For some unfathomable reason, they disabled local multiplayer on the steam deck version of the game. You need to supply a command-line argument to re-enable it. I honestly don't know why they did this.
> This is a gigantic effort from Larian, who among all things is still updating its software instead of resting on its own laurels.
What makes this story even better is how it actually came about - this wasn't initially a top-down corporate initiative, but rather a passion project from a single engineer who worked on it after hours. The fact that Larian immediately recognized the value and threw their full support behind it says everything about their culture.
Swen Vincke shared the backstory:
> The story of how this came to be really is one of true passion. The Steam Deck native build was initiated by a single engineer who really wanted a smoother version of the game on Steam Deck and so he started working on it after hours. When we tried it out, we were all surprised by how good it felt and so it didn't take much to convince us to put our shoulders behind it and get it released. It's this type of pure passion for their craft that makes me fall in love with my developers over and over again. Considering myself very lucky to have people like him on my team. Try it out!
They probably would have to get the permission of the engineer to name them publicly. With how the gaming community behaves on social media I wouldn't be surprised if the engineer doesn't want that. Because that could mean death threats for you and your family the next time a subset of the community gets upset with your employer.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted, you are absolutely correct. The unhinged weirdos are still a minority, but less and less ashamed of their own behavior online. No doubt that dev is better off remaining unnamed in this instance.
They may be a minority but they are more empowered than ever. Both by the new owner of Twitter and the current politics in the US.
It’s a shame that large companies like EA/Bethesda/Valve/etc don’t do more to fight against it, instead of cowering and leaving indie devs that are barely surviving to fend this off.
> all of mid/late 2010s online politics was colored by one reviewer giving a favourable game review to a game that some people disliked
That's kind of a twisted interpretation of events. It was coloured by one incel who though he owned the developer of a game and a whole lot of incels who sympathized because they too were owed a vagina by the ones who controlled them. Now it's spread to broader issues and higher levels of politics and is still going.
I remember the start of GamerGate well, it was all people screaming about "ethics in games journalism". But you're obviously right that that it wasn't really about ethics in games journalism, your description is probably a better reflection of the actual psychology of the people involved.
And then there are people, gamers, who were actually just dismayed with the conflicts of interest that ran rampant in the orthodox "games journalism" space and didn't give two shits about the personal drama side of the story, although that's mostly solved by finding your favorite youtube reviewer. And those who were genuinely focused on improving discovery of good indie games were subjected to some pretty horrible commentary that completely missed the point. Now there are smaller dedicated publications or channels that actually do regularly (weekly/monthly) review a decent volume of new promising indie games to help discover standouts, but that turned out to be a niche that the existing publications didn't want to keep up with, and a niche that suddenly many people denied even existed, for some reason? People who can't contemplate that there are amazing passion projects out there to be discovered, I suppose because those people can't imagine actually working hard on something people would enjoy, because they would rather spend their time raining on others' parades instead.
But it was too close of a tangent towards criticism of establishment journalism in general, so of course establishment journalism countered back with the only weapon it has, and suddenly the vast majority of people forgot any of it had to do with reviewing and promoting good indie video games.
People who make indie games are not losers. People who want good games to be promoted are not losers. It is an art. It's not for everyone. People who just want to play the latest AAA sequel can stick to those. But if you've ever tried a niche indie game and been more impressed than you expected, you know it's art, and you'd want other people discovering and promoting the good ones, and talking about what makes them special.
I am not going to re-litigate GamerGate here. There were people who were genuinely concerned about ethics in games journalism, sure. But it did not become the defining event in the online-political sphere of the mid/late '10s simply due to genuine concerns about ethics in games journalism.
Correct, because a large portion of the public has no idea what indie games are, or how the software industry works, but they know that angry nerds are funny.
What I remember is that there were a subset of people I was acquainted with online who when this started all /immediately/ started posting things exactly like the comment this is a reply to; "these people just don't respect women, you all need to sit down and listen to women and center women" kinds of things. They were all men; mostly straight men although some were bi, and all generally thought to be fine although known for being a little performative and mildly, as they say, horny on main a little too often.
Every single one of them later turned out to be a sexual predator. This is now known as the "softboi" or "male feminist". This kind of person is still out there and is dangerous as ever, so it's important to keep an eye out.
(None of these people were in tech; instead all my tech coworkers who were men and lived in SF also heard "we need to respect women", but being kind of autistic engineers took it too literally and didn't seem to know any women, so they seemed to think the right thing to do was go out and find a woman and literally just start respecting them. This didn't work out for them and they mostly ended up getting scammed by scammers who happened to be women.)
Not that I'm aware of. I thought that was weird at first as well, but I assume it might be in a way to protect the engineer.
Unfortunately, singling out any individual developer, even for praise, can attract unwanted negative attention online. By acknowledging the passion and the work without naming the person, Swen gives them full credit internally while shielding them from becoming a public target.
This doesn't even necessarily have to be intentional harassment, but if this engineer is now the "SteamDeck guy" at Larian, their social media might get flooded by people who mistake their personal social media accounts for a support ticket.
I'm sure the engineer has the option to self-identify if they wish, but this approach feels like a sign of good and thoughtful leadership.
This is an interesting perspective... I'd be at a loss to think of an example of an engineer who's been publicly pilloried (having been highly regarded for great work) for the failings of their company. Perhaps you could cite and example?
Seems enormously more likely to be the all to familiar story in the games industry of not providing credit to individual devs. Something that goes back to the earliest days of Atari.
> I'd be at a loss to think of an example of an engineer who's been publicly pilloried (having been highly regarded for great work) for the failings of their company. Perhaps you could cite and example?
Because these guys and gals are not famous enough to warrant large coverage, and because the phenomenon is unfortunately so widespread that noone is going to cover every case.
Thanks, really appreciate the concrete examples. They're not quite what I was referring to (developer praised by company / media - then attacked for issues with the company beyond their purview), but they do point to a (largely invisible from outside the industry / twitter bubble) truly worrying and frightening level of animosity and aggression pointed towards devs that I wasn't sufficiently aware of.
I don't think you need a case quite this specific because of the following:
> then attacked for issues with the company beyond their purview
Ultimately, whether an employee is praised or not is completely irrelevant to the nutjobs taking their anger out on them because of something their employer did.
I'm not necessarily saying they'd get pilloried. I'm saying that having your personal digital space colonized by people who think you're customer support is insanely disruptive.
Think replies full of "I only get 8 fps in Act 3, pls fix" when you just wanted to post a photo of your vacation.
I can't think of specific names anymore since it's been a while since I have played it, but a lot of the developers for World of Warcraft used to be and likely still are active on Twitter. For a lot of them, the community knew fairly well which features of the game or which class they were responsible for. When I used to look at the replies to some of their Tweets (even ones completely unrelated to WoW), they were often full of complaints about their area of perceived responsibility.
I fully understand every engineer who just wants to put their head down and work on their stuff they're passionate about without having to also be public-facing. Even in a small company like mine, some of our devs constantly complain that some customers know that they are responsible for certain features of our product and email them directly rather than going through the proper support channels.
Your point about the games industry often struggling with providing proper credit to devs is well taken - it's absolutely an issue. But in this case, Vincke did actually do that, in a way. He could've just kept quiet and let the playerbase think it was a company effort, but instead he publicly highlighted and recognized the passion and work of one of their engineers (even though anonymously). That engineer can look at the countless positive replies to that post and get the nice fuzzy feeling without getting dragged into the spotlight.
I take your point about being inadvertently made a point of contact for customer support / complaints about technical issues with the game.
Disagree however about the value credit - personal credit has concrete value (career wise, status wise etc), warm and fuzzy feelings less so. Right now we can only guess whether the dev had a say in the matter.
You're absolutely right that named credit has tangible career benefits that go well beyond feelings. But I think Vincke threaded that needle well with the anonymous public credit - it creates a documented public record of innovative work at the company level while preserving the engineer's privacy.
The engineer can still leverage this (LinkedIn, internal promotions, industry networking) without being forced into a public-facing role they might not want. When they're interviewing or networking, they can point to Vincke's public acknowledgment and say "that was my project" in contexts where it's professionally relevant, without having their personal social media permanently associated with it.
Considering Vincke was impressed enough to publicly acknowledge this individual's passion and initiative, there's no doubt in my mind that this engineer could get named credit or something that would acknowledge their role in the project if they wanted it.
But to go a bit meta:
I think it's strange that we are discussing this in the context of a CEO publicly acknowledging one of their engineers (even if anonymously). Vincke is, at least in the context of the broader industry, going above and beyond. I doubt you'd see Ubisoft, EA, or Blizzard publicly acknowledging a single engineer's after-hours passion project in this way.
Feels a bit like misdirected energy, I guess?
Why are we debating about the nuances of named vs anonymous credit and recognition when industry leaders don't give any?
It's like calling someone out for only tipping 10% while ignoring the guy in the top hat who's tipping 0. If you want gaming companies to get better about giving credit and recognition, you should support the companies that are at least moving in the right direction. I know it's easy to be cynical, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
The Steam deck is really not that limited. Every game could be made to run well on it if some time was spent actually making the low settings work well. Something often skipped on modern games which optimise only for people with a $1000 GPU chugging 400w.
It's not like we have seen anything in gaming that wouldn't be possible on PS3/Xbox360 era hardware, certainly not in terms of complexity.
Just remember that stuff like red dead redemption ran on those things with all of 512 MB of unified memory. It ran and looked better than borderlands 4 does on current consoles.
I think you're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.
The 360/PS3 was a huge jump forward but very limited by today’s standards. RDR was one of the better looking games of the generation but could not maintain a steady 30fps at 1080p/i (and I’m not sure it was even true 1080).
The PC version came later, had higher resolution textures and other graphical improvements so it compares more favourably to modern games when you play it today. It still had problems running on all but the highest-end PCs of the time.
Of course even low-end PCs can run it without breaking a sweat, because they’ve become much more powerful.
Most Xbox360 and PS3 games were 720p at 30fps. 720p was mostly fine because 1080p TVs were luxury items back then.
The performance problems in modern games are often not caused by fillrate-vs-resolution bottlenecks though, but by poor engine architecture decisions (triggering shader recompilations in the hot path).
Shader recompilation causes stuttering not general performance problems. Shader complexity will though, which is a function of render quality.
But I’m confused about why you think fill rate isn’t an issue? If you are now upgrading from 1080p to 4K your GPU needs at the very least 4x the pixel pushing power and even then that’s only to maintain the same detail; you bought a 4K screen for more detail.
Presumably people do this because they hate money; as you say, it's much harder to make the pixels just slightly more crisp and you'll pay dearly for the privilege.
I might be misremembering, but I seem to remember most games of that era were 540p scaled to 1080p. 720p would have been an upgrade. But your point still stands.
Remarkably RDR1 was only released for PCs late last year, ~14 years after the original release.
Maybe that is even related to it's good performance on consoles back then: Rockstar invested a lot of development time and sacrificed portability for performance. Basically the opposite of what modern games achieve with unreal 5.
Deck can run witcher 3 and mh:world decently (maybe some hiccup and lower graphic setting). There should be not a big problem to make games run on steam deck (ignoring controller support since it's a separate matter).
I tried CP2077's Deck mode but it really seemed like a tech demo level of "you could do this if you really wanted to" more than it actually being playable.
The game felt like it had significant input lag, and at 720p with upscaling text becomes very hard to read. The game's visual style of "glitch" effects also translates badly with upscaling and I really had a tough time actually understanding what I'm looking at on the screen.
I thought it was playable on the LCD Deck. I did turn things down below what the Steam Deck preset was at. It certainly wasn't the smoothest 100% of the time but it was better than Fallout New Vegas on a PS3 IMO. It still holds up pretty well against the Switch 2 version in handheld mode.
That's true for GPU bound games but with CPU bound games like BG3 in Act 3 there's no easy toggle on the user side, and often no easy toggle on the dev side either, because the nature of the game necessitates CPU intensive work.
The problem is how horribly unoptimised Unreal Engine 5 itself is - with that sort of foundation there's not a lot you can do. It's a GTX-1050 equivalent GPU, there's only so much that can be expected of it.
UE is easier to ruin a project with but it's not inherently cursed.
The real reason many of these games run like shit is over reliance on real time lighting systems. RT lights are easy. It's easy to throw a bunch of artists into a box and hope for the best. A complete idiot can make a scene mostly look good without much thinking. Baked lights require a lot of anticipation and planning. It impacts iteration time, etc. The tradeoff being that this is orders of magnitude more performant than RT lights. Imagine watching Toy Story after the offline render vs attempting to do it live. This is literally the same scaling problem.
UE has always been a damn huge toolbox. Yes, sure, you can just cobble together all sort of libraries and get a visually very appealing game or, if you want, photorealistic rendering decent enough to back these giant virtual studios for triple-A blockbuster movies, but you will need the hardware to match if you want performance.
If you want performance on everyday hardware, there is no way (and I'd say this holds true for any engine, not just UE5!) that you dig down into the engine an the libraries and invest the money in testing to tune the performance appropriately.
When EVERY game stutters and has the same kind of issues, then you can't put a blame on individual developers.
This isn't a case of "these developers are lazy", UE5 issues are the case of "every single UE5 released game has shader stutter issues on PC". That's an issue with engine architecture and its APIs, not an individual thing.
It's not that I think that UE5 is good for low end hardware, it's not.
One of the reasons that a lot of studios struggle with bad performance on UE5, is because a lot of studios, fired their most experienced devs and hired bunch of cheaper new programmers, because they bought into the whole make game with blueprints idea.
I have several friends (I know just one datapoint ), that were in games industry from 6 to 12 years that got fired, just for the studio to replace them with cheaper more inexperienced devs.
Baicly UE5 overpromised how easy it was. You still get some great working games that use UE5, but this are from studios that have experienced devs.
It’s not terrible at low-end hardware. Fortnite has been able to run on phones for a long time now. It’s not as lightweight as Unity or Godot by any means and they still remain the optimal choice for low-end platforms.
What you can’t do is hit compile out of the box and expect it to work well on those low-end platforms, because it will try to use all the high-end features if it thinks it’s allowed to.
I don’t think it exactly overpromises how easy it is, but unlike a lot of software it has a learning curve that seems gentle at first and then exponentially increases. It’s high-end AAA-grade development software aimed at professionals, it expects you to know what you’re doing.
> This isn't a case of "these developers are lazy", UE5 issues are the case of "every single UE5 released game has shader stutter issues on PC". That's an issue with engine architecture and its APIs, not an individual thing.
Just because an engine offers you a way to shoot yourself in the foot with a sawn off shotgun, you can't blame the engine maker when you do shoot yourself in the foot with a sawn off shotgun and end up with a bleeding ugly stump.
The thing is, of course game studios will go for "we want to use ALLLLLL the newest features, we want to show off with Nanite and god knows what else". Who wouldn't? But game studios aren't willing to put in the effort surrounding such an implementation to properly tune it.
And it's not just tuning engine components for what it's worth - often enough the culprit ends up being ridiculously oversized textures, there's nothing else that could cause dozens of gigabytes worth of patches [1], and it's not a new complaint either [2].
Or in the case of Borderlands 4 and a plethora of other Unreal Engine 5 titles: they’re optimized for nothing and there aren’t even options to turn off most of the expensive graphical effects, despite the engine being able to scale down to mobile devices.
This is absolutely unacceptable and if this happens with nearly every big release, then that also speaks badly of the engine itself. Similarly to how languages like C++ are very powerful and can be used to great effect... and people almost inevitably still write code that has memory safety issues. That comparison should make a few ears perk up, my point is that fewer developers should use Unreal Engine 5 if they can't use it well (same as with the languages).
Frankly, I place more trust in studios that have their own engines or use literally anything other than UE5, like what happened to KDC:2, a modern game that looks good and runs great across a wide variety of hardware. Or how they fixed Cyberpunk 2077, it took a while to get there but now both the visuals and performance are quite good across the board.
Yeah. I just ran Goblin Cleanup, Mars First Logistics and Peak on a Framework 12 - that’s an intel integrated gpu. They all ran fine. Just a solid reminder that you can actually make a fun and good looking game without asking the player to spend hundreds to thousands of euros on future land waste.
> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
IMO it's because a lot of these newer games just don't need that much horsepower. BG3 is not one of them, but looking at the broader industry.
A lot of times were seeing maaaaaybe a 5% bump in fidelity or graphics quality in exchange for 400% less performance.
Like ray tracing. Does Ray tracing look good? Yes. But not that good. Its not the PS1 to the PS2. I've seen baked lighting indistinguishable from Ray tracing in 99% of scenes.
Its just not a good trade off with modern games usually. Unless they really optimize them.
The only people still optimizing games is Nintendo from what I've seen.
There is an interesting discussion about the need for ray tracing in one of the later Digital Foundry videos. The argument goes that sometimes baked lighting is impractical due to the size of the maps and how much dynamic lighting you need. The latest Doom game is one such game where light maps would be 100s of GBs. But I guess most other games are fine with baked lighting.
There's also much cheaper methods of dynamic lighting that aren't real time ray tracing. You can approximate, you can cheat, and it will look almost as good.
> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
Because they bought the game. After decades of PC gaming, it's totally absurd there is no system that tell you how bad or how well a game is going to play on your system. And if it's too difficult to make, how can we expect regular people to know themselves ?
Steam could probably build in a system to guess the performance if there was some benchmarking data, but game performance can change dramatically after release between updates to drives or the game itself.
As soon as what you have in your machine doesn’t literally match the stated system requirements, you’re on your own. It’s up to the user to research and understand which CPU or GPU is ”better” or ”worse” than the required one. These things are nontrivial when comparing between generations and across tiers, not to mention across different vendors.
A knowledgeable user might be able to predict their performance reasonably well, based on publicly available benchmark databases, but you still can’t really get a good estimate FPS unless you find someone with exactly your hardware setup who benchmarked the game (and is willing to share).
Most minimum/recommended game specs reference mainstream gaming CPU/GPUs, and most gamers know the strength of their own hardware relative to mainstream components.
If you're a very casual/young/inexperienced gamer then sure, you might have trouble comparing your own system with the min specs.
Which is so bad it barely means anything for lower-end PCs. I played and enjoyed plenty of hours on Elden Ring while rocking hardware well below the minimum requirements
I think one factor to this is that PC gamers are hostile to telemetry, and couldn't give a damn if the reasoning for it is advertising, real world feedback on game design which would feedback for future patches or the next game, or a mutual benefit of "hardware like (this) generally performs like (this) at low/med/high quality preset".
> I think one factor to this is that PC gamers are hostile to telemetry
Is there any data to support this? IME most PC gamers I know don't give a shit about telemetry. They are stock Windows and Android users, love Google products, etc.
They only care whatsoever when it comes to adblocking, because they don't want to watch ads.
Steam makes it easy to get a full refund for a game you don't like for any reason. So there's no risk in trying an install of a game that might not work well on your below-specs device, but then you shouldn't give it a negative review.
Unless most of the problems come later on, after the 2 hours game time.
I've heard about multiple games that where steamdeck verified but the performance choppy. If it can't hold a steady 30fps, a game shouldn't be steamdeck verified in my opinion.
It could be survey based. Heck, it could be coupon based. Something like:
1. Enroll is the discount program by running steam hardware survey. Steam holds onto your system specs.
2. Steam offers discounts for games that have insufficient benchmarks for your rough system.
3. For these games, steam collects performance data (either 5 minutes of benchmark before, during the game, first run, or maybe when the PC is idle (screensaver mode)).
There's all sorts of way they could do it. I'm guessing a large portion of people would be fine with a "Folding at home" style system, that just runs benchmarks for screensavers (with some coupons or whatever granted).
> I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
Depends on what the game can be reasonably expected to run on. Most games don't even approximate what would be technically possible on today's hardware and waste your electricity on lazy coding instead. "15 years old hardware" is what was cutting edge when Crysis 2 and Skyrim came out, so that's not a good excuse in the majority of cases.
> I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
15 years old? Have you seen many examples of this (I have not) or are you exaggerating to make a point?
Regardless, some very popular gaming hardware from 10-12 years ago is still in use and still very capable in modern games, so long as they allow tuning the graphics down. People running an i5 3570K and RX 480 at 1080p don't generally expect to get the imagery or frame rates of a modern gaming rig, but they are reasonable to expect roughly 60 fps with (for example) low textures and shadow detail, no reflections, static lighting, etc. Perhaps this is what you meant by "minimum settings", but:
While low-spec options like this have been the norm in 3D PC games practically forever, several very popular games released in the past 5 years have adopted anemic options menus that have negligible impact on performance at the low end. To someone with much experience tuning for older hardware, this is a striking and disappointing change. Especially now that gaming hardware upgrades are far more expensive than they were, and more people are struggling just to pay their living expenses.
The change is almost certainly unnecessary. It smells like the developers just aren't putting any effort into it anymore.
And it's not merely disappointing; it's also wasteful, both by pushing older hardware into the landfill and by denying opportunities to reduce power consumption.
> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
I game on 1080P and never have issues with any games I play, though I am on a 3080. It's definitely people trying to max out every setting for their 4K monitor that they overpaid for. I might be giving 2K monitors a try soon on the other hand.
As for the Deck... it's not a powerhouse, but it's still impressive how much it can run with decent tweaks. BG3 on a handheld at all feels like sci-fi to my teenage self
Of course they don’t, it would be crazy to say they would support all the different possible distros and configurations that people might run, when the majority of users are in steam deck. But that doesn’t mean it won’t run, just that if you have issues, they don’t promise to fix them. Seems reasonable to me.
BG3 already ran well enough on Linux, so I imagine this will only make it run better, official support or not.
I'd expect it to work anyway. Under Steam at least. There is nothing special about the Steam Deck/SteamOS that's not available on other distros when running Steam, afaik.
Well, most game companies will only tell you the game only works on something very specific, say Ubuntu 24.04, and everything else is untested/unsupported. That doesn't exclude the game will work perfectly fine on other distros, which is usually the case.
Proton version will always work better if someone does not show an example and encourage the usage of native support. With Proton you are guaranteed to never reach the optimal potential, or get full advantages of the Linux/Wayland ecosystem. While with native versions you have at least the chance to get in there.
It is like judging someone for taking an advantage of the new CPU instructions that accelerate processing because general instructions are already good enough.
When Proton started to get good, there were multiple stories of small game studios just dropping their bespoke Linux builds because the Windows->Proton version ran much much faster and required zero effort from them.
Native doesn't automatically mean better - quite a few examples of games running better on proton than with native executables(and yes then we can start arguing that it just means the native port is done poorly, but I'm just saying don't assume native will always run better).
It seems like a similar argument around the popularity of third party engines, whether studios should use Unreal, or whether they have the expertise/resources to change to and use another engine, or make their own bespoke engine, and if that will produce better results.
I think that is not fair comparison. Proton adds additional layer which can be completely removed and affects the runtime performance. Switching different game engine changes the layer implementation, instead of removing.
That'd be nice, though at the moment I hope that if the update instead breaks something on Linux -- a distinct possibility --, I can go back to the Proton version which has been working pretty much perfectly.
Something I wonder is if this new version is a linux build specifically targeting the deck hardware+OS setup, have Larian now committed themselves to following whatever Valve does in future for changes to that setup. In any case, they've got a fallback which is the windows version on proton, but it's inverting how Valve has trained many to behave which is to make just a windows version and delegate linux support to them.
There's also been persistent speculation about whether Valve would take on the burden of releasing SteamOS as a general distribution anyone can install on their own hardware (which I think is unlikely), which could in turn affect how Larian has to treat this port even if that is just communicating what it is and isn't.
It's worth noting that the native Linux version of games is often buggy and a far worse experience than the Windows version running on Proton. Valve itself is infamous for this: the Left 4 Dead 2 native game has multiple very annoying bugs that have been known for 15 years, and that Valve still hasn't fixed. Unfortunately, there is (another) bug that prevents the Windows version running on Proton from connecting to VAC-secure servers or I would have ditched the Linux version long ago.
At this point game devs should just discontinue the native version if they aren't going to properly support it and just make sure the game runs flawlessly on Proton.
You need to include not just glibc, you also need to include ld.so sometimes, because older libs can become incompatible with current ld.so (Linux port of SMAC for example), and I fear what it might do sometimes when trying to link openGL or Vulkan driver that links to newer glibc.
Oh, is that why steam still depends on trashy 32bit-libs? Last week, after updating my Debian, steam broke because of that s**, and now I have to think about using a separate windows-machine just for this, until steam removes the 32bit-dependencies (which seems to be planned for 2026).
On my Debian system I use the flatpack version of Steam, it comes with the 32bit stuff inside the container, so you don't need any 32bit packages in the OS.
I've had the opposite experience, getting great performance in TF2 for example and even Rust on Linux (but with Rust you couldn't connect to EAC secured servers, so, useless outside of testing stuff on a private server).
That's kind of the state of Linux in general. Binaries need to be build against the correct distribution and version. Even static binaries are a gamble.
Thanks, this is very interesting. So the old native runtime was basically a messy hacky using LD_LIBRARY_PATH and Ubuntu 12.04 libraries, and now they're using containers based on Debian 10 (Steam Runtime 2 'soldier') or Debian 11 (Steam Runtime 3 'sniper').
Edit: Valve actually have some very interesting documents about their compatibility environments:
I hope they'll drop 32-bit support in the runtime with the next major version. More and more distributions are dropping it or are thinking about it. Any new game should really use 64.
The games by Loki Software are still running great for me. It's a matter of skill and discipline. SDL, OpenGL and alike are very stable.
The problems start when developers start to use lots of small third-party libraries and depend on particular versions of them, but IIRC on Windows it's also solved by simply shipping all the libs with the game.
Absolutely not a problem, in fact, I enjoy this. But asking game developers for "discipline" is akin to asking frontend developers for forward compatibility - simply not in their culture.
Yes but that limits you to command line applications. GL and X11 (and I assume Wayland) are always linked dynamically. Granted, those don't suffer from glibc's "DLL version hell", but not sure what happens when you link the main executable statically against musl and then load DLLs which dynamically link glibc.
Another option is to dynamically link against an old glibc version, the Zig toolchain makes that easy also for C/C++ projects.
glibc doesn't suffer from DLL version hell as long as you are not doing anything stupid (like using private symbols). If you commit to using just the "C library" bits you can compile a binary linked against glibc on a distro from 1998 and it will work on modern distros just fine.
There are many issues with libraries breaking backwards compatibility on Linux (like pretty much all GUI ones) but glibc, X11, OpenGL (and to some extent SDL - it used to not be like that, but in recent years they made "SDL1->SDL2" wrappers and there is or will be a "SDL2->SDL3" wrapper too) are fine. I'm not sure about Vulkan but i'd guess that is fine too.
Last I tried the problem was linking against glibc on a new Linux distro and then attempting to run that executable on an old Linux distro which doesn't have a recent-enough glibc installed (usually Debian with their software stack from the last century).
There's probably an obscure linker trick to force an older glibc version number, but if that's the case it really should be the default since the C stdlib is supposed to be ABI backward compatible anyway.
This isn't just a glibc thing but something you can find with any shared library on Linux. For example if you are using a rolling distro and make a build that links against Qt6, the produced binary may not work in another distro that has a slightly older Qt6.
As palata mentioned the "trick" is to build using the oldest version you plan to target. You can use a Docker image with, say, Debian (which has official docker images going back to Squeeze released in 2011) to build the binary and release that.
AFAIK there are some tools that allow you to fudge symbols, etc to allow you to use whatever you have on your system but these feel like brittle solutions and the easiest one is to just build on an older/stable release. It isn't like it takes more than a second to make a VM or docker image anyway :-P.
glibc very much suffers from version hell, because:
a) glibc will drop older versioned symbols over time making your binary not work at all
b) glibc owns ld.so and is not afraid to make incompatible changes, which is why running Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri linux port requires that you dig out not just libc, but the entire dynamic linking stack and know how to bypass default executable interpreter in ELF files.
I wanted to port my semi-minimal 3D ECS game engine ~(10k lines) to a minimal distro, so I decided on Alpine after figuring Arch is actually very bloated on comparison.
I had to recompile even the single-executable command line prebuild system (premake5) for musl. Musl is a more minimal version of libc.
Got it to work fine after that, building a few components from source and getting a few like sdl from the distribution's repos. (also had to of course install relevant driver bits to get opengl working as the distro is truly minimal)
I would tend to agree, I think dev time is better spent supporting Proton. I have even seen benchmarks where Proton on Linux outperforms Windows. As a Steam Deck owner, Proton is fantastic.
I started playing Silksong on my Steam Deck using the linux build. Only to discover that it maxed out at 720p (docked), and wouldn't bind right/left trigger for my controller. Enabling proton (to play the windows build) worked great. Controller worked flawlessly and the game ran smoothly at 1080p.
One of the reasons Proton has been so successful as a dev target is because the Windows API is not changing anymore and is thus stable.
The same, as I understand it, cannot be said about the Linux-native API. SteamOS may have stabilized it somewhat, but there's a reason why the readme on their site for this basically says "it may run on Linux proper, but we're not supporting it except on Steam Deck"
Somehow it's still an issue. Was a while ago now but somehow an update to dbus(?) broke Worms WMD and the publisher just never fixed it. The solution was to just run the Windows version in Proton which works fine.
That is fascinating. So if I have a Linux version of say a game or emulator, and it seems unstable on steam deck, I could try running it in this container?
This is specifically a Steam Deck version and _not_ a general Linux version, so it's likely not applicable in this case. Think of it more like a console native port.
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!
No offense, but some people requirements are really, really low. I played God of War on Steam Deck and it was not a good experience, it was at the bottom of 'okay', and only because at that moment I wasn't at home to play on better hardware.
This is the reason why I don't believe when people say that it runs great without trying it myself.
I recently started it on Deck. At first I thought it was ok, perhaps a bit blurry and hard to read. Then I put it on the TV and oh my when those pixels came at me! I don't consider myself a hifi person, I really don't care much about such things. But that pixel mush was borderline unplayable! And I couldn't up the quality without making the game run unbearably slow. I don't understand why everyone is saying it works great or even fine on SD. Perhaps others don't really use an external screen for it? But now I can't get comfortable looking at it on the small screen either...
> No offense, but some people requirements are really, really low.
I think you kinda hit the nail on the head, but I believe there is an extra dimension to this: desire.
For BG3, it looked fun and I had good memories of BG2 so I was interested in playing it. After tuning the settings a bunch and not being able to get a consistent framerate / not have micro-freezing, I just said "oh well, I'll play it on some other platform in the future." I cared about BG3, but not that much.
This is in contrast to Elden Ring Nightreign, which also had issues. I was able to get it to a somewhat stable 30FPS and celebrated that success before dumping 100+ hours into the game. Why? Well, because I love FromSoft games! I really really really wanted to play the game and was willing to put up with a somewhat subpar experience in order to get it. BG3, among other games, is just not that exciting for me personally so my tolerance of technical hitches is very different.
... which brings us right back to this native release. Hopefully the improvements we see are enough to get me over that "hill" and actually enjoying the game. I have the update queued on my deck now so I can try it out after work.
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 walking away for two hours and coming back to the system still in this state, I gave up and hard-rebooted with the power button.
But if you survive the 12GB update process, I'm sure this is great news :) Maybe I'll finally have to make some time to play this game - bought it two years ago, but never ended up making time for it, despite having played Cyberpunk 2077 a time and a half, and most of Factorio: Space Age, since then.
From my guess, Steam support Vulkan shader pre-compilation so that you don't have to wait in game (like the infamous 10 min Monster Hunter Wilds startup delay). They also seems to also be able to download the compilation cache from Steam if someone already have done the process on the same GPU + driver version. Since fewer Windows games use Vulkan this feature is often not used, but on Linux most games will run on Vulkan (esp. Proton games with dxvk) you may experience the process more often.
Background shader pre-compilation does not use all cores by default and the only way to change that is to manually edit a file. So unless you're consciously changing it, you won't have this problem. It'll only use all cores when you launch the game.
I have been having the issue with the system hanging up when steam is doing big writes. I had assumed it was due to something wrong with my drive and was contemplating reformatting it.
I have massive doubts about the "They also seems to also be able to download the compilation cache from Steam if someone already have done the process on the same GPU + driver version."
This would imply that if I already calculated the shaders for the current game state than i could reuse them and not have to go through the whole compilation step (if no changes happen inbetween).
Matter of fact, i have to recompile the shaders on every game start for every game, even if i restart the game just x times in a row.
For context: using linux/debian and basically running everything on vulcan
Shader precompilation is a standard thing to do now - consoles mostly ship precompiled shaders for their GPU + driver combo, Steam Deck will also download precompiled shader for its Linux + AMD + driver version combo.
The infrastructure for that Steam side is there and is in active use.
That depends on game actually passing exactly the same parameters to shader compiler and your GPU driver actually building and using the cache.
What fossilize does is it generates data of all the parameters passed to shader compilation, and then can trigger "offline" compilation before you run the game.
I don't think I ever found more documents on this feature. I assume it might need lots of users with matching result to ensure that bad actor can't upload malicious shader.
The linux kernel’s handling of IO under memory pressure is abysmal. I have to tune dirty ratios and write back ages and swap and whatnot just to get the system to not hard lock when running multiple node microservices in stages which run fine, just slower, when starting them all at once on a MacBook.
I've had similar problems but no amount of tweaking vm and vfs cache settings helped. Swap or not, both 32gb and 128gb of ram. Manually reclaiming memory would un-lock the system (/sys/fs/cgroup/memory.reclaim).
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?
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.
That pausing issue is plaguing me with several other titles. I think it tracks with background downloading of game updates, but haven’t had enough hours to entirely confirm it. What I did notice is that after installing Decky there are background jobs from some of the plugins that run native Linux updates (flatpak) and snapshotting.
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.
Are you using full disk encryption (LUKS) without enabling the Cloudflare contributed flags? Because that's the most common syndrome of high IO causing high CPU usage until lockup.
I get that on windows when there's no enough space on my disk to install a whole other copy of the game being patched.
So for BG3, if you don't have 150Gb free on your disk, steam will download it on a different disk and then transfer it over, thrashing you disk.
It's bizarre, incredibly annoying, behaviour and I wish it would just ask so I'd know that was about to happen and just clean up some space. Or refuse the upgrade.
But steam want to force upgrades on users before you can play anything, which for single player games is incredibly frustrating. I get why they do it, but it's another one of those things where you feel like you aren't in control of the thing you paid a lot of money for.
Can you no longer disable updates on a per game basis?
You could do that in the past and I did occasionally for single player games because my internet connection wasn't the best and I did not want to waste the little time I could allocate for gaming.
Bought the game when it came out, but still haven't had the time to play. Just flew out for a three week vacation with my Steam Deck in tow. Unfortunately, I left it on the plane and I haven't heard back from lost and found yet (seems unlikely I'll get it back considering it was an international flight). Oh well.
When I left my phone (out of battery) on a plane, I went to the flightradar and checked all airports the airplane was visiting after. Then contacted lost&found at each of them individually and eventually got my phone back. It was found only a fifth flight!
Big tip: get the LCD and a DeckHD. The mod takes a long time, but it's not technically difficult.
Yeah, I know most people will say the Deck is already too slow for 800p, so why would it pull 1080p well?
I have two decks, one's got Deck HD, the other doesn't. I render the Deck HD one at 540 native and upscale 2x with FSR. It looks way better than the stock display one and runs better as well. Similar with HZD and other highly demanding games.
That said, 99% of my time on the Deck is spent playing retro games. Does that need 1080p? No. Can it use it? Yes, very much so.
I never pick up the original deck anymore - the Deck HD modded one is just better.
The DeckHD website says it's sold out. Can I get the same display component without the installation kit from somewhere else? Is there a model or part identifier or something?
So, you’ve got a portable deck wired to augmented reality glasses. Just need a chordic keyboard and you’ll be a full-on Neuromancer/Snow Crash gargoyle :)
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.
I have a g-cloud and it's about 30% lighter than a steam deck and pretty ergonomic to hold.
Yes it can't play Cyberpunk but it'll handle native Android games, classic emulation, and any cloud streaming very well. You can also install moonlight on it and stream full fat desktop games too.
Yeah the SD has pretty bad ergonomics. It's too wide and too heavy. I still like it as a portable system. It's like a console I can pack in my bag and plug in to a TV wherever I'm staying.
I'd love to see a steamdeck lite, with a similar size and weight to the switch. But still with the rounded hand grips of the steamdeck. The deck as it is feels like a HN designed product with way too much stuff jammed in it with no regard to size and weight. The trackpads are cool for desktop mode but the space taken up for something so rarely used isn't worth it.
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
Glad I'm not the only one with that issue. I ended up connecting a Bluetooth controller to my Steam Deck because holding it hurt my wrists so much. At that point, why bother with the thing?
I do the same with my Switch 1— just set the thing up with its kickstand on the tray table and use a normal pad. No amount of slide-on grips or whatever else really make the joycons usable for more than a few minutes with adult hands.
I went the other way and got a portable monitor and a keyboard & mouse. Plug those into the SD and it's effectively a gaming desktop that fits in a backpack.
I got the switch 2 and day one and I've mostly been playing the deck since then. There isn't much on the switch (besides mario kart and donkey kong), and the stuff that is cross-platform doesn't run well (the new "it takes two" is really laggy).
Not really. The Switch 2 has many of the most popular games available on other platforms. Plus a lot of Nintendo exclusives. They are not the same for sure, and YMMV for specific titles.
I have both and I would agree with GP on that, the switch is really exclusively for Nintendo games. Cross platform games don't run really well, I just get them on the deck instead.
Wouldn't that depend heavily on the game and developer in question? The Switch 2 has more than sufficient hardware to compete, with a particularly beefy GPU for a handheld.
I'd be more ready to blame the game and developer in question than this console, unless there are a lot of examples from capable developers performing measurably worse.
On Switch, I had to expensively rebuy games at high prices, which then ran poorly and didn't support any kind of settings to try to fix the situation.
On the Deck I get all my desktop Steam library and I can change game settings until they run as I like (within reason).
I don't see how those two are comparable purchases - I either get a console which runs poorly and demands 40$ for games that are like 5$ on Steam... or a console that already supports my existing library AND on top of that allows me to stream games from main PC at full detail and framerate.
I have no clue, but I've had enough experiences to know better now. I just got Split Fiction, you'd think as a starting title that's made for couch coop it would run pretty well. No, it's horrible. We stopped playing it and we'll just buy it on a different platform.
If you like indie games, the selection is generally better on Steam. And everything that is available on both runs better on the steamdeck. The Switch only makes sense if you particularly want to play Nintendo games.
Sure, but no matter how big of a hurry you are in, you are going to be sitting on the plane waiting for the door to open and the people in front of you to leave. I always use that time to gather everything up, and a steamdeck is really quite big.. you can’t leave it in the seat back pocket or something.
I am not trying to victim blame or anything, I just can’t imagine a situation where I could forget something so big.
> Now that there is a Steam Deck Native build, is Baldur’s Gate 3 supported on Linux?
> Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.
"does not support" is not the same as "no", right? In theory it should be possible to run this build on other arm-based linux?
It will most likely run fine. Steamdeck has AMD x86 APU. I guess gpu might be a problem. They simply dont want to provide official support for the variety of linux.
I finished the game on Ubuntu when it came out, so it should work fine since ever. You can check out https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940 for more info.
The whole point of this post is that there’s a native version that doesn’t use Proton now, so checking ProtonDB isn’t going to tell anyone anything beyond the previous version being fine.
Yeah that would be nice. Some native Linux versions actually have worse performance than Proton when they're done poorly. I got ~60fps on the Linux version of Silksong, but 400fps running the Windows version through Proton.
That sounds like possibly a configuration issue rather than strictly performance (although I agree the symptom is worse performance). For instance, specifically the value "~60fps" vs something as high as 400fps sounds like running with vsync enabled vs. with it disabled.
It definitely is if you have an engine with a DX12 backend but no Vulkan backend. Nothing stops you from detecting Proton and then tweaking uses of the DX12 APIs that translate poorly to Vulkan, and there's no way adding a whole new rendering backend will be easier than writing the extra code paths in the DX12 one.
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.
yeah I played bg3 with controller split screen with my wife the entire playthrough. Normally, I would've strongly preferred KB+M for such a game. We definitely got used to it after several hours.
I'm not sure if I can recall any tips other than just keep at it and it'll eventually become muscle memory. I don't think it's as good as KB+M but it wasn't something that was bugging me once we got significantly into the game. YMMV.
tbh, I've thought of doing this, but it seems kind of outlandish given that I primarily play my Steam Deck in bed. I'd rather just take my laptop with me.
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.
Anyone knows what does "native" means here precisely? Steam Deck has a x86-64 instruction set AFAIK, so it's just same as a the Windows version? Or has it to do with the GPU / OS? Or does it just mean "properly configured"?
Baldur's gate 3 was one of the first (if not the first) big game to run natively on apple silicon. I am glad Larian takes this kind of stuff seriously instead of doing the bare minimum, in an industry that often even the bare minimum is not to be taken for granted.
> Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.
I though the steam deck would be the reason why developper start building their game for linux, but it seems like it's a bigger issue than just making a "linux file". Once they have rewritten the code for the steam deck, what would prevent them to compile the game for Debian and other linux distributions ?
I really have no idea how much more work it is but assumed it would be straight forward.
You can run the game on Linux just fine, Larian just won't help you if it breaks or bugs out. SteamOS is just a well-customised Arch fork, after all.
Announcing official Linux support would also require testing on Intel and Nvidia GPUs, as well as other types of AMD GPUs, which would probably take much more time and effort than testing for a device with effectively two hardware revisions you need to test for. I don't think they want the support burden, and I don't disagree with them having had to debug obscure Linux GPU issues myself.
I would assume the issue is all the variation in different distros. Plus the driver/hardware combinations. While some setups would just work they don’t see it as worth spending the time doing the validation/patching required. The steam deck is 1 device to test, with a single software stack. Much easier to target, and with a known customer base. Which brings up the other issue that they would be unlikely to make their money back on a general Linux release. Companies have cited this as a reason for not doing macOS releases in the past and based on the last steam survey Linux usage is in a similar ballpark (2.6% vs 1.8% for Mac ).
Despite all this I think it’s still a move in the right direction.
Valve released a runtime specifically to combat the variation problem. This allows developers to target a specific runtime and Valve will make the software stack work with as many distros as possible.
On the other hand, that stack can only contain so much, and a lot of Linux bugs involve sound subsystems, GPUs, and compositors/X11/window manager configuration issues. You can't quite target the Linux runtime and assume everything will just work, but at least you don't need to target specific versions of glibc and libxml2 anymore.
> Once they have rewritten the code for the steam deck, what would prevent them to compile the game for Debian and other linux distributions ?
You can install Steam on Debian.
I think the value here is that with Steam being the "approved launcher" you offload a lot of "distro weirdness" over to Valve. The value of a standalone build seems fairly low for most game devs.
They're just talking about official support (i.e. support tickets). It'll probably still run elsewhere, they're just not promising to help you with bugs on other hardware & configurations. Entirely reasonable IMO.
Wow, I bought Baldur's Gate 3 out of nostalgia before a very long (20hours + ) flight and played some good long hours on the plane.
Unfortunately the Proton version meant the game was unplayable on the Deck later in the game.
I'm so happy I can finish it now.
Coincidentally I also realised I can play it on my Mac too...
> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
I won't leave a bad review or whine on BG3, and my (otherwise very capable laptop) is just 6 years old with an Intel UHD 620 integrated GPU, and BG3 barely reaches the 10fps level on 1024x768 with lowest settings on everywhere. So it's not even 720p, and BG3 chokes a lot in this somewhat recent hardware.
I see BG3's graphics and while they are beautiful, they're nothing out of the ordinary in comparison to other games. That is, there are good games that could run very well in my laptop and which look good.
In sum, I see BG3 as being needlessly demanding, and pushes out a large sector of machines and potential buyers. I'd love to have an RTX-class GPU (and have the cash to afford it), but all I have it's a laptop whose GPU cannot be upgraded, and that is perfectly capable in all other areas.
Every time when I point out this limit in games, which I see as silly, I get flamed to death. People in the gaming communities are seemingly unable to understand why making extremely high minimum requirements is not a good sales strategy.
Games can look good with integrated GPUs. See the Wolfenstein games (id engine). Even more recent games like Generation Zero (Apex open world engine) can be run decently at lowest settings on my hardware. MGS5:PhantomPain also runs and looks very good. But no luck with BG3.
To be fair, there is world between "extremely high minimum requirements" and a 6 years old laptop, considering laptop of even the current year are never considered super high end rigs.
If you had s/minimum/recommended I would agree. But no, we are talking about minimum requirements. I submit that a game should be playable even on 10-year old hardware. Of course, the devs can blow the ceiling in their highest settings. Do they need three RTX-7000 series in parallell cooled with liquid nitrogen and eating 3000W of electricity in order to run at the highest/ultra settings? Yeah, be my guest, more power to them. But we are, I insist, talking about minimum requirements. These should be as broad as possible in order to keep the entry barrier low.
In a game which doesn't even look especially good, I see the very demanding hardware requirements as just a contribution to planned/artificial obsolescence.
(and yeah, I got downvoted as expected. This is getting old...)
You've got two trackpads, gyro, 4 extra buttons on the back to bind, and Steam Input lets you make custom radial (or non-radial) menus with entries that can press any keyboard key or key combo for you (which you can bind to the trackpads). It's honestly nothing like using an Xbox controller if that's what you're imagining.
Mario Kart is also a funny example as it's one of the few racing games that makes no use of analog triggers for acceleration, so you really wouldn't miss much playing it on a keyboard.
I just don't want to play anything with a kb and mouse anymore because it just feels like being at work when I'm sitting at a desk using the same setup I just spent all day on.
I love my steam deck over my desktop pc anymore. Once I had kids, I never got to have my desk in a place that’s safe from being climbed on, so I hooked it up to the tv. But then they started taking over the tv, and the only way I could game was on a handheld. I mostly play older stuff, so it’s plenty powerful for what I do most of the time. I still have the desktop and and Xbox to offset anything else.
I agree with you. Steamdeck is amazing but people are often over-enthusiastic about what a handheld device can do.
The most comfortable and consistent gaming experience is still a regular stationary PC. But if you really want to play Civ5 on a train then sure the Steamdeck is there for you. I just never felt the need to game something that bad.
I just don't want to sit at my desk after a whole day of work, and I've got an RTX5090 PC for some stupid reason. I'd much rather play games on the sofa on my steam deck sitting next to my wife or play in bed.
Honestly, I prefer the Steam Deck over M+KB for BG3. I beat the game twice on Steam Deck before I sold mine, in fact - entirely in airports during layovers while traveling for work.
I honestly went from being a hardcore PC only KB+M is king kind of guy to genuienly not playing games unless they can be played on a controller. After 8 hours of work at my desk I just want to slouch and play comfortably, and BG3s controller support is really well done.
> Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform.
This is a huge nitpick but I wish they'd just say "other Linux distros" instead of the "Linux platform". It's fine to pick and choose one (or a few) popular distro(s) to support, like SteamOS. It's not reasonable to expect support for all possible Linux software environments. It's already crazy that they support so many hardware combinations, even on just Windows.
Makes me think they might not have the most knowledgeable people on the job. Hopefully they didn't just throw some unwilling Windows devs into the unknown.
Can someone phonetically spell out “Baldur” for me?
I’ve seen the term across my life but I have never heard it spoken. I think how I imagine it and how it’s said are different - like I discovered from reading LOTR books and then watching the movies…
AFAIK it's just ball-der. I've seen it win awards at The Game Awards and such, plus heard it discussed IRL, everyone seems to say it that way. If that's not the correct pronunciation, it's at least the popular one.
And sometimes the Windows version runs better under Proton than the native Linux build due to the port being so poorly done which is kinda funny.
Occasionally I do still run things under Windows though like Cyberpunk 2077 as I got about 15 more frames under Windows which let me bump the graphics up a bit more.
Or Assassin's Creed Mirage which got me double the FPS somehow. Currently playing AssCree Shadows on Windows too as it just refuses to run at all via Proton. Other people seem to get it running fine so I dunno why I can't. Ah well.
As much as linux for PC gaming has made huge strides over the past few years, it seems really hard to avoid having a dual boot to keep windows available if you're serious about the whole breadth of available games. Or if you want to avoid pitfalls on those titles that run with a list of caveats, you can go exploring on protondb and some games need a collection of commmandline tweaks to get going well. It'd be nice to have a better experience for enabling those or opt-in to commonly used configs on particular games
Maybe I'm cheating by using a 1080P monitor, but I have only ever installed Windows once and that was for Starfield since it didnt work with Proton OOTB, once they fixed it, I purged and havent gone back. In the future I wont be doing that. I love Bethesda games, so in the future I'll just wait it out. I did make sure to play the heck out of it while I was on Windows though.
In hindsight, I really didn't need Windows, but I was impatient.
Yeah, I noticed this myself ~4 years ago when I was playing Overwatch on a relatively low-spec PC. Gave me 10-20% GPU headroom and ~2gb of extra RAM I never had on Windows.
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.
Was a joke. The bug I linked was regarding how trivially easy it was to romance the companions. Such that it spawned its own speed running category (Sex %). New versions of the game have since fixed the bug so the companions will try to keep it in their pants.
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.
Yeah it really was a revelation. I didn’t know much at all going in and was constantly amazed.
I’ve since tried a number of highly touted recent CRPGs and RPGs… and gave up on all of them; BG3 really spoiled me I guess, but I’m also a pretty selective gamer.
If you have the tolerance for dated visuals a lot of the best stuff is in the long since past - Planescape Torment and Baldur's Gate 2 are amazing. The Neverwinter Nights series is also great. Fallout 2 is probably one of the best games ever in terms of atmosphere as well as gameplay, but the visuals there are extremely dated. And finally there's also Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.
Holding Fallout 1/2 as the best gaming experiences of my life for a long time, just recently discovered Fallout Nevada and Sonora that some kind talent also ported to WASM/Web — and it finally hit the spot for me after ~25 years.
To be noted: the main appeal of Neverwinter Nights 1 is the player created content. In particular the main campaign of NWN1 is pretty "meh" and is better thought as a showcase of what's possible with the scenario toolkit (the expansion - what we call now DLC - are better in that regard though). The creativity deployed by some creator is quite astonishing; shootout to the Bastard of Kosigan (James Bond-esque adventures in a kinda alternate historical France), and HeX Coda (magipunk setting where you fight as a champion of open-source magick against corporate wizards).
But as somenameforme noted, you have to content with early 2000 production value .
I've played it three times now, start to finish, and I still enjoy Divinity 2 a lot more. Story wise BG3 I think has a slight edge, but combat wise Divinity is just a much better game(imho). Partially this isn't BG3's fault but it's the consequence of relying on D&Ds rules for its combat, but then.....it was their choice to go that way. BG3 but with Divinity's combat system would be my #1 game of all time.
After all that effort, I'd be legit pissed at the website maintainer for screwing up the image scaling in the blog post, making this release look like some bootleg readme ...
The images themselves are fine, just the post's formatting squishes them.
Let's keep in mind that this API translation is more performent then the original API though (as you can see from the ROG ally windows vs steamOS)
outstanding work by larien however, I just felt strange reading your comment which somehow implied that the translation is the reason for bad performance, when it is actually more performent then the original
The trick to playing BG3 is to play it on your deck by streaming, you can play so many games via streaming via usb-c to ethernet, always wire your house and every room with ethernet PEOPLE.
can someone explain why this is a big deal to me compared to any game being released on multiple platforms? Surely making games for the switch/ps5/etc is hard too?
it's not even aarch64. but what they're saying is they don't want to deal with the support nightmare of supporting anything but the unmodifiable SteamOS image.
Every distro is a bit different though. And there's kernel / libc versions and the whole gui server on top of that. Windows gives you a few configurations to check, Mac does as well. But Linux means hundreds of possible setups before you even get to hardware differences. They just don't want to deal with that.
Not to nitpick, there is a 'native' option. Atleast it has been available on Arch for many years now (when SteamOS was on Debian?). In most cases we just the symlink the newer versions of libs to the older versions and the games run fine / better.
I don't want to be one of those unbearable apologists in forum threads... but BG3's legitimately my favourite game, and IMO Larian have been excellent stewards, so I'll go up to bat for them here; have you played the newer patches?
For the first few months, act 3 (in the city) was legitimately hard to play. Performance, stability, visual glitches, all pervasive. But later patches did do a better job of improving those points.
Act 3's still the most intensive part of the game by far so on many setups it's still wise to at least crank down the crowd density, but it's come a long way since the launch version of the game.
I had no idea this was a thing. Does it work from a Linux host? If the Deck is just acting as a streaming receiver, can it handle a 4k output? Or is the hardware limited such that it can only handle ~resolution of the deck?
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.
Could you share your configuration? (Mostly interested in Network) I still see some noticeable latency if I stream from my PC through wifi to steam deck which is connected to a TV. At one point I just dropped the idea as I wanted to actually play the game instead of tinkering for too long.
I play on the Steam Deck directly rather than on a TV, which might be part of it. In the past, I've had noticeable input lag with some 4K TVs even when playing a Switch directly docked into it, so it might be worth ruling the TV itself out as a potential source of error (e.g. by seeing if the same input is noticeable from the PC to the Steam Deck directly, or if you use something hooked up to the TV directly).
In terms of the wifi itself, I have two mesh routers in the house, one directly connected to the modem in the living room, and the other upstairs in my office, with the desktop plugged into it via ethernet. I'm lucky enough to be in an area with gigabit fiber, which made it seem worthwhile to invest in a good mesh setup, and I honestly might ended up with fairly low local latency mostly by accident from that. I've read some things that indicate that WiFi 7 might be a significant part of why this works well for me, but having never tried streaming games before having this setup, I don't have anything to compare it to.
On the software side of things, I mostly use the defaults that the AUR `sunshine` package comes preinstalled with for the server (although I'm not sure how much of that is tweaked from upstream). I don't have any ports exposed to the wider internet, and I have LAN encryption disabled, which likely reduces the overhead a bit. I'm not sure if it matters, but for the sake of completeness, but my GPU is a Radeon RX 6900 XT, and I'm running the standard Arch repo versions of of mesa, Plasma 6, and the `linux-zen` kernel (with Plasma configured to use Wayland rather than X11). On the client side, the Steam Deck is using Moonlight from the flatpak listed in the "Discover" app in desktop mode, with the resolution set to 1440p (since that what my monitor has, and I've found a lot of games lower the quality of the graphics if I lower the resolution to match my Steam Deck's native 800p) and the refresh rate set to 90 FPS, which the app then displays as converting to a bitrate of 49 Mbps. I have it set to fullscreen (since I don't really have any need to use the steam deck for other things when gaming, and it still does allow me to easily get back in to the local settings without much issue even with that set) and Vsync off, the boxes checked off for "Optimize game settings for streaming", "Capture system keyboard shortcuts", "Enable mouse control with gamepads...", "Enable HDR", and "Unlock bitrate limit" (the last of which presumably overrides the auto-computed bitrate mentioned above), as well as turning pretty much every audio setting I can off or at least to the lowest possible value since I'm pretty much always either watching TV or listening to music nowadays when playing. I left the video decoder and codecs as "automatic".
The only two things that ever seem to go wrong is that the Steam Deck sometimes seems to decide to render the on-screen keyboard below the streamed desktop rather than above it, and occasionally (maybe once every 10-12 hours of playing over several days?) the connection will start to degrade over the course of a minute or so and become unable to sustain the necessary bandwidth. The keyboard issue seems like it might be a bug in Moonlight, since I'm able to fix it by disconnecting and restarting the client itself, and the connection issue seems like it's either an issue with Sunshine or my network itself, since I can always fix it by simply disconnecting (without needing to restart Moonlight itself). The experience overall has been so good that I've almost completely stopped playing anything locally on the Deck itself (with the only exception being occasional emulation of Gameboy Color/Gameboy Advance games, which obvious don't require much in terms of hardware). I'm able to play games with much higher graphical settings than I could locally on the Deck, and the battery life is significantly improved (maybe around 6-8 hours of dedicated playing). It's such a smooth experience that I've been seriously considering upgrading to the Legion Go literally just to have a higher-res screen for this setup without having to change much (since SteamOS is supported for it nowadays; I don't have much interest in the Legion Go 2 with Windows, and the more powerful/efficient hardware wouldn't do much for me with my current setup).
[1]: I didn't have a ton of experience with mesh wifi honestly, but after some basic research I ended up buying of two of this mode (which seems to have a version of 6.1.0 from checking just now)l, and they seems to work reasonably well: TP-Link Deco BE25 Dual-Band BE5000 WiFi 7 Mesh Wi-Fi Router https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DKVKLJX3
It’s possible that some of the engine improvements could be easily back-ported to BG3. Or even just compiler improvements could be a little more oomph.
Edit:
> Our Proton version runs on the Steam Deck via the Proton compatibility layer, which requires extra CPU processing power. Running the game natively on the Steam Deck requires less CPU usage and memory consumption overall!
Workaround for a performance regression helps some but I suspect more has gone on.
From what they've said, they were actually hired to work on Baldur's Gate 4 and got partway through development but chose to stop because they didn't love having to stick with the D&D ruleset and preferred doing their own thing: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/baldurs-gate/larian-nearly-mad...
It's a shame, BG3 is one of my all time favourite games. But I really have to respect a company that can make a decision like this, leaving a super successful title behind as they feel it's not a good fit for the team.
They tightened the purse strings regardless of bg3.
WOTC were completely dysfunctional over the last few years and it nearly destroyed d&d.
- They tried to build their own bg3, except it was a VTT that they could fill with microtransactions, but they didn't know what VTTs needed to actually be used. They just thought: "Build something that we can nickle and dime all the users of"
- The new "backwards-compatible" edition that de jure isn't a new edition, but with the power creep is a de facto new edition.
- The OGL fiasco that shattered the community content creators who decided to attempt to make their own games "with blackjack and hookers". (e.g. daggerheart, dc20, draw steel, tales of the valiant, dragonbane, shadowdark, ) and bring their communities along to try the new games (including older offshoots like pathfinder 1e/2e, lancer, 13th age, etc...)
Imagine how much money they've had to pay their major community members (critical role, dimension 20, etc...) just to keep them playing the d&d branded games.
I would really love them to do a Fallout game. The original two games had a lot of properties to them that 3 and subsequent games just ignored or straight up went against, including NV. To me, as a fan who grew up with the first two, it's like a different game series.
They are currently building their capacity to do multiple games in parallel.
I suspect not wanting to do BG4 is at the end of the day a negotiation tactic. There’s an amount of money and consideration that will make them put it back in the queue. But it’s likely at least five years out before they start on such a thing.
They’ll want to avoid the Torchlight trap, where the team got sick of doing Diablo clones and the company kind of cratered afterward.
The path to BG3 existing involved people at WotC playing D:OS 2 and then convincing their bosses that they should partner with Larian. Everyone involved in that on the WotC/Hasbro side subsequently left the company while BG3 was in production, and their replacements are much less favored towards Larian.
BG4 will almost certainly happen, but by some other studio.
I suspect all the awards and giant piles of money may change that opinion back.
You can classify a vendor as a pain in your ass but if they get results, it’s time to look in the mirror and think about why you kept telling them to go right when they went left, and everybody loves the results.
Though it’s also true that a lot of key people have now left WotC and we are slowly working toward a situation where a Darrington Press game is more likely than a WotC game.
Yea, I could also blame steam's SD verification system, which just rates compatibility without giving much thought to performance. Cause I'm aware BG3 "works" on SD but walk into an area crowded with NPCs and it becomes an impressionist painting at 10fps
ProtonDB is better for gauging the performance penalty, giving different "medals" in accordance with how good/easily it runs on Linux: https://www.protondb.com/
My guess is that it’s not so much an effort to improve performance (there are other, easier ways to do that and it runs ok as it is) but to experiment with supporting SteamOS as platform in future.
I played it on Steam Deck when it first came out (docked, standard HD display). It was perfectly acceptable, as long as you're fine with semi-stable 30 FPS and cranking down the graphics a tad. The only real problem that I encountered was that the game wouldn't recognize or remember my input settings, and would always default to controller-only, so I would have to attach a controller to navigate to the menu to switch it to keyboard; hopefully the Deck-native version fixes that.
One big upside of single player games is that they have an ending. After playing MUDs back in the day, this was a decision I've kept -- no games without an end.
To be fair, I've still spent a crazy amount of time with the Civilization games so let's say that was a partial success.
You can make it run much better by increasing the game's process priority with `renice`. I know that sounds like something that should not work, but it does.
When was the last time you played? They've been making continuous performance improvements and act 3 hasn't chugged on my PC for a long time. Even steam deck seems to get a steady 30fps.
fwiw, my wife played through it on SD while i played through on my PC. it's a completely different experience, but it's very do-able. she also went on to replay it 4 more times after that, which is 5 more times than i finished the game.
Steam achievements say that 90% of players have beaten the tutorial and 40% have beaten act 2, so while it's not the "vast" majority, it is true that the majority of players never made it to act 3.
I hope to see more games go steamdeck native in the future. While the proton layer is great it would be a nice way to start choking windows out of the games industry. I hate that I have a PC that really does nothing by play games.
This is not a huge issue though. The game runs perfect on Proton on Linux, the problem is really just on the Steam Deck it had poor performance. But on the average desktop it runs flawless.
I'm just happy the Steam Deck seems to be pushing devs to make sure their games run on low power hardware. Really any game should be able to run fine on the Steamdeck, there's no gameplay that isn't possible to run on the hardware. It's just the lack of engineering time spent on making sure the graphics have a proper low option.
The existence of "steamdeck" as a graphics preset in a bunch of games is really a boon for anyone using a gaming handheld, especially as hardware improves. Provides a bar for manufacturers to clear too.
I think from Valve's end you can't really do one without the other, so at the very least I am sure it will run just fine elsewhere. This sort of mentality will probably slowly fade if more SteamOS devices hit the market successfully.
This is extremely common. There's a vanishingly small number of games that officially support the Steam Deck that do NOT unofficially run on any given Linux box. That small number seems to be exclusively gacha games. A number of those can be made to run by setting `SteamDeck=1 %command%` as the launch command.
Anyways, BG3 runs perfectly fine, natively, on my Ubuntu 25.04 RTX 4090 rig.
Gaming on Linux is hard because there's not one Linux, there's tons of Linuses. What version of the glibc/libstdc++/mesa/xorg/wayland/kernel/drivers are you running?
The Linux ecosystem is fragmented in such a way that only open-source and an army of volunteers can really work around. It is really not binary-friendly at a fundamental, philosophical level.
(You're not going to get game companies to open-source their games, except as an exception, and after their economic life is finished)
The Steam Deck provides one well-known hardware and software platform that a vendor can reasonably target. Don't expect much more except by the most dedicated developer.
Valve provides a common runtime/build environment for Linux devs in the form of the Steam Linux Runtime. There is version 1 (Scout), which uses an LD_PRELOAD system. There is version 2 (Soldier), which uses cgroups (podman) and is deprecated. Then, there is version 3 (Sniper), which is the current target.
As of right now, proton and proton-ge both build in and require Steam Runtime Version 3 to run in. The steam client itself is running in a runtime, and I think it is the scout runtime, so LD_PRELOAD based. This means that steam has its own common platform to "deploy" against, and all Linux native games have a common platform to deploy against.
It used to be that games had to be compiled in a chroot for Steam runtime 1.0, but now with Steam runtime 3.0, developers are heavily recommended to build their game in a "OCI-based container framework"—so podman basically—and enable the Steam Runtime 3.0 on steam. I know that TF2 and Dota 2 use steam runtime 3.0, and apparently so does Retroarch. Of course, since there is a podman/docker image, you can also test existing games to see if they run in the runtime too.
Valve has a gitlab with lots of great docs for developers who want to publish a linux native game.
I think all native linux games will run in the Scout 1.0 runtime by default
Edit: I will say that as an end-user, running an up-to-date Linux kernel and Mesa stack is important for gaming. I know some people who run Mint and are surprised that their Radeon RX 9060 runs like ass. As long as you aren't using a Debian based LTS distro, like mint or ubuntu lts, or you are running those distro but get a newer kernel, you should be fine. This matters less for older hardware, but having a newer kernel and especially a newer mesa version is important.
The fact we need containers to ship games is still a complete joke. Windows has been shipping binary games for decades but to do a best-effort portable Linux build you've got to spin up containers with bespoke build environments and tie the build to one specific platform's container image.
The alternative is using (what is effectively) a cross compiling toolchain to target Linux from itself! Or spin up an ancient Debian image (including ancient compiler) to build against ancient glibc.
It's hard to blame anyone for just using Proton, with the perma-stable Win32 API. No build containers, no chroot, no locking the build to Steam. Just the same build infra you already have.
Windows might not have build containers, but it has an enormous compatibility layer. API calls may work differently based on the executable running. Windows goes as far as changing the freaking memory allocator to not deallocate pages for buggy games. Raymond Chen's blog is a good source for some of these compat workarounds.
One could argue that Proton is a kind of a container. It has a runtime system, filesystem, wine itself has several executables and interprocess communication, etc.
I think valve uses user namespaces if available nowadays. This also checks that devs arent accidentally relying on libs outside of the runtime. (Aside from mesa and libc of course)
That's a pretty uncharitable take, given that they already had it working via Proton for years. Sure, there's always more a company could do short of literally providing unlimited support and open sourcing everything, but they could have very easily stopped without taking the time to make a Linux native build at all. Most game developers don't even put in this amount of effort, and they did it over two years after the game originally came out without making any additional money beyond the initial purchase from DLC or subscriptions. Linux ecosystems aren't the only place where treating everything as a binary is problematic.
> given that they already had it working via Proton for years
That's irrelevant, because Proton is literally a Windows emulation layer, (the product of decades of cumulative work). "they" (Larian) didn't have to do anything for that.
Certainly Larian's effort for making a Steam Deck native version is commendable (I hear it was the result of one single employee's effort). Larian is a rare beacon in the video games industry biz for the amount of post-launch support and content they provide.
But my point remains: supporting Linux broadly is a far larger, and ultimately unreasonable, ask, than just supporting the Steam Deck.
It works, I played the entire back half of the game on Linux. A lot of games fall into this bracket with proton of "devs not willing to commit to Linux support, but does actually work".
And honestly I'm fine with that. Given the permutations involved I think it's reasonable for Larian to not commit to supporting them all. And as you said, it will probably work fine.
Proton titles on steam are illegal in tons of countries: there is no official support and real money is involved. Some say there is some special refunding policy with proton titles: well I have not seen any "legally binding" document about a game patch or a proton patch killing your game for good on elf/linux, and that anytime during the life cycle of the game. Only whining when that happens, no official support to turn to.
Basically PROTON = ZERO BUCKS is the only sane way. I am playing proton titles: gacha games which are kind of free-to-play friendly, well... those without 'anti-non-steamdeck-elf/linux' software like ACE(cf WuWa). They have the windows whales to finance them already, and we are only penguins which dislike to be scammed.
But now elf/linux people will be able to buy this game with the legally required official support.
This game is really not my thing, but I'll go back to banging my head against the wall and throwing my keyboard thru the window, aka I am going back to play silk song natively on elf/linux available since day one of its release (well, this is a unity game, then ez).
That sub is mostly pictures of "jUsT bOuGhT a StEaM DeCk", sob bait, random steam sales, and rarely ever anything useful related to the Deck itself.
Every now and then I go to check top posts from the past month to see if anyone has posted anything significant, like the DeckMate or EmuDeck or actual useful stuff. Inevitably, it's all standard reddit garbage.
That type of community may not be your cup of tea or what you are looking for but that doesn't mean GP shouldn't be proud of building it.
The world is plenty big enough for all types of communities. Its okay for people to be proud of the things they lead, even if they aren't things that are interesting to you or me.
I don't have a problem with communities existing that I don't care for, but it's furstrating when those low effort communities squat on the most relevant search terms/domains/subreddits/etc
This is random, but I wonder if it would be possible to render BG3 with isometric camera, and then, on the fly, convert most of 3d objects into sprites.
Whatever they are doing to make the image fit 100% is not retaining aspect ratio on mobile Safari. The cookies banner was initially full width and the content was in a small column to the left and I had to zoom to get to it. I’ve never viewed a Steam Deck web layout outside of its element before.
Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
For some unfathomable reason, they disabled local multiplayer on the steam deck version of the game. You need to supply a command-line argument to re-enable it. I honestly don't know why they did this.
This is a gigantic effort from Larian, who among all things is still updating its software instead of resting on its own laurels.
But the Deck is limited in hardware. It makes sense that it has some difficulties running gigantic games and is more aimed towards simpler games.
In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
> This is a gigantic effort from Larian, who among all things is still updating its software instead of resting on its own laurels.
What makes this story even better is how it actually came about - this wasn't initially a top-down corporate initiative, but rather a passion project from a single engineer who worked on it after hours. The fact that Larian immediately recognized the value and threw their full support behind it says everything about their culture.
Swen Vincke shared the backstory:
> The story of how this came to be really is one of true passion. The Steam Deck native build was initiated by a single engineer who really wanted a smoother version of the game on Steam Deck and so he started working on it after hours. When we tried it out, we were all surprised by how good it felt and so it didn't take much to convince us to put our shoulders behind it and get it released. It's this type of pure passion for their craft that makes me fall in love with my developers over and over again. Considering myself very lucky to have people like him on my team. Try it out!
https://x.com/LarAtLarian/status/1970526548592623969
That combination of individual passion and company willingness to back good ideas is what makes Larian special.
Do they name the engineer somewhere in the public messages? Super glad the company recognized the value and supported the release!
They probably would have to get the permission of the engineer to name them publicly. With how the gaming community behaves on social media I wouldn't be surprised if the engineer doesn't want that. Because that could mean death threats for you and your family the next time a subset of the community gets upset with your employer.
Not sure why this is getting downvoted, you are absolutely correct. The unhinged weirdos are still a minority, but less and less ashamed of their own behavior online. No doubt that dev is better off remaining unnamed in this instance.
They may be a minority but they are more empowered than ever. Both by the new owner of Twitter and the current politics in the US.
It’s a shame that large companies like EA/Bethesda/Valve/etc don’t do more to fight against it, instead of cowering and leaving indie devs that are barely surviving to fend this off.
Reminder that all of mid/late 2010s online politics was colored by one reviewer giving a favourable game review to a game that some people disliked.
> all of mid/late 2010s online politics was colored by one reviewer giving a favourable game review to a game that some people disliked
That's kind of a twisted interpretation of events. It was coloured by one incel who though he owned the developer of a game and a whole lot of incels who sympathized because they too were owed a vagina by the ones who controlled them. Now it's spread to broader issues and higher levels of politics and is still going.
I remember the start of GamerGate well, it was all people screaming about "ethics in games journalism". But you're obviously right that that it wasn't really about ethics in games journalism, your description is probably a better reflection of the actual psychology of the people involved.
And then there are people, gamers, who were actually just dismayed with the conflicts of interest that ran rampant in the orthodox "games journalism" space and didn't give two shits about the personal drama side of the story, although that's mostly solved by finding your favorite youtube reviewer. And those who were genuinely focused on improving discovery of good indie games were subjected to some pretty horrible commentary that completely missed the point. Now there are smaller dedicated publications or channels that actually do regularly (weekly/monthly) review a decent volume of new promising indie games to help discover standouts, but that turned out to be a niche that the existing publications didn't want to keep up with, and a niche that suddenly many people denied even existed, for some reason? People who can't contemplate that there are amazing passion projects out there to be discovered, I suppose because those people can't imagine actually working hard on something people would enjoy, because they would rather spend their time raining on others' parades instead.
But it was too close of a tangent towards criticism of establishment journalism in general, so of course establishment journalism countered back with the only weapon it has, and suddenly the vast majority of people forgot any of it had to do with reviewing and promoting good indie video games.
People who make indie games are not losers. People who want good games to be promoted are not losers. It is an art. It's not for everyone. People who just want to play the latest AAA sequel can stick to those. But if you've ever tried a niche indie game and been more impressed than you expected, you know it's art, and you'd want other people discovering and promoting the good ones, and talking about what makes them special.
I am not going to re-litigate GamerGate here. There were people who were genuinely concerned about ethics in games journalism, sure. But it did not become the defining event in the online-political sphere of the mid/late '10s simply due to genuine concerns about ethics in games journalism.
Correct, because a large portion of the public has no idea what indie games are, or how the software industry works, but they know that angry nerds are funny.
That's not how it went down. Sorry. It wasn't "the big bad left laughing at some video game nerds whose feelings were hurt".
What I remember is that there were a subset of people I was acquainted with online who when this started all /immediately/ started posting things exactly like the comment this is a reply to; "these people just don't respect women, you all need to sit down and listen to women and center women" kinds of things. They were all men; mostly straight men although some were bi, and all generally thought to be fine although known for being a little performative and mildly, as they say, horny on main a little too often.
Every single one of them later turned out to be a sexual predator. This is now known as the "softboi" or "male feminist". This kind of person is still out there and is dangerous as ever, so it's important to keep an eye out.
(None of these people were in tech; instead all my tech coworkers who were men and lived in SF also heard "we need to respect women", but being kind of autistic engineers took it too literally and didn't seem to know any women, so they seemed to think the right thing to do was go out and find a woman and literally just start respecting them. This didn't work out for them and they mostly ended up getting scammed by scammers who happened to be women.)
Or even "it has a trivial bug/doesn't run as well as i think it should/insulted my home decor, you die now"
Not that I'm aware of. I thought that was weird at first as well, but I assume it might be in a way to protect the engineer.
Unfortunately, singling out any individual developer, even for praise, can attract unwanted negative attention online. By acknowledging the passion and the work without naming the person, Swen gives them full credit internally while shielding them from becoming a public target.
This doesn't even necessarily have to be intentional harassment, but if this engineer is now the "SteamDeck guy" at Larian, their social media might get flooded by people who mistake their personal social media accounts for a support ticket.
I'm sure the engineer has the option to self-identify if they wish, but this approach feels like a sign of good and thoughtful leadership.
This is an interesting perspective... I'd be at a loss to think of an example of an engineer who's been publicly pilloried (having been highly regarded for great work) for the failings of their company. Perhaps you could cite and example?
Seems enormously more likely to be the all to familiar story in the games industry of not providing credit to individual devs. Something that goes back to the earliest days of Atari.
> I'd be at a loss to think of an example of an engineer who's been publicly pilloried (having been highly regarded for great work) for the failings of their company. Perhaps you could cite and example?
Because these guys and gals are not famous enough to warrant large coverage, and because the phenomenon is unfortunately so widespread that noone is going to cover every case.
https://endofaspecies.com/oped/the-harassment-of-game-develo...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2621gzvkdo
https://old.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/zoe13c/passionate_...
https://www.gameshub.com/news/news/video-games-developers-gd...
https://www.xfire.com/authorities-investigating-death-threat...
https://f1000research.com/articles/11-1518
Thanks, really appreciate the concrete examples. They're not quite what I was referring to (developer praised by company / media - then attacked for issues with the company beyond their purview), but they do point to a (largely invisible from outside the industry / twitter bubble) truly worrying and frightening level of animosity and aggression pointed towards devs that I wasn't sufficiently aware of.
> They're not quite what I was referring to
I don't think you need a case quite this specific because of the following:
> then attacked for issues with the company beyond their purview
Ultimately, whether an employee is praised or not is completely irrelevant to the nutjobs taking their anger out on them because of something their employer did.
I'm not necessarily saying they'd get pilloried. I'm saying that having your personal digital space colonized by people who think you're customer support is insanely disruptive. Think replies full of "I only get 8 fps in Act 3, pls fix" when you just wanted to post a photo of your vacation.
I can't think of specific names anymore since it's been a while since I have played it, but a lot of the developers for World of Warcraft used to be and likely still are active on Twitter. For a lot of them, the community knew fairly well which features of the game or which class they were responsible for. When I used to look at the replies to some of their Tweets (even ones completely unrelated to WoW), they were often full of complaints about their area of perceived responsibility.
I fully understand every engineer who just wants to put their head down and work on their stuff they're passionate about without having to also be public-facing. Even in a small company like mine, some of our devs constantly complain that some customers know that they are responsible for certain features of our product and email them directly rather than going through the proper support channels.
Your point about the games industry often struggling with providing proper credit to devs is well taken - it's absolutely an issue. But in this case, Vincke did actually do that, in a way. He could've just kept quiet and let the playerbase think it was a company effort, but instead he publicly highlighted and recognized the passion and work of one of their engineers (even though anonymously). That engineer can look at the countless positive replies to that post and get the nice fuzzy feeling without getting dragged into the spotlight.
I take your point about being inadvertently made a point of contact for customer support / complaints about technical issues with the game.
Disagree however about the value credit - personal credit has concrete value (career wise, status wise etc), warm and fuzzy feelings less so. Right now we can only guess whether the dev had a say in the matter.
You're absolutely right that named credit has tangible career benefits that go well beyond feelings. But I think Vincke threaded that needle well with the anonymous public credit - it creates a documented public record of innovative work at the company level while preserving the engineer's privacy.
The engineer can still leverage this (LinkedIn, internal promotions, industry networking) without being forced into a public-facing role they might not want. When they're interviewing or networking, they can point to Vincke's public acknowledgment and say "that was my project" in contexts where it's professionally relevant, without having their personal social media permanently associated with it.
Considering Vincke was impressed enough to publicly acknowledge this individual's passion and initiative, there's no doubt in my mind that this engineer could get named credit or something that would acknowledge their role in the project if they wanted it.
But to go a bit meta: I think it's strange that we are discussing this in the context of a CEO publicly acknowledging one of their engineers (even if anonymously). Vincke is, at least in the context of the broader industry, going above and beyond. I doubt you'd see Ubisoft, EA, or Blizzard publicly acknowledging a single engineer's after-hours passion project in this way.
Feels a bit like misdirected energy, I guess? Why are we debating about the nuances of named vs anonymous credit and recognition when industry leaders don't give any?
It's like calling someone out for only tipping 10% while ignoring the guy in the top hat who's tipping 0. If you want gaming companies to get better about giving credit and recognition, you should support the companies that are at least moving in the right direction. I know it's easy to be cynical, but don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
It would make them at least Internet famous, and most people do not know how or are not ready to handle being famous.
The Steam deck is really not that limited. Every game could be made to run well on it if some time was spent actually making the low settings work well. Something often skipped on modern games which optimise only for people with a $1000 GPU chugging 400w.
It's not like we have seen anything in gaming that wouldn't be possible on PS3/Xbox360 era hardware, certainly not in terms of complexity.
Just remember that stuff like red dead redemption ran on those things with all of 512 MB of unified memory. It ran and looked better than borderlands 4 does on current consoles.
I think you're looking back with rose-tinted glasses.
The 360/PS3 was a huge jump forward but very limited by today’s standards. RDR was one of the better looking games of the generation but could not maintain a steady 30fps at 1080p/i (and I’m not sure it was even true 1080).
The PC version came later, had higher resolution textures and other graphical improvements so it compares more favourably to modern games when you play it today. It still had problems running on all but the highest-end PCs of the time.
Of course even low-end PCs can run it without breaking a sweat, because they’ve become much more powerful.
Most Xbox360 and PS3 games were 720p at 30fps. 720p was mostly fine because 1080p TVs were luxury items back then.
The performance problems in modern games are often not caused by fillrate-vs-resolution bottlenecks though, but by poor engine architecture decisions (triggering shader recompilations in the hot path).
Shader recompilation causes stuttering not general performance problems. Shader complexity will though, which is a function of render quality.
But I’m confused about why you think fill rate isn’t an issue? If you are now upgrading from 1080p to 4K your GPU needs at the very least 4x the pixel pushing power and even then that’s only to maintain the same detail; you bought a 4K screen for more detail.
> If you are now upgrading from 1080p to 4K
Presumably people do this because they hate money; as you say, it's much harder to make the pixels just slightly more crisp and you'll pay dearly for the privilege.
I think people do it because they want the best quality but they underestimate how much compute power is needed to drive it properly.
I might be misremembering, but I seem to remember most games of that era were 540p scaled to 1080p. 720p would have been an upgrade. But your point still stands.
Remarkably RDR1 was only released for PCs late last year, ~14 years after the original release.
Maybe that is even related to it's good performance on consoles back then: Rockstar invested a lot of development time and sacrificed portability for performance. Basically the opposite of what modern games achieve with unreal 5.
Deck can run witcher 3 and mh:world decently (maybe some hiccup and lower graphic setting). There should be not a big problem to make games run on steam deck (ignoring controller support since it's a separate matter).
Yeah, sure...I'd like to see something like MSFS2024 or BeamNG.drive running on a PS3.
Cyberpunk 2077 proved that one wrong very easily :D
I tried CP2077's Deck mode but it really seemed like a tech demo level of "you could do this if you really wanted to" more than it actually being playable.
The game felt like it had significant input lag, and at 720p with upscaling text becomes very hard to read. The game's visual style of "glitch" effects also translates badly with upscaling and I really had a tough time actually understanding what I'm looking at on the screen.
Perhaps the situation is better on OLED.
Played and beat on an OLED deck, twice. Extremely playable. 30fps or higher almost all the time, handheld and docked work great.
It's the #10 top most played game on Steam Deck.
https://store.steampowered.com/charts/steamdecktopplayed
I thought it was playable on the LCD Deck. I did turn things down below what the Steam Deck preset was at. It certainly wasn't the smoothest 100% of the time but it was better than Fallout New Vegas on a PS3 IMO. It still holds up pretty well against the Switch 2 version in handheld mode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SvGQik3m6ag
Yeah, and famously CP2077 isn't really playable on PS4 and Xbox One era hardware. Even HDD equipped machines need to downgrade the streaming.
The game on new machines is quite impressive, quite unlike anything else made.
Portal RTX might not be possible on that hardware without some severe compromises. But then again, RTX is pretty much Brute Force: The Renderer
Portal RTX isn’t a new game, its Portal on supermax settings, so the original point on making sure low settings work still stands.
That's true for GPU bound games but with CPU bound games like BG3 in Act 3 there's no easy toggle on the user side, and often no easy toggle on the dev side either, because the nature of the game necessitates CPU intensive work.
The problem is how horribly unoptimised Unreal Engine 5 itself is - with that sort of foundation there's not a lot you can do. It's a GTX-1050 equivalent GPU, there's only so much that can be expected of it.
UE is easier to ruin a project with but it's not inherently cursed.
The real reason many of these games run like shit is over reliance on real time lighting systems. RT lights are easy. It's easy to throw a bunch of artists into a box and hope for the best. A complete idiot can make a scene mostly look good without much thinking. Baked lights require a lot of anticipation and planning. It impacts iteration time, etc. The tradeoff being that this is orders of magnitude more performant than RT lights. Imagine watching Toy Story after the offline render vs attempting to do it live. This is literally the same scaling problem.
https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/unreal-engine/...
UE has always been a damn huge toolbox. Yes, sure, you can just cobble together all sort of libraries and get a visually very appealing game or, if you want, photorealistic rendering decent enough to back these giant virtual studios for triple-A blockbuster movies, but you will need the hardware to match if you want performance.
If you want performance on everyday hardware, there is no way (and I'd say this holds true for any engine, not just UE5!) that you dig down into the engine an the libraries and invest the money in testing to tune the performance appropriately.
To make the point, if you turn the next-gen Nanite and Lumen features off, UE5 will typically be faster (more optimised!) than UE4.
And don’t get me wrong, those features are great, but they’re not intended for low-end hardware or where fps is a priority.
When EVERY game stutters and has the same kind of issues, then you can't put a blame on individual developers.
This isn't a case of "these developers are lazy", UE5 issues are the case of "every single UE5 released game has shader stutter issues on PC". That's an issue with engine architecture and its APIs, not an individual thing.
It's not that I think that UE5 is good for low end hardware, it's not.
One of the reasons that a lot of studios struggle with bad performance on UE5, is because a lot of studios, fired their most experienced devs and hired bunch of cheaper new programmers, because they bought into the whole make game with blueprints idea. I have several friends (I know just one datapoint ), that were in games industry from 6 to 12 years that got fired, just for the studio to replace them with cheaper more inexperienced devs.
Baicly UE5 overpromised how easy it was. You still get some great working games that use UE5, but this are from studios that have experienced devs.
It’s not terrible at low-end hardware. Fortnite has been able to run on phones for a long time now. It’s not as lightweight as Unity or Godot by any means and they still remain the optimal choice for low-end platforms.
What you can’t do is hit compile out of the box and expect it to work well on those low-end platforms, because it will try to use all the high-end features if it thinks it’s allowed to.
I don’t think it exactly overpromises how easy it is, but unlike a lot of software it has a learning curve that seems gentle at first and then exponentially increases. It’s high-end AAA-grade development software aimed at professionals, it expects you to know what you’re doing.
> This isn't a case of "these developers are lazy", UE5 issues are the case of "every single UE5 released game has shader stutter issues on PC". That's an issue with engine architecture and its APIs, not an individual thing.
Just because an engine offers you a way to shoot yourself in the foot with a sawn off shotgun, you can't blame the engine maker when you do shoot yourself in the foot with a sawn off shotgun and end up with a bleeding ugly stump.
The thing is, of course game studios will go for "we want to use ALLLLLL the newest features, we want to show off with Nanite and god knows what else". Who wouldn't? But game studios aren't willing to put in the effort surrounding such an implementation to properly tune it.
And it's not just tuning engine components for what it's worth - often enough the culprit ends up being ridiculously oversized textures, there's nothing else that could cause dozens of gigabytes worth of patches [1], and it's not a new complaint either [2].
[1] https://www.neogaf.com/threads/days-gone-whats-up-with-the-r...
[2] https://forums.guru3d.com/threads/are-game-patch-sizes-becom...
Or in the case of Borderlands 4 and a plethora of other Unreal Engine 5 titles: they’re optimized for nothing and there aren’t even options to turn off most of the expensive graphical effects, despite the engine being able to scale down to mobile devices.
Yeah, UE5 games don't even run well on 5090s these days -_-
For anyone doubting this, here's some receipts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoSoElmw--M
This is absolutely unacceptable and if this happens with nearly every big release, then that also speaks badly of the engine itself. Similarly to how languages like C++ are very powerful and can be used to great effect... and people almost inevitably still write code that has memory safety issues. That comparison should make a few ears perk up, my point is that fewer developers should use Unreal Engine 5 if they can't use it well (same as with the languages).
Frankly, I place more trust in studios that have their own engines or use literally anything other than UE5, like what happened to KDC:2, a modern game that looks good and runs great across a wide variety of hardware. Or how they fixed Cyberpunk 2077, it took a while to get there but now both the visuals and performance are quite good across the board.
I can't imagine how shit space marine 2 would run if it was built on ue5.
It has limited performance, but it is also very limited by the display resolution, so it kind of cancels out
Yeah. I just ran Goblin Cleanup, Mars First Logistics and Peak on a Framework 12 - that’s an intel integrated gpu. They all ran fine. Just a solid reminder that you can actually make a fun and good looking game without asking the player to spend hundreds to thousands of euros on future land waste.
> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
IMO it's because a lot of these newer games just don't need that much horsepower. BG3 is not one of them, but looking at the broader industry.
A lot of times were seeing maaaaaybe a 5% bump in fidelity or graphics quality in exchange for 400% less performance.
Like ray tracing. Does Ray tracing look good? Yes. But not that good. Its not the PS1 to the PS2. I've seen baked lighting indistinguishable from Ray tracing in 99% of scenes.
Its just not a good trade off with modern games usually. Unless they really optimize them.
The only people still optimizing games is Nintendo from what I've seen.
There is an interesting discussion about the need for ray tracing in one of the later Digital Foundry videos. The argument goes that sometimes baked lighting is impractical due to the size of the maps and how much dynamic lighting you need. The latest Doom game is one such game where light maps would be 100s of GBs. But I guess most other games are fine with baked lighting.
There's also much cheaper methods of dynamic lighting that aren't real time ray tracing. You can approximate, you can cheat, and it will look almost as good.
> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
Because they bought the game. After decades of PC gaming, it's totally absurd there is no system that tell you how bad or how well a game is going to play on your system. And if it's too difficult to make, how can we expect regular people to know themselves ?
Most games publish minimum and recommend specs.
Steam could probably build in a system to guess the performance if there was some benchmarking data, but game performance can change dramatically after release between updates to drives or the game itself.
Steam literally has a section called Hardware Requirements under every game.
As soon as what you have in your machine doesn’t literally match the stated system requirements, you’re on your own. It’s up to the user to research and understand which CPU or GPU is ”better” or ”worse” than the required one. These things are nontrivial when comparing between generations and across tiers, not to mention across different vendors.
A knowledgeable user might be able to predict their performance reasonably well, based on publicly available benchmark databases, but you still can’t really get a good estimate FPS unless you find someone with exactly your hardware setup who benchmarked the game (and is willing to share).
Most minimum/recommended game specs reference mainstream gaming CPU/GPUs, and most gamers know the strength of their own hardware relative to mainstream components.
If you're a very casual/young/inexperienced gamer then sure, you might have trouble comparing your own system with the min specs.
Which is so bad it barely means anything for lower-end PCs. I played and enjoyed plenty of hours on Elden Ring while rocking hardware well below the minimum requirements
Yes, they are entirely arbitrary. Worst cases (e.g. Cities Skylines 2) outright false
I think one factor to this is that PC gamers are hostile to telemetry, and couldn't give a damn if the reasoning for it is advertising, real world feedback on game design which would feedback for future patches or the next game, or a mutual benefit of "hardware like (this) generally performs like (this) at low/med/high quality preset".
The only thing I've seen which is close is Star Citizen's telemetry: https://robertsspaceindustries.com/en/telemetry
> I think one factor to this is that PC gamers are hostile to telemetry
Is there any data to support this? IME most PC gamers I know don't give a shit about telemetry. They are stock Windows and Android users, love Google products, etc.
They only care whatsoever when it comes to adblocking, because they don't want to watch ads.
(I'm also in the US)
Steam makes it easy to get a full refund for a game you don't like for any reason. So there's no risk in trying an install of a game that might not work well on your below-specs device, but then you shouldn't give it a negative review.
Unless most of the problems come later on, after the 2 hours game time.
I've heard about multiple games that where steamdeck verified but the performance choppy. If it can't hold a steady 30fps, a game shouldn't be steamdeck verified in my opinion.
There are too many dimensions to address unfortunately, cpu, gpu, memory, gpu memory, hell even disk speed for some games.
It could be survey based. Heck, it could be coupon based. Something like:
1. Enroll is the discount program by running steam hardware survey. Steam holds onto your system specs.
2. Steam offers discounts for games that have insufficient benchmarks for your rough system.
3. For these games, steam collects performance data (either 5 minutes of benchmark before, during the game, first run, or maybe when the PC is idle (screensaver mode)).
There's all sorts of way they could do it. I'm guessing a large portion of people would be fine with a "Folding at home" style system, that just runs benchmarks for screensavers (with some coupons or whatever granted).
The steam deck happily provides an enjoyable experience running Cyberpunk 2077.
It's limited, but the limitations in a large part cancel out. It's still very capable.
BG3 runs well on the steam deck, you can even run it in 1080 at 30 FPS which is sufficient for this type of game.
From what I've heard it really struggles when you get to Baldur's Gate itself. Which I haven't got to yet :)
> I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
Depends on what the game can be reasonably expected to run on. Most games don't even approximate what would be technically possible on today's hardware and waste your electricity on lazy coding instead. "15 years old hardware" is what was cutting edge when Crysis 2 and Skyrim came out, so that's not a good excuse in the majority of cases.
> when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings
It's because most of those games don't have the graphics to justify choking.
On lower end hardware it's extremely easy to notice who actually programmed the game and who just used the Unity defaults.
Agree this is great from Larian. Though BG3 does run fine on Steam Deck as it is, especially for such a large game.
> I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
15 years old? Have you seen many examples of this (I have not) or are you exaggerating to make a point?
Regardless, some very popular gaming hardware from 10-12 years ago is still in use and still very capable in modern games, so long as they allow tuning the graphics down. People running an i5 3570K and RX 480 at 1080p don't generally expect to get the imagery or frame rates of a modern gaming rig, but they are reasonable to expect roughly 60 fps with (for example) low textures and shadow detail, no reflections, static lighting, etc. Perhaps this is what you meant by "minimum settings", but:
While low-spec options like this have been the norm in 3D PC games practically forever, several very popular games released in the past 5 years have adopted anemic options menus that have negligible impact on performance at the low end. To someone with much experience tuning for older hardware, this is a striking and disappointing change. Especially now that gaming hardware upgrades are far more expensive than they were, and more people are struggling just to pay their living expenses.
The change is almost certainly unnecessary. It smells like the developers just aren't putting any effort into it anymore.
And it's not merely disappointing; it's also wasteful, both by pushing older hardware into the landfill and by denying opportunities to reduce power consumption.
> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
I game on 1080P and never have issues with any games I play, though I am on a 3080. It's definitely people trying to max out every setting for their 4K monitor that they overpaid for. I might be giving 2K monitors a try soon on the other hand.
As for the Deck... it's not a powerhouse, but it's still impressive how much it can run with decent tweaks. BG3 on a handheld at all feels like sci-fi to my teenage self
The only thing that seems to unite gamers is whining about basically every aspect of gaming, hardware requirements included.
I would imagine this update tranfers to general Linux well? Not a small thing.
Sadly they explicitly don't support that. :(
> Now that there is a Steam Deck Native build, is Baldur’s Gate 3 supported on Linux?
> Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.
Of course they don’t, it would be crazy to say they would support all the different possible distros and configurations that people might run, when the majority of users are in steam deck. But that doesn’t mean it won’t run, just that if you have issues, they don’t promise to fix them. Seems reasonable to me.
BG3 already ran well enough on Linux, so I imagine this will only make it run better, official support or not.
I don't think they have to do that for a Steam Linux release. Steam has Linux native runtimes to provide games with a consistent environment across distros. https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/blob/master/R...
Ah, that’s true. Steam Linux is a smaller target than Linux in general. You’re right.
I'd expect it to work anyway. Under Steam at least. There is nothing special about the Steam Deck/SteamOS that's not available on other distros when running Steam, afaik.
Well, most game companies will only tell you the game only works on something very specific, say Ubuntu 24.04, and everything else is untested/unsupported. That doesn't exclude the game will work perfectly fine on other distros, which is usually the case.
Already runs smooth on Linux (Wine)
Yes, but native is always native.
Proton version often works much better than a native port. So I now always just force that on even if there's a native version.
Proton version will always work better if someone does not show an example and encourage the usage of native support. With Proton you are guaranteed to never reach the optimal potential, or get full advantages of the Linux/Wayland ecosystem. While with native versions you have at least the chance to get in there.
It is like judging someone for taking an advantage of the new CPU instructions that accelerate processing because general instructions are already good enough.
When Proton started to get good, there were multiple stories of small game studios just dropping their bespoke Linux builds because the Windows->Proton version ran much much faster and required zero effort from them.
Native doesn't automatically mean better - quite a few examples of games running better on proton than with native executables(and yes then we can start arguing that it just means the native port is done poorly, but I'm just saying don't assume native will always run better).
It seems like a similar argument around the popularity of third party engines, whether studios should use Unreal, or whether they have the expertise/resources to change to and use another engine, or make their own bespoke engine, and if that will produce better results.
I think that is not fair comparison. Proton adds additional layer which can be completely removed and affects the runtime performance. Switching different game engine changes the layer implementation, instead of removing.
Or just Proton
That'd be nice, though at the moment I hope that if the update instead breaks something on Linux -- a distinct possibility --, I can go back to the Proton version which has been working pretty much perfectly.
Something I wonder is if this new version is a linux build specifically targeting the deck hardware+OS setup, have Larian now committed themselves to following whatever Valve does in future for changes to that setup. In any case, they've got a fallback which is the windows version on proton, but it's inverting how Valve has trained many to behave which is to make just a windows version and delegate linux support to them.
There's also been persistent speculation about whether Valve would take on the burden of releasing SteamOS as a general distribution anyone can install on their own hardware (which I think is unlikely), which could in turn affect how Larian has to treat this port even if that is just communicating what it is and isn't.
The part of BG3 that was not in early access runs like shit even on the most powerful pc's
Native vs Proton benchmark
https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/10
https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/11
Roughly ~10% better FPS in Act 3 but the first benchmark average is pretty much the same.
You can download the native version on any Linux distro
https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/laria...
Just goes to show how impressive Proton really is. It has overhead, but it's tiny in most use cases.
Those are huge frametime spikes for the native during benchmark #10. Maybe shader comp?
It's worth noting that the native Linux version of games is often buggy and a far worse experience than the Windows version running on Proton. Valve itself is infamous for this: the Left 4 Dead 2 native game has multiple very annoying bugs that have been known for 15 years, and that Valve still hasn't fixed. Unfortunately, there is (another) bug that prevents the Windows version running on Proton from connecting to VAC-secure servers or I would have ditched the Linux version long ago.
At this point game devs should just discontinue the native version if they aren't going to properly support it and just make sure the game runs flawlessly on Proton.
Time to link the famous “Win32 Is The Only Stable ABI on Linux” https://blog.hiler.eu/win32-the-only-stable-abi/
500 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32471624
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that's an entirely fair comparison?
The syscall abi has been stable for decades, and any game that included glibc or compiled with musl keeps running just fine?
You need to include not just glibc, you also need to include ld.so sometimes, because older libs can become incompatible with current ld.so (Linux port of SMAC for example), and I fear what it might do sometimes when trying to link openGL or Vulkan driver that links to newer glibc.
Oh, is that why steam still depends on trashy 32bit-libs? Last week, after updating my Debian, steam broke because of that s**, and now I have to think about using a separate windows-machine just for this, until steam removes the 32bit-dependencies (which seems to be planned for 2026).
On my Debian system I use the flatpack version of Steam, it comes with the 32bit stuff inside the container, so you don't need any 32bit packages in the OS.
I've had the opposite experience, getting great performance in TF2 for example and even Rust on Linux (but with Rust you couldn't connect to EAC secured servers, so, useless outside of testing stuff on a private server).
That's kind of the state of Linux in general. Binaries need to be build against the correct distribution and version. Even static binaries are a gamble.
Steam takes care of the distribution and version mumbo jumbo for you with their runtime
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime
https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/b...
Thanks, this is very interesting. So the old native runtime was basically a messy hacky using LD_LIBRARY_PATH and Ubuntu 12.04 libraries, and now they're using containers based on Debian 10 (Steam Runtime 2 'soldier') or Debian 11 (Steam Runtime 3 'sniper').
Edit: Valve actually have some very interesting documents about their compatibility environments:
- https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-runtime/blob/master/d...
- https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steamrt/...
- https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steamrt/...
- https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steamrt/-/blob/steamrt/...
Not entirely, but it's a lot better than 1.0/Legacy.
https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/b...
I hope they'll drop 32-bit support in the runtime with the next major version. More and more distributions are dropping it or are thinking about it. Any new game should really use 64.
I'm not sure this is true tho.
The games by Loki Software are still running great for me. It's a matter of skill and discipline. SDL, OpenGL and alike are very stable.
The problems start when developers start to use lots of small third-party libraries and depend on particular versions of them, but IIRC on Windows it's also solved by simply shipping all the libs with the game.
Discipline? In gamedev? The industry which famously modeled trains as hats and was proud of it?
And why is that a problem if it works? What if I told you that games also don't simulate each atom individually?
Absolutely not a problem, in fact, I enjoy this. But asking game developers for "discipline" is akin to asking frontend developers for forward compatibility - simply not in their culture.
Meanwhile I love the "trains as hats" hack.
I love it too, but what game developers never have, never will and probably even never should — is discipline
Actual static binaries (so including libc) should run just fine anywhere, right? The Linux kernel has always had a very stable ABI.
Yes but that limits you to command line applications. GL and X11 (and I assume Wayland) are always linked dynamically. Granted, those don't suffer from glibc's "DLL version hell", but not sure what happens when you link the main executable statically against musl and then load DLLs which dynamically link glibc.
Another option is to dynamically link against an old glibc version, the Zig toolchain makes that easy also for C/C++ projects.
glibc doesn't suffer from DLL version hell as long as you are not doing anything stupid (like using private symbols). If you commit to using just the "C library" bits you can compile a binary linked against glibc on a distro from 1998 and it will work on modern distros just fine.
There are many issues with libraries breaking backwards compatibility on Linux (like pretty much all GUI ones) but glibc, X11, OpenGL (and to some extent SDL - it used to not be like that, but in recent years they made "SDL1->SDL2" wrappers and there is or will be a "SDL2->SDL3" wrapper too) are fine. I'm not sure about Vulkan but i'd guess that is fine too.
Last I tried the problem was linking against glibc on a new Linux distro and then attempting to run that executable on an old Linux distro which doesn't have a recent-enough glibc installed (usually Debian with their software stack from the last century).
There's probably an obscure linker trick to force an older glibc version number, but if that's the case it really should be the default since the C stdlib is supposed to be ABI backward compatible anyway.
This isn't just a glibc thing but something you can find with any shared library on Linux. For example if you are using a rolling distro and make a build that links against Qt6, the produced binary may not work in another distro that has a slightly older Qt6.
As palata mentioned the "trick" is to build using the oldest version you plan to target. You can use a Docker image with, say, Debian (which has official docker images going back to Squeeze released in 2011) to build the binary and release that.
AFAIK there are some tools that allow you to fudge symbols, etc to allow you to use whatever you have on your system but these feel like brittle solutions and the easiest one is to just build on an older/stable release. It isn't like it takes more than a second to make a VM or docker image anyway :-P.
Well the "trick" is to build with the oldest glibc version you want to support. Nothing more.
It can't be the default, otherwise using any new feature would fail.
glibc very much suffers from version hell, because:
a) glibc will drop older versioned symbols over time making your binary not work at all
b) glibc owns ld.so and is not afraid to make incompatible changes, which is why running Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri linux port requires that you dig out not just libc, but the entire dynamic linking stack and know how to bypass default executable interpreter in ELF files.
...aaaaand stuff like this is exactly why NixOS is the only sensible Linux distro
NixOS removes outdated packages from its repo pretty rapidly... :-/
If you statically link musl, dlopen doesn't work at all. You can't load any shared library.
Not true even for all apps having just libc.
I wanted to port my semi-minimal 3D ECS game engine ~(10k lines) to a minimal distro, so I decided on Alpine after figuring Arch is actually very bloated on comparison.
I had to recompile even the single-executable command line prebuild system (premake5) for musl. Musl is a more minimal version of libc.
Got it to work fine after that, building a few components from source and getting a few like sdl from the distribution's repos. (also had to of course install relevant driver bits to get opengl working as the distro is truly minimal)
I would tend to agree, I think dev time is better spent supporting Proton. I have even seen benchmarks where Proton on Linux outperforms Windows. As a Steam Deck owner, Proton is fantastic.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2024/08/21/linux...
I started playing Silksong on my Steam Deck using the linux build. Only to discover that it maxed out at 720p (docked), and wouldn't bind right/left trigger for my controller. Enabling proton (to play the windows build) worked great. Controller worked flawlessly and the game ran smoothly at 1080p.
Unless a studio is fully committed to proper Linux support (like, Feral-level), they might as well just optimize for Proton and call it a day
One of the reasons Proton has been so successful as a dev target is because the Windows API is not changing anymore and is thus stable.
The same, as I understand it, cannot be said about the Linux-native API. SteamOS may have stabilized it somewhat, but there's a reason why the readme on their site for this basically says "it may run on Linux proper, but we're not supporting it except on Steam Deck"
Is this the case for BG3?
Often the linux builds do work when they are released, but then an OS update changes some dynamic linked library which then breaks them.
Except valve runs these games in well defined container runtimes to avoid these issues: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/b...
Somehow it's still an issue. Was a while ago now but somehow an update to dbus(?) broke Worms WMD and the publisher just never fixed it. The solution was to just run the Windows version in Proton which works fine.
That is fascinating. So if I have a Linux version of say a game or emulator, and it seems unstable on steam deck, I could try running it in this container?
I believe steam deck already does this, if not yes you can.
Pinch me when a single flake.nix takes equal care of this.
So the answer is no?
It's a "yes, for a while".
This is specifically a Steam Deck version and _not_ a general Linux version, so it's likely not applicable in this case. Think of it more like a console native port.
I would be surprised if it was hard to run it on a generic Linux.
The SD version crashes the steam overlay. I didn't check further than the menu yet.
If you want to play on Nvidia, probably yes.
Yes, BG3 crashed my Linux computer continuously so I could not even play it until I bought a ps5
I think you might be confused, there wasn't a linux-native version until yesterday.
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!
I played the entire game on Steam Deck and had a great experience. 100+ hours
No offense, but some people requirements are really, really low. I played God of War on Steam Deck and it was not a good experience, it was at the bottom of 'okay', and only because at that moment I wasn't at home to play on better hardware.
This is the reason why I don't believe when people say that it runs great without trying it myself.
I recently started it on Deck. At first I thought it was ok, perhaps a bit blurry and hard to read. Then I put it on the TV and oh my when those pixels came at me! I don't consider myself a hifi person, I really don't care much about such things. But that pixel mush was borderline unplayable! And I couldn't up the quality without making the game run unbearably slow. I don't understand why everyone is saying it works great or even fine on SD. Perhaps others don't really use an external screen for it? But now I can't get comfortable looking at it on the small screen either...
> No offense, but some people requirements are really, really low.
I think you kinda hit the nail on the head, but I believe there is an extra dimension to this: desire.
For BG3, it looked fun and I had good memories of BG2 so I was interested in playing it. After tuning the settings a bunch and not being able to get a consistent framerate / not have micro-freezing, I just said "oh well, I'll play it on some other platform in the future." I cared about BG3, but not that much.
This is in contrast to Elden Ring Nightreign, which also had issues. I was able to get it to a somewhat stable 30FPS and celebrated that success before dumping 100+ hours into the game. Why? Well, because I love FromSoft games! I really really really wanted to play the game and was willing to put up with a somewhat subpar experience in order to get it. BG3, among other games, is just not that exciting for me personally so my tolerance of technical hitches is very different.
... which brings us right back to this native release. Hopefully the improvements we see are enough to get me over that "hill" and actually enjoying the game. I have the update queued on my deck now so I can try it out after work.
Really didn't expect a native build either, especially post-launch. Huge props to Larian for going the extra mile
Huge props to the dev who burned his free time to do this, and to Larian for then backing it.
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 walking away for two hours and coming back to the system still in this state, I gave up and hard-rebooted with the power button.
But if you survive the 12GB update process, I'm sure this is great news :) Maybe I'll finally have to make some time to play this game - bought it two years ago, but never ended up making time for it, despite having played Cyberpunk 2077 a time and a half, and most of Factorio: Space Age, since then.
I had that with MHW and I nailed it down to shader (fossilize-replay - https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Fossilize).
From my guess, Steam support Vulkan shader pre-compilation so that you don't have to wait in game (like the infamous 10 min Monster Hunter Wilds startup delay). They also seems to also be able to download the compilation cache from Steam if someone already have done the process on the same GPU + driver version. Since fewer Windows games use Vulkan this feature is often not used, but on Linux most games will run on Vulkan (esp. Proton games with dxvk) you may experience the process more often.
Background shader pre-compilation does not use all cores by default and the only way to change that is to manually edit a file. So unless you're consciously changing it, you won't have this problem. It'll only use all cores when you launch the game.
I have been having the issue with the system hanging up when steam is doing big writes. I had assumed it was due to something wrong with my drive and was contemplating reformatting it.
I have massive doubts about the "They also seems to also be able to download the compilation cache from Steam if someone already have done the process on the same GPU + driver version."
This would imply that if I already calculated the shaders for the current game state than i could reuse them and not have to go through the whole compilation step (if no changes happen inbetween).
Matter of fact, i have to recompile the shaders on every game start for every game, even if i restart the game just x times in a row.
For context: using linux/debian and basically running everything on vulcan
No reason to doubt nor speculate. It's been a feature of Steam since 2017.
https://www.techpowerup.com/239687/latest-steam-client-beta-...
What are your doubts exactly?
Shader precompilation is a standard thing to do now - consoles mostly ship precompiled shaders for their GPU + driver combo, Steam Deck will also download precompiled shader for its Linux + AMD + driver version combo.
The infrastructure for that Steam side is there and is in active use.
That depends on game actually passing exactly the same parameters to shader compiler and your GPU driver actually building and using the cache.
What fossilize does is it generates data of all the parameters passed to shader compilation, and then can trigger "offline" compilation before you run the game.
It's documented here https://store.steampowered.com/oldnews/35534?l=
I don't think I ever found more documents on this feature. I assume it might need lots of users with matching result to ensure that bad actor can't upload malicious shader.
The linux kernel’s handling of IO under memory pressure is abysmal. I have to tune dirty ratios and write back ages and swap and whatnot just to get the system to not hard lock when running multiple node microservices in stages which run fine, just slower, when starting them all at once on a MacBook.
Disclaimer: I don’t even like macOS.
I've had similar problems but no amount of tweaking vm and vfs cache settings helped. Swap or not, both 32gb and 128gb of ram. Manually reclaiming memory would un-lock the system (/sys/fs/cgroup/memory.reclaim).
I wrote a user space memory reclaimer and have not got a lockup since. https://gist.github.com/EBADBEEF/f168458028f684a91148f4d3e79...
I don't know how to give more visibility to this hack, but it deserves it. Bookmarking and deploying on my boxen.
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.
BEAM handles this very gracefully. Shame preemptive scheduling isn't more common..
That pausing issue is plaguing me with several other titles. I think it tracks with background downloading of game updates, but haven’t had enough hours to entirely confirm it. What I did notice is that after installing Decky there are background jobs from some of the plugins that run native Linux updates (flatpak) and snapshotting.
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.
Are you using full disk encryption (LUKS) without enabling the Cloudflare contributed flags? Because that's the most common syndrome of high IO causing high CPU usage until lockup.
I had to free 100GB so that it has enough disk space.
I am amazed this game is even playable on the steam deck. Was trying to find an excuse to play it after cyberpunk. I guess this one it is…
If you survived the warzone of your desktop’s update process, BG3 is absolutely worth diving into
I get that on windows when there's no enough space on my disk to install a whole other copy of the game being patched.
So for BG3, if you don't have 150Gb free on your disk, steam will download it on a different disk and then transfer it over, thrashing you disk.
It's bizarre, incredibly annoying, behaviour and I wish it would just ask so I'd know that was about to happen and just clean up some space. Or refuse the upgrade.
But steam want to force upgrades on users before you can play anything, which for single player games is incredibly frustrating. I get why they do it, but it's another one of those things where you feel like you aren't in control of the thing you paid a lot of money for.
Can you no longer disable updates on a per game basis?
You could do that in the past and I did occasionally for single player games because my internet connection wasn't the best and I did not want to waste the little time I could allocate for gaming.
Bought the game when it came out, but still haven't had the time to play. Just flew out for a three week vacation with my Steam Deck in tow. Unfortunately, I left it on the plane and I haven't heard back from lost and found yet (seems unlikely I'll get it back considering it was an international flight). Oh well.
When I left my phone (out of battery) on a plane, I went to the flightradar and checked all airports the airplane was visiting after. Then contacted lost&found at each of them individually and eventually got my phone back. It was found only a fifth flight!
Wow, I would read a write up about that. I think I would’ve given up after the second try
I think you just read the writeup!
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.
Big tip: get the LCD and a DeckHD. The mod takes a long time, but it's not technically difficult.
Yeah, I know most people will say the Deck is already too slow for 800p, so why would it pull 1080p well?
I have two decks, one's got Deck HD, the other doesn't. I render the Deck HD one at 540 native and upscale 2x with FSR. It looks way better than the stock display one and runs better as well. Similar with HZD and other highly demanding games.
That said, 99% of my time on the Deck is spent playing retro games. Does that need 1080p? No. Can it use it? Yes, very much so.
I never pick up the original deck anymore - the Deck HD modded one is just better.
Just checking DeckHD, sadly it's still 60hz.
I mostly use SD to stream from my main rig, so i can always have >60fps on my SD.
Can you stream games at over 60fps?
Yes. I can stream 120fps with moonlight and sunshine
That's kind of misleading though given that the deck can't display 120 Hz
yeah, wish it was higher than 60 hz
The DeckHD website says it's sold out. Can I get the same display component without the installation kit from somewhere else? Is there a model or part identifier or something?
sadly no.
i guess that's that then!
I tell people to get an LCD and xreal or viture AR glasses with the saved money. AR glasses are a WAY better display than a small OLED screen.
So, you’ve got a portable deck wired to augmented reality glasses. Just need a chordic keyboard and you’ll be a full-on Neuromancer/Snow Crash gargoyle :)
Strange days !
Would the latency be good enough for gaming though?
they're wired, so probably.
And solves the wrists problem mentioned earlier
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/handheld/legion-go/len106g000...
- https://rog.asus.com/gaming-handhelds-group/
Honestly, I think a gaming laptop and a controller makes more sense for most things, if you don't need that little bit of increased portability.
My go to for gaming has been Steam Deck on the couch or bed though. The whole weight of it NOT on my wrists.
This has been so comfortable that this helped me ignore the pain in my arm after a fracture/surgery this year.
I have a g-cloud and it's about 30% lighter than a steam deck and pretty ergonomic to hold.
Yes it can't play Cyberpunk but it'll handle native Android games, classic emulation, and any cloud streaming very well. You can also install moonlight on it and stream full fat desktop games too.
Yeah the SD has pretty bad ergonomics. It's too wide and too heavy. I still like it as a portable system. It's like a console I can pack in my bag and plug in to a TV wherever I'm staying.
I'd love to see a steamdeck lite, with a similar size and weight to the switch. But still with the rounded hand grips of the steamdeck. The deck as it is feels like a HN designed product with way too much stuff jammed in it with no regard to size and weight. The trackpads are cool for desktop mode but the space taken up for something so rarely used isn't worth it.
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
Glad I'm not the only one with that issue. I ended up connecting a Bluetooth controller to my Steam Deck because holding it hurt my wrists so much. At that point, why bother with the thing?
I do the same with my Switch 1— just set the thing up with its kickstand on the tray table and use a normal pad. No amount of slide-on grips or whatever else really make the joycons usable for more than a few minutes with adult hands.
I ended up 3D printing some larger grips to help when I have nerve pain flare-ups. Love using the deck with them
I went the other way and got a portable monitor and a keyboard & mouse. Plug those into the SD and it's effectively a gaming desktop that fits in a backpack.
This type of setup is very popular at lan parties nowadays.
May as well get a Switch 2 at this point. Then at least it’s something new.
I got the switch 2 and day one and I've mostly been playing the deck since then. There isn't much on the switch (besides mario kart and donkey kong), and the stuff that is cross-platform doesn't run well (the new "it takes two" is really laggy).
A Switch and a Steam Deck are orthogonal purchases.
Not really. The Switch 2 has many of the most popular games available on other platforms. Plus a lot of Nintendo exclusives. They are not the same for sure, and YMMV for specific titles.
I have both and I would agree with GP on that, the switch is really exclusively for Nintendo games. Cross platform games don't run really well, I just get them on the deck instead.
> Cross platform games don't run really well
Wouldn't that depend heavily on the game and developer in question? The Switch 2 has more than sufficient hardware to compete, with a particularly beefy GPU for a handheld.
I'd be more ready to blame the game and developer in question than this console, unless there are a lot of examples from capable developers performing measurably worse.
So why does it matter?
On Switch, I had to expensively rebuy games at high prices, which then ran poorly and didn't support any kind of settings to try to fix the situation.
On the Deck I get all my desktop Steam library and I can change game settings until they run as I like (within reason).
I don't see how those two are comparable purchases - I either get a console which runs poorly and demands 40$ for games that are like 5$ on Steam... or a console that already supports my existing library AND on top of that allows me to stream games from main PC at full detail and framerate.
I have no clue, but I've had enough experiences to know better now. I just got Split Fiction, you'd think as a starting title that's made for couch coop it would run pretty well. No, it's horrible. We stopped playing it and we'll just buy it on a different platform.
"Cross platform games don't really run well"
Leaves the question who is to blame completely out.
And as a consumer I couldn't care less why it doesn't work. I paid for it, it doesn't work: I am not recommending it.
Easy as that. I don't have to write thesis about such stuff.
You're probably right though, if it's any consolation.
It doesn't change the reality though, that currently many of the cross platform titles don't work well on the Switch 2.
Cross platform games tend to run better on Switch 2 than the Deck, which is showing its teeth. E.g., Cyberpunk
The Deck is amazing but a hardware refresh would be helpful
wat
The Deck can play most of those Nintendo exclusives better than the Switch itself ;)
If you like indie games, the selection is generally better on Steam. And everything that is available on both runs better on the steamdeck. The Switch only makes sense if you particularly want to play Nintendo games.
I’ve been having a lot of fun with my Switch 2, but due to its size I find it far less ergonomic than the original.
I spent like 98% of my playtime on the original in handheld. That has switched completely. It’s not just the size but especially the weight I think.
May as well replace all of your apples with oranges while you're at it.
The Switch 2 and the Steam Deck are hugely different machines, despite sharing a form factor.
To some people, they are like xbox and playstation. Both are different machine with different game store, but still, they are console.
Obviously SD can be more than just "handheld console", but a lot of people won't need that.
Bazzite on PC is much better.
Or Bazzite on a Legion Go if you would like to keep that portability.
Or Bazzite on a ROG Ally (X), which is what I run, very happy with it.
Though if I was buying it now, I'd want to see what the next generation offers.
It's a shame that the Steam Deck has no such a thing like Apple's "Find my".
I used to be a great fan of Prey Project, but I don't think it's installable on the Steam Deck without leaving Steam mode.
https://preyproject.com
How did you leave it on the plane!?!
Maybe they had a tight connection and were in a hurry.
Sure, but no matter how big of a hurry you are in, you are going to be sitting on the plane waiting for the door to open and the people in front of you to leave. I always use that time to gather everything up, and a steamdeck is really quite big.. you can’t leave it in the seat back pocket or something.
I am not trying to victim blame or anything, I just can’t imagine a situation where I could forget something so big.
> Now that there is a Steam Deck Native build, is Baldur’s Gate 3 supported on Linux? > Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.
"does not support" is not the same as "no", right? In theory it should be possible to run this build on other arm-based linux?
Steam deck is x86_64. It would probably run but they won't accept bug reports.
It will most likely run fine. Steamdeck has AMD x86 APU. I guess gpu might be a problem. They simply dont want to provide official support for the variety of linux.
You can download the native version on any Linux distro https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/laria...
I finished the game on Ubuntu when it came out, so it should work fine since ever. You can check out https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940 for more info.
The whole point of this post is that there’s a native version that doesn’t use Proton now, so checking ProtonDB isn’t going to tell anyone anything beyond the previous version being fine.
That's amazing, it would be interesting to see benchmarks comparing the two versions
Yeah that would be nice. Some native Linux versions actually have worse performance than Proton when they're done poorly. I got ~60fps on the Linux version of Silksong, but 400fps running the Windows version through Proton.
That sounds like possibly a configuration issue rather than strictly performance (although I agree the symptom is worse performance). For instance, specifically the value "~60fps" vs something as high as 400fps sounds like running with vsync enabled vs. with it disabled.
That sounds like vsync to me. I'd be worried if I was rendering 400fps when my monitor can't get close to displaying that framerate.
The linux version gets 340 fps on the SD for me, same as the Proton version
sounds like the game was capped to 60
Wow, I wonder if it would be easier to just target proton directly
It would be, since targeting proton is largely just targeting Windows and not falling into a few traps most games don't fall into anyway.
It definitely is if you have an engine with a DX12 backend but no Vulkan backend. Nothing stops you from detecting Proton and then tweaking uses of the DX12 APIs that translate poorly to Vulkan, and there's no way adding a whole new rendering backend will be easier than writing the extra code paths in the DX12 one.
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.
yeah I played bg3 with controller split screen with my wife the entire playthrough. Normally, I would've strongly preferred KB+M for such a game. We definitely got used to it after several hours.
I'm not sure if I can recall any tips other than just keep at it and it'll eventually become muscle memory. I don't think it's as good as KB+M but it wasn't something that was bugging me once we got significantly into the game. YMMV.
I got used to it after a few hours. M&K is probably the better experience overall, sure.
You can just plug a keyboard and mouse into the Deck if you prefer that.
tbh, I've thought of doing this, but it seems kind of outlandish given that I primarily play my Steam Deck in bed. I'd rather just take my laptop with me.
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.
Anyone knows what does "native" means here precisely? Steam Deck has a x86-64 instruction set AFAIK, so it's just same as a the Windows version? Or has it to do with the GPU / OS? Or does it just mean "properly configured"?
It means compiled for Linux/SteamOS instead of being compiled for Windows and using a compatibility layer to play.
Native as in it's a Linux binary, no wine/proton involved
Baldur's gate 3 was one of the first (if not the first) big game to run natively on apple silicon. I am glad Larian takes this kind of stuff seriously instead of doing the bare minimum, in an industry that often even the bare minimum is not to be taken for granted.
> Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.
I though the steam deck would be the reason why developper start building their game for linux, but it seems like it's a bigger issue than just making a "linux file". Once they have rewritten the code for the steam deck, what would prevent them to compile the game for Debian and other linux distributions ?
I really have no idea how much more work it is but assumed it would be straight forward.
You can run the game on Linux just fine, Larian just won't help you if it breaks or bugs out. SteamOS is just a well-customised Arch fork, after all.
Announcing official Linux support would also require testing on Intel and Nvidia GPUs, as well as other types of AMD GPUs, which would probably take much more time and effort than testing for a device with effectively two hardware revisions you need to test for. I don't think they want the support burden, and I don't disagree with them having had to debug obscure Linux GPU issues myself.
I would assume the issue is all the variation in different distros. Plus the driver/hardware combinations. While some setups would just work they don’t see it as worth spending the time doing the validation/patching required. The steam deck is 1 device to test, with a single software stack. Much easier to target, and with a known customer base. Which brings up the other issue that they would be unlikely to make their money back on a general Linux release. Companies have cited this as a reason for not doing macOS releases in the past and based on the last steam survey Linux usage is in a similar ballpark (2.6% vs 1.8% for Mac ).
Despite all this I think it’s still a move in the right direction.
Valve released a runtime specifically to combat the variation problem. This allows developers to target a specific runtime and Valve will make the software stack work with as many distros as possible.
On the other hand, that stack can only contain so much, and a lot of Linux bugs involve sound subsystems, GPUs, and compositors/X11/window manager configuration issues. You can't quite target the Linux runtime and assume everything will just work, but at least you don't need to target specific versions of glibc and libxml2 anymore.
> Once they have rewritten the code for the steam deck, what would prevent them to compile the game for Debian and other linux distributions ?
You can install Steam on Debian.
I think the value here is that with Steam being the "approved launcher" you offload a lot of "distro weirdness" over to Valve. The value of a standalone build seems fairly low for most game devs.
They're just talking about official support (i.e. support tickets). It'll probably still run elsewhere, they're just not promising to help you with bugs on other hardware & configurations. Entirely reasonable IMO.
Wow, I bought Baldur's Gate 3 out of nostalgia before a very long (20hours + ) flight and played some good long hours on the plane. Unfortunately the Proton version meant the game was unplayable on the Deck later in the game. I'm so happy I can finish it now. Coincidentally I also realised I can play it on my Mac too...
> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
I won't leave a bad review or whine on BG3, and my (otherwise very capable laptop) is just 6 years old with an Intel UHD 620 integrated GPU, and BG3 barely reaches the 10fps level on 1024x768 with lowest settings on everywhere. So it's not even 720p, and BG3 chokes a lot in this somewhat recent hardware.
I see BG3's graphics and while they are beautiful, they're nothing out of the ordinary in comparison to other games. That is, there are good games that could run very well in my laptop and which look good.
In sum, I see BG3 as being needlessly demanding, and pushes out a large sector of machines and potential buyers. I'd love to have an RTX-class GPU (and have the cash to afford it), but all I have it's a laptop whose GPU cannot be upgraded, and that is perfectly capable in all other areas.
Every time when I point out this limit in games, which I see as silly, I get flamed to death. People in the gaming communities are seemingly unable to understand why making extremely high minimum requirements is not a good sales strategy.
Games can look good with integrated GPUs. See the Wolfenstein games (id engine). Even more recent games like Generation Zero (Apex open world engine) can be run decently at lowest settings on my hardware. MGS5:PhantomPain also runs and looks very good. But no luck with BG3.
To be fair, there is world between "extremely high minimum requirements" and a 6 years old laptop, considering laptop of even the current year are never considered super high end rigs.
If you had s/minimum/recommended I would agree. But no, we are talking about minimum requirements. I submit that a game should be playable even on 10-year old hardware. Of course, the devs can blow the ceiling in their highest settings. Do they need three RTX-7000 series in parallell cooled with liquid nitrogen and eating 3000W of electricity in order to run at the highest/ultra settings? Yeah, be my guest, more power to them. But we are, I insist, talking about minimum requirements. These should be as broad as possible in order to keep the entry barrier low.
In a game which doesn't even look especially good, I see the very demanding hardware requirements as just a contribution to planned/artificial obsolescence.
(and yeah, I got downvoted as expected. This is getting old...)
If there was ever a game to play with KB+M, this is it. I don't get the need to stuff everything into a handheld. It's not Mario kart!
You've got two trackpads, gyro, 4 extra buttons on the back to bind, and Steam Input lets you make custom radial (or non-radial) menus with entries that can press any keyboard key or key combo for you (which you can bind to the trackpads). It's honestly nothing like using an Xbox controller if that's what you're imagining.
Mario Kart is also a funny example as it's one of the few racing games that makes no use of analog triggers for acceleration, so you really wouldn't miss much playing it on a keyboard.
I just don't want to play anything with a kb and mouse anymore because it just feels like being at work when I'm sitting at a desk using the same setup I just spent all day on.
THIS.
1000x this.
When I grab the deck it's downtime mode for me now, keyboard/mouse time is work or side-project mode.
I love my steam deck over my desktop pc anymore. Once I had kids, I never got to have my desk in a place that’s safe from being climbed on, so I hooked it up to the tv. But then they started taking over the tv, and the only way I could game was on a handheld. I mostly play older stuff, so it’s plenty powerful for what I do most of the time. I still have the desktop and and Xbox to offset anything else.
I agree with you. Steamdeck is amazing but people are often over-enthusiastic about what a handheld device can do.
The most comfortable and consistent gaming experience is still a regular stationary PC. But if you really want to play Civ5 on a train then sure the Steamdeck is there for you. I just never felt the need to game something that bad.
> The most comfortable and consistent gaming experience is still a regular stationary PC.
That would be playing console on an 80 inch screen from a couch.
I just don't want to sit at my desk after a whole day of work, and I've got an RTX5090 PC for some stupid reason. I'd much rather play games on the sofa on my steam deck sitting next to my wife or play in bed.
There's no "need" to, just some people's preference. Also you can play the game just fine on PlayStation or Xbox using a game pad too.
Honestly, I prefer the Steam Deck over M+KB for BG3. I beat the game twice on Steam Deck before I sold mine, in fact - entirely in airports during layovers while traveling for work.
My current obsession is Satisfactory.
Those back muscles aren't going to rest themselves
Hey, some of us use these things exactly like that. I have an Asus ROG Ally, which runs steamOS and never leaves its dock, KB+M and monitor.
I would have gotten a mini PC, but strangely enough the Ally was the cheapest steamOS-compatible option I could find.
I honestly went from being a hardcore PC only KB+M is king kind of guy to genuienly not playing games unless they can be played on a controller. After 8 hours of work at my desk I just want to slouch and play comfortably, and BG3s controller support is really well done.
Nice to see Larian putting in the effort for a native Steam Deck build, especially considering how resource-heavy BG3 can get
> Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform.
This is a huge nitpick but I wish they'd just say "other Linux distros" instead of the "Linux platform". It's fine to pick and choose one (or a few) popular distro(s) to support, like SteamOS. It's not reasonable to expect support for all possible Linux software environments. It's already crazy that they support so many hardware combinations, even on just Windows.
Makes me think they might not have the most knowledgeable people on the job. Hopefully they didn't just throw some unwilling Windows devs into the unknown.
They have native macOS version too.
Can someone phonetically spell out “Baldur” for me?
I’ve seen the term across my life but I have never heard it spoken. I think how I imagine it and how it’s said are different - like I discovered from reading LOTR books and then watching the movies…
AFAIK it's just ball-der. I've seen it win awards at The Game Awards and such, plus heard it discussed IRL, everyone seems to say it that way. If that's not the correct pronunciation, it's at least the popular one.
Look for baldur’s gate reviews on youtube?
Solasta COTM is a similar game with good steam deck support (native controls) and many community made campaigns for replayability.
Slick! Worth noting that Baldurs Gate 3 runs fine through Proton already - I played it on Linux at release with zero issues.
Worth noting that some games run better on Linux than on Windows and have for a few years now. Crazy.
And sometimes the Windows version runs better under Proton than the native Linux build due to the port being so poorly done which is kinda funny.
Occasionally I do still run things under Windows though like Cyberpunk 2077 as I got about 15 more frames under Windows which let me bump the graphics up a bit more.
Or Assassin's Creed Mirage which got me double the FPS somehow. Currently playing AssCree Shadows on Windows too as it just refuses to run at all via Proton. Other people seem to get it running fine so I dunno why I can't. Ah well.
As much as linux for PC gaming has made huge strides over the past few years, it seems really hard to avoid having a dual boot to keep windows available if you're serious about the whole breadth of available games. Or if you want to avoid pitfalls on those titles that run with a list of caveats, you can go exploring on protondb and some games need a collection of commmandline tweaks to get going well. It'd be nice to have a better experience for enabling those or opt-in to commonly used configs on particular games
Maybe I'm cheating by using a 1080P monitor, but I have only ever installed Windows once and that was for Starfield since it didnt work with Proton OOTB, once they fixed it, I purged and havent gone back. In the future I wont be doing that. I love Bethesda games, so in the future I'll just wait it out. I did make sure to play the heck out of it while I was on Windows though.
In hindsight, I really didn't need Windows, but I was impatient.
Yeah, I noticed this myself ~4 years ago when I was playing Overwatch on a relatively low-spec PC. Gave me 10-20% GPU headroom and ~2gb of extra RAM I never had on Windows.
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...
Was a joke. The bug I linked was regarding how trivially easy it was to romance the companions. Such that it spawned its own speed running category (Sex %). New versions of the game have since fixed the bug so the companions will try to keep it in their pants.
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.
I just finished playing all the acts in the game. An amazing game, what can I say ?
Yeah it really was a revelation. I didn’t know much at all going in and was constantly amazed.
I’ve since tried a number of highly touted recent CRPGs and RPGs… and gave up on all of them; BG3 really spoiled me I guess, but I’m also a pretty selective gamer.
If you have the tolerance for dated visuals a lot of the best stuff is in the long since past - Planescape Torment and Baldur's Gate 2 are amazing. The Neverwinter Nights series is also great. Fallout 2 is probably one of the best games ever in terms of atmosphere as well as gameplay, but the visuals there are extremely dated. And finally there's also Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.
Holding Fallout 1/2 as the best gaming experiences of my life for a long time, just recently discovered Fallout Nevada and Sonora that some kind talent also ported to WASM/Web — and it finally hit the spot for me after ~25 years.
> The Neverwinter Nights series is also great
To be noted: the main appeal of Neverwinter Nights 1 is the player created content. In particular the main campaign of NWN1 is pretty "meh" and is better thought as a showcase of what's possible with the scenario toolkit (the expansion - what we call now DLC - are better in that regard though). The creativity deployed by some creator is quite astonishing; shootout to the Bastard of Kosigan (James Bond-esque adventures in a kinda alternate historical France), and HeX Coda (magipunk setting where you fight as a champion of open-source magick against corporate wizards).
But as somenameforme noted, you have to content with early 2000 production value .
Larian's previous game, Divinity Original Sin 2, is pretty close. Planescape Torment with a guide is another good one.
The default campaigns in Neverwinter Nights are a mixed bag but the fanmade content is amazing.
Shame the final act seemed a bit rushed though with the Upper City completely axed. Having the coronation in a gatehouse was pretty funny.
It has a billion different branches and choices you can take. It's pretty surprising. Replayability is great.
I've played it three times now, start to finish, and I still enjoy Divinity 2 a lot more. Story wise BG3 I think has a slight edge, but combat wise Divinity is just a much better game(imho). Partially this isn't BG3's fault but it's the consequence of relying on D&Ds rules for its combat, but then.....it was their choice to go that way. BG3 but with Divinity's combat system would be my #1 game of all time.
What does native mean?
Is this a linux binary? Using wine directly linked under the hood?
Or did they actually build a native application with no translation layers, no matter how they're added?
>Is this a linux binary?
Yes
https://steamdb.info/depot/2330359/
You can download the native version on any Linux distro https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/laria...
Well I could, but I already finished the game using the Mac version :)
Thanks to Larian for doing cross platform.
After all that effort, I'd be legit pissed at the website maintainer for screwing up the image scaling in the blog post, making this release look like some bootleg readme ...
The images themselves are fine, just the post's formatting squishes them.
This is how it is supposed to be, not by doing API translation.
Kudos to Larian.
Let's keep in mind that this API translation is more performent then the original API though (as you can see from the ROG ally windows vs steamOS)
outstanding work by larien however, I just felt strange reading your comment which somehow implied that the translation is the reason for bad performance, when it is actually more performent then the original
Naturally, because it doesn't take into account that the OS does much less.
Less see how those benchmarks compare, now that just like with netbooks, Microsoft is finally acknowledging they need to react.
The translation is the reason SteamDeck will suffer the same fate as OS/2, and netbooks, building castles on other companies kingdoms.
For that not to happen, the SteamDeck needs to be sold on its actual capabilities, not by pretending to be someone's else platform.
You suuuuure love to talk... https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/11
The trick to playing BG3 is to play it on your deck by streaming, you can play so many games via streaming via usb-c to ethernet, always wire your house and every room with ethernet PEOPLE.
can someone explain why this is a big deal to me compared to any game being released on multiple platforms? Surely making games for the switch/ps5/etc is hard too?
>Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.
huh? but Steam Deck is just normal Arch Linux with x86_64 ~~aarch64~~?...
it's not even aarch64. but what they're saying is they don't want to deal with the support nightmare of supporting anything but the unmodifiable SteamOS image.
Yeah that was my take as well, it's more of a nod to the fact that you _can_ run it on other devices but you should expect not any help from them.
oh right, it's just AMD Zen2...
I think their point is: don't complain to them if you have an issue, unless you can reproduce it on the Steam Deck.
They don't want to deal with esoteric Linux bugs.
Every distro is a bit different though. And there's kernel / libc versions and the whole gui server on top of that. Windows gives you a few configurations to check, Mac does as well. But Linux means hundreds of possible setups before you even get to hardware differences. They just don't want to deal with that.
Steam runs all games in a container called the Steam Linux Runtime, so the only difference is the kernel and host Mesa drivers.
Not to nitpick, there is a 'native' option. Atleast it has been available on Arch for many years now (when SteamOS was on Debian?). In most cases we just the symlink the newer versions of libs to the older versions and the games run fine / better.
Can I get the native linux build on gog?
You love to see it
I really appreciate this. But color me skeptical that the late game will work on SD. It chugs on PCs. Hopefully they conjured a miracle!
I don't want to be one of those unbearable apologists in forum threads... but BG3's legitimately my favourite game, and IMO Larian have been excellent stewards, so I'll go up to bat for them here; have you played the newer patches?
For the first few months, act 3 (in the city) was legitimately hard to play. Performance, stability, visual glitches, all pervasive. But later patches did do a better job of improving those points.
Act 3's still the most intensive part of the game by far so on many setups it's still wise to at least crank down the crowd density, but it's come a long way since the launch version of the game.
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
I had no idea this was a thing. Does it work from a Linux host? If the Deck is just acting as a streaming receiver, can it handle a 4k output? Or is the hardware limited such that it can only handle ~resolution of the deck?
As you would expect, wayland doesnt make a good host for remote playing. X11 should be fine though.
* Based on my experience
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.
Could you share your configuration? (Mostly interested in Network) I still see some noticeable latency if I stream from my PC through wifi to steam deck which is connected to a TV. At one point I just dropped the idea as I wanted to actually play the game instead of tinkering for too long.
I play on the Steam Deck directly rather than on a TV, which might be part of it. In the past, I've had noticeable input lag with some 4K TVs even when playing a Switch directly docked into it, so it might be worth ruling the TV itself out as a potential source of error (e.g. by seeing if the same input is noticeable from the PC to the Steam Deck directly, or if you use something hooked up to the TV directly).
In terms of the wifi itself, I have two mesh routers in the house, one directly connected to the modem in the living room, and the other upstairs in my office, with the desktop plugged into it via ethernet. I'm lucky enough to be in an area with gigabit fiber, which made it seem worthwhile to invest in a good mesh setup, and I honestly might ended up with fairly low local latency mostly by accident from that. I've read some things that indicate that WiFi 7 might be a significant part of why this works well for me, but having never tried streaming games before having this setup, I don't have anything to compare it to.
On the software side of things, I mostly use the defaults that the AUR `sunshine` package comes preinstalled with for the server (although I'm not sure how much of that is tweaked from upstream). I don't have any ports exposed to the wider internet, and I have LAN encryption disabled, which likely reduces the overhead a bit. I'm not sure if it matters, but for the sake of completeness, but my GPU is a Radeon RX 6900 XT, and I'm running the standard Arch repo versions of of mesa, Plasma 6, and the `linux-zen` kernel (with Plasma configured to use Wayland rather than X11). On the client side, the Steam Deck is using Moonlight from the flatpak listed in the "Discover" app in desktop mode, with the resolution set to 1440p (since that what my monitor has, and I've found a lot of games lower the quality of the graphics if I lower the resolution to match my Steam Deck's native 800p) and the refresh rate set to 90 FPS, which the app then displays as converting to a bitrate of 49 Mbps. I have it set to fullscreen (since I don't really have any need to use the steam deck for other things when gaming, and it still does allow me to easily get back in to the local settings without much issue even with that set) and Vsync off, the boxes checked off for "Optimize game settings for streaming", "Capture system keyboard shortcuts", "Enable mouse control with gamepads...", "Enable HDR", and "Unlock bitrate limit" (the last of which presumably overrides the auto-computed bitrate mentioned above), as well as turning pretty much every audio setting I can off or at least to the lowest possible value since I'm pretty much always either watching TV or listening to music nowadays when playing. I left the video decoder and codecs as "automatic".
The only two things that ever seem to go wrong is that the Steam Deck sometimes seems to decide to render the on-screen keyboard below the streamed desktop rather than above it, and occasionally (maybe once every 10-12 hours of playing over several days?) the connection will start to degrade over the course of a minute or so and become unable to sustain the necessary bandwidth. The keyboard issue seems like it might be a bug in Moonlight, since I'm able to fix it by disconnecting and restarting the client itself, and the connection issue seems like it's either an issue with Sunshine or my network itself, since I can always fix it by simply disconnecting (without needing to restart Moonlight itself). The experience overall has been so good that I've almost completely stopped playing anything locally on the Deck itself (with the only exception being occasional emulation of Gameboy Color/Gameboy Advance games, which obvious don't require much in terms of hardware). I'm able to play games with much higher graphical settings than I could locally on the Deck, and the battery life is significantly improved (maybe around 6-8 hours of dedicated playing). It's such a smooth experience that I've been seriously considering upgrading to the Legion Go literally just to have a higher-res screen for this setup without having to change much (since SteamOS is supported for it nowadays; I don't have much interest in the Legion Go 2 with Windows, and the more powerful/efficient hardware wouldn't do much for me with my current setup).
[1]: I didn't have a ton of experience with mesh wifi honestly, but after some basic research I ended up buying of two of this mode (which seems to have a version of 6.1.0 from checking just now)l, and they seems to work reasonably well: TP-Link Deco BE25 Dual-Band BE5000 WiFi 7 Mesh Wi-Fi Router https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DKVKLJX3
It'd be on the order of 10ms extra latency, while at 60fps, each frame takes 17ms.
They are partway through creating two new games.
It’s possible that some of the engine improvements could be easily back-ported to BG3. Or even just compiler improvements could be a little more oomph.
Edit:
> Our Proton version runs on the Steam Deck via the Proton compatibility layer, which requires extra CPU processing power. Running the game natively on the Steam Deck requires less CPU usage and memory consumption overall!
Workaround for a performance regression helps some but I suspect more has gone on.
Shame they said they’re not going to do more in the Forgotten Realms though, I love this campaign setting
I completely agree, but it's hard to blame them though. I'm sure WOTC tightened the proverbial purse strings on their D&D IP after the success of BG3.
From what they've said, they were actually hired to work on Baldur's Gate 4 and got partway through development but chose to stop because they didn't love having to stick with the D&D ruleset and preferred doing their own thing: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/baldurs-gate/larian-nearly-mad...
It's a shame, BG3 is one of my all time favourite games. But I really have to respect a company that can make a decision like this, leaving a super successful title behind as they feel it's not a good fit for the team.
Fully agreed!
They tightened the purse strings regardless of bg3.
WOTC were completely dysfunctional over the last few years and it nearly destroyed d&d.
- They tried to build their own bg3, except it was a VTT that they could fill with microtransactions, but they didn't know what VTTs needed to actually be used. They just thought: "Build something that we can nickle and dime all the users of"
- The new "backwards-compatible" edition that de jure isn't a new edition, but with the power creep is a de facto new edition.
- The OGL fiasco that shattered the community content creators who decided to attempt to make their own games "with blackjack and hookers". (e.g. daggerheart, dc20, draw steel, tales of the valiant, dragonbane, shadowdark, ) and bring their communities along to try the new games (including older offshoots like pathfinder 1e/2e, lancer, 13th age, etc...)
Imagine how much money they've had to pay their major community members (critical role, dimension 20, etc...) just to keep them playing the d&d branded games.
Same.
I would really love them to do a Fallout game. The original two games had a lot of properties to them that 3 and subsequent games just ignored or straight up went against, including NV. To me, as a fan who grew up with the first two, it's like a different game series.
They are currently building their capacity to do multiple games in parallel.
I suspect not wanting to do BG4 is at the end of the day a negotiation tactic. There’s an amount of money and consideration that will make them put it back in the queue. But it’s likely at least five years out before they start on such a thing.
They’ll want to avoid the Torchlight trap, where the team got sick of doing Diablo clones and the company kind of cratered afterward.
The path to BG3 existing involved people at WotC playing D:OS 2 and then convincing their bosses that they should partner with Larian. Everyone involved in that on the WotC/Hasbro side subsequently left the company while BG3 was in production, and their replacements are much less favored towards Larian.
BG4 will almost certainly happen, but by some other studio.
I suspect all the awards and giant piles of money may change that opinion back.
You can classify a vendor as a pain in your ass but if they get results, it’s time to look in the mirror and think about why you kept telling them to go right when they went left, and everybody loves the results.
Though it’s also true that a lot of key people have now left WotC and we are slowly working toward a situation where a Darrington Press game is more likely than a WotC game.
They've supported the Steam Deck for a couple years now.
Here's a review of Steam Deck performance from early 2024: https://steamdeckhq.com/game-reviews/baldurs-gate-3/
I'm assuming this is just an effort to slightly improve things.
Yea, I could also blame steam's SD verification system, which just rates compatibility without giving much thought to performance. Cause I'm aware BG3 "works" on SD but walk into an area crowded with NPCs and it becomes an impressionist painting at 10fps
> but walk into an area crowded with NPCs and it becomes an impressionist painting at 10fps
I feel like this describe how I feel about life in general. maybe we really are living in a simulation.
ProtonDB is better for gauging the performance penalty, giving different "medals" in accordance with how good/easily it runs on Linux: https://www.protondb.com/
My guess is that it’s not so much an effort to improve performance (there are other, easier ways to do that and it runs ok as it is) but to experiment with supporting SteamOS as platform in future.
I played it on Steam Deck when it first came out (docked, standard HD display). It was perfectly acceptable, as long as you're fine with semi-stable 30 FPS and cranking down the graphics a tad. The only real problem that I encountered was that the game wouldn't recognize or remember my input settings, and would always default to controller-only, so I would have to attach a controller to navigate to the menu to switch it to keyboard; hopefully the Deck-native version fixes that.
It played tolerably until act 3, same with my M1 MacBook Pro. Act 3 was awful on both.
I fully admit that I spent 40 delicious hours faffing about in Act 1 and then put it down out of fear that I'd never get anything else done. :P
One big upside of single player games is that they have an ending. After playing MUDs back in the day, this was a decision I've kept -- no games without an end.
To be fair, I've still spent a crazy amount of time with the Civilization games so let's say that was a partial success.
You can make it run much better by increasing the game's process priority with `renice`. I know that sounds like something that should not work, but it does.
When was the last time you played? They've been making continuous performance improvements and act 3 hasn't chugged on my PC for a long time. Even steam deck seems to get a steady 30fps.
fwiw, my wife played through it on SD while i played through on my PC. it's a completely different experience, but it's very do-able. she also went on to replay it 4 more times after that, which is 5 more times than i finished the game.
It runs fine on a SD card on a steam deck for me. It is a good travel game.
To be clear, did you test the game in Act 3? Because Act 3 generally has significantly worse performance than other parts of the game
Yeah, I have played through the game like three or four times on a steam deck.
There are some hiccups at times, but it is acceptable, IMO.
Tbh the vast majority of players never made it to act 3
Going by steam achievements it looks like 40% of players make it to Act 3 and 23% finish it. So majority is accurate - but vast is hyperbole.
> Tbh the vast majority of players never made it to act 3
You seem to comment with generalizations a lot.
Here is some data:
https://steamcommunity.com/stats/1086940/achievements
"The City Awaits (40.3%)"
So 59.7% of all players didn't make it to Act 3 on Steam, a bit under a "vast majority".
Steam achievements say that 90% of players have beaten the tutorial and 40% have beaten act 2, so while it's not the "vast" majority, it is true that the majority of players never made it to act 3.
Chugs on PCs? What kind of PC?
I hope to see more games go steamdeck native in the future. While the proton layer is great it would be a nice way to start choking windows out of the games industry. I hate that I have a PC that really does nothing by play games.
(from the FAQ)
>>Now that there is a Steam Deck Native build, is Baldur’s Gate 3 supported on Linux?
>Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck.
Only half a step forward.
This is not a huge issue though. The game runs perfect on Proton on Linux, the problem is really just on the Steam Deck it had poor performance. But on the average desktop it runs flawless.
I'm just happy the Steam Deck seems to be pushing devs to make sure their games run on low power hardware. Really any game should be able to run fine on the Steamdeck, there's no gameplay that isn't possible to run on the hardware. It's just the lack of engineering time spent on making sure the graphics have a proper low option.
The existence of "steamdeck" as a graphics preset in a bunch of games is really a boon for anyone using a gaming handheld, especially as hardware improves. Provides a bar for manufacturers to clear too.
Not supported means they're not debugging your broken system. It doesn't mean the game doesn't work when your system isn't broken.
I think from Valve's end you can't really do one without the other, so at the very least I am sure it will run just fine elsewhere. This sort of mentality will probably slowly fade if more SteamOS devices hit the market successfully.
This is extremely common. There's a vanishingly small number of games that officially support the Steam Deck that do NOT unofficially run on any given Linux box. That small number seems to be exclusively gacha games. A number of those can be made to run by setting `SteamDeck=1 %command%` as the launch command.
Anyways, BG3 runs perfectly fine, natively, on my Ubuntu 25.04 RTX 4090 rig.
Meh, useless purity check.
Gaming on Linux is hard because there's not one Linux, there's tons of Linuses. What version of the glibc/libstdc++/mesa/xorg/wayland/kernel/drivers are you running?
The Linux ecosystem is fragmented in such a way that only open-source and an army of volunteers can really work around. It is really not binary-friendly at a fundamental, philosophical level.
(You're not going to get game companies to open-source their games, except as an exception, and after their economic life is finished)
The Steam Deck provides one well-known hardware and software platform that a vendor can reasonably target. Don't expect much more except by the most dedicated developer.
Valve provides a common runtime/build environment for Linux devs in the form of the Steam Linux Runtime. There is version 1 (Scout), which uses an LD_PRELOAD system. There is version 2 (Soldier), which uses cgroups (podman) and is deprecated. Then, there is version 3 (Sniper), which is the current target.
As of right now, proton and proton-ge both build in and require Steam Runtime Version 3 to run in. The steam client itself is running in a runtime, and I think it is the scout runtime, so LD_PRELOAD based. This means that steam has its own common platform to "deploy" against, and all Linux native games have a common platform to deploy against.
It used to be that games had to be compiled in a chroot for Steam runtime 1.0, but now with Steam runtime 3.0, developers are heavily recommended to build their game in a "OCI-based container framework"—so podman basically—and enable the Steam Runtime 3.0 on steam. I know that TF2 and Dota 2 use steam runtime 3.0, and apparently so does Retroarch. Of course, since there is a podman/docker image, you can also test existing games to see if they run in the runtime too.
You can find a lot of more information about the steam runtime 3.0 here: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/sniper/sdk
Valve has a gitlab with lots of great docs for developers who want to publish a linux native game.
I think all native linux games will run in the Scout 1.0 runtime by default
Edit: I will say that as an end-user, running an up-to-date Linux kernel and Mesa stack is important for gaming. I know some people who run Mint and are surprised that their Radeon RX 9060 runs like ass. As long as you aren't using a Debian based LTS distro, like mint or ubuntu lts, or you are running those distro but get a newer kernel, you should be fine. This matters less for older hardware, but having a newer kernel and especially a newer mesa version is important.
The fact we need containers to ship games is still a complete joke. Windows has been shipping binary games for decades but to do a best-effort portable Linux build you've got to spin up containers with bespoke build environments and tie the build to one specific platform's container image.
The alternative is using (what is effectively) a cross compiling toolchain to target Linux from itself! Or spin up an ancient Debian image (including ancient compiler) to build against ancient glibc.
It's hard to blame anyone for just using Proton, with the perma-stable Win32 API. No build containers, no chroot, no locking the build to Steam. Just the same build infra you already have.
Windows might not have build containers, but it has an enormous compatibility layer. API calls may work differently based on the executable running. Windows goes as far as changing the freaking memory allocator to not deallocate pages for buggy games. Raymond Chen's blog is a good source for some of these compat workarounds.
One could argue that Proton is a kind of a container. It has a runtime system, filesystem, wine itself has several executables and interprocess communication, etc.
Until mesa fixes its dependance on libc, we will continue to need games to be dynamically linked and nothing will change.
(Not saying mesa should be statically linked, but that we should be able to load and use it without libc)
I think valve uses user namespaces if available nowadays. This also checks that devs arent accidentally relying on libs outside of the runtime. (Aside from mesa and libc of course)
use CachyOS if you are gaming.
I use Arch since I enjoy having control over what packages I have and how I configure some stuff.
use cachyos repos, they are doing some good work if you are on one of the new amd cpus, it turned my TOASTER into a RACECAR.
I'm not going to use cachyOS repos. I am an AUR developer and my target is the Arch repos.
Would they work fine though? Is there any reason other than preference?
That's a pretty uncharitable take, given that they already had it working via Proton for years. Sure, there's always more a company could do short of literally providing unlimited support and open sourcing everything, but they could have very easily stopped without taking the time to make a Linux native build at all. Most game developers don't even put in this amount of effort, and they did it over two years after the game originally came out without making any additional money beyond the initial purchase from DLC or subscriptions. Linux ecosystems aren't the only place where treating everything as a binary is problematic.
> given that they already had it working via Proton for years
That's irrelevant, because Proton is literally a Windows emulation layer, (the product of decades of cumulative work). "they" (Larian) didn't have to do anything for that.
Certainly Larian's effort for making a Steam Deck native version is commendable (I hear it was the result of one single employee's effort). Larian is a rare beacon in the video games industry biz for the amount of post-launch support and content they provide.
But my point remains: supporting Linux broadly is a far larger, and ultimately unreasonable, ask, than just supporting the Steam Deck.
AHHAHAHA https://www.reddit.com/r/SteamDeck/comments/1nok6qg/baldurs_...
I don't have BG3, but wondetr if this 'works' on Bazzite in that case.
I recommend cachyos over bazzite for steamdeck.
Running Bazzite on a Legion Go, and got gaming and productivity device at the same time.
My question was about; do they enforce a device label?
I bet it still works, it's just not supported. It's just arch on an AMD chip after all.
It works, I played the entire back half of the game on Linux. A lot of games fall into this bracket with proton of "devs not willing to commit to Linux support, but does actually work".
> It works, I played the entire back half of the game on Linux.
How could you already have done this with the native linux build, which was just released today? I would think BG3 too long a game for that.
Or are you talking about playing the Windows build in Proton?
SteamOS isn’t just Arch, it’s significantly custom and doesn’t have access to the arch repos.
The window manager, package manager, etc are completely custom. The OS is a read only image based system.
And honestly I'm fine with that. Given the permutations involved I think it's reasonable for Larian to not commit to supporting them all. And as you said, it will probably work fine.
Proton titles on steam are illegal in tons of countries: there is no official support and real money is involved. Some say there is some special refunding policy with proton titles: well I have not seen any "legally binding" document about a game patch or a proton patch killing your game for good on elf/linux, and that anytime during the life cycle of the game. Only whining when that happens, no official support to turn to.
Basically PROTON = ZERO BUCKS is the only sane way. I am playing proton titles: gacha games which are kind of free-to-play friendly, well... those without 'anti-non-steamdeck-elf/linux' software like ACE(cf WuWa). They have the windows whales to finance them already, and we are only penguins which dislike to be scammed.
But now elf/linux people will be able to buy this game with the legally required official support.
This game is really not my thing, but I'll go back to banging my head against the wall and throwing my keyboard thru the window, aka I am going back to play silk song natively on elf/linux available since day one of its release (well, this is a unity game, then ez).
Nice the steamdeck sub that I mod will be happy to hear this.
I wouldn't brag about that if I were you.
That sub is mostly pictures of "jUsT bOuGhT a StEaM DeCk", sob bait, random steam sales, and rarely ever anything useful related to the Deck itself.
Every now and then I go to check top posts from the past month to see if anyone has posted anything significant, like the DeckMate or EmuDeck or actual useful stuff. Inevitably, it's all standard reddit garbage.
That type of community may not be your cup of tea or what you are looking for but that doesn't mean GP shouldn't be proud of building it.
The world is plenty big enough for all types of communities. Its okay for people to be proud of the things they lead, even if they aren't things that are interesting to you or me.
I agree, building a community is very difficult, I've built a few myself.
But sometimes something merely existing can prevent other things from flourishing, e.g. due to the mechanism of Schelling points:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schelling_point
I don't have a problem with communities existing that I don't care for, but it's furstrating when those low effort communities squat on the most relevant search terms/domains/subreddits/etc
Thanks for your work as a mod. It's a decent sub.
Which one is it?
Judging by their username, probably r/steamdeck
This is random, but I wonder if it would be possible to render BG3 with isometric camera, and then, on the fly, convert most of 3d objects into sprites.
Whatever they are doing to make the image fit 100% is not retaining aspect ratio on mobile Safari. The cookies banner was initially full width and the content was in a small column to the left and I had to zoom to get to it. I’ve never viewed a Steam Deck web layout outside of its element before.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html