Uh, who said I ignored 90% of your post? Projecting there a little, lmao... I simply addressed you particularly saying there would be an expensive add-on, and there isn't: if you take Ring Fit, dump the game and emulate it on your Steam Deck, this would include pairing up the Joy Con so you can use the ring... I don't know where you got all the ignoring, I simply addressed that part of your post lol You breaking out the steps of emulation as granularly as possible, though, looks like an agenda against emulation even if you say you are not. I'm not for or against it, but I'll leave you with this: I confess to having emulated a Wii game a long time ago. I emulated Xenoblade Chronicles because I had already gotten into PC gaming at the time and was enjoying 1080p resolutions and 60fps. You can imagine that 480p and 30fps (or lower sometimes) was painful for me, so I dumped the game, and emulated it surprisingly well (I can't recall what CPU I had at the time, but I had it overclocked to 5.0GHz and with a CPU cooler running 100% all the time... My PC was annoyingly loud!) at 1080p 30fps. Naturally, I had to pair up my Wiimote in which I connected the Classic controller to it. You have a time frame for when I did this based on the game I'm talking about, and I will tell you it wasn't hard at all. Fast-forward to now, and I guarantee you that most of the "doesn't run well" complaints are from potato PC users trying to emulate. Emulation is really easy: anyone can do it. Most people who will buy the Steam Deck likely are already more tech savvy and have mid-to-upper tier PCs. Emulation isn't hard in the slightest as it already wasn't back when I did it, and the only thing you need to dump a game on the Switch is an inexpensive part that puts the Switch into RCM mode. You might not be aware of this part, but as an example: yuzu runs on Linux, too. It's just not complicated... Is it as simple as buying a Switch and popping in a cart? Of course not, no one at any point was arguing that except you. It's the emulation is easy enough to be considered a fair option, and as stated later on, even kids could do it. The part about online is a different story entirely, and that's where the Melee part comes in where Nintendo shut it down anyway. Online gaming has always been a point of contention in piracy, the one area that's harder to "crack" since there's more authentication challenges, and yet the strength of Nintendo's library isn't online gaming. I can concede that you would be right if someone's focus on Nintendo games were there multiplayer ones, but it's also fair for someone to say that's not the majority of Nintendo's exclusives which makes emulation still a fair crack (me so punny!) at covering the vast majority of the Switch games people will care about.
I do |
"Oof, I'm going to confess I'm majorly having trouble keeping up lol...BUT, it seems the next universal point of contention is size and weight. I never discussed those specs mostly because I didn't figure that small of a weight difference would be make or break, but by the numbers:
- The Switch OLED is .93 lbs with Joy Con attached, and the Switch is .88 lbs with the Joy Con attached
- The Steam Deck is 1.47 lbs, or 0.54lbs heavier than a Switch OLED, and 0.59lbs heavier than a Switch. The weight difference is a little over half a pound. If I round for simplicity, that's 9oz, and a pair of Joy Con attached to the grip is 6.9oz. Take your Joy Con, put them on the grip, and then top it with one more Joy Con and there's the total weight difference in your hands. You can decide from this is that's too much more weight or not, surely lol"
This wasn't addressed towards me but is another example of downplaying any advantage the Switch has, and honestly to a point where it seems intentionally dishonest. I'm quite capable of holding an extra 7 oz, but my pocket can't just go and hit the gym if it's struggling. The Swtich already juts out of my pocket on most of my pants, and I tend to take one of the joy cons off of it to make it fit better. The steamdeck is a full 2" longer than the Switch with both joycons, and length really does matter. The steam deck just isn't fitting in my pocket, which is the ideal place for a portable gaming system. You really could not have just not considered that. And honestly, the weight does make it significantly less comfortable, particularly for touch based games where I'm going to be holding it with one hand. A 3DS feels so much better in that regard.
I said you ignored 90% of my post. Because you did. The post contained 27 sentences, and your response addressed two, poorly. So, I actually slightly understated how much was ignored. That was a rather insubstantial part of the whole thing and how you got from "Something like Ring fit could easily run on the steamdeck" to "Joycons won't work on the Steamdeck" is rather strange. Picking out the least significant detail of my post and arguing against a point that could not be reasonably inferred from it is kind of irksome.
Plus, you're dead wrong on this too. I wasn't talking about literally running Ring Fit though you seem to think I was, but you actually cannot do that in Yuzu at the moment according to what I can find on the internet can not emulate the Ring Con properly. The pressure sensing feature has not yet been emulated properly. You could try running it on a NASA supercomputer and it wouldn't work.
"You breaking out the steps of emulation as granularly as possible, though, looks like an agenda against emulation even if you say you are not. I'm not for or against it, but I'll leave you with this: I confess to having emulated a Wii game a long time ago. I emulated Xenoblade Chronicles because I had already gotten into PC gaming at the time and was enjoying 1080p resolutions and 60fps. You can imagine that 480p and 30fps (or lower sometimes) was painful for me, so I dumped the game, and emulated it surprisingly well (I can't recall what CPU I had at the time, but I had it overclocked to 5.0GHz and with a CPU cooler running 100% all the time... My PC was annoyingly loud!) at 1080p 30fps. Naturally, I had to pair up my Wiimote in which I connected the Classic controller to it. You have a time frame for when I did this based on the game I'm talking about, and I will tell you it wasn't hard at all. Fast-forward to now, and I guarantee you that most of the "doesn't run well" complaints are from potato PC users trying to emulate. Emulation is really easy: anyone can do it."
Actually, no, my list is if anything way too generous. According to Yuzu's website, arms will require workarounds to play, which means several other steps may need to be done to get it to run, and online multiplayer is effectively impossible. So, no matter how many steps I put in there, I was actually overstating how easy it would be to play Arms online by an infinite amount.
For the record, I don't really care if anyone emulates anything. My preference to hardware has way more to do with the fact that it's way more convenient and I could thankfully afford most games I want. If there was a reasonably good way to play Powerstone online through emulation, and not on dedicated gaming hardware, I'd be on that shit immediately.
And... because you were able to easily emulate a Wii game a decade ago on unspecified hardware, the Steamdeck can emulate Switch games? O_o... This is a really shit analogy. It in no way speaks to how easy emulation is nowadays, which we'll get to later. If your most recent experience with emulation is from about a decade ago, maybe you should do more research before speaking to that...
"Most people who will buy the Steam Deck likely are already more tech savvy and have mid-to-upper tier PCs. Emulation isn't hard in the slightest as it already wasn't back when I did it, and the only thing you need to dump a game on the Switch is an inexpensive part that puts the Switch into RCM mode. You might not be aware of this part, but as an example: yuzu runs on Linux, too. It's just not complicated... Is it as simple as buying a Switch and popping in a cart? Of course not, no one at any point was arguing that except you. It's the emulation is easy enough to be considered a fair option, and as stated later on, even kids could do it."
Yes, you were arguing that, when you said the Steamdeck could do literally anything the Switch could do. Does popping in a cart and playing a game not fall under the umbrella of "literally anything"?
Even aside from emulation, there would be basically no reason, aside from exclusives in Sony's case and pretty much nothing for MS, to buy a gaming console if convenience and simplicity weren't important to people. Yet, people buy consoles.
Bringing up the specific people who would buy the steam deck is a huge shifting of the goal posts, and an entirely different argument, so stop that. People who don't need a device that does everything Nintendoes may find the Steamdeck to be a substitute, which has nothing to do with this conversation. And it's actually still wrong, which we'll get to.
"The part about online is a different story entirely, and that's where the Melee part comes in where Nintendo shut it down anyway. Online gaming has always been a point of contention in piracy, the one area that's harder to "crack" since there's more authentication challenges, and yet the strength of Nintendo's library isn't online gaming. I can concede that you would be right if someone's focus on Nintendo games were there multiplayer ones, but it's also fair for someone to say that's not the majority of Nintendo's exclusives which makes emulation still a fair crack (me so punny!) at covering the vast majority of the Switch games people will care about."
Nintendo did... not shut down Melee multiplayer? I assure you that it is still very much possible. Not sure what actions Nintendo has taken to try, but they have failed.
I'm not right "if". I am in fact right. Your premise was that the Steamdeck can do literally anything the Switch can do, and you are literally wrong. You literally cannot play Switch games online. And to brush off a fundamental feature like that as nbd kind of destroys any credibility. Like, if Nintendo announced the Switch and said it doesn't do online multiplayer people would just have shrugged and said "Still just as good".
But that's just kind of your whole schtick in your video and this thread which is why it's kind of... well dumb. The Steamdeck does everything the Switch does, as long as you downplay or ignore everything the Switch does that the Steamdeck doesn't.
Just for fun, let's see how the Yuzu community feels the emulator runs the top 10 Switch titles. They have a list that is easily googlable, but I won't post it because idk if there is any policy about linking to sites that have emulators available. Obviously there are other emulators available, but this tends to be the best one, and having to have a variety of emulators for different games is another rather significant disadvantage.
1. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe- Okay which they define as "Game functions with major graphical or audio glitches, but game is playable from start to finish with workarounds."
2. Animal Crossing- Great "Game functions with minor graphical or audio glitches and is playable from start to finish. May require some workarounds."
3. Super Smash Brother Ultimate- "Okay which they define as "Game functions with major graphical or audio glitches, but game is playable from start to finish with workarounds."
4. Zelda Breath of the Wild- Great ("Game functions with minor graphical or audio glitches and is playable from start to finish. May require some workarounds.")
5. Pokemon Sword- (Okay "Game functions with major graphical or audio glitches, but game is playable from start to finish with workarounds.")
6. Mario Odyssey- Ok
7. Super Mario Party- Bad (Game functions, but with major graphical or audio glitches. Unable to progress in specific areas due to glitches even with workarounds.)
8. Pokemon Let's Go- Okay
9. Splatoon 2- Bad
10. NSMB Deluxe- Okay
So, you claimed that emulation covers a "vast majority" of games people care about. Ignoring the downplaying of online features, according to Yuzu, two of these games can't be played through at all, and 6 have major visual/audio glitches and require "workarounds". Only two games run without any major graphical or audio glitches, and even those may require workarounds. The majority of first party games in general run "ok", some significant titles are "bad" which is effectively unplayable.
Of the Switch library, 409 games are listed as running perfectly, 545 are listed as Great, 350 are okay, 345 are bad, 310 can't get past the intro menu, and 187 won't boot. 2146 This means 39% of the Switch's library is practically unplayable, another 16% will require workarounds and have glitches, and another 25% may require workarounds. Pretty much all of these were tested by their team within the last 6 months.
And even for the games that run great, that's going to depend a lot on your hardware. I'm not the most tech savvy, but someone on the site who tested BOTW found the game to run "bad" with a Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4770K CPU @ 3.50GHz and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980. I'm not really all that knowledgeable, but as the cheapest version of that card runs at about 500 dollars, seems like this would be way stronger than Steamdeck. Someone with more tech knowhow can let me know if that's right. And a lot of games require certain settings to be enabled, which is a major pain in the ass, especially for a portable system where the ability to take it out and play anywhere right away is kind of a big deal. I play my Switch mainly on my morning commute, and I don't want to fiddle with the settings to get into my game and hope that the game will run properly at the part I'm on. Moreover, how well a particular computer runs a game is not necessarily a function of its power. Certain gpus don't play nice with certain drivers when implementing certain features. Mario Odyssey doesn't like AMD GPUs and Fire Emblem Three Houses doesn't like Nvidia.
As for what a "workaround" entails, I don't see a clear answer, but for FireEmblem Three Houses the description is... "~* Both Chapter 15 - Valley of Torment and Chapter 17 - Blood of the Eagle and Lion cause an unskippable cutscene crash. To circumvent this issue you need to either transfer your save to your switch and proceed past this point before transferring the save back or download the very old yuzu version mainline 41 and create a portable install with it (this version is so old that current settings etc. do not work with it so a portable install is required). Load the mission with this version and then save when in battle preparation and copy the save back to the current yuzu. You can also follow this guide on Reddit for chapters 15 and 17. It works perfectly with the save editor solution with version 1.2 of this game. It should be the same with 1.0 and 1.1. You can also transfer your saves from Yuzu to Ryujinx to get past this issue.~" Sounds like the workarounds for games that run "ok" can be pretty substantial. When I buy a Switch game I can be reasonably confident that I'm going to be able to play it from start to finish with no major non-gameplay related impediments, whereas my experience with emulators would be much less stable and predictable.
Steamdeck owners will be able to play about 1-2/5 of current Switch games, have to worry about potential gamecrashing glitches (which I've experienced maybe thrice in all of my Switch gaming), have no reasonable confidence they will be able to play future Switch games (it can be quite hit or miss with Fire Emblem Warriors running bad but Age of Calamity running ok), will not be able to play online pretty much at all, won't be able to play local multiplayer with two systems, won't be able to play local multiplayer on one system unless they plan on carrying around two controllers with them, have a system that is about twice as bulky to carry around, will require "workarounds" for most of the games that are playable to the finish, and won't run physical media. But yeah, it's essentially "I can't believe it's not Switch".
Not only can the Steamdeck not do literally everything the Switch can do, but it *maybe* can do a small portion of what it does, and of that, it likely won't do it very well. There are plenty of reasons to get a Steamdeck, but being a Switch isn't one of them.
Last edited by JWeinCom - on 01 August 2021
