Steam News & Updates

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Rossell
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Re: Steam News & Updates

Post by Rossell » Tue Nov 16, 2021 2:13 pm

I accidentally clicked on a link to this a couple of years ago, you can imagine what happened next:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003BR9LP4/ ... W06T4PRZHZ

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Lenny Solidus
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Re: Steam News & Updates

Post by Lenny Solidus » Tue Mar 01, 2022 3:53 pm

Building the future, and keeping the past alive - are one and the same thing.

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Alan
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Re: Steam News & Updates

Post by Alan » Tue Mar 01, 2022 3:59 pm

I'm getting a lot of FOMO for these like Ive not felt in a long time but I'm trying to keep to my resolution of stop-bloody-spending.



Part of me is actually thinking - sell the Series X and try and get a Deck preorder just to justify it. I'd so do a straight swap for a Series X with no hesitation ;)
A man who could tell more truth and eat fewer pies.

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Wrathbone
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Re: Steam News & Updates

Post by Wrathbone » Mon Jul 18, 2022 6:09 pm

Just paid for my Steam Deck! :) They don’t appear to mention any details about delivery, which is annoying as I’m away this weekend. From what I gather it could be anything from a couple of days to over a week.

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Snowy
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Re: Steam News & Updates

Post by Snowy » Thu Jul 21, 2022 9:06 pm

Just paid for mine too. Pretty pleased, I am very lazy checking my home email account, but knowing I only get 72 hours has had me checking daily. The window for my order coming up said, on Steam, between July and September - I deal with enough email at work that stuff at home can wait till I am good and ready again :)
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Wrathbone
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Re: Steam News & Updates

Post by Wrathbone » Tue Jul 26, 2022 12:57 pm

The Steam Deck arrived yesterday but I've barely had chance to play anything on it yet. First impressions of the hardware are positive - it's surprisingly light for its size, it's comfy to hold and the controls feel like good quality. I'm not totally sold on the rear grip buttons yet but I need more time actually using them. The trackpads aren't perfect but they do feel like an improvement over the Steam controller and I think they should be fine for some games where controller settings aren't feasible.

Still loads more to figure out and test. I think it's obvious even at this point though that this is very much a tinkerer's device, where there is a certain expectation of effort on the user's part to get some things working or to configure stuff optimally - more so than your average PC gamer. There's an experimental edge to it, which suits me fine (I grew up playing DOS games, when fun had to be earned ;) ), but I can see how people going in expecting a straightforward, streamlined experience like the Switch could find themselves out of their depth or uninterested in putting the required effort in.

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Drarok
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Re: Steam News & Updates

Post by Drarok » Tue Jul 26, 2022 1:08 pm

Are the rear grip buttons are like those on the Steam Controller? I had to disable those. Any remotely stressful part of a game has me holding on for dear life, so I was triggering them ALL. THE. TIME. Especially in Rocket League. Ugh.
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Wrathbone
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Re: Steam News & Updates

Post by Wrathbone » Tue Jul 26, 2022 1:16 pm

From what I remember, yeah, they're similar. It's been a while since I've used the Steam controls mapping interface but it seems way better than it used to be, so it's simple enough to disable the rear buttons.

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Wrathbone
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Re: Steam News & Updates

Post by Wrathbone » Wed Jul 27, 2022 3:37 pm

After a bit of faffing I’ve got GOG working and to my amazement, Fallout 2 works! :o Everything’s a bit small but totally usable and it controls better than I imagined it would. The fact that it runs at all is kind of wild to me.

I did also try running Arcanum through GOG but it failed to start, which doesn’t surprise me as it’s always been temperamental. Would be fun to get it working, though.

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Snowy
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Re: Steam News & Updates

Post by Snowy » Wed Jul 27, 2022 3:46 pm

Mine is in the process of shipping
RCHD wrote:Snowy is my favourite. He's a metal God.
08/10/2003 - 17/08/2018
10501 :-({|=

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Achtung Englander
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Re: Steam News & Updates

Post by Achtung Englander » Wed Jul 27, 2022 8:39 pm

I cancelled my order. It was taking way too long and I figured I did not need it for the time being....
Games playing : Bioshock (Remastered) / Total War Britannia / Dirt 4

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Wrathbone
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Re: Steam News & Updates

Post by Wrathbone » Thu Jul 28, 2022 8:15 pm

Some quick thoughts on every game I've tried so far:

Flawless out of the box
Not much to say about these - they just work and perform well.

Civilization VI
Dark Souls Remastered
F1 2021
Fallout 4
Kingdom Come: Deliverance
Stardew Valley


Good
Battle Brothers - Great after some tweaks to the controls. Well suited to the deck and could be a huge timesink.

Fallout 2 - It's Fallout 2. On a handheld. And it damn well works! What a time to be alive.

Mass Effect Legendary Edition - Very excited about this as it works as well as I'd hoped. Only downgraded from Flawless due to the faff of Origin, but it's not an issue once set up.

Might and Magic X - Slight pain in getting Ubisoft Connect working and some control mapping required, but it runs nicely and is surprisingly easy on the battery.

Pillars of Eternity - Aside from some control changes for preference, works great.

Red Dead Redemption 2 - Would be in Flawless if not for the fact that after changing some graphics settings, it crashed and wouldn't restart, so I had to reinstall it. I think the mistake was changing it to DirectX12. Oh, and the Rockstar Social Club should be cast into the sea. Otherwise it runs great.

Tomb Raider - I can't remember exactly what the problem was, but there was a problem. Nothing huge, and it's now running fine.


Reasonable
Arcanum - Got it working! It needed an earlier version of Proton and now it works, which frankly astounds me given how flaky it is on my main gaming PC.

Crusader Kings 3 - Good in terms of performance; a bit clunky with controls but totally playable. UI scaling makes text readable. Probably just needs some control tweaks for preference.

Dragon Age: Origins - I'm tempted to put this in the Good category because now that I've got it working and configured properly, it's fantastic and I'm genuinely surprised how well it works with the controls. But getting to this point was a straight up nightmare. The low point was finally getting into the game only to find that dropdowns in the options menus didn't work, which meant I had to hunt down the virtual Windows documents folder so I could manually text-edit the config file as required. Would have been significantly easier if I'd bothered to plug in a mouse and keyboard.

Jedi: Fallen Order - A pain to set up initially due to Origin, but it also runs quite poorly even on the lowest settings, getting about 40fps while absolutely hammering the battery. It's fine and absolutely playable, but I feel like it should be getting better performance.

XCOM-2 - It works, but the controls are a bit weird and don't seem to map as intended. I've played it on Xbox before and it works fine with a controller, so I think it must be some setting that needs changing to make it recognise pad controls rather than mouse/keyboard controls in-game.


Bad
Baldur's Gate 2 (ehanced edition) - Strangely unresponsive and has some strange stuttering issues with visual effects like spells, which I can't account for given how old it is. A shame, as it isn't really playable in this state.

Rimworld - To be honest, I didn't expect this to do well. As much as I love the game, it's not well suited to the Deck at all. The controls are just too fiddly and text is tricky to read. I've left it installed as it should work just fine on an external monitor with a mouse and keyboard.

TIE Fighter - I had to try it! Sadly it doesn't work as it errors saying I need to plug in a joystick. :( I expect there's a workaround but I'm yet to find it.

Wasteland 2 - The controls don't seem to work, even after manually setting them. The trackpads in particular do nothing, which is a bad for a game requiring mouse control. I've read that it's possible with some messing around but I've not got round to that yet. Has potential to be great on Deck, so it's a shame that it's unplayable by default.
Last edited by Wrathbone on Fri Jul 29, 2022 6:03 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Mantis
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Re: Steam News & Updates

Post by Mantis » Thu Jul 28, 2022 10:26 pm

For XCOM 2, have you been into the in-game settings and changed the primary default control input method to the console controls?

I play Enemy Unknown on my Steam Link with an Xbox 360 pad plugged in and it absolutely hated mapping the inputs correctly until I changed the game settings themselves to controller mode. Without that it won't recognise the pad inputs natively and tries to treat it as a mouse and keyboard with the thumbstick and limited keys.

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Wrathbone
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Re: Steam News & Updates

Post by Wrathbone » Fri Jul 29, 2022 5:58 am

I’ll give that a go, cheers. I wondered if it’d be something along those lines.

I hope I can get it working comfortably because it’s a perfect game for playing with some background TV.

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Snowy
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Re: Steam News & Updates

Post by Snowy » Fri Jul 29, 2022 6:46 am

Mine arrived yesterday, so I have nowhere near as many thoughts on it as WB. Here goes though.

First off, how the hell are they delivering these, by orbital strike? On Wednesday evening the parcel had been handed over to the delivery firm in the Netherlands. 9am the following morning they were knocking on my door with it (on the only day I was in the office, sods law). Pretty impressive tbh.

Secondly it is both wider and lighter than I expected it to be. It looks very nice though and the screen carries a good amount of detail.

So far I have installed Noita (works perfectly), Batman Arkham City (works perfectly but you have to turn fullscreen mode off or it will hang with the swirly steam logo indefinitely) and Wreckfest (not tried yet).

Not sure about the buttons on the back of it, I can see myself pressing those by accident while intending to just hold it.

More updates to follow.
RCHD wrote:Snowy is my favourite. He's a metal God.
08/10/2003 - 17/08/2018
10501 :-({|=

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