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  • Late to the party, but I recently closed a (re-)playthrough of Mass Effect I Legendary Edition.

    I'm now moving onto Dishonored, a saga that I completely ignored being massively bad at stealth games, plus a bit of Spacebourne 2 here and there

  • I’ve been on a Souls-like kick lately, so the two games I’ve been playing the most recently on my Deck are Blasphemous 2 and No Rest for the Wicked.

    Blasphemous 2 I got as part of Humble Choice a bit ago and I’m really enjoying it. Not too difficult, but definitely gives its own unique feel to a metroidvania.

    I just picked up No Rest for the Wicked after its recent Breach update and I’ve been loving the gameplay and loop they’ve built. Hope to see more performance improvements for the Deck…it really feels like a game that they should be able to get running much better on the Deck over time, but I am able to get a mostly stable 30 FPS so far.

  • My big two games recently have been Blue Prince (which I made a post raving about a week ago), and Clair Obscura: Expedition 33.

    Blue Prince is a fantastic puzzle game/rogue-likes mix, and as someone who enjoys both genres I've found their combination is fantastic. Really satisfying game for me, I didn't close the game on my deck for about a week after first trying it. I'm not done with it yet either, lots more to discover.

    Clair Obscura Expedition 33 is a really flashy turn based JRPG made by a team of 30 people who quit Ubisoft because they wanted to make good games. It has incredible production values for such a small team and puts a lot of AAA games to shame. It pushes the deck performance wise, but I think it performs acceptably after tweaking some settings. I'd recommend people follow this guide for making it run it's best, but the TL;DW is:

    The game hides some graphics settings on deck by default and uses a deck specific present. You can re-enable the settings by using the launch option SteamDeck=0 %command%, and customize it to your liking. Basically it's TSR to low, shadow and post processing to low, film grain off, chromatica off, motion blur off, any other option to medium, FPS capped at 30.

    • How have you felt about playing CO:E33 on the Deck? The game looks quite good, but I’m really unsure about playing it now on the Deck or waiting until I build a new mid-range PC in the fall/winter.

      Do you feel the trade-offs for getting it working on the Deck are worth it?

      • For me, absolutely. I definitely recommend those tweaks I listed above, but I consider the graphics very acceptable. I have the game installed on my main PC as well (with the idea of streaming to the Deck), but ultimately I've been content enough with the graphics to not bother with that.

        The game is definitely a bit blurry, and some early areas have less than ideal shadow aliasing. But the game manages to be pretty beautiful despite that, and I'm having a great time.

    • I've been playing Expedition 33 on desktop Linux, and it's really great. It really does put a lot of other games to shame. Good to know it works acceptably on the Deck.

  • V Rising. I'd rather play it on my desktop most of the time but I just want that couch chill at the end of the day

    • Have you had a chance to play it since the recent update? They completely re-did the controls on the Deck, right? I’d love to hear how it plays now, I’ve been eying it for a while.

  • Minecraft when I want to chill, Helldivers 2 when I don't

    • You play Helldivers 2 on the deck? What's the performance like? I imagine, especially at higher level dificulties, the Deck must be struggling.

      • I play on diff 7 mostly, I use the deck presets with the regular eye candy things turned off (motion blur, bloom, others) and average around 40 frames. It's a worse experience than desktop (my gaming PC is pretty beefy and plays it at 4k/60fps native) but totally playable. Even at diff 10 it's not that bad but with many things on screen and explosions and stuff I'll drop down to about 30. I grew up on PlayStation 1 and N64 so I'm used to trash frame rates, if you have lower tolerance for that it might be frustrating but personally I don't care.

  • Fallout 4 for those end world vibes.

    Waiting to see if Clair Obscura gets any performance patches. Heard mixed reviews about it running on Deck.

    • I'm playing Clair Obscur. It runs at about 30 fps if you put everything on Low and use TSR with 60% resolution.

    • I'm playing Clair Obscura and it's running acceptably well by my standards.

      The game hides some graphics settings on deck by default and uses a deck specific present. You can re-enable the settings by using the launch option SteamDeck=0 %command%, and customize it to your liking. I've been following this video's settings and have been pretty happy with the results. Basically it's TSR to low, shadow and post processing to low, film grain off, chromatica off, motion blur off, any other option to medium, FPS cap to 30.

      • Thanks for the video. Looks pretty good to me. I'm usually more concerned about stable framerate even if it's 30fps. I'll probably pick it up this weekend now.

      • Clair's default graphics on Deck are unbelievably ugly, doing the SteamDeck=0 thing is mandatory. I was never great with reaction games, so the slight framerate loss means I go from "missing counters 98% of the time" to "missing counters 98.2% of the time". I'll take that.

  • Specifically on Deck, I think I've been relegated to just Pokemon Rejuvenation, Baba Is You, and Gemcraft Frostborn Wrath.

    I tried getting gyro controls working for Dolphin to play the 2 Sonic book based games, but I can't figure it out with my stupidity and cannot find a used compatible USB or bluetooth IFR sensor online for the wii remote I can connect to my deck.

  • Lately I have been mainly playing my usual, Operation Harsh Doorstop. OHD is a free and moddable, big map vehicle and infantry (including helis) multiplayer game like Project Reality but the big difference is that OHD is moddable and so the whole game is a really exciting platform for all kinds of games with functioning client side downloading of mods so you can just connect to a multiplayer server and go!

    https://store.steampowered.com/app/736590/Operation_Harsh_Doorstop/

    I sing the praises of the game a lot, but to be fair it has a lot of rough edges. OHD runs decent on the Steam Deck (keep view distance as high as possible, turn down everything else, lock the max framerate of the deck at like 40fps). Gunplay is fairly realistic, the bipod mechanics are awesome, APCs and AFVs feel weighty and powerful but this is definitely a game where unprotected armor gets eaten for lunch by infantry since... pretty much everybody on the other team who doesn't have a better plan or wants an smg is strapping a RPG or other form of AT too. You have to turn the graphics way down on the Steam Deck... but I just don't really care? I think the realism of OHD helps in that if you get the drop on someone you will probably win if you are smart, and pretty much any gun in the game can be used in any situation this isn't some crazy confusing game like COD, Apex or another game with constantly changing gun metas and hyper specific strategies. Just pick a gun and go, it will work great lol.

    The real reason OHD is one of my favorite Steam Deck games is flying helicopters on the Steam Deck it is an absolute joy, I mean driving any kind of vehicles is a blast (holy shit I have spent so many hours in Motortown powersliding around corners and I regret none of it lol) too but specifically helicopters become a form of psychedelic drug as your mind locks into flying them organically and it is a thrill to master using helicopters (transport and attack) effectively in a semi-realistic game like this. The skill ceiling is intimidatingly high, both for the crazy variable way you can apply attack helicopters in this game and also for the way you can realistically shift the momentum of entire matches by making effective troop drops with the transport helicopter.

    Also if you aren't looking for a realistic shooter.. again this is a moddable platform and there are already mods like casualfield that make the game play more like call of duty or battlefield.

    I have shared this game as a recommendation so many times but the reason I am sharing it this time is I ran into another player playing on the steam deck the other day and that was the first time that had happened!

    Subscribe to the workshop mod "OHD Vehicle Overhaul" and you can mess around with flying helicopters in singleplayer if you are curious (pick singleplayer then ohd vehicle overhaul for mode and then jaziira for map).

  • Last Epoch! Haven't had a lot of free time for gaming, so my progression of the season is slow - but I'm having a good time with it so far. Season 2 is definitely quite the breath of fresh air.

    • From what I understand, Last Epoch has an online and offline mode. If you're playing in online mode, and you put your deck to sleep, what happens when you wake up the Deck?

      Some online games just have a brief reconnecting delay, but other games (like Diablo 4 at launch) will completely kick you out or make you restart the game completely.

      • I can't say that I've tried to do that directly (I'm unfortunately not at my steam deck this moment to test), however I've been disconnected from the game servers before whenever they have to apply a server-side fix (or during general server issues) and it allowed me to rejoin without relaunching the entire game. So I imagine an Internet drop from putting the deck to sleep would be treated the same and not require a relaunch, unless maybe you've put it to sleep for an extended period of time (such as 24 hours) causing an authentication token of sorts to expire.

        So far I've only had to do a full relaunch whenever there is a new patch available (if you try to rejoin instantly it'll just tell you to update the game).

        EHG has been putting a lot of focus on Deck related stuff, so I suspect even if it does cause a relaunch they'd be receptive to feedback to try to find a workaround on their side if possible.

      • Okay, was just able to test this with my Ally running Bazzite (which I did have with me, but was charged down). I was able to put it to sleep for a few minutes while in a town, after waking back up I got disconnected but was able to just log back in from the menu without a game relaunch!

  • We finished Split Fiction recently, it was fantastic.

    We tried Unravel Two yesterday but I found it a bit underwhelming, not sure it will stick.

54 comments