Games

There've been fantastic CRPGs in the last handful of years. Off the top of my head: Divinity Original Sin 2 (2017), PoE/PoE2(2015/2018), Tyranny(2016), Torment: Tides of Numenera(2017), Pathfinder Kingmaker/WotR(2018/2021), and Disco Elysium^1^ (2019).

There's definitely been a comeback, I feel like I've been eating good on that side for a while now.

^1^Play this game if you haven't. It's so fucking good

Sorry what's a boomer shooter?😳

While I love me some Doom and grew up with boomer shooters, I am not sure if FPS games moving on and expanding past them can be considered a mistake.

I am digging the shit out of Baldur's Gate 3 tho. This is RPG done right. I bought it during early access years back and I literally took PTO off work to play the final release on launch day.

It works great day one. Multiplayer actually works and is easy to do. No shitty mobile game features. No shitty micro transactions. No shitty battle pass that keeps blinking in the corner reminding you that you haven’t bought it.

No predatory user hostile features.

See, every other video game company, it can still be done!

I mean, technically speaking, it isn't Day 1. It's Day 1031.

It's been in EA for over a year, so they've already worked the bugs out.

I have. One small caveat is that I was using the deck to stream it from my Desktop where I have much better hardware (and I've noticed that some games play differently locally on the Deck vs streaming, so YMMV).

I played probably 2 hours so far. I wasn't able to get the controls to work comfortably. I tried 2 of the top listed control configs without much success.

There are a lot of camera controls, like camera rotation, elevation changes, etc and they just aren't intuitive. One mapped camera rotation to L1 and R1, one mapped it to the back L and R keys (L4 and R4 I think).

None of the configs seemed to support using the analog sticks or d-pad to navigate/make ui selections so instead you're stuck using the right touchpad to control the mouse cursor and R2 for selecting/left click.

For context, I enjoyed Divinity 2 massively on PC with an Xbox controller, and I feel like it was much more intuitive.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'm itching to play it, but until I find a better solution keyboard and mouse might be the best way.

I would see what digital foundry says before playing it on deck. They have been very good at settings recommendations and performance reviews for games.

Played for the last few hours on my new Steam Deck (the one with the big disk). Game wouldn't load and I had to select Experimental Proton or whatever it's called.

Once I did everything has been fine.

Playing handheld and I've had no issues.

The text is readable, but it is smaller than I'd like. I haven't played with any settings so maybe I can fix that. But not an issue while playing.

I'm sure some graphics aren't optimized or something but the game plays and I'm happy.

I'm playing docked on the Deck. Animations and cut scenes play really well. If you can, I'd recommend using a Bluetooth controller as I've found the deck specific controls to not be the best. The controller UI takes a little getting used to but it is pretty good now I've been playing a few hours.

The biggest negative is, naturally, the graphics. It's smooth enough, but there is just a lot of blurriness and weird edging I can't get rid of on any setting. In the close up cut scenes that pretty much goes away. That said, I'm still having a lot of fun and none of that was a deal breaker for me. It runs significantly better than it did in EA for me.

The one 'annoying' thing that has happened is I'm the video cut scenes there is quite a significant audio delay. It is not there for the in-engine ones or during combat. I've only seen two of these though and they're right at the start of the game. I just watched on YouTube to see them properly.

Not tested version that came today but saying do not think it's perfect game for deck as most actions relay on using mouse. Also game has some issues with Vulcan so for now I'm using Direct X

Well. I now know what I’m doing with my next 4 days. Game is currently downloading on my PC.

Yeah, depending on your connection, will probably be done in 4 days :)

I played through Divinity Original Sin EE on the deck with absolutely no issues when I was bed ridden due to an illness. Trackpads make the experience good.

My husband is currently playing it on steamdeck and it works just fine!

Having played DOS2 with a controller & split screen, it worked just fine.

This is the best D&D experience I've had in a video game.

This is the exact quote I’ve been using to explain this game to anyone that asks. So much truth!

GeForce Now while you wait?

You'll be waiting a bit, the release today was Windows only with macOS and console versions coming later.