Soulstone Survivors is far more than a “clone” of Vampire Survivors. The gameplay during a run is similar, but the variety of characters, the power of available pools, the breadth of passive boosts, the extensive per-character skill progression… all lead to a game that doesn’t deserve to be referred to as a “clone” of anything.
It pains me, but yes. For any other device MO2 is still the king, but Vortex just runs better on this platform.
Uninstalling MO2 might depend on how you installed it. I followed the walkthrough by rockerbacon, which I think was a simple “delete the folder” uninstall. But it’s been a few months so I could be misremembering.
I’ve been an MO2 user for years, and firmly believe that in a vacuum it’s the vastly more powerful program. That said, I gave up on it with the Steam Deck for a few reasons:
I couldn’t for the life of me get it to download more from the Nexus with the “mod manager” button. I had to download them manually, then drag them into MO2 myself.
The thirty second hangups I got in first load on my PC stretched to over a minute on the Deck. This made the already prolonged loading time for a heavily modded game to load all the way on the Deck.
I don’t know if it’s down to a cache issue or something, but after about two/three actions of any kind (download, rename, load order change, whatever) MO2 would become painfully slow to the point of being all but unresponsive. I got tired of having to reboot it so often.
It doesn’t seem physically possible to set things up so that hitting “Play” in Steam launches your modded profile. I managed to set things up so that hitting “Play” launched MO2, but I’d still have to hit the button in MO2 itself as well — when and if it finally loaded.
For modding on the Steam Deck specifically, I’ve found that Vortex is a more streamlined and reliable experience. The “mod manager” button works flawlessly, it doesn’t freeze or hang after ten minutes’ work, and if you have Nexus Premium you can just download entire collections in one click.
In no particular order:
The Witcher 3
Mass Effect: Legendary Edition
Fallout 4
Horizon Zero Dawn
Spider-Man Remastered
I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically recommend Horizon Zero Dawn.
Use the “Original” graphics settings as a base, turn Shadows down a notch, and install CryoUtilities. You’ll get a very consistent 36-40FPS most of the time, with the occasional momentary drop down to the low 20s (I experienced 6 in 70-odd hours of play); these drops are relatively common for HZD on all platforms, though — it’s generally a poorly optimized game overall.
No Man’s Sky.
Rimworld.
Against the Storm.
If Spider-Man is the newest game you expect to try running, a Steam Deck will likely work for about 80-90% of games you’ll try. Some newer AAA titles from the last several years struggle more than others, depending on how well optimized it is; and your own threshold for playability will be more important than anything anyone on the internet has to say.
If you’re taking open votes, I vote for the Deck. It’s more powerful than any gaming computer of comparable price, and the freedom to play games without being chained to one spot more than outweighs the devices drawbacks, IMO.
You’ll notice a dramatic difference the moment you reboot after the update!
No, but some tweaks available through the CSS plugin need to be updated to accommodate some of the UI changes from 3.5.
I don’t have a solution for you, but I want to thank you for asking the question that finally helped me track down the cause of this issue. I had been blaming my Steam Input configuration forcing the game to switch between controller and M/K setups, but could never duplicate the problem.
Once. A small drop from my lap to the carpeted floor when our six month old puppy jumped up on me when he got home from an outing with my wife.
The hardware took no damage and everything works perfectly, but one of the plastic clips holding the shell together broke off. The first time I opened it was to find out what the rattling sound was.
Now the right hand side of the casing doesn’t snap all the way together. There’s no visible gap or anything, but it does make a very gentle plastic creaky noise if I squeeze firmly enough and sometimes the right trackpad makes a physical click noise when pressed (as opposed to the haptic feedback of a normal click).
If anyone has any advice for reattaching or replacing the plastic clip (without replacing the entire shell) I’m all ears, but it doesn’t really bother me.
For $12.00 you can get the Mass Effect Legendary Edition, which is all three remastered games plus all their DLCs save one, which has been restored by the modding community.
At $9.99 you should also look at the Master Chief Collection of Halo, which gives you all the mainline games up to Reach (including the remasters of the first two) as well as the multiplayer for all of them.
And while the base game alone does fit your price limit, the Complete Edition of Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is only a little bit more but adds easily 50-60 hours of additional story content, never mind the extra armours and game mechanics.