Check out Retro Game Corps on Youtube. He reviews tons of handhelds with a strong focus on emulation. I have a feeling some of the handhelds he covers might be better value for your use case than a Steam Deck.

Bleak Faith: Forsaken

I don’t have the words to do it justice, but I’ve heard the art style described as “Silk Punk”, and it takes obvious inspiration from the manga/anime “Blame!” where a future megacity has grown completely out of control. It creates a dark, oppressive and, well, bleak science-fantasy world where all structures utterly dwarf the player and make you feel insignificant and lost as you traverse it.

The game itself is unfortunately quite janky in a number of ways (it’s a very ambitious game made by a tiny team of three people), though it has been improved tremendously since launch. But the atmosphere alone made me stick with it even when it was in much rougher shape than it is now.

Also, Scorn. H.R. Giger-esque biomechanical world, into which you are dropped without any context and left to puzzle your way to the end. Unfortunately it stumbles in terms of gameplay when it tries to be a shooter too, which it doesn’t do a very good job at. Still, a very memorable experience, and short enough that I would recommend it to anybody who enjoys the grotesque and doesn’t mind body horror.

I feel like I kind of fall into this category too, or at least close.

The last time I had a well-specced PC I used for gaming was back in the late 90s/early 2000s (though I would say that back then there was less difference between “a good PC” and a “gaming PC” than there seems to be these days.

But I haven’t had one in nearly 2 decades, have zero knowledge of the current state of the art, know relatively little about Windows (and mostly dislike what I know, after being very much a Linux/Unix person since 2009-ish), and didn’t own more than maybe a dozen Steam games before I got my Deck (now I have over 200).

I did own two other gaming handhelds before the Steam Deck, but one of them I almost exclusively used for emulation and the other was just a stop gap while waiting until I could get a Steam Deck (not initially available in my region).

Also, like you I had a Switch before the Deck, but got frustrated at the limited choice of games. Though I will forever be grateful to that Switch for getting me back into gaming after a long hiatus.

Nothing.

I don’t see any task besides gaming where my Deck would be better than either my phone, tablet or laptop.

In theory, I appreciate the ability to do things other than gaming in a pinch, but in practice, the only things I’ve done outside gaming mode have been strictly in the service of gaming - installing a few mods and of course community Proton, duplicating my SD card when I upgraded it etc.

It’s extremely user friendly for a PC, as long as you stick to Steam games, especially games that are considered Steam Deck Verified by Valve.

But it’s not as user friendly as a console, and it can’t really ever be.

With consoles all games are made specifically for the hardware and all releases (and updates) must be certified to ensure they run (and perform decently), have controls optimized for gamepads etc. That’s just not how game development and distribution on PC works (for better and for worse) and the Steam Deck is ultimately a PC under its nice console-like UX.

Contrary to popular belief, a single dead pixel may not necessarily be considered a defect by a company.

I used to work for a big consumer electronics company, in customer support. We had guidelines to how many dead pixels in a screen are acceptable, and it depended on screen resolution. Basically, in a screen up to size X, N dead pixels might be acceptable. It also depended on whether or not it was white or black dead pixels IIRC.

Why is this? Because companies order screens at a certain price per unit, and that component price goes down if they are willing to accept a certain rate of deviation from spec, and up if they are very strict with their requirements.

In other words: it’s quite possible that in a relatively cheap device like Steam Deck, Valve consider a single dead pixel within acceptable tolerances.

In that light, this actually sounds like a fairly customer friendly response from them.

I played/am playing BG1 on Deck, and it runs perfectly and with battery life out the wazoo to boot. I don’t expect BG2 would be any worse either since the Steam versions are the Enhanced Edition, which all use the exact same engine.

Only thing to be aware of is that you need to use a community control scheme or make your own, since these do not have native gamepad support.

Oh, and be prepared to look things up before/while playing, because these games are pretty old school. But IMO very worth it still in 2023.

It’s decently performant after patches, but if you expect 30FPS stable everywhere, I still don’t think it can quite achieve that. Personally, I played at 24FPS@48Hz in the first act and 20FPS@40Hz in act 2 and act 3. It’s pretty much the opposite of a fast-paced game and I preferred a mostly locked framerate to constant dips in later areas.

Have you tried the Pillars of Eternity series? They are party-based CRPGs strongly inspired by (the old) Baldur’s Gate series. Compared to BG3 they are less cinematic and combat is real-time with pause instead of turn-based (the second game also has a turn-based option), but I could see somebody who enjoyed BG3 enjoying Pillars of Eternity.

But I think people posting issues is way more appropriate than the thousandth “what games are you currently playing?” and “look what arrived today” posts, and those posts I think are totally fine and I will participate in those from time to time because it is fun. […] I’m just not sure what types of posts people expect, most are redundant when looking at the big picture, so I suspect people just get annoyed with certain redundant posts compared to other redundant posts.

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I simply tend to want a high signal-to-noise ratio for communities that I’m in. It’s OK for there to be fewer posts, as long as each post adds something new. I feel the same whether a post is positive or negative - both annoy me if they are repetitive (and both annoy me more if they are wrong or baseless).

Because I dislike noise, I tend to dislike repetitive posts - somebody posting photos of their new Deck is repetitive unless there is genuine creativity or something out of the ordinary to be found there. We’ve seen tons of photos of cats in empty Deck boxes by now - kudos to the first person who did it, but as much as I love cats, those are just annoying noise to me now. Wake me when somebody posts their pet King Cobra coiled up around their Deck with the caption “it’s hers now”.

And while I sympathize with people who have issues and want to vent or get help, having the same issue posted 50 times is just noise to anybody who does not have the issue (or even an OLED Deck, in this case). Yeah we know, the issue exists, there is already a thread (or 49) discussing it. Go read that and comment there. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I think people should at least make a basic effort to use the search function first, and post to whatever threads they found (assuming the existing answers they found there did not resolve their issue).

The “what are you playing” ones are a bit different to me, in so far as what people are playing actually changes over time. Maybe not on a weekly basis for everybody, but chances are that in aggregate you will see changes between weeks. So it makes some sense. However, that being said, while I personally think they are OK as separate threads, I would not object if somebody said they should be made into a mega-thread of sorts.

I can’t give you a proper number, but “high”.

I have bought >200 games in the past two years (I wasn’t really a PC gamer for a solid decade, so I owned very few Steam games before the Deck), played about 20+ of them, and finished 10 or so out of those.

That said, the main reason I bought so many in such a short time is because I had a huge backlog of games I wanted to get as soon as I got back into PC gaming - games I’d heard about after the Switch got me back into gaming a few years prior, but that were never ported/could never be ported.

Of course I bought the vast majority of them on steep sales, and a few giveaways/bundles, but I still spent a fair chunk of money. That said, I am now at the point where there are few things left on my wishlist, and I’m already seeing the number of games I buy on a monthly basis decreasing by a lot compared to when I was filling out my backlog, so over time my “tax rate” should start to go down :-)

What is wrong with someone sharing their first hand experience?

I find it redundant if other people have shared the same experience already. If you want to amplify that same experience or add something to it, by all means, but I think it would be more appropriate to do by upvoting or commenting on an existing thread, not by creating redundant posts that say the same thing somebody else has already said.

Just my opinion, as somebody who hates noise and redundancy, and who has recently found it hard to find valuable content on this sub.

FWIW, I think the recent changes with regards to Reddit’s APIs have made moderation a lot harder, since third party tools that mods relied on no longer work.

I could be wrong, but that was a big part of the discussion around the API pricing changes at the time they were announced, not sure if anything changed substantially about Reddit’s approach to pricing since then, but I do feel like this sub has become less well-moderated since around that period.

I have what I’d call smaller than average hands for an adult male, and I have always found the Switch joycons to be a pretty good size for my hands, only slightly on the small side. I used to have an Ayaneo 2021 before the Deck, which was perfect for me in terms of ergonomics - a little larger than the Switch, but similar shape. The Deck is noticeably larger and the shoulders are less rounded.

That said, I mostly find playing on Deck comfortable. The main exception are games where both triggers and bumpers are heavily used - such as Souls-likes. My fingers have trouble finding a position where I can reach both equally well. Certainly not unplayable, but less comfortable for me than on either my Switch or my old Ayaneo. I find myself wishing the Deck was a little smaller, or at least the shoulders were more sloped.

Keep in mind that if you find any particular input hard to reach, you can always use SteamInput to remap it to one of the back paddles, although that may come with the risk of messing up your muscle memory if you go back to a normal controller.

It depends, because I’m using dynamic resolution.

Indoors or in areas that aren’t particularly busy (e.g. Hopetown/Hopetec exterior), it usually looks quite nice - I’d compare it to Cyberpunk 2077 at default settings on Deck. Crisp, clear, lots of detail.

In open and busy areas like Akila and New Atlantis, it’s a different story. It can get rather blurry. Sometimes in the wilderness as well. I’d say look up footage of the Outer Worlds on Switch (but make sure it’s footage of the fully patched version), and look especially for footage in cities and wide open outdoor areas. I would say it never looks quite as bad as that, but the worst case scenario is in the same ballpark. If you look at that footage and think “gross”, my Starfield settings are probably not for you, but if you think “I could accept that for handheld play”, it might be worth a shot :-)

Personally, I only find it annoying in so far as sometimes it can be hard to identify enemies or wildlife at very long ranges (which was also a problem I had in OW for Switch).

(Keep in mind that I’m playing with an 8W TDP cap - if you’re happy to go higher (less battery life) you might get less aggressive resolution scaling, but I haven’t tested that, since I’m just barely satisfied with the battery life I get now - it’s basically hitting the TDP cap at all times, and I get only ~3h.)

I do. I live in Japan, which did not get the Steam Deck officially until almost a year later, and even when availability in Japan was announced, it wasn’t clear when we’d be able to actually order, let alone receive, a Deck. So I ordered one through a friend in Germany (I’m a German expat living in Japan) first, but also put a pre-order in for a Japanese one as soon as I could.

The German Deck came through first, and I considered cancelling the Japanese order at that point but ended up keeping both. My thinking was that if I ever have any issues with a foreign bought Deck, that will be a pain to resolve (as I don’t assume the Japanese distributor would be willing to support a Deck bought abroad - at least that’s not how tech support here usually works for most companies).

Right now, the second Deck is really just a fallback in case my original Deck ever breaks down. I charge it occasionally and sometimes I play on it, but mostly I use the original Deck because some data (mods, non-cloud saves) are local and I don’t want to bother keeping them synced manually. I appreciate the peace of mind of having redundancy, as the Deck is for all intents and purposes my only gaming device and gaming is my main hobby. If I ever upgrade to an OLED or a future Steam Deck 2, I’d very likely still keep one of them as a backup. I have a friend who has been tempted by the Deck though, and if she ever expressed concrete interest in buying one, I might sell her my mostly unused Deck for a bargain if she wants.

Nothing, actually … though I might try and install Icewind Dale 2 and/or Neverwinter Nights 2 via GOG one of these days. But my Steam backlog is massive enough to keep me entertained for the rest of my natural lifespan.

I’ve been playing for a few days. Runs fine for me so far, no freezing or crashing (spits over shoulder and crosses himself).

Performance is not great in cities, but I find it playable. Otherwise I’m generally hitting 30FPS or close. I’m playing at all low settings, dynamic resolution, FSR2 with 85% sharpening, 8W TDP cap, 30FPS cap, no mods, stock hardware, stock SteamOS (stable branch).

Only real issue I have is audio crackling, and I’m not sure if that’s due to the game or SteamOS 3.5 (I occasionally have crackling in other games since the update, and it seems to be a known issue with 3.5… however, Starfield seems to have it worse).

I don’t have immediate plans to upgrade. Ideally I’ll wait for a generational leap in performance.

The screen itself doesn’t tempt me at all. I’m sure I’d enjoy it, but not enough to replace an otherwise perfectly fine device.

That said, battery life and low fan noise are in fact very important to me. Currently on the LCD, I’m achieving 3h+ battery life and acceptable levels of fan noise by capping most games at 8-10W TDP. Should I hit any games where I can’t do that anymore, I’d be tempted to get the OLED.

A year without any new features but full of bugfixes, stability improvements and user experience improvements.

There’s long been a ton of low-hanging fruit in that regard, and it didn’t get any better after 3.5 and the bugs that brought.