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Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version

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Re: Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep 1000h+ on Linux here, it's flawless

After some patches, that is debatable: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/baldurs-gate-3-companions-...

Complete nonsense, of course there were bugs d'uh! But none of them had any major impact on anything and none of that has anything to do with the fact that the game ran flawlessly on Linux from day 1.

Re: Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version

#132
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's any consolation, the Deck LCD is discounted by 20% for the next few weeks if you need to pick up a new one.

IMO, there are better ergonomics on competitors. Over a thousand + of hours using one, a steam deck is death for your wrists in comparison. When I was playing Elden Ring on the SD for a few hundred hours, I almost thought I needed to have surgery. There are strategies to help with this, rest it on a pillow on your lap, or whatever, but you won't experience that with some of these. - https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/han…

as the owner of a Legion Go, I think you're better off with the gaming laptop. This thing is just as inconvenient to carry (it's big and heavy) and way less powerful

Re: Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version

#133

I have played a couple hours of BG3 on PlayStation (time-limited demo), and a couple hours on my Mac (purchased on Steam), and I found the controller UI to be really weird and counterintuitive compared to the mouse-driven UI on the desktop computer. Does it get easier? Does anyone have any suggestions for coming to terms with the controller weirdness? I would much rather play BG3 on my Steam Deck than on my computer.

As a Steam Deck player (who mostly streams from my desktop at this point but still pretty much exclusively games with controller inputs nowadays), I got frustrated with a lot of the "automatic" management of the radial menus. Quite often, when the game adds a new ability to the radial menus, it completely rearranges them, and for some reason it really likes to automatically add things even if you manually remove them, so it becomes very unwieldly especially for spellcasters at higher levels. My frustration reached the point where I realized I either needed this problem solved or I just wouldn't be able to play anymore, which was disappointing for me given how much I've enjoyed it, so I decided to bit the bullet and start developing a mod to try to impose some semblance of order on the radial menus myself. Unfortunately it relies heavily on the Script Extender, which isn't available on consoles (and also doesn't work on the Steam Deck native version, since it's provided as a DLL that gets loaded by the game and presumably would require a non-trivial amount of effort to port to a native Linux shared library), but so far I've implemented a number of specific settings (which can each individually be enabled or disabled) around automatically preventing changes to the radial menus in certain certain circumstances and clearing them in certain other ones (e.g. for new games or when changing ca character's class). Most recently, I added a way to define a custom keybinding to manually lock the radial menus for the currently controlled character until manually toggled off by hitting the keybinding again (which currently doesn't persist past a reload, but I'm fairly close to being done integrating it with a Script Extender feature to preserve arbitrary data alongside save files so that it's possible to save them so that they get restored to the same state they were when a given save was made. Given the reception when I starting publishing this, there seem to be a small but passionate set of players with the same frustrations as me, which helped motivate me to spend the time to keep working on it.

To me, the modding ecosystem is probably one of the two most important things about this game (the other being that Larian seems to be pretty awesome as far as studios go nowadays, with their CEO taking a firm stance against "crunch" to get games out and in favor of the model of offline games that don't require paid DLC or microtransactions, as well as their continued support of the modding ecosystem itself). Long before I ever considered writing any mods myself, I started referring to BG3 as similar to Skyrim in that the mods will likely keep things fresh long after new official content stops coming out. I still think this is true, but I also keep being surprised just how much work they're continuing to put into the game even with new content presumably finally having come to an end.

Re: Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version

#134

This 12GB update managed to trigger the bizarre Steam behavior on my Linux desktop where the game patching process pegs all cores to 100% and thrashes the disk so hard the system eventually stops allowing eg. launching new processes (though the system isn't frozen stiff like running out of RAM - switching Niri desktops is fine, but launching eg. htop hangs forever, and eventually browsers stop responding). After walk…

A bit of a tangent, but I’ve seen these issues mentioned before and to me it’s always felt like more the OS’s fault than Steam’s. Like shouldn’t Steam be free to express full utilization of the available resources? And isn’t it the OS’s job to manage QoS?

What am I missing here?

Re: Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version

#135

This 12GB update managed to trigger the bizarre Steam behavior on my Linux desktop where the game patching process pegs all cores to 100% and thrashes the disk so hard the system eventually stops allowing eg. launching new processes (though the system isn't frozen stiff like running out of RAM - switching Niri desktops is fine, but launching eg. htop hangs forever, and eventually browsers stop responding). After walk…

Update was intense for me too. 12 gb with hotfixes, downloaded after kids had gone to bed. It took about 30 minutes to apply. That was about the allotted time for me.

Re: Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep 1000h+ on Linux here, it's flawless

After some patches, that is debatable: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/baldurs-gate-3-companions-...

I think they meant it was "flawless" in terms of not being a degraded experience compared to Windows. Bugs will obviously still happen, but I'd also argue that the sheer breadth of the bugs they continue to squash over two years after the full game came out without having charged a cent for any new content that got released after the fact very well might be unparalleled by any other popular mainstream game. Over the summer, they released a set of fixes that included bugs like "one specific set of gloves were rendered poorly when worn by one specific race in combination with one specific set of armor[1]. When plenty of live-service games have much worse bugs than that they don't even get acknowledged for months at a time, it just doesn't seem useful to criticize a relatively small studio that's clearly going above and beyond to continue supporting a game with the only benefit for them being continued goodwill.

[1]: https://baldursgate3.game/news/room-temperature-fix-33-now-l...

Re: Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version

#138
post #134

This 12GB update managed to trigger the bizarre Steam behavior on my Linux desktop where the game patching process pegs all cores to 100% and thrashes the disk so hard the system eventually stops allowing eg. launching new processes (though the system isn't frozen stiff like running out of RAM - switching Niri desktops is fine, but launching eg. htop hangs forever, and eventually browsers stop responding). After walk…

A bit of a tangent, but I’ve seen these issues mentioned before and to me it’s always felt like more the OS’s fault than Steam’s. Like shouldn’t Steam be free to express full utilization of the available resources? And isn’t it the OS’s job to manage QoS? What am I missing here?

Systems tend to not have particularly strong guardrails against pathological access patterns which aren't trying to use 100% but a large multiple of that or are abusing some subsystem or another. The application is almost always also unresponsive.

Putting up those guardrails temporarily hides big problems more often than it avoids needing to have them solved.

Re: Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version

#139
I had tried to run BG3 on my Steam Deck a couple months back. It ran... okay. Lot's of hitches and I had to tune things way way way down, but somewhat playable.

I'm very grateful that they took the time to build a native Steam Deck release for the game, not really something I had ever expected. Hopefully with this I can actually jump in and enjoy the game!

Re: Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, BG3 is basically a system seller for the deck.

I streamed BG3 on the deck, I played it with one of those logitech keyboards on my living room tv setups, was pretty great

My default way of playing nowadays (for all games, not just BG3) is to stream to my Deck from my desktop using Sunshine. Surprisingly, I don't really notice any input latency even with my desktop upstairs in my office while I'm playing downstairs in my living room.
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