Hacker News Reader

Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

My Deck ownership is at a point where I don't even buy a game if it's not either Deck Verified on Steam or gold/platinum on ProtonDB.

I also prefer games that have cross-platform cloud saves so I can play longer sessions on my Xbox or PC and continue from the exact same spot on the Deck when I'm on the go. I think I can finally finish Witcher 3 this time when they added cloud saves, I don't need to have 3 parallel games going on different platforms.

The quick pick up and immediate suspend are the killer features for me. The Spouse Acceptance Factor is pretty good for a device I can play with on the couch and be semi-present. Instead of me taking up the TV or being in my own dark corner playing with my gaming PC.

I've finished more games during this fall on the deck than my PC during the last two years.

View on HN

> The quick pick up and immediate suspend are the killer features for me.

Yep, this has been the killer feature for me too.

When playing a game involves closing out some other stuff, starting up steam, starting up the game, waiting for it to load, loading my save, waiting for it to load, playing for a bit, saving, exiting to the menu, exiting the game, etc... there's a certain minimum commitment of time involved.

When I can just tap the power button and get dropped back in the game where I left it, and when the next distraction comes up just tap it again (in a menu, in a cutscene, anywhere) and put it back down... suddenly all those little 20 minute chunks of dead time where I'd be doom-scrolling the internet can turn into gaming time.

Even when I _am_ sitting at my desk, I often just dock my Steam Deck and play with a controller on my monitor instead of firing up the game on my PC because it's so convenient. (The fact that it also doesn't heat my office up to 85 degrees like my PC is a bonus as well.)

That's genuinely a huge selling point I never even factored or was marketed/informed about!

Well for the record, this has been standard functionality for mobile consoles in the past - both Playstation Vita and Nintendo Switch have the same instant suspend mechanics. Not sure about the TV-connected consoles as I never had one.

With the Playstation 4, you can put the console in sleep mode and resume from where you left off. As long as you don't switch to something else (another game), it will stay in the background.

As a grown ass adult with children, I have no time to sit through several hours in a single shot. So this has been invaluable.

I'm amazed how well it works for the games I tried and how quickly it resumes.

It does drain the batteries relatively quickly while in stand by though

> The Spouse Acceptance Factor is pretty good for a device I can play with on the couch and be semi-present.

I even get away with playing in bed as a "kill time until I feel sleepy" activity. Nothing else other than browsing a phone has reached this level of acceptance.

(I must admit I do have an unusually tolerant partner...)

>I've finished more games during this fall on the deck than my PC during the last two years.

I can say the same, but about single-player games. I play games very often (you can call me addict if you want), but every time i get to my PC i always get dragged into some coop/multiplayer game by my friends. While with deck, i can just drop to bed, fire up some game i've been delaying to play for 5 years, and finally complete it. Almost without distractions.

There's something magical about a single-purpose device.

There is no web browser, Discord, Spotify, IRC or anything. Just you and a thousand games you promised yourself you'd finish some day =)

Well it isn't single-purpose, you can get browser, discord, spotify, irc or anything just by swapping to desktop mode... But i'd rather use my phone or pc for that and leave deck for games.

Also, on steamdeck subreddit i saw people using it as their main PC (not much power, but definitely more than enough for majority of day-to-day tasks, especially with external monitor). I recall motorola razr (android one) had dualboot (android + ubuntu), and when plugged to external monitor you was able to use it as a small PC. But due to pretty weak hardware back in 2011, this idea never took off.

Of course you _can_, but in Steam Mode they're not readily available and won't entice you to check hackernews just this once =)

> There's something magical about a single-purpose device.

A couple of times a year I think about whether I should ditch music streaming and pick up an old iPod

huh, I have all but IRC in steam mode though, just gotta add them as an "External Game" to steam while in desktop mode and it becomes available in steam mode

This is almost exactly my experience. I'm the type of person that's not great to shop for gifts for because I mostly buy the things I want and am minimal in what I want. My wife knows this, though, and just told everyone to buy me Steam gift cards for Xmas now that I have my Steam Deck.

My only complaint right now is that, for some reason, it seems like my cloud saves on Steam also saved the configurations for some games so my graphics settings always revert to the settings saved on the Steam Deck, even when I play on my PC. Titanfall 2, for example, crashes when I open it on my PC the first time after playing on the Steam Deck but then restarts and runs fine afterwards (albeit with the settings from the Steam Deck). Changing the graphics settings back words until I play again on my Steam Deck (which lags horribly until I reset the settings back to Steam Deck defaults).

That's up to the developers, graphics settings should not be synced. Unfortunately some games just dump all settings in there.

Steam Cloud docs explicitely mention this:

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/cloud#1

> Avoid machine specific configurations such as video settings.

I didn’t realise Steam Deck was capable of playing Titanfall 2. I loved that game (coulda used more giant robot battles, though!). How well does Titanfall 2 play on Steam Deck?

I played it all the way on the Deck with zero issues.

It's the first game that made first person wall running actually fun and easy to do even for a casual player like me.

It plays really, really well. So well, in fact, that I played it and beat it on the Deck and then played it again on my PC hooked up to the TV. Great game, great experience, and (as they advertise) great on Deck.

Oh, that's great to hear that Titanfall 2 runs on Steam Deck (apart from that crashing/over-syncing problem).

I'm guessing you own the game on Steam and not from EA/Origin? Are you using the base game or Northstar? If Northstar, did you have more trouble setting that up than on your Windows PC?

Yes, through Steam but Origin/EA's launcher gets installed too. I'm not familiar with Northstar so I guess the base game? I'm looking that up now.

Northstar is a modding framework/launcher: https://github.com/R2Northstar

Yup, Northstar lets you self-host multiplayer servers for Titanfall 2, with non-standard game modes, settings, and map rotations. And with the Northstar client (modded TF|2 app) you can access a server browser for Northstar servers, so you don't need to go through the official servers at all.

Northstar first got really popular in a period when the official Titanfall 2 servers were extremely unreliable - you'd either be stuck matchmaking forever even with a supposedly large number of players online, or you'd start a game with 12 players and be lucky to have 3 or 4 of them still connected by the end. Most people blamed the problems on DDoS attackers, and although the game developer Respawn acknowledged the problems, they never really delivered a server-side or client-side fix for them. So, the only enjoyable way to play TF|2 on PC was with Northstar.

> on the deck than my PC

I have some games in Steam, but actually don't like to use a PC to play games, so the steamdeck looks like a viable alternative.

Thanks for this!

I did the math when I preordered my Deck last year, it was cheaper to get the max version of the deck than it would've cost me to upgrade my gaming pc to a reasonable level. Even with the official dock and dbrand case + screen protector it was still less than a GPU would've been :D

Cool, many thanks again!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com