The Steam Library redesign beta releasing on September 17

[AnotherGills 25]

Steam is finally getting a major interface overhaul, announced to enter a public beta period on September 17th.

The library's new look will provide a new way to browse your collection and it's categories, along with viewing the activity of friends as well as recent news pertaining to titles in your library.

More news regarding the beta will be released on the Steam blog in the coming days. Will you be taking part in the beta? Do you prefer the current design of the Steam library?

 

[Rose 268]

It will make me use GOG Galaxy 2.0 more if not switch to it altogether!

[Aemony 141]

About time. I'm cautiously optimistic, and the idea of dynamic collections I really like.

[DAOWAce 5]

I'm always anti-UI changes in things because I'm a damn old dog who hates learning new tricks (and objectively, most redesigns are productivity downgrades as a whole), but Steam's slow UI changes have not been ones aimed at PC, which makes me extremely opposed to it changing.

Also, last I heard, they're removing skin support.  While skins have really fallen off in the modern years (forum shutdown hurt a lot), there's still quite a vocal number of people who use them, myself included (Steam Compact, a proper PC UI; the antitheses of the current default UI).

I've had the new friends/chat system disabled since it's been implemented.  The UI is awful, and still fails to work correctly.  Plus we all use Discord anyway, we don't need a worse version of it.

But, I don't use 'big mode' for anything in Steam besides the download screen (which they removed the link to in big mode in the last major update).  I use small mode and just have a list of games, so in the end, I don't really care if just the library view is changing now.. if they leave small mode alone.

Regardless, I'm never hopeful when it comes to things like this..  Would love if things go right and actually improve (see: Github), but experience has taught me things usually do the opposite.

[Rose 268]

11 hours ago, DAOWAce said:

Also, last I heard, they're removing skin support.

It is hackable nevertheless.

[Uhuru N'Uru 0]

No, I Don't want any store clients, I detest them, and everything about them, I use GOG as my store of choice, because it's the only store where using the client is optional, and I can get the offline installers I want. I actually consider the Epic client second best, but only because, it's so broken the only two games I own on Epic, run without the store client.

Metro Exodus has Denuvo which (For that Denuvo version) requires the game be launched from the store, every few days. Control just runs, apparently DRM free, though I suspect it's not intentional, but I've not had the fail to run, I get with Metro Exodus. That is the only good thing Epic offers, but it's my most desired feature, and it's most likely to be a bug, which says it all.

Steam still to this day forces updates, with complicated manual workarounds required to avoid those updates breaking a modded game,  Even Uplay, and Origin let me choose not to take an update, until I want it, which as an active mod user, is exactly what I need.

Steam's major flaws

Forced Updates: This is always breaking my mods, if I don't use a lot of effort for each game, to avoid it.

Broken games: I discovered GOG, because the KOTOR games I bought on Steam, were utterly broken, and there are many others, where without steam user support the games, still being sold would never run. GOG gets old games playable, on a modern PC.

If steam hadn't chosen to pay Aspyr for Linux conversions, to promote the Steam OS/Steam Box systems KOTOR2 would never have got fixed, but even so that fix, broke all the existing mods, they only paid to get the Restored Content Mod, which was pretty much essential to fix the broken rushed release.

Steam Workshop: This shouldn't even exist, it's a walled garden, where you must own the game on Steam, to use the mods, (Default, I've seen unconfirmed reports that devs can change this, but that doesn't matter, if the default is used by 99.9% of devs). GOG gets this right, by rejecting the idea, and choosing to leave modding independent, except in rare cases where a community patch is essential to get a specific broken game to even run, where it's included with the game.

Forced Binary Review Scores: How can I recommend games, to random users, when I have no idea what they like. All scoring systems for reviews, are useless, forced binary ones, are the worst form of useless. Reviews are the words, whether written, or spoken on a vid, not some meaningless number, and aggregating already meaningless numbers makes then worse than useless.

Steam is a bloat filled mess of useless algorithms designed to throw marketing at me at me, and buries the basic store pages I actually will use under a huge pile of trash I won't. It's by far the worst store out there.

As for the "I want all my games in one place" argument, you already have that. It's called a desktop full of shortcuts.

Too Many games for that? I have three 1440p monitors, and it's still not enough. So I use a tool called Fences, which has several ways to use the same desktop area, I use the "Roll-Up" feature, giving me currently 6 Games Fences, with room for many more.

As this pic shows, though being an RPG fan, that's now filling up it's bottom row, so I'll need another one soon.

Doesn't matter what store client a game requires (none for the GOG games), the shortcut will start the client, then run the game. I don't need "One Client To Rule Them All", and that includes Galaxy 2, but that's the big difference, it's my choice with Galaxy.

All I want from a store, is the game, the whole game, and nothing but the game, so help me GOG.

Edited September 14, 2019 by Uhuru N'Uru
Finished a sentence, it made no sense unfinished

[Rose 268]

42 minutes ago, Uhuru N'Uru said:

Metro Exodus has Denuvo which (For that Denuvo version) requires the game be launched from the store, every few days. Control just runs, apparently DRM free, though I suspect it's not intentional, but I've not had the fail to run, I get with Metro Exodus. That is the only good thing Epic offers, but it's my most desired feature, and it's most likely to be a bug, which says it all. 

That is not a bug. Games on the EGS are DRM-free by design, as pointed out by Aemony in our Epic Games Store article.

[DAOWAce 5]

On 9/14/2019 at 10:25 AM, Uhuru N'Uru said:

Steam's major flaws

Forced Updates: This is always breaking my mods, if I don't use a lot of effort for each game, to avoid it.

^^^^

Having to set every game on steam, manually one at a time, to "never update until I launch it" is the worst part of the platform.  Want to launch said game that has a patch but don't want to patch it?  We either have to make a duplicate folder of the game and toggle between them when we play (huge waste of disk space/SSD lifetime), or we have to go into offline mode and lose Steamworks support.

These are both bad solutions.

And sometimes?  Steam just ignores the fact we told it to never update games, and updates them anyway.  I've had this happen every so often with a number of titles and it completely screwed up my modded installs, or just wasted bandwidth when I was actively playing an online game (lag spikes).

Most of Steam is a great convenience for people.. but this forced update thing is the #1 problem and there's still to this day nothing we can do to really prevent it.

Slightly OT, but just wanted to chime into this anyway.