The Steam Deck has been out for a while now, and it’s probably a good time to try and articulate some of the thoughts that I’ve accrued while playing around with the device, as well as thinking through some of the sporadic threads of ideas I’ve had which I hubristically believe could help it.

I haven’t gone out of my way to check on every complaint or suggestion for a feature, if only because this steam of consciousness post is to highlight my own experiences.

• The Games
  • DOOM Eternal
  • Dungeon Keeper
  • Zeus: Master of Olympus
  • Stray
  • Notable Mentions
• General Positive Musings
  • Approach to Games
  • Older vs. Newer
  • Backlog
  • Writing in a Pinch
• Problems
  • Glyphs
  • Syncing Graphics
  • Rubbing Sticks
  • Battery Life
  • Playable, Verified, and Borked
  • Community Input

The Games

Unsure what to expect, I couldn’t have predicted the games that I would find comfortable to play on the SD when I first got it, but given those that I have played, it’s clear that the device is very capable.

To name a few of those which I’ve completed: Stray, Dungeon Keeper, Hollow Knight, Zeus: Master of Olympus, DOOM Eternal, and Celeste.

There are more besides, but needless to say there are some interesting elements which it’s worth exploring, starting with the fact there’s no consistent genre to those games I’ve completed on the device¹. There are first person shooters, simulation games, strategy games, platformers, and puzzle games.

This is somewhat surprising, given the seemingly limited nature of the SD control scheme. You’d think that shooters, racing games, and RPGs might be accessible, but games like Dungeon Keeper would be tricky.

In truth, the scenario for playing games which are definitely targeted towards keyboards & mice isn’t so black and white. Because of the extensive control customisation on the SD, and the fact you can macro functions to certain buttons, makes it very likely that you will come up with a control scheme that works for you in a good number of games².

Out of the box, DOOM Eternal, Stray, Hollow Knight and Celeste were obviously near-perfect, and I don’t recall tweaking any of these at all. I do use an inverted Y, because I play games correctly, but I usually tweak this from the Steam Deck controller page, rather than in game, to keep my setup consistent.

By way of individual case studies, let’s look at…

DOOM Eternal

A pretty game, and well suited to a controller. I have played it on a desktop with reasonable specs, and it’s undoubtedly nicer on a larger display, but the very fact you can play it on the SD’s 1280x800 is amazing, and if anything it doesn’t detract, or add to the experience.

Having played through the entire campaign on the device, I do have some complaints. It crashed back to the SD landing page on two occasions that I can remember, causing me to lose a bit of progress; it also has an always-online function, which means that when you disconnect, which the SD WiFi seemed compelled to do on occasion, it pauses you right in the middle of the action³.

Amazingly, I didn’t find myself compelled to play it on my “main rig” at all, and thoroughly enjoyed my experience.

No tweaking of controllers required.

Dungeon Keeper

A very different experience to DOOM Eternal, but still interesting. I’ve been playing DK on and off for years, but I never completed it (as in finished the campaign). Given I had the time, and I was trying to see what the SD could do, I opted to install it through Lutris and added it to my library.

There were some problems, it doesn’t run perfectly with Wine and requires a couple of well-documented tweaks to get it running, but once those are done it launches from the default SD interface without issue.

I added a lot of custom bindings for DK, but once I’d spent a couple of hours (hours!) fiddling with the configuration, I realised that I was very happy with the experience, and found it to be on-par with a keyboard and mouse experience.

Some parts of the game did slow down, and DK is a notably buggy game in places which isn’t exactly going to get fixed, I don’t think many of the issues I experienced were because of the Steam Deck though, so much as the emulation and general DK problems. It was released in 1997 after all.

Overall, I enjoyed it, though I did play DKII and complete that on my main rig instead, not for any real reason…

Zeus: Master of Olympus

Much like DK, and another import from Good Old Games, I played through the entire “campaign” of ZMoO on the Steam Deck, after I’d added it with Lutris and made a small tweak to get it running properly.

Again, as with DK, this game required a good degree of customising the controls, and because I hadn’t played it in a good few years, I also had to go through the tutorial. The tutorial experience was interesting, because I’d be told a feature or function, and then have to decide how much it was worth mapping to a dedicated key, which sometimes it wasn’t. This experience led to a good mapping though, and I would consider it for future games.

I ended up with a control scheme that I found comfortable though, and played through about 95% of the game on the SD itself. Occasionally, mostly for the whim of the thing, I plugged it into my monitor and used a keyboard & mouse, but the experience wasn’t better or worse with either of these playing styles.

I’ve since started the sequel/expansion, Poseidon, on my main rig, and haven’t had anywhere near the same impulse to play it. This could be because I played Zeus so recently though, so I’m not entirely ruling out fatigue here.

Stray

The newest game I played, and possibly the one that I have the least to say about. It ran mostly okay, with occasional dips which stuttered the gameplay. They were the sort of performance hits that could very well be smoothed out with patches though, and I played it relatively close to release as I was sharing a library with someone else, which gave me access to the title.

It works well, it has control schemes for the Xbox mappings already, which made the experience fluid, and it was a game I devoured very quickly, though it is short.

Overall, I’m not sure I would have played this game if I didn’t have a Steam Deck, so I think that’s a good indication of its value.

Notable Mentions

I tried some ROMs out⁴ and found the experience passable enough. I still prefer to play my retro games on the console they were intended for though, and frequently pull out my Game Boy Micro to go back a few years and play the games I first experienced on those cramped devices.

Without trying anything more demanding than a SNES era game, because it was more of a test of the experience than anything, I can see why people would use the SD as an emulation device and love it, but it isn’t an area that’s of particular interest to me.

I also tried a few staples, and some games which are my favourites of all time, but which I wouldn’t consider myself to have “completed” on the Steam Deck. I tried Little Big Adventure, which worked well with some custom control tweaks; and I played CK3, which was… okay, but the scaling of the display didn’t work too well without it being docked⁵.

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General Positive Musings

Some thoughts on the general positive experience of using the Steam Deck.

Approach to Games

While owning and playing with the Steam Deck, I realised that it had fundamentally altered how I thought of games. I found myself picking up the SD on a whim, and going to find a quiet spot somewhere to play for a few hours.

The fact it had a suspend and resume that works very well, meant I could ignore the problem of loading screens in some games (notably the Witcher 2) because I could be confident in being able to “pick up and play” when I came back to the device, even for a few minutes at a time.

I realised that a good chunk of this was association. Because I work with computers in my daily life, I appreciated the difference in comfort of playing with a distinctly “gaming” device, versus sitting at a desk which was nominally the same as my working environment.

So in my head, the Steam Deck is my gaming PC, whereas my main rig is sort of a hybrid.

Older vs. Newer

Because of the screen size, and aspect ratio (16:10) I found that the Steam Deck worked well for new and old games alike. It wasn’t so big that older games like Dungeon Keeper felt like they were being stretched, and turned into a blurry mess, but it wasn’t so small that it made games like DOOM Eternal unplayable.

There’s a minor quibble here which is mostly against developers, and another thing I noticed in Witcher 2, which is that text scaling can be very hit and miss depending on the game and studio, but I don’t hold the Steam Deck personally responsible for this, because Borderlands 2 on the Vita was very similar.

Older games obviously require more tweaking, usually, especially if they are a PC-first title which doesn’t detect controllers well, if at all. Overall though, that brings me to my next point.

Backlog

I’ve not really bought any new games for the Steam Deck; I don’t buy new games anyway, and certainly not in the first day, week, or month of release. I am pretty much a founding member and card-carrying lifer to the /r/patientgamers subreddit, and as a result of that, I have a large backlog of older titles that I’m slowly working through.

Some of these games I would have never played, were it not for the fact they’re quite small, and they’re now able to be installed to a dedicated device. I wouldn’t have ever completed VVVVVV without the Steam Deck, or Wizorb, but I did without real thought, because I spotted them in my library, and thought they would play well.

I like this, because I no longer feel like I could be playing one of my staple games, when I’m gaming on my main rig, the Steam Deck is my “other” device, which also plays games, but is falling into a niche of its own.

Writing in a Pinch

Without getting into too much detail, I do a lot of writing, and I have been required to use the Steam Deck for this in a pinch. I used the desktop mode, and being familiar enough with KDE (though I use Gnome in my usual setup) I was able to use a couple of different text editors, including my writing-environment-of-choice to great effect.

I wouldn’t do it frequently, because of the aforementioned fact that I’m envisioning the SD as a purely gaming device, but in a pinch is was more than passable, with a portable keyboard to help it along.

There may be a longer post in the future about the desktop mode and the experience of using a Steam Deck “as a computer” while docked, but I haven’t done it enough to write in an informed way. It’s just Linux, I’m pretty okay at Linux, so I can’t say much at the specifics of SteamOS at the moment.

Problems

Now for the bits which are liable to cause some consternation.

Glyphs

While not a personal experience of mine, I do speak to someone regularly who also has a Steam Deck, and who found the experience of trying to play non-controller-friendly games to be something of a chore. They told me that the glyphs for keyboard keys coming up, in some games, was a distraction, so I’m adding it here to cover that base.

I do appreciate the niceties of having the correct button and colours pop up in game, which seems to work well if the developer opts to use Steam Input when developing their game.

I’m not sure how Valve can solve for this, and they certainly won’t be able to in third party games, which means it’s on the game developers to pull their weight to.

I no longer play WoW, after the controversy surrounding the company behind it being absolutely horrible, but I do know of people who play it with a controller mod and appropriate glyph changes, and who love it.

Syncing Graphics

We don’t need graphics profiles to sync between PCs. My main rig is considerably more powerful than the Steam Deck, and that’s okay! But what isn’t okay is the fact some games will import your profile from your main rig, and apply the same profile to the Steam Deck, which is an objective struggle.

Mostly, this is on the developers, and I don’t think it’s really fair to include it in the gripes section, but it might gain some visibility this way.

Rubbing Sticks

I have a confession, this is my second Steam Deck, as my first one had to be RMA’d due to an excessive amount of black gunk buildup on the left analogue stick.

This happens when the stick itself rubs against the chassis of the device, and it’s a common problem with some controllers, but modern controllers like those of the PS5 have gotten very good about mitigating the issue, and I’ve never seen it on a Switch⁶. It happened on my first Steam Deck, and I ignored those comments on /r/SteamDeck who said it wasn’t worth RMA’ing. Valve accepted the problem immediately, with a photo, and I had a new Deck a week later.

The shipping and RMA experience was… just fine?

I learned two things with my new Steam Deck, firstly it confirmed my suspicion that of the two SKUs that seem to be out there at the moment (one has a bigger gap between the trackpads and the chassis,) the “newer” or more common SKU appears to be the replacement one I got; and secondly, I learned that the “gritty” stick problem is still present on that design.

Valve, to their credit, seem to be aware of this issue, and while it can be mitigated with silicon rings around the sticks with this generation, I expect the next generation of SD to have more completely resolved the issue.

Battery Life

No getting away from it, the battery life is mostly fine, especially for older games which don’t take much power, but if you’re playing DOOM Eternal then it drinks the power without a second thought, and I spent a lot of my time playing with the device plugged in.

Again, this isn’t uniquely a Valve issue, and battery technology is slowly getting better, so it’s entirely possible that the next generation of CPUs they use will require a lower wattage, and the device itself will have a bigger battery.

There are some mitigations for this that I think are possible too, covered below.

Playable, Verified, and Borked

The system that Valve uses for verifying if games are playable or not needs a bit of an overhaul, it’s mostly okay, but it should more aggressively canvas the opinion of Steam Deck owners on the compatibility of the games they’re playing, from “Untested” all the way up to “Verified”.

I’ve played some Verified games that objectively ran poorly, or scaled incorrectly, or had text which was borderline illegible; and similarly I’ve played Untested games which I’ve wanted to submit as “Perfect” from the device itself.

At the moment, the only ways to feedback on experience that I’m aware of are the GitHub Issues entries for individual games, and the occasional prompt from the Steam Deck interface, which appears to be sporadic as to when it pops up, and I’ve only seen it when it’s validating that “Verified” games are actually “Verified”.

This should be much more of a crowdsourced effort, especially for the many thousands of Steam games.

Community Input

Similarly, community input should more broadly be canvassed in a few other areas. Custom profiles for power settings, refresh rates, half-rate shading and the like should be something which can be submitted to the community, so that other players can take the advice of the profile on board, and apply it.

Closely related are in-game graphics settings, which are harder to implement in an automated fashion, or API-compatible way, but which could be sourced in a nicer way than the current setup we have, which is either: A. Playing around with the settings yourself, until you’re comfortable, or B. Going to ProtonDB and hoping the suggestions are recent.

Valve have proved that elements like this are possible with the custom controller profiles, so seeing it expanded would be a big win.

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On the whole, I’m extremely excited about the Steam Deck’s future, and hats off to Valve for pulling off an amazing feat.