS, as it has supported battery passthrough from day one. You didn't do anything wrong if you kept your Deck plugged into a charger basically 24/7, in other words. At the same time, the fact that a charge limit is coming should make it even easier to trust your Deck's battery as it ages.

Your Steam Deck's battery might stay healthy for longer, if Valve implements the Battery Charge Limit feature

As surprising as it may be, the Steam Deck doesn't actually have a proper charge limiter in place, and Valve is only just now looking into implementing the feature via a future SteamOS update. The Battery Charge Limit, as it is usually known in mobile phone parlance, makes it so that a given device does not continue to charge past 80% of its total battery charge. This is important because modern lithium-ion batteries degrade over time and thus lose capacity. Keeping them in an optimum charge range (i.e between 20 and 80%) reduces the degradation rate first and foremost, but implementing Battery Charge Limit also adds an additional 20% of extra charge overhead that can be used and drawn upon as capacity is lost over long periods of time. The end result is a healthier battery as the device using it ages, which is obviously a boon for the Steam Deck.

There's no ETA for when Battery Charge Limit might be released, but everything points to it being in active development at this time. SteamOS 3.7, perhaps?

One of the r/SteamDeck's resident Linux wizards, NoFly3972, pointed out that you can already force the feature on by running the following Sudo command:

Obviously, you're implementing this tweak at your own risk, but this is a verified one that many Deck users have been relying on for years now. Alternatively, you may wish to install the delightful Power Tools Decky plugin and toggle the "Battery Charge" tweak. Loads of options at your disposal, then, though I certainly understand if you'd prefer to wait for the official feature from Valve itself.

Whatever the case, there's no reason to worry about using your Steam Deck's battery in the interim. However, outliers do exist, as always, the battery passthrough feature I mentioned before is a big help by default. If you, too, often play on the Deck while plugged into the wall, battery passthrough makes it so that the Deck stops using the battery after it's been fully charged. Instead, it uses the charger for power directly, while the battery is almost entirely left out of the picture. It will only resume charging after dropping to 90%, which usually takes a long while.

The post The Steam Deck is about to get a standard charging feature that it’s sorely been missing appeared first on Destructoid.

As you may be aware, Helldivers 2 went through an extremely tumultuous period in May of 2024, thanks mostly to Sony on the technical side of things. This entire mess resulted in Helldivers 2 being taken off sale in over 130 territories worldwide, but that may be changing now.

More specifically, Helldivers 2 players have caught wind of the fact that the game's Steam backend is actively being updated with new information about which countries the game is restricted in. As per an update from January 21, someone has been mucking about with regional availability in Helldivers 2's Steam backend, which may suggest that big changes are afoot. The reason why I'd still recommend keeping a pinch of salt at hand is that almost all of the referenced territories are rather small regions of entire countries, and there may still be something else going on, instead.

Is Helldivers 2 about to be available worldwide (again)?

For those who lack the context, Helldivers 2 was heavily review-bombed back in May 2024, when Sony announced that it was going to enforce its PlayStation Network linking policy. The original plan was for Helldivers 2 to enforce PSN linking from launch-day onwards, but this fell through due to network instability and other assorted problems. Instead, the "feature" was postponed, only for the community to push back against the late enforcement of the policy in the end.

Now, Helldivers 2 obviously doesn't enforce its planned PSN linking at this time, as Sony and Arrowhead caved in to the community's request at the time. However, the flip side of the equation is that Sony also took Helldivers 2 off sale in all the territories PSN did not officially support at the time. The tricky bit is that Helldivers 2, an always-online live-service multiplayer game, was being sold in countries and regions where Sony didn't have the regulatory support for continued operations. To alleviate this issue ahead of potential legal blowback, Sony simply took the steps that it did, and that left us with a grand total of 176 countries (and territories) blocked worldwide.

Of those 176 territories, the list that's being edited over on SteamDB includes only 43 of them, and they're mostly fairly minor regions at this time. Territories such as Gibraltar, Greenland, British Virgin Islands, and Norfolk (Island), just to list very few of them. Still, the reason why I think this is exciting is that there's something happening on this front at all, and it may well be a sign of things to come at a later date.

Once again, none of this should be taken as an official confirmation that something's happening with Helldivers 2's spotty regional coverage, it's just that someone is clearly fiddling about with it. Another thing to keep in mind is that Helldivers 2 was simply taken off sale in the 176 mentioned territories worldwide: if you live in one of the affected regions and purchased the game before the unlisting, you've been able to play Helldivers 2 just fine all along.

It's a complicated and tiring topic, for sure, and hopefully Sony and Arrowhead will be able to resolve it as soon as possible.

The post Helldivers 2 is slowly being made available in previously banned regions appeared first on Destructoid.

Having previously spoken at length about Nvidia's insistence on using AI wherever possible, I do have to admit to personal curiosity about the tech. It just so happens that I won't have to wait long to see it in action because Cyberpunk 2077's new Patch 2.21 is all about DLSS4.

Cyberpunk 2077 has historically been Nvidia's flagship tech-testing vehicle, featuring the latest and greatest upsamplers and ray-tracing doodads as soon as they hit the market. Even though the game is now effectively done, it's still receiving bug fixes and tech upgrades, and Patch 2.21 is precisely just that. Its biggest draw? The DLSS4 AI tech-suite, specifically Transformer-based supersampling and Multi-Frame Generation. In case you haven't been keeping up with the Joneses, these are effectively the RTX 5000 GPUs' respective calling cards.

Cyberpunk 2077 Patch 2.21 is all about that DLSS4, with plenty of fixes thrown in for good measure

Nvidia's RTX 5000 series of graphics processors is set to debut on January 30, with the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 GPUs here to mark the occasion. The lower-spec cards are to follow suit in February and beyond, from what we've been told so far. While the value proposition of this new generation of hardware is rather iffy still, there's no denying the fact that RTX 5000 will be the go-to choice for ray-tracing and AI-based supersampling. DLSS4 is here to help things along, though game developers may need to put in some elbow grease to get it all working properly.

It was, perhaps, to be expected that CD Projekt RED's Cyberpunk 2077 would be among the first adopters of these exciting new features. Patch 2.21 specifically adds support for DLSS4, which the patch notes state "boosts FPS by using AI to generate up to three times per traditionally rendered frame – enabled with GeForce RTX 50 Series on January 30th." Latency concerns aside, this means we'll presumably be able to test MFG on the day of the new Nvidia GPUs' release.

Far more exciting in my book is DLSS4's new supersampling model: Transformer. This feature can be enabled right this instant on any old Nvidia RTX graphics card, and it will be downright transformative for DLSS users. Players have already reported that DLSS with Transformer model upscaling looks much, much better than the old CNN model in action, with the game no longer looking like an oil painting due to AI smearing and other artifacting. Note that Transfomer-based DLSS supersampling comes at a performance cost compared to CNN-based DLSS, though the good news is that you can switch between the two willy-nilly.

For non-Nvidia users, 2.21 is still a pretty decent update with an impressive list of Photo Mode improvements and bug fixes. Problems with CrystalCoat vehicle customizations have also been fixed, and various quests have been revised to accommodate previously unresolved problems. A decent showing overall, but DLSS4 really is the star of the show. Give it a shot if you can!

The post Cyberpunk 2077 introduces support for DLSS4 Multi-Frame Generation and Transformer-based upscaling appeared first on Destructoid.

Project Zomboid rules in its Build 42, and you should play it, but there's a reason why this massive update is still in its "Unstable" version. Much of it is broken still, and bugs rear up where you least expect them. Trees, for example, could straight-up slit your throat.

Please note that I am being very literal here: there was a non-zero chance for you to get sliced up into ribbons while exploring forests in Project Zomboid. It was every bit as hilarious as it was disturbing and painful to see, and it may or may not have happened to me while testing out Zomboid's new intercity wilderness systems. This problem has thankfully now been fixed as part of Build 42.1.0, which you can (and should) download at your earliest convenience.

Project Zomboid Build 42.1.0 fixes the infamous killer trees, adds awesome new features

Specifically, Project Zomboid's killer trees came about due to the possibility for your avatar to get scratched up while pushing through dense forest canopies. And hey, if a tree can scratch you, why not make it possible for it to straight-up slit your throat while you're mucking about? That's precisely what would occasionally happen, and the odds naturally grew the more time you spent prowling about Project Zomboid's many, many cool forests.

Build 42.1.0 resolves this bug by "[removing] death-by-tree," as per the official patch notes. "Scratches no longer bleed. Erroneous lacerations taken out," it continues. Excellent news, of course, but there's lots more where that came from. The full patch notes are downright massive, but here are some of the most important and notable highlights I've spotted so far:

• Firearm damage reworked: Chance-to-Damage system introduced, making it so that each successfully aimed shot hits.
• Purify Water recipe added, allowing you to purify up to one liter of tainted water using Water Purification Tablets.
• Various new Blacksmithing recipes added, including Iron Bands, Mace and Spear Heads, Spiked Clubs, etc.
• New "Report Bug" button added to the main menu screen.
• Planks can now be carved from Large Branches.
• "Discomfort Modifier" option added to Sandbox Mode.
• Maintenance XP gain doubled.
• Zombies climbing through windows become visible as soon as their heads are visible.
• Boiling water now takes ten times as long.
• Safe House loot has been adjusted, allowing skill books, recipes, and firearms to spawn late-game.
• Lowered the default number of zombies prowling through the forest biome.
• Hot water can once again be used to disinfect bandages.

This is just a very truncated list of all the improvements, tweaks, and fixes delivered as part of update 42.1.0, but it should illustrate my point that it is an excellent release across the board.

If you've been playing Project Zomboid with mods even after it's been updated to B42, it may take a while before they're all brought fully up-to-speed with the new release. It shouldn't be too big of a deal, however, given how quick the modding community has been as of late.

On that note, if you'd like to experience Project Zomboid from an entirely different point of view, boy do I have a recommendation for you. The ridiculously ambitious (and astonishingly janky) Week One mod begins the game a full seven days before the outbreak, allowing you to experience actual human beings doing their own things in Knox Country. Give it a shot, and you can thank me later.

The post You can no longer die to a tree in Project Zomboid appeared first on Destructoid.

If you were an avid gamer in the early naughts, then you surely remember the legendary Havok Engine, (in)famous for its striking physics in games such as Half-Life 2, Max Payne 2, and the entire first-party Bethesda RPG roster. Now, Havok may be clawing its way back into the limelight.

To be perfectly clear, it's not like Havok's gone anywhere in the time since: the video games' focus on physics-driven gameplay and activities has simply shrunken down into irrelevance. Havok is a very particular kind of middleware that's been designed from the ground up specifically and only to handle video game physics, and this feature has been de-emphasized to the point of mere neatness. Like, sure, it's cool that clutter flies around when you shoot through shelving in The Division 2, but it doesn't add much to the experience at all. That may well change sometime in the future because Havok has just released a delightful new showpiece.

Is Havok Engine about to make itself the star of the show once again?

It's hard not to feel giddy upon seeing Havok in action in the featured video, I've got to admit. Caves come crashing down, rocks break apart, and barrels explode to immensely satisfying effect, making it clear that Havok intends to make video game physics as cool as it darn well should be. Curiously, this is the first YouTube showcase video Havok's uploaded in over a decade. The company's previous outing was decidedly less impressive, if I might say so myself.

Now, the important bit to keep in mind is that Havok is only useful when it's being integrated into an actual video game: that's the middleware part of the equation. Crucially, at the end of the showcase, Havok features a small Unreal Engine badge in the lower right corner of the screen. This implies (if not outright confirms) that the demo ran on UE, suggesting relatively easy and straightforward Havok implementations for UE projects down the line. Would physics such as these be enough to make me like Unreal 5? Perhaps, yes.

As I previously pointed out, Havok has been remarkably successful all along, though it's taken a backseat since its introduction to the industry. Whereas once you might've gotten all excited just to see the legendary Havok logo during the game's splash screen videos, now it's entirely too easy to miss the fact that Havok is there in the first place. Did you know that Destiny 2 and Helldivers 2 both use Havok for physics calculations, for example? How about Doom Eternal, Elden Ring, or Final Fantasy 16? They all leverage this tech to some extent, it's just that physics is usually just an added bonus rather than a kicker all of its own.

It's still too early to get hyped up over a mere developer-focused tech demo, but Havok is an institution unto itself, and I cannot wait to see what comes of this exciting new iteration of it. Half-Life 3 confirmed, perhaps? If not, how about an Oblivion remake with appropriately upgraded physics interactions?

The post Remember the Havok Physics Engine? In case you forgot, its new trailer kicks things into overdrive appeared first on Destructoid.

Team Cherry fans will regretfully agree that we know precious little about Hollow Knight: Silksong at this time, a whopping six years after the game's original announcement. It was only a matter of time, perhaps, before we had a serious community meltdown over at the biggest Silksong subreddit.

There are layers upon layers of memes and sheer desperation to be uncovered here, and honestly, they're not for the faint of heart. To begin with, it's important to keep in mind that Team Cherry, the developer of Hollow Knight, hasn't exactly been forthcoming with information about Silksong. We know that the game exists, yes, and its rough outline is more-or-less set in place, but everything else is a huge unknown. The reasons for such an opaque approach to development are unclear, but its effects on the community sure are transparent.

Most fans just want an update of some sort, but since Team Cherry isn't providing one, it's oh-so-easy to start grasping for straws. It doesn't help, either, that some members of Team Cherry are seemingly keen to outright give the community members straws to hold onto, rather than concrete Silksong information. For example, Hollow Knight designer William Pellen provided us with a mysterious Tweet back on January 16:

The obvious expectation, then, is that Pellen was referring to something to do with Hollow Knight: Silksong. Except, the big thing that came about about a day after was the announcement of Nintendo Switch 2. The sensible takeaway would be that Pellen had insider information that made him lampshade the looming console announcement, but that's not what the community's initial reading of the situation was.

The really curious bit about Pellen's post was that he changed his profile picture to that of a cake ahead of posting. Fans over at the Silksong subreddit quickly found that it was sourced from a cake recipe posted on April 2, 2024. If that specific date rings a bell, you've been paying attention to industry news, because Nintendo's big Switch 2 Direct is due to release on April 2, 2025. Coincidence? Oh, r/Silksong didn't think so, opting instead to believe that Team Cherry is kicking off a fancy new Alternate Reality Game (i.e. ARG). Thing is, that doesn't seem to have been the case.

Hollow Knight: Silksong was originally supposed to be a Hornet-focused expansion to the original Hollow Knight, but Team Cherry quickly discovered (all the way back in 2019) that she deserved a standalone entry all of her own. Updates since have been very far and few between, which is particularly surprising when you consider that Team Cherry had a playable Silksong demo over half a decade ago.

Silksong was supposed to release sometime early in 2023 only to receive a substantial pushback in May of that year. This obviously wasn't great news for the community, but Team Cherry's work has historically been extremely high-quality and well worth the wait, so it was understandable. The bit that fans haven't taken a liking to is how Team Cherry seemingly refuses to communicate its plans, which is atypical for a studio that got its wings thanks to an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign.

Really though, it's the lack of information followed by cryptic will-they-won't-they approach to community outreach that has sent Silksong fans into a frenzy, and things haven't been going well on that front since.

The question that needs to be posed, from my point of view, is whether Team Cherry has provided any real reason for the Silksong community to have its meltdown in the first place. Though the developer has been cryptic and stealthy when it comes to Hollow Knight's production, I fail to see any real reason to think that Team Cherry wouldn't be able to deliver a masterpiece. Time and again, this small team has delivered high-quality content that's made people as eager as they are for their next release. Though more information about Silksong would certainly be welcome, the fact of the matter is that it's being actively developed and will release at some point in the future. That really ought to be enough. Predictably, the r/Silksong community doesn't appear to agree.

Circling back to the non-starter ARG, the r/Silksong community has a bunch of theories as to what's happening with Hollow Knight: Silksong at this time. One of the most popular takes is that Team Cherry has signed a non-disclosure agreement with Nintendo for a Switch 2 day-and-date release of Silksong. Many have come to believe that Silksong will be bundled with the handheld console, and that the reveal of this monumental deal will come about as part of the upcoming Nintendo Direct. One thing I will say is that Team Cherry's insistence on not sharing more information about Silksong does seem like something Nintendo would wish to enforce, even if it isn't a first-party studio. Otherwise, such a severe dearth of information about a game as desirable as Silksong is definitely strange.

At face value, this sounds like exceedingly fanciful thinking, but even I feel uneasy dismissing the claims. After all, that profile cake picture seems like an oddly specific choice for a Team Cherry dev to suddenly switch to... yet, I also can't help but wonder does it really matter that much? How far can theorycrafting be stretched before it devolves into schizophrenic connection-making that even It's Always Sunny's Charlie Kelly wouldn't be ashamed of? Whatever the case may be, I wouldn't recommend jumping into r/Silksong at this time.

If you'd like to get a sense of things we actually, verifiably do know about Hollow Knight: Silksong, there's an article for that right here at Destructoid. Everything else is at this time mere theorycrafting that could end up going either way in the end. And speaking of theorycrafting, did you hear what happened with Gravity Falls not too long ago? Yeah, me neither. Funny thing, that.

I would advise you to keep an eye out for Nintendo's April Direct, but heck, everyone's going to be watching it anyways. Who knows, maybe Team Cherry's logo will come to greet us there, in the end.

The post Hollow Knight: Silksong fans are having a meltdown on social media. What happened? appeared first on Destructoid.

There's much to be said about the current state of Destiny 2, but the world's first race events are a tried-and-true roll call for the community. Since we're not getting any new Raids anytime soon, Dungeons are the next best thing, and Sundered Doctrine is now on the docket.

Though we have absolutely no actual promotional materials for Sundered Doctrine in Destiny 2, Bungie has been kind enough to reveal some interesting details about this fancy new Dungeon in the latest TWID (This Week in Destiny) blog post. For example, we now know that Sundered Doctrine takes place aboard Rhulk's sunken Pyramid vessel, back in Savathûn’s Throne World. Sundered Doctrine's world's first completion race will kick off on the Dungeon's release on February 7 (Friday). Remember, too, that this means Contest Mode will be enabled for the next 48 hours, making Sundered Doctrine far more challenging than it otherwise would be.

The Sundered Doctrine Dungeon world's first race is coming to Destiny 2

Sundered Doctrine is thus poised to be the second Dungeon released to its very own world's first race, following last year's Vesper's Host. Only, this time around, Bungie intends to pull all the stops for the winning team: "This time around, rather than a podium race, we’ll be looking to crown the single team that rises to the top and finishes first. With that, we are leveling up the reward, creating something memorable and unique to honor the incredible accomplishment of the winning team. That's why, for this race, each winning team member will receive the first-ever Dungeon Race trophy," says the announcement.

This is fairly unprecedented, as such real-world trophies had previously been the exclusive purview of Raids. Things definitely are a-changing, as we can see.

If you're a mere mortal such as myself, and don't necessarily intend to compete in the world's first race proper, odds are you're still going to want to score a piece of sweet loot. Fancy new guns and armor are a given, and to get any of that goodness, you'll need to meet the Power Level requirement. As per Bungie, the PL target is 1995 for all encounters, which should be easy enough to target.

To be eligible to play Sundered Doctrine in the first place, all players in your Fireteam need to own the Final Shape Dungeon key and acquire the Drowning Labyrinth quest. Whenever a new Dungeon releases, this NPC or the other will invite Guardians to pick up its respective quest from them. This is, presumably, how we'll acquire Drowning Labyrinth upon the Dungeon's release.

I'll happily admit that I wasn't able to complete Vesper's Host during its Contest Mode period. If you, too, end up struggling with Sundered Doctrine in February, there's nothing to worry about: all the important goodies (i.e. guns and armor) will still be available after Contest Mode runs out, on the reset of February 9. From that point onwards, the Dungeon will be more accessible to the average player with a reduced Power Level requirement. Neat!

Remember, too, that this is going to mark the start of the third major Episode of Destiny 2: The Final Shape. It's a thrilling enough predicament, for sure, but Bungie's recent track record has got me slightly worried for what might happen to Oryx's Dreadnaught.

The post Destiny 2’s next Dungeon, Sundered Doctrine, is coming out very soon, and so is the world’s first race appeared first on Destructoid.

Hyper Light Breaker is a pretty darn neat game, even if it does have all the usual roughness of an Early Access release, but its Steam Deck performance was practically inexcusable on launch day. Somewhat unexpectedly, the developer Heart Machine has already managed to turn that around, however!

Heart Machine made a name for itself with the original Hyper Light Drifter, a practically legendary top-down hack 'n' slash indie adventure that sets the stage for Breaker. Seeing Hyper Light Drifter release in Early Access the way it did made me slightly worried about what the future might hold, but Hotfix v0.5.1.107947 has thankfully dispelled many of my concerns. Specifically, shoddy performance remains one of Breaker's biggest problems, but I am thrilled to report that the game is no longer unplayable on the Steam Deck. The flip side of the coin is that there's some serious weirdness with how Heart Machine handles the Deck in general.

You can now enjoy Hyper Light Breaker on the Steam Deck, but there's still some strangeness about

I am thrilled that Hyper Light Breaker runs reasonably well on the Deck. The gameplay loop is a perfect match for the console, and the new hotfix's performance improvements have already made for a genuinely enjoyable experience. Heart Machine has already promised more optimization to come, and soon: "The strongest feedback we’ve received this week focuses on performance, particularly on lower-end machines and the Steam Deck. Today’s Hotfix includes a large number of performance improvements and improved Graphics Settings. Expect even more improvements in future planned updates as well."

I didn't anticipate the difference between the graphics settings a Steam Deck has access to and those you have on a regular PC setup. In my previous article, I mentioned that Hyper Light Breaker only lets you tweak three different settings:

• Shadow quality
• Foliage distance
• Prop detail

The new hotfix changed that on the Steam Deck, but not necessarily for the better. On the Deck, you now only have access to:

• Ambient occlusion
• Film effects
• Film grain
• Chromatic aberration

That's right: the three original settings have been taken out of the graphics sub-menu and replaced with a handful of entirely different ones instead. Why is that the case? I do not know, but it gets weirder still. You see, the regular PC build of Hyper Light Breaker has what I would call a proper graphics tweak menu:

It's still far from perfect, but it's genuinely helpful and allows you to tweak the visual experience however you see fit. There's no real way to do so on the Steam Deck at this time, and I cannot fathom why this would be the case unless there's something very painfully obvious that I keep missing.

My gut feeling is that Heart Machine is trying to deliver a curated, optimized experience on the Steam Deck. This is fair, and an approach that's more than valid for what is at its core a very low-spec gaming laptop. Yet, I do not see the value in only giving Steam Deck users a gutted version of the PC build's graphics settings, no matter how I flip it.

Another possibility is that the Steam Deck's options UI is somehow squeezed together and only displays a small portion of the full settings list. Since only the four bottom options show up on the Deck, that's a distinctively realistic option but a problem nonetheless.

This whole realization has sort of overshadowed Heart Machine's hotfixing efforts for me personally, though I'm sure the team will eventually get around to resolving this apparent problem in due time. Otherwise, Hyper Light Breaker is proving to be rather good overall, and I can finally recommend it. Even on the Steam Deck, as long as you're okay with not being able to tweak settings however you want!

The post New Hyper Light Breaker update makes the game playable on the Steam Deck appeared first on Destructoid.

It's finally happening, folks: Nintendo's officially revealed the Switch 2, and it absolutely is the grown-up version of the beloved handheld. More muted, a bigger screen, and substantially more modern hardware: everyone's going to want the Switch 2, but how does it compare to the original Nintendo Switch?

Nintendo is yet to provide us with a full and comprehensive spec sheet for the Nintendo Switch 2. Without mucking about with potentially false and/or misleading leaks, all we've got to go on are the bits and bobs we see as part of the reveal trailer. The good news is that there's a bunch we can learn from this admittedly short piece already. Do watch the featured video if you haven't yet had the chance to see it, and then proceed down below for a comprehensive comparison of the Switch and the Switch 2!

Nintendo Switch vs Switch 2 comparison TL;DR

Here's we already know about for sure about Nintendo Switch 2 versus the original Switch:

• Switch 2 has a substantially bigger screen than the Switch.
• Switch 2 is slimmer, with potentially more ergonomic Joy-Cons than the Switch.
• Switch 2 Joy-Cons are not compatible with old Switch Joy-Cons; they attach magnetically.
• Switch 2 has a redesigned docking station that won't be compatible with the Switch, and vice versa.
• Switch 2 has a stronger and larger kick-stand attached than the Switch.
• Switch 2 has one extra USB-C port (one at the top, one at the bottom) alongside the classic 3.5mm audio output.
• Switch 2 has one extra button just under the 'Home' key. Function not yet identified.

Extrapolating further from the design that's on show, the expectation is that we should be comparing the Nintendo Switch 2 to the original Switch, specifically, and leave the Switch OLED out of the equation for the time being. That's because it seems like the Switch 2 won't ship with an OLED display by default, with Nintendo possibly opting to release an upgraded Switch 2 OLED at a later date instead. This isn't confirmed, mind, but it seems to be the way the winds are blowing from what we currently have to go on, based mostly on bezel sizes.

Switch 2 Joy-Cons compared to Switch Joy-Cons

Prone to stick drift and other breakages, the original Switch's Joy-Cons were a huge pain to deal with, and weren't particularly ergonomic to begin with, leading to many criticisms.

Nintendo has yet to detail any improvements that may or may not have been made to the new Switch 2 Joy-Con design, but they appear more robustly built, if nothing else. The reveal trailer also adds to the rumors that it may be possible to use Joy-Cons as mouse-like sliding controllers, but keep a pinch of salt at hand as far as that goes.

Is the Nintendo Switch 2 the upgrade we've been waiting for?

Even without concrete performance benchmarks, this is clearly going to be a substantially more powerful device than the original Switch. Rumor has it that we should expect a performance envelope roughly comparable to the RTX 3060 in a portable package, which would put it a tad above the Steam Deck. Stay tuned: we should know more by the time Nintendo's Switch 2 Direct rolls around on April 2nd, 2025.

With that in mind, Nintendo Switch 2 seems like a more robust and comprehensive console than its predecessor. And I don't think I need to go into much detail on just how performant this little machine has been over the years. So, exciting weeks and months ahead of us, no matter how you slice it!

The post What’s the difference between the Switch and the Switch 2? appeared first on Destructoid.

Fortune's Run is a pretty rad Early Access retro FPS / Immersive Sim hybrid that's been rummaging about its niche for a little while now, but its development is about to cease for a long while. Specifically, the main developer is going to prison, and the QA lead is out.

"First of all, I have some stuff going on I need to make public as it's going to interrupt development," said the lead developer of Fortune's Run, Dizzy. "I've been sentenced to prison for the next 3 years." That's more-or-less the opening statement of the latest development blog posted on Steam. Though Dizzy has chosen not to reveal what's gone down, they've been adamant that he deserves the punishment even though that part of their life is in the past: "I do not have a sex crime. I'm not going to go into specific charges and such or tell you the story. What I did was wrong and that's all you need to know," he concluded. There's more, though.

Fortune's Run will stay in its current state for the foreseeable future

"My case is about 5 years old now, I have been going through the legal process the whole time I've been working on [Fortune's Run]," said Dizzy. "I have finally been found guilty and sentenced, and I'm going away next month. It's a shame, but it's the consequences of my actions. I was a very violent person and I hurt a lot of people in my life."

Dizzy hasn't been a one-person dev team all along, note. They've been working on Fortune's Run alongside their wife, Arachne, who is also off the project following some traumatic happenings from July 2024: "About three weeks ago, Arachne had a major surgery. Everything should have went well and we were planning on resuming production at a slower pace about a week and a half later, with me taking over some of the more demanding responsibilities as she recovers for the rest of the year," Dizzie then posted about the matter, adding that "[Arachne] has had multiple complications from the surgery and had to be hospitalized in the ICU two days after being released from the surgery center. We've been bouncing around between different departments and hospitals for about a week now. Long story short, she was very ill and almost died but is now stable and has been released home into my care."

The silver lining to this situation is that Arachne has recovered since, but things got complicated further still: "Once [Arachne] recovered, she decided that she was no longer interested in game development. She was in charge of QA and a few level segments, all of which has been abandoned and I've been forced to get by on my own for the past while. It's been very difficult to do alone but I actually managed, by basically not sleeping, to complete all of the work in time so that it could be released before I'm sent away."

Dizzie has also added that they "decided to part ways," which has led to the current situation. Fortune's Run's development is now "completely interrupted," though Dizzie wants to continue working on it as soon as he is able to. "I want to underline that I'm no longer in financial dire straits since our game actually sold OK, so I should be able to afford rent once I get out, so there's a chance that if you wait a few years I'll be able to cap off the release. In fact, there's not very much content left to work on, I've been making stubs and prototypes of the missing levels in my spare time," he explained.

It's not all grim, then, though it's not great, either. Dizzie is clearly intent on continuing the development of Fortune's Run if at all possible, which is admirable. Also worth keeping in mind is that Fortune's Run just received a massive new content update that should add a bunch of fresh gameplay to the mix. In conclusion, then, if you've been waiting for Fortune's Run to release from Early Access, I suggest either taking it off your wishlist for the foreseeable future or playing it for what it is. The bits that are there are good, I can tell you that much!

The post Indie ImSim Fortune’s Run effectively ceases development amidst health problems and prison time appeared first on Destructoid.

Even though Lovecraft might've been an indubitably racist author, others have built upon his legacy to create a genuinely compelling library of cosmic horror media. Very few games truly drive home how horrific it is to live alongside Lovecraft's monstrosities, however, and Cyclopean: The Great Abyss may correct that.

Frankly, I can't help but be surprised that we haven't yet had an honest-to-goodness cosmic horror dungeon crawler. That's what Cyclopean: The Great Abyss is, of course, but just look at it! How has nobody else come up with this particular concept before? Thankfully, small-scale developer Schmidt Workshops is here to correct that wrong, and I think there's some real merit in this project beyond its impeccable vibes.

Cyclopean: The Great Abyss releases in Early Access on January 17, check out the demo now

A free demo is available via Steam, and it's a tiny download, so you'll be in-game before you know it. The crux of the experience is Cyclopean's obvious Ultima gameplay loop. This is a full-fledged old-school CRPG that plainly states it's been heavily inspired by the likes of Ultima and Questron, just to list a few. You've got the one-two combo of a bird's eye exploration component with first-person dungeon crawling. The deliciously grainy graphics tie it all together with a gross, slimy bow on top.

Schmidt Workshops points out that, even though Cyclopean is releasing via Early Access on January 17, the game is more-or-less functionally complete already: "Cyclopean is a complete game, but it is still in need of more thorough play-testing. Early Access will help me enhance and expand the game while getting important feedback from players," says the developer's statement on Steam.

"As mentioned there is a complete game already playable, with three different potential endings. The quests are not too long or involved, but they have a beginning, middle and end. The player has many options in how to engage with the game world, including combat, stealth and dialogue," they continue.

Good showing, then, but I'd like to add more context to why I think this may be Schmidt Workshops' most promising game yet. This one-man game-dev studio effectively specializes in producing small-scale Lovecraftian adventure games, and I'm genuinely surprised they're not more popular in the cosmic horror gaming niche.

For example, Schmidt Workshops' Aberration Analyst is more-or-less a Delta Green operation handler simulator. Paradox Vector, on the other hand, is described as an "homage and sequel" to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness with a wild graphics style to keep things spicy. As you can probably tell, I've been on a bit of a Schmidt Workshops bender as of late, but it's really good stuff.

Once again, these are all relatively small-scale titles that come in at just under $5. At that price point, though, I'm happy to recommend them and will be looking forward to whatever else Schmidt Workshops pushes out in the future.

The post Lovecraftian old-school dungeon crawler Cyclopean: The Great Abyss is about slither into Early Access appeared first on Destructoid.

Hyper Light Breaker sure looks neat, right? Well, that neatness comes at a steep, steep performance cost, as the game is extremely hard to run. The apparent lack of performance optimization isn't the only problem, either, as the game doesn't even have a proper graphics settings menu to begin with.

I really do hate to rag on the developer Heart Machine for this, but the fact of the matter is that Hyper Light Breaker hasn't gotten off on the right foot. On top of its "Mixed" review rating on Steam, I can attest to it being totally unplayable on the Steam Deck. Even at the absolute lowest settings, Valve's handheld can barely eke out an unstable 15-30 FPS. This is particularly disappointing because Heart Machine specifically mentioned back in December that Hyper Light Breaker should run well on the Deck on launch-day. Obviously, that claim hasn't panned out, but Heart Machine is on the case already.

Hyper Light Breaker's performance is bad, but you can at least enable V-Sync right now

The fact that Hyper Light Breaker runs much the same as a bag of cement powder is just one-half of the equation, as I alluded to earlier. For some reason, the game's selection of graphics settings is beyond small. As of the Early Access release build, you can tweak a grand total of three settings:

• Shadow quality
• Foliage distance
• Prop detail

On that note, it's definitely worth pointing out that I've been having trouble figuring out what, exactly, is changing as I modify settings from one stage to the other outside of shadow quality. Putting shadow quality onto anything above "0" obliterates the Steam Deck frame rate further still, which is fun. You can also change the rendering resolution of the game and whether it runs full-screen or not, but frame-pacing is off no matter what you do since there's no way to enable V-Sync in-game. Fun stuff.

Heart Machine's solution is thankfully simple, just slap the following code into Steam's launch options sub-menu: "-ExecCmds="r.vsync 1"".

For everyone who's trying to play Hyper Light Breaker on faster machines than the admittedly humble Steam Deck, Heart Machine invites you to share your dxdiag for them to assess, so they are on the case already, which is a good sign.

Granted, Hyper Light Breaker is an Early Access title that's just come out of its shell. I do understand that Heart Machine is likely struggling to keep up with all the feedback the community is definitely sending their way, of course. It's also possible that the build that got shipped is lacking some of the optimizations that Heart Machine intended to ship, as per their Steam Deck performance assessments. Even so, it's sad to see Hyper Light Breaker fumble this hard.

As a big fan of Hyper Light Drifter, I was really excited to see what might come of this project. Its performance so far has put me off, so I'm hoping that Heart Machine clears this up by the time I circle back to trying it out again.

The post Hyper Light Breaker runs very badly on PC and Steam Deck, but FPS improvements are coming appeared first on Destructoid.

Starfield is a whole lot of things, but perfect it most definitely ain't. While the game's got merit, Bethesda is yet to pivot it into one of its trademark success stories. Now, we're getting insight into its development thanks to a former Bethesda artist, and he's spilling some serious beans.

Specifically, this latest interview comes about thanks to YouTube talk host Kiwi Talkz (Reece Reilly). On their show, Kiwi Talkz has hosted Bethesda's former game designer Will Shen, and then followed up that particular interview with an all-new one featuring former character artist Dennis Mejillones. Mejillones had a whole host of interesting stuff to share, including a whole bunch of praise for Todd Howard and his approach to game development. As far as Starfield goes, specifically, Mejillones said that the BSG team generally agrees with the players' critique of the game, but that the community has some things very, very wrong still.

Todd Howard is great to work with, actually, and people don't know what they're talking about when it comes to game engines

First things first, if you've got an hour to spare, I cannot recommend Kiwi Talkz interviews enough. Informative, loaded with valuable content and insights, and just a joy to listen to, the people hosted on this show are who gamers should be listening too. If they want game development context, that is.

Need a prime example? Look no further than Mejillones' thoughts on whether Bethesda should ditch Creation Engine in lieu of Unreal 5: "[People making these claims] don't know what the hell they're talking about," he said. "Creation Engine has been re-written from the ground-up, like, I mean completely from scratch, it just [kept] the name. But the entire systems have been ripped out of it and replaced [over the years.]" Sure, Skyrim ported over to UE5 as a fan project looks great, but a game engine is most definitely not the be-all-end-all of how a game plays.

"There's a lot of things that the players don't really [get]. And they can't, I mean, I understand. They're not gonna know, it's a technical thing that you don't really know until you start having experience with [game development]," said Mejillones. "At times it wouldn't be a bad idea to maybe be more thoughtful about the way that's communicated versus saying 'oh, the devs are lazy.'."

On the topic of Todd Howard, specifically, Mejillones had little else than praise to share: "One of the things I loved about working with Todd [...] he'd come over by everybody's desk, he'd walk around the whole studio to see what you're doing, come talk to you for a little bit - to all the developers - and I had a really strong relationship with him." Mejillones said Howard was "very reasonable" when it comes to listening to his staff and understanding them. He never pulled rank, Mejillones claims, and the only real problem as time went on was that Howard could no longer manage Bethesda the way he used to due to the company growing tremendously. "His attention was very scattered," said Mejillones, the implication being that this is one of the reasons Starfield might not have delivered on all fronts. "Some of the people that took Todd's place, they're not Todd. It takes a lot to be Todd."

Of course, I cannot hope to summarize all the phenomenal insight Mejillones gives in this interview. There's lots of stuff he references, going so far as to discuss why Elder Scrolls 6 is under heavy scrutiny by Microsoft, and how Bethesda was sure Skyrim would fail mere months ahead of its release. For that (and lots more), absolutely do watch the interview featured above.

One last bit I do wish to reference here is somewhat random, and it's got to do with Starfield's confusingly neutered blood and gore systems: "That has a lot of implications with all the different suits," Mejillones explained. "From a technical perspective, there's a lot that has to go with it." According to him, the original plan was for Starfield to feel a tad more Fallout in that respect, but the technical challenges were simply too great. In fact, Mejillones says that systems were already in place for limb dissection and in-depth visual body damage systems, but it quickly turned into a "rat's nest" of mesh and model problems.

So, there you have it. Once again, I cannot recommend watching Kiwi Talkz' interviews enough, and if you're even remotely interested in what's up at Bethesda and with Todd Howard specifically, this is the place to be.

The post Former Bethesda artist praises Todd Howard, provides more context for Starfield’s development, and its surprising lack of gore appeared first on Destructoid.

It's very self-apparent that nostalgia, specifically, is a crucial aspect of modern gaming. Emulation's been important since forever now, certainly, but it's particularly relevant nowadays, and more powerful than ever before. Games such as Sierra Entertainment's output are, however, often overlooked in this respect. They certainly shouldn't be, though.

Sierra Entertainment's classic adventure games generally released on MS-DOS, Macintosh, and early iterations of Windows proper, and they were all the rage at the time. Though point 'n' click games have mostly gone the way of the dodo in this day and age, even more so than real-time strategy titles have, they used to be the de facto genre for computer gaming.

We're talking top-tier graphics, excellent interactivity, and a usually appropriately wild combo of solid and hammy voice-acting to top it all off. As far as these features go, Sierra Entertainment was the bees' knees for the longest time, and here I've picked out ten of the very best point 'n' click adventures the publisher ever released. Note that you can play many of these games on the cheap via GOG, if you wish to. Alternatives include ScummVM and DosBox if you're feeling more adventurous! Though, you will need to supply your own original copies of games for the latter.

Top 10 best Sierra Entertainment adventure games

While virtually everyone's emulating those pesky Pokey-mans and Excellent Italian Plumbers, be it on the go or not, Sierra's adventures don't come up nearly as often. It's not necessarily hard to see why, mind: these games sport fairly out-of-date tech and no accommodations for modern control schemes. Further, point 'n' click adventures basically need your full and undivided attention, which is a far cry from the simple gameplay of a Pokemon game.

Still, I do genuinely believe you should give Sierra adventures a shot if you're even remotely interested in them. And, oh hey, I've got a list of must-plays ready for your consideration. Do note, however, that unlike the more modern LucasArts adventures, classic Sierra games are not very player-friendly, and it's often possible to lock yourself into a situation where it's impossible to progress. Use guides, y'all.

#10: King's Quest 3: To Heir is Human

King's Quest 3 was wildly annoying in some respects but also incredibly immersive in others. Graphics aren't the key draw here, obviously, but the sheer ambition and innovation on show in this particular franchise entry were staggering. Players take control over a slave who's about to be sacrificed on his 18th birthday, and the main objective for the first half of the game is to figure out a way to escape.

There is a timed element to King's Quest 3: it's up to you to accomplish all the objectives the wizard gives you and work on your escape plan within the allotted time frame. However, you can't allow the wizard to spot you mucking about with stuff you shouldn't touch, so you're always pressed for this resource or the other.

The bit that I personally loved the most about King's Quest 3 was the need to reference the physical manual to actually create various concoctions and cast spells. There's a physicality to Sierra's adventure games that we just don't get in modern titles, and that, in particular, is one of the bits I miss about the old titles. If you end up playing KQ3, I recommend printing out a copy of the manual to go along with it!

#9: Quest for Glory: So You Want to Be A Hero

Quest for Glory was, much like some other Sierra adventure games, a role-playing hybrid. Even though these games generally do fall into the same niche as, say, Gabriel Knight titles, there's a world of difference when it comes to gameplay. And gameplay, specifically, was the driving force behind Quest for Glory's rise to fame.

Crucially, Quest for Glory had multiple puzzle solutions due to its RPG mechanics (i.e., character classes, abilities, etc.), which meant getting stuck didn't happen all that often. Players could choose a Fighter, a Thief, or a Magic User to start things off, but you could still build them up to unlock additional cross-class skills, which could, in turn, be used both in combat and during adventuring.

I specifically remember being flabbergasted when I realized Quest for Glory had the actual passage of time I needed to take into account. To say nothing of having to eat and rest if I wanted my wily Fighter to keep trucking along. Future Quest for Glory titles also allowed you to import your character to continue the adventure, which was a real joy!

#8: The Beast Within: A Gabriel Knight Mystery

Full-Motion Video (FMV) point-and-click games aren't to everyone's taste, and I'm not particularly fond of them myself. Yet, the second game in the revered Gabriel Knight series is just excellent and a perfect showcase of what could've been accomplished in FMV titles.

Make no mistake, The Beast Within isn't nearly as good as the first Gabriel Knight title was, and it does perform some character assassination along the way. As a standalone project, though, it's very competent and one of those experiences that grow on you if you allow them to. I myself absolutely adore the awkward campiness of it all: they just do not make games like these anymore. As long as you're okay with this type of thing, I cannot recommend The Beast Within enough.

#7: Laura Bow 2: The Dagger of Amon-Ra

While the original Laura Bow game was fairly interesting in its own right, the sequel is easily one of the best Sierra adventure titles. As its title may imply, Laura Bow 2 is all about that 1920s' Egyptology craze, and it may well remind you of Poirot's adventures in some ways. It's an excellent setting and a very memorable story in its own right.

Gameplay-wise, the bits that separate The Dagger of Amon-Ra from other games of its era are the various bespoke gameplay mechanics (though they don't function all that well in some respects), such as eavesdropping and interrogation, as well as the availability of multiple endings. Some annoyances do remain, naturally. The biggest problem with Laura Bow 2 by far is one that comes up often in Sierra adventures: you can lock yourself out of progression by failing to pick up certain items, and the game might not outright state that you would ever need them. Once again, I highly recommend using a spoiler-free guide and the official manual with this game.

#6: Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail

Another atypically mature Sierra game, Conquests of Camelot was a stark and engaging adventure for those of us who played it back in the day. While the exploration of Arthurian mythology was a fairly common topic for games in the '90s, Conquests of Camelot deliberately went against the grain in many ways. The main conceit for Arthur's quest for the Grail is, for example, the curse brought about by the love triangle between him, Guinevere, and Lancelot. It gets brought up rather often to grim effect.

Gameplay-wise, you're getting a solid combination of real-time action sequences and bog-standard point 'n' click adventuring. It's nothing to really write home about, but the experience is overall extremely memorable and engaging throughout.

#5: King's Quest 6: Heir Today Gone Tomorrow

King's Quest 6 is one of those games that are plainly wonderful to engage with. There's been plenty of discussion as to which King's Quest is best, but I am very much willing to die on this particular hill. More so than any other KQ, Heir Today Gone Tomorrow is an honest-to-goodness fantasy adventure poised purely to entertain and make its players happy.

Crucially, KQ6 is relatively easy to beat without a guide, and its almost open-world nature means you can approach the vast majority of its content at any point in time. One of the best memories I personally have with this game is starting it anew and following a prolonged playthrough, only to discover that a frankly ridiculous number of its quests are entirely optional. I missed them on my first go! This is something we take for granted nowadays, but it was outright unprecedented at the time. And that's without going into the wonderful variety of content you'll enjoy, even without looking for side-quests.

Exploring the Isles of Wonder, Crown, Beast, and the Sacred Mountain was an experience like no other, and it comes highly recommended.

#4: Space Quest 4: Roger Wilco and the Time Rippers

If pure ridiculousness is what you're after, boy, will you enjoy Space Quest 4. As Sierra Entertainment's designated IP for goofy jokes and assorted silliness, Space Quest games are all hilarious. The fourth entry, though, kicks things into overdrive. This is partially due to SQ4's adoption of the traditional Sierra point 'n' click interface. The key twist is that the titular protagonist also gets to smell and taste whatever the heck you wish him to.

This feature, in particular, is used almost exclusively for comedic effects. Let me tell you: the fact that Roger's mishaps are narrated by none other than Gary Owens works incredibly well.

For those who are unfamiliar with Space Quest, it's an effective and delightful parody of science fiction in general. In that sense, it's quite unique even in Sierra's remarkable roster, and it's often way better than you'd expect it to be.

#3: Quest for Glory 4: Shadows of Darkness

As a youngling who hadn't yet been exposed to Lovecraftian horror at the time, I was absolutely bedazzled by the vibe and setting of Quest for Glory 4. Certainly, it also helps that the game takes many of its cues from Slavic folklore, which I was quite familiar with. Whereas the prior QFG titles were relatively straightforward fantasy ordeals, Shadows of Darkness amped things by being substantially darker and edgier than we had been used to.

Quest for Glory 4's biggest issue by far was the fact that it wasn't thoroughly tested. It shipped in what many reviewers at the time agreed was an unacceptable state, and this took away from its awesome setting and mythos. Gameplay-wise, it continued QFG's classic RPG/adventure loop with the added bonus of introducing auto-combat for those who preferred to focus purely on adventuring. Dark, creepy, and incredibly memorable, Quest for Glory 4 is a franchise highlight today, even though it really did need more time in the oven at the time.

#2: Conquests of the Longbow: The Legend of Robin Hood

Retellings of Robin Hood's (mis)adventures were a dime-a-dozen in the run-up to Y2K, but I'd go so far as to argue that Conquests of the Longbow remains the best of the video-game bunch even today. Without a doubt, The Legend of Robin Hood is one of Sierra Entertainment's crown jewels. It merits a playthrough, even if only for the awesome amount of research that had to have gone into it, much the same as the case with Conquests of Camelot.

Curiously, whereas Conquests of Camelot was extremely grim in tone for much of its playtime, The Legend of Robin Hood elevates itself beyond mere dreariness. It's a matter of taste which approach you prefer, of course, but Conquests of the Longbow fits more neatly with the rest of Sierra's output without being outright zany. A heck of a balance, that.

You're getting some truly phenomenal graphics and some of the best gameplay Sierra could've mustered back in the day, on top of all the other boons I mentioned above. Plainly excellent, this game.

#1: Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers

If you're only ever going to play a single Sierra point 'n' click adventure game, it should probably be Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers. The arguable pinnacle of Jane Jensen's rich tenure, Sins of the Fathers is a full-fledged tour de force of all the best adventure tropes.

You've got a likable protagonist with a shady past and a world-changing fate, an engaging narrative that keeps you interested throughout the story, and more interactive elements than you could shake a voodoo doll at. Tim Curry lends his voice to Knight himself, adding some levity to an atypically mature narrative that truly stood out among all the other classic Sierra properties. The setting (a "modern" New Orleans as the starter backdrop) helped in this respect, too.

Gameplay-wise, the reliance on tried-and-true tropes continues: Sins of the Fathers' gameplay loop used the arcane action bar for interactive elements. Knight could WALK, LOOK, ASK, TALK, PICKUP, OPEN, CLOSE, OPERATE, and MOVE any given thing at any given time, often to comical effect. Figuring out what it is, exactly, that the game wants you to do was a job in and of itself.

Yet, disregarding questionable pacing and a frankly ridiculous insistence on pixel-peeping for item discovery, Sins of the Fathers remains a phenomenal experience in the context of Sierra's output. A real showstopper, if you will.

Explore more: See every Sierra game in order on a timeline and share your favorites on Listium.

The post 10 Best Sierra adventure games appeared first on Destructoid.

Though you may feel that Bungie has fumbled Episode: Revenant's grand finale, Destiny 2 is thankfully more than just its latest narrative beat. 2025's Festival of the Lost, for example, is bound to be a hoot, and now's the time to vote on each Guardian Class's cheeky new armor set.

After Festival of the Lost 2024's wizard-themed armor sets, Bungie is now steering back towards the event's horror roots. What better way to do so than with a suite of monster costumes from contemporary pop-horror media, then? Once again, players get to vote on each of the three Classes' respective armor sets, and it is going to be a tough choice.

Vote for Slasher or Specter armor sets for Destiny 2's FOTL 2025

The vote for 2025's FOTL is now up, and you can participate either by entering the survey via this link or by checking in with Bungie's promotional email newsletters, which should be coming our way sometime soon. The choices are all rather phenomenal, if I may say so myself:

• Titan Class: Jason Vorhees (Halloween) vs the Babadook (Babadook)
• Hunter Class: Ghostface (Scream) vs La Llorona (Mexican folklore)
• Warlock Class: Scarecrow vs Slenderman (internet creepypasta)

I don't believe there's any chance of the generic scarecrow costume beating out the literal Slenderman, but you never know! We'll need to wait and see how the armor sets look and feel in-game, but the designs as they appear in the featured artwork seem like they'd work well when mixed and matched with other assorted sets. A huge boon, that, and not something that fashion-minded Guardians will take for granted.

The really good news is that the armor sets that lose the vote won't be gone forever: "While you’ll still vote on which armor set is going to be released during Festival of the Lost, we will commit to producing the runner-up sets later. While we aren’t promising a specific timeline, they’ll typically be released before the next year’s Festival of the Lost event," says Bungie in this week's TWID.

As for all those wizard and witch-themed armor sets that lost in 2024, those are set and primed to release this year, in a surprise twist: "We know a lot of you loved the Wizards who didn’t make the cut for 2024. We felt the same way, so we’re making plans to release those armors during Heresy this year. We aren’t planning on producing all past runner-up armor, but we felt like the fashion could use a few more wizard hat options," the post reads.

So, Destiny 2 fashionistas are going to have their hands full this year 'round no matter what. The Festival of the Lost 2025 will kick off sometime late in October, and if you'd like to get a sense of what to expect, look no further than this handy guide to last year's FOTL. It's a grind, for sure, but one that's often very well worth it.

The post Destiny 2’s Festival of the Lost 2025 vote is now on, featuring Slenderman Warlocks and Friday the 13th Titans appeared first on Destructoid.

Motion blur sucks, and that's coming from someone who does use it. In video games, it generally helps smooth out the perceived frame-rate in a video game, but it also smears the image to a ridiculous degree. The good news is that BlurBusters might have an alternative.

As you may or may not know, the old cathode-ray tube screens weren't without merit. Heavy, clunky, and egregiously outdated in some respects, CRTs handled motion much, much better than any modern screen does. This isn't magic, justthe nature of the beast: Black Frame Insertion came part-and-parcel with these displays, drawing lines of pixels (phosphors, really) so quickly that motion remained crystal-clear no matter your refresh rate. Modern displays don't have BFI by default except in select rare cases, and there's usually a caveat attached.

Now, BlurBusters has been dedicated entirely to the elimination of perceived motion blur in games, and the team's new Refresh Cycle Shaders may be key to this problem. How? By emulating the CRTs' strobing effect, of course. Here's a 60 FPS 120Hz side-by-side demo to demonstrate the transformative effect of the shader, if you don't believe me.

Check out Refresh Cycle Shaders via BlurBusters today

Now, BlurBusters' Refresh Cycle Shaders aren't Black Frame Insertion as such: it's much more involved and effective than that. The baseline shader is already available via GitHub and ShaderToy, but the web browser demo I included above should illustrate how effective it is without any added fuss.

The obvious kicker is that this tech won't be too useful by default to a large subset of users: you ideally want to have a 240Hz (or faster) display for it to render properly, otherwise you may get loads and loads of flicker. Pixel response times are crucial, too; you want those to be as fast as possible. In other words, the shader isn't even close to being universally applicable. Still, it's the start of a potential solution for motion blur as faster displays become more readily available on the market.

BlurBusters is also already in talks with Valve for SteamOS implementations, which is exciting in its own right: "Blur Busters is currently communicating to Valve and has now committed to adding a refresh cycle shader system to SteamOS that runs independently of content frame rate," says the official blog post. The shader has also been implemented into the cutting-edge build of Retroarch for those who are ready to give it a shot right away.

The use cases for Refresh Cycle Shaders are almost too numerous to keep track of:

• Display simulation of CRTs, plasmas, and other exotic, unavailable screens.
• Adjustable pixel-response and overdrive settings.
• Deflickering and de-stuttering features.
• Massive motion blur reduction.
• Fixes for non-standard subpixel layouts (QD-OLED, WOLED, etc.).
• Professional esports gaming.

And that's just scratching the surface of what else might be possible with RCS, even if there are many requirements for them to work properly, too. These include an appropriate level of hardware (i.e., a dedicated GPU), support for independent refresh cycle processing, VSYNC virtualization, and linear nit support, just to name a few.

BlurBusters' work on RCS is still rather arcane from a layperson's point of view, but this may well be the killer of motion blur some of us have been waiting for all along. With a bit of luck, it's just a matter of time before hardware makers and OS developers pick RCS up and run with it.

The post BlurBusters announces Refresh Cycle Shaders in a breakthrough solution for motion blur appeared first on Destructoid.

While there might've been some skepticism over Nvidia RTX Remix, there's merit in this project yet. Though it's still a work in progress, the astonishingly good-looking Need for Speed: Underground RTX mod shows just how potent RTX Remix can be. And you can start playing it right now, to boot.

I'm not one to bemoan the current state of the Need for Speed franchise, as I genuinely feel that Unbound is on to something special. At the same time, though, there's no denying that Underground, Underground 2, and Most Wanted were the heyday for the series, and it's a real shame that there's no official remaster or remake in tow. That's where Alessandro893's RTX Remix version of the original 2003 NFS: Underground comes into the picture. Don't believe me? The neon speaks for itself, I feel.

Play the unofficial NFS: Underground RTX remaster today (version 0.3, though)

I'll happily admit to being awestruck upon seeing NFS: Underground RTX Remix in action. This wonderful mod is already available for download and testing via ModDB, though it's obviously unfinished and somewhat unstable. Setting it up isn't the simplest thing in the world, either, but look at the featured gameplay video and tell me you're not intrigued.

Crucially, Alessandro893's RTX Remix of NFS: Underground isn't just a new visual layer plastered on top of the original game's old codebase. To begin with, you're getting a fully ray-traced global illumination setup with ray reconstruction supported. All the textures have been tastefully upscaled, too, and the entire roster of in-game materials has been updated for pixel-based rendering (PBR). Combine all of this, and you get a game that could conceivably trade blows with some much newer titles. It's not entirely photorealistic, but it sure as heck looks convincing in motion.

The creator also added over 1,000 additional light sources to Underground's urban race tracks, fixed a bunch of bugs with the base game, and introduced DLSS support for those with lower-end rigs. I'd also recommend giving DLAA a shot if you want to toss pesky aliasing issues straight into the sun. To say nothing of the various high-poly meshes that have been added to the game. Or HDR support if you've got the hardware to display it.

Again, this is a relatively early iteration of the mod. Certain aspects of NFS: Underground are yet to be updated for the new render setup. Car headlights, for example, don't currently cast shadows, which can stick out in certain scenes.

Regardless, I cannot recommend this mod enough. If you're a fan of classic Need for Speed, you're going to want to check it out even if you're not keen on trying out something that's still rather early in development. If this project ends up being successful, it's only a matter of time before someone does something similar for Underground 2. And hey, if you're into RTX Remix projects, don't forget to look into mods for Unreal and Portal 2, both of which are trucking along as well.

The post NFS: Underground mod remasters the game with ray-tracing, PBR materials, and HDR support appeared first on Destructoid.

Destiny 2 has finally delivered the closing mission of Episode: Revenant's third and final Act and it's a perfectly fine piece of content. The bit that's not fine, according to some players (myself included), is the lore behind it and what happens with Eramis, one of the main Eliksni antagonists.

Obvious spoilers ahead for those who haven't yet finished Destiny 2's grand finale of Episode: Revenant's third act. I cannot help but feel that Bungie's storytelling has fallen off a cliff after The Final Shape wrapped up. Episodes have served up narrative flubs one after another, and Revenant is no different in this respect. Specifically, while it's certainly great news that we've finally received the conclusion to the all-but-forgotten Kell of Kells story thread, it's gone in a truly wild direction. Mithrax is only technically now the Kell of Kells, while the grand savior of the Eliksni goes to Eramis. How's that for a twist?

Players do not enjoy what Destiny 2 is doing with one of its main living antagonists

For those who haven't kept up with Destiny's story-beats over the years, Eramis (the literal Kell of Darkness) is many things. Chiefly, a xenocidal maniac that's been leading the House of Salvation since the Beyond Light era onwards. Disregarding whatever character growth Eramis might've received in the subsequent DLCs, she has done all of the following:

• Tried (and almost succeded) to blow up the Last City with a nuclear bomb.
• Attempted to eradicate regular Eliksni living on Europa.
• Mounted numerous assaults on both Eliksni and human civilians.
• Went after Mithrax, the Kell of Light several times.
• Caused the destruction of Rasputin and his Warsat network.

This is an inexhaustive list, mind, but it illustrates the point I am trying to make. Then, in the final moments of Revenant's final cinematic cutscene, the Echo MacGuffin ends up choosing and empowering Eramis over Mithrax. Simultaneously, Mithrax has been suffering from the curse of Nezarec all along, and it's conceivable that a super-causal artifact such as the Echo could've cleansed him of it. Subsequently, Eramis chooses to take her House of Salvation Eliksni with her and travels into deep space.

Mithrax becomes the de facto Kell of Kells (but Variks and Eido are still around). Has Bungie gone against the lore-established prophecy of Traveler itself blessing the Kell of Kells? Perhaps, but we'll have to see if there's more to this than currently meets the eye.

The fact is that it doesn't sit right with the community that one of the worst in-universe war criminals still alive in Destiny has just received their happily-ever-after ending. Not everyone agrees with this assessment, of course, but the discussion has overtaken a part of the game's subreddit.

Bungie has been on a bit of a bender when it comes to redemption arcs. Between Uldren/Crow, Savathun, Rasputin, and now Eramis, the trope is tiring by now. At the same time, there's always been a chance that Eramis would turn a new page at some point, and Bungie's been setting the stage for that over the past couple of releases. Regardless, this development doesn't feel like a very satisfying conclusion to this whole year of content.

Whether this was a redemption arc for Eramis or just a somewhat clumsy way of taking her off the board for Destiny: Frontiers, it doesn't fill me with confidence for Bungie's future narrative development. Content-wise, I'm still excited for what's to come, and Frontiers looks mighty interesting in the context of what we've been getting over the course of 2024, but I feel that Destiny's writing has lost much of its luster by now. The whole Kell of Kells schtick drives that home for me.

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Project Zomboid's Build 42 has been a delight so far. Delivering highly requested quality-of-life improvements and features, it's an excellent step forward and a stellar modding baseline. That's where the new Week One mod comes into the picture letting you start the game before the zombies rise.

The sheer ambition of Project Zomboid's new Week One mod cannot be overstated. Created by Slayer and available via the Steam Workshop, Week One sets you up for seven days' worth of regular life simulation before the real gameplay loop kicks off. This delivers an entirely different gameplay loop for the early stages of your new Project Zomboid playthrough, and you also get to see NPCs both friendly and hostile and an attempt at simulating a life sandbox early on. The whole thing is far too complex for its own good, but it's impossible not to enjoy it for what it is. Even if you do need to ignore occasional anomalies, such as instances of NPCs engaging in communal face-washing over the toilet.

Project Zomboid: Week One is utterly broken but infinitely amusing

Crucially, Project Zomboid doesn't yet have human NPCs as of Build 42. They're supposed to come out as part of the upcoming Build 43, which makes modded NPCs a remarkable feat of engineering. Week One's NPCs don't just exist and walk around, though. They also (attempt to) fulfill their professional duties, drive cars, interact with one another, and even respond to simple player queries. It's a whole thing!

Playing Week One, you'll notice postmen walking around the block to deliver mail, policemen patrolling around the neighborhood, hikers exploring the woods, and so on. It feels remarkably immersive at times. Coincidentally, Week One also necessitates a massive suspension of disbelief. Project Zomboid simply isn't built to simulate regular, non-apocalyptic life. To that end, Week One has to make a bunch of concessions to keep all the NPCs doing what they need to do.

The mod is loaded with custom events that sometimes bug out and lead directly to your character's death. Simply cussing at NPCs can cause them to pull out a weapon and attack you, and equipping the wrong article of clothing can draw aggro at random. Stealth straight-up doesn't seem to work, as NPCs are aware of the player avatar at all times, and since Week One also comes with Bandit NPCs integrated by default, it's not hard to see why this might be a problem.

Many players are having a harder time surviving in Project Zomboid's modded civilized society than they do after the zombies start roaming about. I am yet to actually get to the part where the apocalypse begins, but Week One is a hoot regardless.

Week One adds an entirely different gameplay sandbox that plays out regardless of what you do. To call it immersive would be a disservice, at least in the context of Project Zomboid's usual jank. As long as you're okay with just experimenting with NPCs and seeing where that gets you, I cannot recommend the mod enough.

The furthest I've gotten in Week One so far is day four, and I can attest to the mod being great at showing how Knox Country is falling apart at the seams in the background. Whereas NPCs do try to keep up their routines for as long as possible, there are more and more accidents, mysterious military interventions, and bandit attacks as days go on. You also can't really loot whatever you want while there are NPCs around, so you have to keep up with the simulation of "regular" life as well. It's going to be interesting to see how the zombie infestation spreads from patient zero with this mod and how it transitions into regular Zomboid survival gameplay, but I may well need god mode to survive until then.

Presumably, Slayer will continue delivering improvements and fixes for Week One as time goes on. Just don't expect all the jankiness to be taken out of the mod anytime soon: Project Zomboid is in a class of its own when it comes to these things, and you really just need to roll with it.

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If you've been playing Assassin's Creed from day one onwards, you may recall just how enamored the community was with its parkour systems. These developed rather nicely up until Unity, only for subsequent RPG-like releases to downplay parkour as a whole. That's all changing in Assassin's Creed: Shadows, happily enough.

As someone who fell off the AC ride around the time of Unity's release, the fact that the franchise would de-emphasize arguably its most important gameplay system to the degree of Origins and Odyssey caught me off-guard. Ubisoft does appear to agree to some extent, because Assassin's Creed Shadows is adding complexity and manual movement control back into the mix. Ubisoft has recently published a blog discussing Shadows' parkour systems in great depth, and boy howdy will long-time fans of the franchise enjoy it.

Parkour is better than ever in Assassin's Creed Shadows

In the broadest sense possible, Assassin's Creed Shadows' parkour mechanics are seemingly going to be deeper and more engaging than ever before. To begin with, we've got a frankly surprising list of moves to choose from:

• Parkour Up
• Parkour Down
• Recovery Roll
• Hard Drops
• Climb-Downs
• Sprint Dodge / Dive Roll
• Automated Passover / Vaulting
• Knee Slide
• Frontal Dive
• Wall-Run
• Grapple Hook
• Stance Dodges
• Ejects
• High Structure Safety
• Prone

The majority of these are rather self-explanatory, but the most important bit by far is that they all flow together and can be triggered at any point if necessary. Obviously, Yasuke is going to be a tad slower and less agile than Naoe, but they're both very capable runners who can seamlessly transition from one stance into another. It's just that Yasuke might straight-up barrel through certain objects, whereas Naoe might be able to hop on over or under them.

One of my biggest problems with the recent Assassin's Creed titles has been that the dodge function had absolutely no use out of combat. Odyssey's Kassandra could, for example, relatively gracefully clamber onto stuff if needed, but her dodging was about as graceful as something James Sunderland would do in Silent Hill 2. Assassin's Creed Shadows solves this issue by making dodges fast, seamless, and snappy. Better yet, they tie into parkour mechanics by opening up, particularly acrobatic leaps and slides.

"In our game, holding down the parkour up button like it's a gas pedal is not the optimal way to do parkour," said the game's associate director Simon Lemay-Comtois. "Discerning which button does what is necessary to maximize a great parkour flow and keep your momentum." This is particularly important because the traditional "Parkour Up" option will be a loud, high-profile activity that folks won't enjoy seeing.

So, whereas you could've easily just used Parkour Up in ACs prior and slept your way through most parkour sections, Shadows will be far more involved in that respect. Or it should be, at least. All of these functions seem downright excellent on paper, but nothing beats hands-on time when it comes to video games.

In Assassin's Creed, specifically, movement either clicks or it does not. Ubisoft seems to have figured out the prior games' biggest problems with parkour well enough, now we just need to see if the new system meshes together the way it should. Be sure to give the official Ubi blog a read, though: there are demonstration videos, and you're going to want to check those out.

The post Assassin’s Creed Shadows’ parkour system is what we’ve been waiting for since the first game appeared first on Destructoid.

If there was any doubt as to whether Nvidia was all-in on the generative AI hype train, now's the time to dispel those notions. The announcement of RTX 5000 GPUs has been followed by a glut of other related information, including Nvidia ACE: a new kind of AI-driven NPC.

To clarify right off the bat, AI has, over the past couple of years, become a universal moniker for advanced language models in the real world. These things aren't really any sort of artificial intelligence, but calling them AI sure is neat and simple, so companies leverage that for marketing hype. Nvidia ACE, however, kind-of-sort-of fits into the classic definition of AI due to it driving in-game NPCs using small, localized language models. That's right: Nvidia is now looking to improve video game AI using boring real-world AI (what a sentence that is), and though it's a tad cringey right now, there's loads of potential here.

Experience Nvidia ACE in PUBG and InZOI, with more to come

"Powered by generative AI," says Nvidia's pitch of the new ACE feature-set,"ACE will enable living, dynamic game worlds with companions that comprehend and support player goals, and enemies that adapt dynamically to player tactics."

While Nvidia ACE might've been announced back in 2023, it wasn't entirely clear what, exactly, might come of it. To that end, Nvidia's prepared a curious gameplay video showing off PUBG's new "co-playable" characters. In the context of PUBG's gameplay loop, CPCs behave as partially autonomous party members who will source loot for the player, call out enemies and dangers, and provide strategic suggestions on the go. It's an honestly neat idea, even if the gameplay video showing it off feels excessively corporate in some strange, indescribable way.

Crucially, CPCs won't rely on online language models for decision-making. Instead, they're going to be driven by Nvidia's local SLMs (small language models) that the company claims will be "capable of planning at human-like frequencies required for realistic decision making." Interesting stuff, for sure, but even more interesting is that decision-making SLMs will be backed by "multi-modal SLMs for vision and audio that allow AI characters to hear audio cues and perceive their environment."

In other words, co-playable characters will have access to the exact same information as the player does, which sits in stark contrast to regular, garden-variety video game AI.

As seen in the video featured above, PUBG is going to be one of the first games to use Nvidia ACE in regular gameplay: "Built with NVIDIA ACE, [PUBG Ally] utilizes the Mistral-Nemo-Minitron-8B-128k-instruct small language model that enables AI teammates to communicate using game-specific lingo, provide real-time strategic recommendations, find and share loot, drive vehicles, and fight other human players using the game’s extensive arsenal of weapons," says the blog. PUBG Ally should launch sometime later this year.

Other games that will support Nvidia ACE in some capacity include Naraka: Bladepoint, InZOI, MIR5, Dead Meat, AI People, and ZooPunk. So, it won't take too long before we see ACE spread its language-modeled wings to either fly or fall flat on its face. I will say, though, that not all of these implementations thrill me at face value.

MIR5, for example, is touting a fully SLM-driven boss monster that's going to learn from its previous fights with players to constantly reinvent its strategy. This could very easily turn into a real pain in moment-to-moment gameplay, as creatures slowly become "immune" to common player tactics. The practical implementation will be crucial because, frankly, nobody wants to fight against an unbeatable, ever-shifting monstrosity time and again.

Nvidia ACE is, then, already quite widespread and very promising if it all materializes properly. As with most AI-driven things, though, only time will tell how reliable and effective these features are. It's also going to be interesting to see if ACE's small language model handling of AI will come with a major performance drop in gameplay, and if older GPU generations might be locked out of some of its offline features. Curious stuff, regardless!

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Forza Motorsport has enjoyed a rather transformative 2024. The game runs well now, has plenty of permanent content, and even features ray-traced global illumination if you've got the rig for it. Developer Turn 10 is now continuing its winning streak with Update 16: the month of BMW cars.

In the broadest sense possible, Update 16 may well be somewhat disappointing from a feature and core gameplay improvement point of view. The focus falls squarely on the frankly impressive suite of new BMW vehicles, and so we're not getting a new track or anything of the kind this time around. In fact, the three tracks that received visual overhauls in the recent updates (Homestead-Miami, Hakone, Maple Valley) have been reverted to their original designs, which is a bit of a bummer. In return, we're getting eight new and returning BMWs and a suite of updated events.

Forza Motorsport's Update 16 is a celebration of BMW's automotive and racing history

To get right into the nitty-gritty of Update 16's BMW Month, here are all the new cars and how to unlock them:

• BMW #96 Turner Motorsports M4 GT3 (2023): Complete the BMW Tour in Career Mode.
• BMW #1 3.0 CSL (1976): Complete the Open Class Tour in Career Mode.
• BMW #25 BMW Team RLL M-Hybrid V8 (2023): Challenge Hub.
• BMW #91 Formula Drift M2 (2020): Challenge Hub.
• BMW M6 Coupe (2010): Showroom purchase.
• BMW M5 (2009): Showroom purchase.
• BMW M3 (2008): Showroom purchase.
• BMW M5 (2003): Showroom purchase.

The BMW Tour will only be available for about one month, starting from Wednesday, January 8, and it gives you an opportunity to drive the whole gamut of classic cars in an escalating series of challenges. Early M, BMW Motorsport GT, Modern M, and BMW Motorsport Endurance all tell you precisely what you're getting into with their titles alone, and this is exactly the sort of thing we need more of in Forza Motorsport. Frankly, it'd be amazing if we could get permanent brand-themed events as a separate championship category in FM's core Career Mode, but that's a different can of worms.

If all of the above isn't enough and you need more BMW craziness to tide you over until Update 17 releases, consider competing in the BMW Challenge Series in Featured Multiplayer. Featured Multiplayer will also play host to Lexus RC F-Spec Series, Forza Proto-H Series, and Prototype Group events, alongside a bevy of other themed championships. Plenty of variety there, too, ranging from the humble MX-5 Cup to the BMW Pro-Car Series.

One last tidbit of note for gearheads is that Forza Motorsport is giving us all a chance to win a two-person trip to the legendary Le Mans as part of BMW Month. You can use this registration form to enter the contest, because why not? Thankfully, it doesn't seem like the contest necessitates an event completion of any sort, so you can enter even if you're not actively playing Forza Motorsport at this time.

As for Update 17, that's still some ways out, but it's looking mighty promising in my book: "February’s update will be a celebration of Daily Racers in Forza Motorsport, showcasing numerous modern cars that only show their true potential once unleashed onto the track," says the official blog. As a hot hatch aficionado, I've got my hopes up!

The post BMW Month kicks off in Forza Motorsport appeared first on Destructoid.

Though Nvidia's GeForce Now has always had a caveat or two in place, it's hard to argue against its value proposition. This comprehensive game streaming service has always been rather janky on the Steam Deck, however, which made it less-than-ideal on the Valve handheld. That's all changing, though.

Amidst a dizzying array of announcements made at CES 2025, Nvidia has also published a blog on its upcoming GeForce Now application for the Steam Deck. Up until now, the impromptu "solution" has been to simply install Google Chrome onto the Deck and run GeForce Now that way. This, however, was not only janky but also rather limiting as users couldn't leverage GeForce Now's HDR features or go for frame-rates higher than 60. The new native Steam Deck app should solve all of these problems and then some.

Get GeForce Now with full functionality on the Steam Deck... soon

Slated to release sometime later this year, the native Steam Deck GeForce Now application is going to give users the full array of boons available on regular Windows PCs. This means HDR10/SDR10 color grading, 1440P/120 FPS and 4K/60 FPS streaming setups, and the usual assortment of features you get on a high-tier RTX graphics card. The specifics will, naturally, depend on the particular subscription tier you might purchase for GeForce Now.

GeForce Now is particularly important for the Steam Deck because it's a fast and reliable streaming service that can massively expand your handheld's longevity and improve its performance. This is highly reliant on your Internet speed and latency, of course, but if you've got that sorted out, GeForce Now lets you play cutting-edge AAAs fully maxed-out on the Deck. That's not something the device can achieve natively, so it's definitely worth considering for some users.

Notably, you can use GeForce Now without spending a dime. It's just that free access locks you into basic, lower-end host PCs with long queue times and a maximum hour-long session time. There are two premium alternatives, Performance and Ultimate, which massively expand the service's feature set to up to 22 euros per month. That might sound like a steep recurring purchase, but it may well be the best way to play on the Steam Deck if you've got excellent home Internet.

Nvidia has already clarified that both DOOM: The Dark Ages and Avowed will be available to play on GeForce Now on day one, and the Steam Deck is unlikely to be able to run them natively. Something worth considering, perhaps, if you're in the market for such an app.

One might argue that relying on GeForce Now reduces the Steam Deck to a far simpler use case that cheaper devices could handle just as well, but I see it as an expansion of its feature-set, instead. Just note that monthly playtime caps are a thing, so you're going to want to have some games installed on your Steam Deck regardless of how good the value proposition might be, for your specific use case.

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