Community MetaSteam | December 2020 - Empire of Doom

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Mor

Me llamo Willy y no hice la mili, pero vendo Chili
Sep 7, 2018
7,109
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So many people on Twitter talking about the CP2077 timer on the Steam front page. Valve sure knows how to create engagement.
You have no idea how many things have the potential for engagement inside Steam, like literally, a fuck-ton :evilblob:
 

Wok

Wok
Oct 30, 2018
4,923
13,188
113
France
I still haven't decided what character background to play. Still don't know about male or female. Who to create. Or what difficulty to play on :anguished-face:
Considering the numerous bugs, I would just put all of my points in strength, and avoid playing stealthy.
I think this way the issues with the AI won't be as obvious.
 
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Stone Ocean

Proud Degenerate
Apr 17, 2019
2,356
7,475
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Don't CDPR games usually do better on GOG than Steam? I'd be amazed if it hit numbers that high :blobpanburn:
After Thronebreaker I wouldn't be so sure. Remember how they tried making that temporarily GOG exclusive and then backtracked that almost immediatly after launch?
 
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fantomena

MetaMember
Dec 17, 2018
9,841
26,486
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Some fuckery going on with Steam. Can't download the LN2 demo and despite having bought Spiritfarer and showing that I have it in my library on the game store page, it has yet to show up in the library.

I blame CP2077.

Edit: Restarting Steam worked for Spiritfarer
Edit 2: Also for LN2 demo.
 

Wok

Wok
Oct 30, 2018
4,923
13,188
113
France
When are the TGA? I think it was Dec 10th, but that is this night or next night? It must be American time, so the next night.

Edit: So it starts 24 hours after the release of CP2077. And there are actors and actresses... lmao



As long as there is no anime, I won't complain. :troll:
 
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Swenhir

Spaceships!
Apr 18, 2019
3,534
7,621
113
The only thing I'm looking forward to with TGA is the Elite Odyssey dev diary which should hopefully narrow down the scope of expectations.
 

Arsene

On a break
Apr 17, 2019
3,280
8,305
113
Canada
When are the TGA? I think it was Dec 10th, but that is this night or next night? It must be American time, so the next night.

Edit: So it starts 24 hours after the release of CP2077. And there are actors and actresses... lmao



As long as there is no anime, I won't complain. :troll:
Tomorrow at 4PM PST
 

Mor

Me llamo Willy y no hice la mili, pero vendo Chili
Sep 7, 2018
7,109
26,224
113
Btw did you ever share some stats or data you were thinking of sharing today?
It was actually yesterday and I sure did :blobeyes:

EGS 2019/2020 comparison/wrap-up.

 

Wildebeet

First Stage Hero
Dec 5, 2018
798
1,883
93
The last few posts remind me i have Alan Wake and Alyx in my Library unplayed :(
Yep same. I've got all the Alan Wake games on both Steam and GOG. They had them on sale for 1.50, or free sometimes, etc. But never played it. I'm always surprised at how many people love it, so I probably ought to give it a shot huh.

I feel for them. They gotta deal with the boring middle of the map for a long time.
Nah, once you get to the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, OK, Iowa, all that, you can just copy/paste and drag the highways across it. I bet they're looking forward to those states. You just hit "Generate Plains States" and there you go instant DLC with procedural corn generation tech. Should take them about an afternoon to get to the mississippi river.
 

Nzyme

Time to get Fit
Sep 19, 2018
192
538
93
What's the TL;DR?
"This is like the new Crysis"
"This feels like a true from the ground up PC game"
"It is the most visually dense impressively lit open world city I've ever seen"
"It's hard to believe... they massively undersold the visuals." "When you run this with all RT features enabled, it is quite possible the single most impressive game I've seen on the PC to date. Just the raw amount of detail, the quality of the lighting, the materials, the RT implementation, unbelievable"

Now 5 different RT options
  • RT reflections
  • RT shadows
  • RT ambient occulusions
  • RT traced direct lighting (emissive)
  • (at Psycho setting) Ray Traced Global Illumination
 

Tomasety

MetaEyesMember
Jun 8, 2020
882
3,448
93
It feels a bit odd to see Rocket League from 2015 winners without a price and worse than that, without a chance to get it on Steam.



It's definitely one of those cases where you wouldn't expect this outcome in 2015.
 
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lashman

lashman

Dead & Forgotten
Sep 5, 2018
31,978
90,086
113
Also i tried Little Nightmares II Demo and that franchise is so creepy.
damn, that looks great! :)

you gotta post those in:

 

LEANIJA

MetaMember
May 5, 2019
3,217
7,860
113
Austria
I only got 12 "perfect" "games", and one of them isnt a game (but a movie, dunno why that had achivements)...and then there's Deus Ex HR and its Directors Cut, which I both have at 100% for some reason (I played both versions + The Missing Link for a combined 210 hours).



edit:

also, here's all those games I have above 50% 38% achievements. Maybe I should bring Skyrim to 100%

 
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Le Pertti

0.01% Game dev
Oct 10, 2018
8,578
22,008
113
45
Paris, France
lepertti.com
My perfect games (25):
The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead 2
Broken Sword 5
Tales From the Borderlands
Voxelgram
Grow Home
PictoQuest
Paint it Back
Inside
Delicious! Pretty Girls Mahjong Solitaire(heh)
Influent
CrossCells
SOMA
Firewatch
A Short Hike
Hexcells Infinite
Indie Game: The Movie
SquareCells
HexCells Plus
HexCells
Tiny Echo
To the Moon
Finding Paradise
A Bird Story
Qubbure 2(not even sure what this is)

Used to be more, but damn devs that add achievements in DLC that I don't have!
 
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lashman

lashman

Dead & Forgotten
Sep 5, 2018
31,978
90,086
113

Introducing New Ways to Browse Steam
With this experiment, we aim to increase the surface area of the store by introducing a broader set of ways to browse Steam’s catalog of games from the outset—no login or complex searching required. Our new views provide greater exposure to the breadth of games available on Steam through new useful points of entry such as sub-genres, themes, and player modes. We hope you’ll [UWSL]opt into our Store Browse Experiment[/UWSL] to give these news views a try, [UWSL]then let us know what you think[/UWSL] in the discussions.

New & Noteworthy
Many users rely on our charts for quick snapshots of what’s new and popular on Steam. These are now accessible from one menu, New & Noteworthy, which also provides direct access to the biggest events currently running Steam—including game festivals, publisher sales, and other seasonal celebrations.

Categories
A basic list of genres, while easy to browse, falls a bit short given how large our catalog has grown. Our new Categories menu helps users quickly discover and dive into the breadth and depth of interesting games on Steam. This menu serves up dozens of new categories of games, which can then be explored further.



It’s not enough to simply offer good games on Steam—we also need to make sure they’re easy to discover. And to do that, we need to organize them in ways that make sense without being overwhelming. You might be able to fit the same amount of goods in an open-air bazaar as in a cramped warehouse, but you’re far more likely to find what you want in the former.

The first step in building such a system is to present meaningful entry points which reflect the various ways people typically want to browse a store full of games.


New Entry Points: Genres, Themes, and Player Modes

This experiment exposes entry points modeled after the three chief ways players tend to browse Steam—by genre, by theme, and by player modes. Each of these motivations broadly answers a different question:

Genres “What kind of game is this? What is it like to play?”
Strategy, RPG, 3D Platformer, Metroidvania, etc.

Themes “What is the game’s content like?”
Fantasy, Science Fiction, Cute, Relaxing, Anime, Horror, etc.

Player Modes “Who can I play the game with?”
Singleplayer, Multiplayer, MMO, Co-op, etc.

These player motivations can be organized and expressed using our existing tags and metadata. Categories grouped under the Genres and Themes entry points are defined by tags, whereas categories grouped under Player Modes are defined by metadata provided directly by the developer.

We arrived at these three top-level categories through a mix of formal research and intuition. But there’s also strong precedent for this scheme on Steam itself in the form of Steam Curators. We noticed many curators are building lists of specific types of games, almost all of which fall under one of the above three patterns: Gameplay and genre-based lists like City Builders, theme-based lists like Games with Dogs, or player mode-based lists like Games to Play with Your Significant Other.


New Browse Views

Among these three entry points we are currently surfacing 48 genre categories, 8 theme categories, and 7 player mode categories, for a total of 63 new categories. Clicking on any of these will take you to a dedicated content hub, a landing page dedicated to that kind of game.



Each of these destinations has its own URL, so you can bookmark them or share them with friends. Each features a carousel highlighting featured games, top sellers, and specials, as well as five specific tabs listing
  • New & Trending
  • Top Sellers
  • What’s Being Played
  • Top Rated
  • Upcoming


Players can narrow by popular tags within these hubs as well. The left column of tags surfaces popular genre and sub-genre tags common to this category, and the right column surfaces other types of popular tags (such as mechanics, visuals, themes, and player modes).

Clicking on any of these will take you to a sub-view of the content hub. In the illustration above, we’re viewing Building & Automation Sims, but now we’re viewing only those which also include the Space Sim tag. Each of these sub-views gets its own unique URLs too.

Viewers can return to the parent category any time by toggling the filtering tag previously clicked, or by clicking another to display a different sub-view of the category.


Steam’s Special Sections

This experiment also moves some items previously found in their own top-level menus (such as Software and Hardware) into Special Sections under Categories. Now these and other potential points of entry are all consolidated in a single categorical browse menu.

Our Design Process
How can we be confident in our selection and definition of over 60 new categories? This is an experiment, and thankfully our process includes you. [UWSL]Your feedback[/UWSL] on our decisions will help us refine our categorization. To date, our methodology has been a mixture of traditional Library Science and human intuition backed by numerical analysis, and is built leveraging previous Steam Labs experimentation.

  1. We organized all of our user tags into meaningful Categories such as Genres, Visuals, Themes, and Features. These categories were first used in Deep Dive to help determine similarity between games.

  2. We mapped out the semantic relationships between tags, so Steam could recognize that a Strategy RPG is both a Strategy game and also an RPG. This feature was first used in Query Expansion for Search.

  3. We’ve made some efforts to improve the quality of Steam tags. We built an internal tool that analyzes the quality of the tags of every game on Steam, flagging games that have too few tags, or are missing crucial tags like genres and subgenres, and now surface these and other warnings to developers. We paired this tag quality inspector with a new developer tool, the [UWSL]Tag Wizard[/UWSL], that helps our partners improve the sets of tags associated with their games.

  4. We identified a flexible hierarchy of genres using prior research in games classification, as well as statistical analysis of which tags appear most commonly alongside other tags on Steam.

  5. We built a system for defining tag clusters to reveal higher-level concepts like Card & Board Games rather than a single tag like Card Game. Now, a tag cluster like Card & Board Games isn’t defined as simply Card Game plus Board Game. Instead, it also includes tags like Solitaire, Card Battler, Deckbuilder, Tabletop, and so on. And naturally, it uses Query Expansion to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.

  6. We gave each tag cluster its own permanent landing page as described above.

  7. We built a tool that analyzes which games fall into which categories, across the entire catalog. This helps us gut-check our choices and identify and resolve situations like:
    • Narrow categories too small to stand on their own that might be better served when merged with a sibling or two. This is where hubs like City & Settlement and Grand Strategy & 4X came from.
    • Overly broad or redundant categories that overlap too much with adjacent genres. These should be broken down into smaller categories or removed altogether. A good example is Action-Adventure; although we have a tag for this, in practice the concept of Action-Adventure doesn’t meaningfully distinguish itself enough from either Action or Adventure alone.
    • Games that aren’t being surfaced by any of our proposed categories. This is a wake-up call that we need to add new categories. This check kept us from overlooking the need for categories like Experimental and Exploration & Open World.
  8. And most recently, we launched [UWSL]this experiment in Steam Labs[/UWSL]!


Now we want to hear from you! What’s missing? What seems redundant? What is most interesting, and what’s… just not? [UWSL]Share your feedback[/UWSL] in the discussions and help us improve the Steam store through Labs.
 

kio

MetaMember
Apr 19, 2019
1,600
5,132
113
CDPR should have made cyberpunk exclusive to their store only. Fools!
Didn't they try that with Gwent and it failed horribly? I'm not saying CP would also fail, it almost surely wouldn't, but it seems the desire to lock down things to GOG is no longer there.
 
Reason: forgot the not in "I'm not saying"
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Mor

Me llamo Willy y no hice la mili, pero vendo Chili
Sep 7, 2018
7,109
26,224
113

fspm

MetaMember
Nov 1, 2018
443
1,030
93
I switched out of small mode to check out perfect games tab - ran out of ram after clicking 'games' and switched back to small mode. Fucking steam:steam_cleanseal:
 
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