Steam

I'm not really a gamer, so I'm just curious. I bought Borderlands 4 a few days ago and have been playing it on my Linux desktop every day since then, and every day I run it, it downloads another 2GB patch. Every. Day. I have to make sure I don't start it when anyone else wants to use the WAN, and I have to start it a half-hour before I want to play, and I'm just curious if this is normal? Is it Linux? Is it Borderlands? Is it Steam? I've read that you can't fully disable these updates under Steam, but you can if you buy through Gog; perhaps I made the wrong choice of platform.

I'm just a bit baffled at the idea that Borderlands is releasing a new 2GB patch (and it's never less than 2GB) every 8 hours, or that every patch is necessary. I also know that Borderlands 3 did not have updates this frequently on the PS3. But I accept that, perhaps, I have something set up wrong. As I said, I'm not really a gamer.

Is this par for the course, now?

Edit

It seems disabling the shader caching fixed it. The first time I ran it, it took a long time to get through "resurrecting", which is where it compiles shaders, but after that first time it doesn't take much longer to get to playable, and I haven't had it force download assets yet.

I see a couple of comments about the game itself being buggy. I'm several hours into the campaign (level 15) and haven't had any issues. I have problem with the Linux bluetooth stack glitching on the PS4 controller (kernel CRC errors from the driver) but I haven't had any crashes. I did encounter a glitch where a creature wasn't being rendered, but moving around brought it back and nothing yet has affected gameplay. I don't know if the creature glitch was related to disabling the cache, but... FWIW, the game seems to run as well as BL3 on my PS4.

Linux breaks the 5% threshold for the Hardware survey first time ever on
@steam

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/43688600

More details here: https://www.techspot.com/news/111951-steam-could-soon-show-estimated-fps-based-crowd.html?hl=en-US

I like checking on Popular New Releases to see what's trending in a given week, but it just does not do that anymore since a handful of weeks ago. It's showing entries from all the way back in 2020, ones that have – as far as I checked – not even new DLC.

There's several decently sized games I've just not seen launch because the feed is.. broken? It's probably but broken, I assume this is intended, but why.

If you happen to know what's up with this, please do tell. But I mostly just want to complain I guess. I can check my Steam release calendar but that's hidden behind several menus. Sigh.

This is like a bunch of months late, but I am curious what people here thinks about steams new AI disclosure policy, which I think requires you to disclose or refrain from making AI content that is consumable, e.g the player sees and interacts with, whereas anything on the backend does not need to be disclosed, I know people are upset steam didn't push for a complete disclosure, but imo I agree with this approach, if anyone uses it for asset generate, i think thats prohibited given they previously took down a game for potential copyright violations, but for things you can interact with, those are like the first thing that can appear as bugs which could very quickly fill steam up with slop/buggy games, but for stuff less visible, I don't know, I guess wont matter as much? I worked on a few singleplayer games in the past (nothing on steam, also i did not use ai then). So I don't know is it an important distinction? I don't think i would be in favor with steam forcing people to disclose ALL uses of AI, like if its used appropriately like a tool, because too alot of people its all the same with no nuance, but thats just my opinion.

In other very late news, pre-generated content and live-generated content is an important distinction with steam, with live-generated having much more scrutiny and being banned for any 18+ content, this makes sense for me, I don't think anyone would disagree with this, but if anyone has any thoughts on this I am curious on what they are.