Comment on Deadlock: How to select or level skill on controller?

• hand@lemmy.studio ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  My apologies, when I said released I meant released for public testing / playing (ie, it’s current state).

  I’ve played a little with keyboard and mouse as well as a controller (using community settings) and currently it very much feels like it would be difficult to play with a controller (I’d like to stress I’m hoping and happy to be proven wrong about that further down the line).

  My surprise was that Valve have brought about a game like Deadlock which currently (to me) feels very much like a keyboard and mouse only game. Again, looking forward to that potentially changing.

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  • tal@lemmy.today ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    released for public testing

    I mean, it’s not publicly-available either; it’s just available to a select group of testers.

    I haven’t been following the game’s development. But my guess is that the devs are going to prioritize targeting the machines that they’re using to do development of the thing. They won’t be using a Deck to develop the thing. This probably won’t be the only tradeoff made, either – I’d guess that performance optimizations aimed at the Deck or other lower-end machines might be something that would be further down on the list. I’d guess that any kind of tutorial or whatever probably won’t go in until late in the development – not that that’s not important to bring new users up to speed, but it’s just not something that the devs need to work on it. Probably not an issue for this game, which looks like it’s multiplayer, but I’d guess that breaking save or progress compatibility is something that they’d be fine with. That’s frustrating for a player, but it can make development a lot easier.

    Doesn’t mean that those don’t matter, just that they won’t be top of the priority list to get working. What they’re gonna prioritize is stuff that unblocks other things that they need.

    I worked on a product in the past that had a more “customer-friendly” interface and a command line interface. When a feature gets implemented, the first thing that a dev puts in is the CLI support – it’s low-effort, and it’s all that the dev needs to get the internal feature into a testable state for the internal people. The more-customer-friendly stuff, documentation, etc all happens later in the development cycle. Doesn’t mean that we didn’t care about getting that out, just that we didn’t need it to unblock other parts of the the development process. Sometimes we’d give access to development builds to customers who specifically urgently needed a feature early-on and were willing to accept the drawbacks of using stuff that just isn’t done, but they’re inevitably gonna be getting something that’s only half-baked.

    I mean, if it bugs you, I’d just wait. Like, they aren’t gonna be trying to provide an ideal customer experience at this point in the development cycle. They’re just gonna want to be using it as a testbed to see what works. It’s gonna inevitably be a subpar experience in various ways for users. The folks who are using the thing at this point are volunteering to do unpaid testing work in exchange for getting to play the thing very early and maybe doing so at a point where they can still alter the gameplay substantially. There are some people who really enjoy that, but depends on the person. It’s not really my cup of tea. I dunno about you, but I’ve got a Steam games backlog that goes on forever; it’s not like I’ve got a lack of finished games to get through.

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  • Zoot@reddthat.com ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Maybe try actually playing it on the deck then? How are you even gonna complain about something you haven’t tried, for a game no where near done.

    I have played on my deck. All the keys are mapped and you can easily play the game with all of the controls.

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    • hand@lemmy.studio ⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      I didn’t mean to sound like I was complaining, I was trying to express my surprise.

      I said in my comment I’d used a controller to play on PC. When I played Deadlock (a week or two ago) the controls were most certainly not configured (at least not via PC + wired controller) hense the community keybinds.

      The only thing I can suggest is; either there has been an update in the last week which has added support or it’s configured for the Deck but not PC+controller yet.

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