Steam Deck Archives - Page 2 of 2 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Good Morning Friends! I have joined the tribe that is an owner of the Steam Deck. In all honesty, it did not take nearly as long to get my Deck as I thought it might have. For those who might be going down this path and trying to judge the time the process takes to complete… I placed my reservation for the Steam Deck on May 27th or 2022. This was considerably after the original reservation start date of July 16th of 2021, and long after they had already begun shipping out decks. I knew I would have to wait quite a while but was largely okay with that. I completed the confirmation and payment for the Deck on September 12th and then received it on September 20th, with it actually shipping on the 17th some 5 days after the confirmation. We’ve heard anecdotal tales of Valve trying to speed up this process considerably and if you place an order today it lists a window of September to December as the time frame.

The Steam Deck comes in three configurations, and part of the reason why it took me so long to order mine was trying to decide which model I should go for. Thankfully I had a wealth of resources talking about the process of using and upgrading the Deck to help me narrow my choices. So when it comes to gaming I love having a bunch of games installed at any given time. Currently, on my desktop, I have 3 TB of fast NVMe storage and 4 TB of slow mechanical storage. So I knew from the start that 512 for the largest model was simply not going to cut it at all. The core difference between the models comes down to two things… firstly the type and size of storage included and secondly for the final model the finish of the screen. Given that I knew at some point I would be likely dropping at 2 TB m.2 drive in my unit and an anti-glare screen protector, I opted to go for the smallest available amount of storage space.

Basically, it did not make sense to me to pay a markup for storage, that was not going to be useful in the long run… and was really too small for me to repurpose in another environment later. With storage essentially every month, you delay your purchases… the amount of storage that you can buy for your dollar increases. Again thanks to the wealth of information floating around about the Steam Deck I also know that loading games from an SD Card are honestly not that different from loading via internal storage. The above video is an example of this, and having seen it in person… the difference really is that negligible. Loading a game from an SD card takes a bit the very first time, but after that, the games load extremely quickly.

I happened to have a 512GB SD card that I could repurpose for this adventure, which is a bit slower than the image that I am showing above and it works fine. However, if you are inspired by this blog post what you are ultimately looking for in order to get the best performance is an SD Card with the following properties.

A2 – This denotes the Application Performance class and indicates the expected number of Random Read and Writes to the disk. A2 indicates that a disk can sustain 4000 IOPS for random reads and 2000 IOPS for random writes, as opposed to 1500/500 for A1 classification.
U3 – This indicates that the disk supports a maximum transfer speed of 30 MB/s.

If you find an SD Card with those classifications and is from a reputable vendor… you are effectively going to have the best possible results. The card I am actually using is an A1/U1 model which supports the 1500/500 IOPS and 10 MB/s throughputs and I am not experiencing any issues with games. Another cool thing about the SD Cards and the Steam Deck is that you can apparently hot-swap them. So if you have a number of smaller cards you could in theory have specific games on each, and swap them in the middle of your play session or while traveling.

I think the most impressive thing initially is just how sturdy the unit feels. There is no way that Valve is not taking a very large loss on the $399 unit because it feels so exceptionally well crafted. On the hand, it feels very much like a better Nintendo Switch. The grips form to your hands and the little sloped areas on the front of the unique conform perfectly to the curve of your palms. Admittedly I have notoriously large hands, but I was expecting the unit to feel far heavier. It really does not feel significantly different than the weight of the original switch and joycons together. The only real complaint I have is right now my shoulder buttons, and back buttons feel extremely stiff to press. I assume over time this will be less of a case but they are at least for the moment a bit awkward. The face buttons and d-pad, however feel excellent and have a very satisfying actuation. The thumbstick is also excellent and feels like this happy medium between something like the Series X controller and a low-index stick like that of the Switch.

Another impressive thing is the sheer number of configuration options this device has. One of the first things I did was spend some of the points that I have been accruing for years while purchasing games on Steam buying this sweet rainbow keyboard. If you think about the device itself it has two analog sticks, eight face buttons, four shoulder buttons, four back buttons, and two trackpads… all of which are entirely configurable for every single game that you choose to play. On top of that there is easy support for downloading community profiles that someone else has gone through the effort of setting up for a specific game. Little things like mouse emulation using the right trackpad and back triggers to represent left and right mouse buttons… sounds awkward at first but I adapted to it exceptionally quickly.

If you want to get really custom, there is functionality in the UI to add in pop-up menus when you press a trackpad, and the above video covers adding a menu to Guild Wars 2. You can also configure different actions to different usages of the same button so that a tap, a double tap, and a press and hold… all perform different actions. However, this also outlines the key problem that is going to exist for a lot of users. The Steam Deck is not exactly “plug and play”. Even the basic things like installing Cult of the Lamb, required me to fiddle with it a bit to at a minimum set the resolution to the correct 1280×800 16:10 aspect ratio. Most games have required at least something to fiddle with in order to get the best from them.

The deepest dive so far however have been when I was trying to get New World working. Admittedly I am not quite there on the control scheme, but it is functional. Essentially with my desire to start over from scratch and level a new character when the next major patch drops, I figured I might go ahead and get things running on the Steam Deck. In order to do this, I had to track down a piece of software called Proton EasyAntiCheat Runtime to fix an error when the game boots up and tries to dial home to EasyAntiCheat Servers and fails. This did not involve going into the desktop mode or running any shell commands, but I still had to know to do it, which required a certain measure of research. Other things that I want to get running are going to require me to do a lot more esoteric things with the device but again… wanting to play a game is often going to require you to resort to google.

So far the actual gameplay however has been phenomenal, and the screen looks gorgeous. I’ve yet to put in a ton of hours on the device because right now it feels like buying a new computer. I am still very much in the “moving in phase” and getting everything set up the way that I want it. I am also doing copious amounts of research because it seems like this device really is the swiss army knife of handheld gaming. Effectively for $400 it appears to be a one size fits all platform and I am going to venture forth into uncharted waters soon. I’ve been collecting a number of things that I am going to start trying and likely reporting back on the success. Here are the things I am planning on attempting to get working.

XCloud Streaming
Xbox and PS5 Remote Play
Epic Game Store and GOG via Heroic Games Launcher
PlayStation Now/PS+
A Plethora of Emulators including Switch/WiiU
Stadia
Android games
Battle.net

Most of these things are going to require some nonsense but given my penchant for such things I am going to soldier on.

I honestly do not feel like I have done a lot with my device yet, but already I am extremely happy with it. I had been holding off on other handheld purchases because at least on paper the Steam Deck seemed like it would be able to do anything I wanted it to do. What is making this all possible however is the legion of fans that are pouring information out into the world. More than a million steam decks have shipped and given that a huge chunk of that player base is folks who are willing to fiddle with things… it ends up equating to massive community support. I even have some nonsense ideas about maybe trying to get one of the laptop devices designed for Samsung Dex, and potentially replace my existing laptop with it.

As always as I do dumb things, I will be giving you information about what has worked and what did not work terribly well.

Good Morning Friends! I am currently like many in the holding pattern for the Steam Deck, checking my purchase history page to see if it has shipped yet. In my travels, I have found out that this exists, and feel like you all need to know as well. I introduce to you Steam Pal, which is apparently the original name of the Steam Deck when it was in development. Since everything in Japan needs to have a mascot, this comes from the Steam Deck Japan regional Twitter account. I love this mascot so much, and I especially love the fact that there is a tiny valve on top of its head.

It has apparently been seen at the Tokyo Game Show attached to the carrying case on display in the Steam Deck booth. I have to admit I really hope that this is something that crosses the ocean because I think everyone would be better off with a tiny Steam Pal guarding their expensive toy. I think that I have reached peak excitement for the Steam Deck, and I am sure like always you will be flooded with testing information when I get my hands on it. I fully expect to install lots of unsanctioned things on mine so will hopefully be able to report how well things like the Epic Game Store and Xbox Game Pass work on the device. I’ve also been holding off on any more emulation devices because I knew that eventually, the Steam Deck would blow them all out of the water.

In other news, I have been playing quite a bit on the New World PTR and working my way through the story and questing. There are so many small quality-of-life changes coming with this patch. The New World channel on the AggroChat podcast slack has been flooded with random observations that I have made while running around. Some examples are… you now get bonus experience the first time you craft a new item, making it more valuable to just craft a bunch of different things. There is a visual indicator now to denote “named” items that drop with static stat packages so that you can easily differentiate them from random rolled loot. All of the factions have bases now, and they are themed based on the faction. Harvest breakpoints have been lowered a bit so that you can get to higher tiers of materials a bit faster and now those “rare” drop items can be created out of base materials so if you really need Fae Iron to craft something, you can just pour Iron ore into making some.

My biggest takeaway is that I am in love with the Greatsword. If this weapon had existed at launch I would have been a Greatsword main. I believe whoever designed this weapon damage-dealing kit, was absolutely used to playing a Greatsword Warrior in Guild Wars 2. So many of the abilities feel like they were lifted straight from that game. I have a multi-slash attack that feels very much the same and a spinning charge attack that can be used to either get into battle or get out of battle quickly. The only thing that doesn’t really fit is that there is a big jumping hit that starts as an uppercut but has a follow-up downward slash. I need to respec at some point and play around with the tanking abilities to see if I like those as well. I am looking forward to when this game has loadouts, which are apparently coming… because I could absolutely see having a greatsword damage build-out and a greatsword tank build-out.

I finished up my night with a little bit of Cyberpunk. This game is absolutely “comfort gaming” for me and really other than ARPGs… the whole Open World RPG genre is my comfy place. There was a time when I would boot up Skyrim or Fallout New Vegas, but now I tend to gravitate towards Cyberpunk and Witcher 3. I am not terribly far into the game on this playthrough and when I decided to go to bed last night, I was about halfway through the initial braindance sequence. I hope there was a reasonable checkpoint because the game would not let me save… so I ultimately just bailed out. I don’t think I am necessarily done with Path of Exile, and am most definitely not done with Diablo III Season 27… but I needed a break from that style of gameplay for a bit.