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Comment by dkonofalski | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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