I’ve just started playing beam ng drive. Looks great so far, but I’m pretty shit at it.
Solo:
- Break the loop - small indie roguelite with some fun mechanisms
- Cassette Beasts - never played Pokemon before so any comparison would be helpless here. But a nice deck game on the train for sure!
Coop:
- For the King II - loved the first one, they did good with the second one
- Wartales - with 2 other friends, it’s our recurring Tuesday game night. Really fun gameplay!
I have been playing a lot of games recently, but I think the one I want to highlight most is a game I have recommended in the past here.
Beyond All Reason is a free and open source RTS game inspired by Total Annihilation. It is based on the Spring RTS Engine and collectively BAR represents probably almost two decades of community development over the years and the game is at a really polished fun state at this point with a diverse variety of units and strategies.
The AI is good, it constantly probes your defenses, multiplayer is a blast with active lobbies, you can play PvP or PvE and there are a massive amount of maps. I know I am a weirdo but with gyro on I don’t find playing Beyond All Reason difficult at all. Am I going to out APM a mouse and keyboard player? Nope, but that isn’t really why I play RTS games anyways, and I can hold my own fine especially with the awesome action que system that BAR expanded on from Total Annihilation.
Honestly, I don’t think you are going to find a 3D RTS game with better performance on the Deck for the insane amount of units that get thrown around in a typical BAR match than the Spring RTS Engine/BAR, it is a fairly old 3d RTS engine that by today’s standards has extremely low system requirements but at the same time, everything is simulated. When a tank shoots at another tank in the Spring Engine, the tank aims and then launches a projectile… that projectile is modeled as a physical object and it may or may not hit its target. It is VERY impressive that there can be hundreds of units blasting it out on the battlefield in BAR, and the game just keeps chugging along somehow without melting my steam deck.
https://www.beyondallreason.info/
p.s. check out the new BAR trailer, can you believe this game is a free and open source game??!?
So I had shoulder surgery a few weeks ago. I spent a lot of one-handed time on the couch. Played some Shapez 2 with a mouse on the couch via the deck, I played some the Witness (goofily with one hand on my xbox controller), some Slay the Spire, and some Stray
Been nice to have the ability to not sit at my computer when it was too uncomfortable
Darkest Dungeon, Black Reliquary, Pillars of Eternity, Cloudpunk, Pathfinder 2, Divinity 2 Original Sin, Slay the Spire, Witcher 1 and 3, Morrowind, Oblivion, Torment, to name just a few…
Morrowind
Using OpenMW or vanilla engine? Any mods? I just ordered a Deck and Morrowind is at the top of my list of games to install.
I’m using Vanilla, but AFAIK modded would work just as well. The key for playing old, pre-controller games meant for big monitors on the Deck are two features: Stream Input and Native Zoom. I always map one of the back buttons (usually) to Toggle Zoom.
Please post about your experience with modded Morrowind, I might want to try that too!
Thanks for the tips :)
Please post about your experience with modded Morrowind, I might want to try that too!
Sure, I’ll try to remember to do that!
You should definitely use OpenMW instead of vanilla, it’s not a mod but is instead a full engine rewrite. It runs natively on linux, has better performance, and a whole lot of other benefits:
- Native support for macOS, Linux, and Windows
- Improved physics and AI
- Distant terrain
- Save/Load dialogs organized by character
- Quality of life UI improvements, such as being able to search for spells
- Multiple quicksaves
- World map adjusts automatically to fit new landmass from mods such as Tamriel Rebuilt
- Support for up to 2147483646 loaded mods (up from 255 in the original Morrowind engine)
- Since it was made from scratch, virtually no engine bugs from the original Morrowind
- And much more
You can install it from the Discover store in desktop mode and then add it to steam, or alternatively you can use a tool like Protonup-qt (also in the discover store) to install Luxtorpeda, which is a tool for automatically launching supported games with rewritten engines. Once Luxtorpeda is installed you can open Morrowind steam properties in game mode, and check the “force specific compatibility tool” box and select to run the game with Luxtorpeda. After that it will automatically run the game through the OpenMW engine instead.
Wow, thanks, I’ll try this!
I’ve been playing a whole lot of Monster Hunter Rise. It runs really good, great performance and battery life (which makes sense considering it was originally a switch game). It’s my first real Monster Hunter game and I’m having a great time with it.
Only issues I’ve encountered: switching between docked and handheld play causes a minor fps drop until I restart the game. The game also has a utterly bizarre bug where if you’re playing with a controller designated as the 2nd player controller, any monster roar will drop the fps to 0 for like a minute. Super bizarre, no idea what kind of spaghetti code could cause that.
It does look like a nice deck game. I only ever played World, but I eventually got tired by the endless grind. How is Rise in this regard?
Octopath 2
Shapez2 works well
@Fubarberry
Dome Keeper. A solid 30 hours of fun gameplay. Recommended.I recently bought the Cat Quest trilogy. I played the first two on my switch but the third one just came out and Steam did the whole bundle at a discount so I snagged it. Been enjoying replaying the first two before I start on the new one.
@Fubarberry I’ve started playing Cities:Skylines (the original one) again, and downloaded multiple mods from the Steam Workshop. It froze one day and I couldn’t fix it in any way than to shut down my Deck. Every upgrades I did to that city were just gone.
That’s unfortunate, full system freezes like that are sometimes because you ran out of ram/VRAM. If that was what happened, the SteamOS Beta uses zram which should prevent this once the change makes it to stable. In the meantime you could use something like Cryoutilites to increase your swap file size, which should also prevent crashes like that.
@Fubarberry Thank you. This seems like it should be useful for my situation 😁 Do I need to go through the process of setting a root/sudo account for this?
Was surprised to see that GTA-V gives me over 6hrs of play on a charge on the OLED with 45fps/90hz and half-rate shading enabled so played a bunch on that for old times sake. Going to get RDR2 on sale this week to keep scratching that Rockstar itch.
Finally figured out how to get Assassin’s Creed - Syndicate running on the deck and this is such a great game, my first in the AC series.
Ryujinx 😁
Hell yeah, fuck Nintendo, don’t let them take away your right to emulate the games you paid for (hell, I don’t mind if you emulate games you didn’t pay for, Nintendo is a massive scumbag company, it’s totally fine to pirate their stuff)
I use moonlight to stream my pc to my steam deck. It automatically sets the resolution and refresh rate when i connect. It amazing.
I’ve been playing red dead redemption 2 and i just finished crime scene cleaner yesterday. and as always, genshin impact.
Any (especially input) lag? When I was using steam stream about 5 years ago any quick reaction based game was a no go die to the input lag between my well specxed pc and crappy laptop.
Honestly non at all. I even took a video once with my phone of my steam deck screen next to the pc monitor and the frames were perfectly in sync. The input feels native and i have zero latency with that. I remember years ago it indeed wasn’t that good. But nowadays its so perfect!
I even play competitive counter strike that way.
The stats show around 1ms. And that is network and decoding combined.
As long as you are at home, its indistinguishable from directly plugging in a mouse+keyboard and monitor.
Can you say why you do that? It’s it because you can play with better quality settings because you offload the work to your pc?
Yeah i like it that i can play the game on the highest quality and it makes the steam deck less hot and the battery last waaaaay longer :)
I also have it connected to my tv a lot so i can play pc games in 4k on the couch.
I also tend to switch between the steam deck and pc multiple times in a day, so having everything on one system is really nice.
Games like vampire survivor, emulators, bind of isaac, olders games etc, i play on the steam deck directly. But having immediate access to my xbox games pass library is also really nice ^^
Not OP, but that’s one part of it. You can turn down graphics, and games will still look fine on the small screen, but some games just need some extra power.
I haven’t played RDR2 but something like Returnal runs okayish on the Deck, but runs great on my PC. If I want good framerates on the Deck, I need to turn everything down, and it’s acceptable on the go, but at home I could run it at 60 fps easy with better graphics if I stream it.
Guardians of the Galaxy. FPS is a little sluggish especially first chapter (theres a bug where the whole screen goes black but audio goes through). However, its still fun
Also LIMBO which runs fine on the deck
Just played Limbo and Inside back to back and they’re such amazing games holy eff. And perfect for the deck.
Awesome!! I see its on sale today too! I’ll pick it up! Thanks for the rec