They haven’t backed down at all. They’re still committed to implementing FaceIt according to the devs in their discord. The only reason it’s not implemented now is because of privacy concerns so they’re trying to rework it a bit.

In the servers browser I’ve noticed some community ones but there are only a few and mostly in different regions. Hopefully they will open it up for more players to host soon.

With open world games, I don’t care where I go or what I do most of the time because it’s just a giant sandbox for me. My issue though is when I return to something so vast, like in Pillars of Eternity, after a while I don’t know what to do and I’m overwhelmed by all these quests to keep track of. Even with games like Subnautica I need to focus on just beating it in a few weeks. Then theres Factorio… I’ll never understand what I was previously up to because suddenly all my previously laid out plans seemed so dumb.

It’s a great game but there IS a catch that wasn’t mentioned.

The devs plan on implementing one of the more intrusive Anti-Cheats (Face It Anti Cheat) which doesn’t work on Linux which also stops all Steam Deck users from playing. It also forces you to disable virtualization on windows. I can’t recall the last time I had to go into bios to disable an option to turn off important windows features.

According to their stream, it’s non-negotiable and will be added regardless of what the community wants. But they did mention that community servers would be able to pick which Anti Cheat they wanted to use?

It’s the one device where it’s a joy to use the dpad. After using it I’m still trying to find one that comes close to how good the dpad functions.