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Comment by rfarley04 | Hacker News Reader

I really appreciate this. But color me skeptical that the late game will work on SD. It chugs on PCs. Hopefully they conjured a miracle!

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I don't want to be one of those unbearable apologists in forum threads... but BG3's legitimately my favourite game, and IMO Larian have been excellent stewards, so I'll go up to bat for them here; have you played the newer patches?

For the first few months, act 3 (in the city) was legitimately hard to play. Performance, stability, visual glitches, all pervasive. But later patches did do a better job of improving those points.

Act 3's still the most intensive part of the game by far so on many setups it's still wise to at least crank down the crowd density, but it's come a long way since the launch version of the game.

To me, BG3 is basically a system seller for the deck.

I streamed BG3 on the deck, I played it with one of those logitech keyboards on my living room tv setups, was pretty great

My default way of playing nowadays (for all games, not just BG3) is to stream to my Deck from my desktop using Sunshine. Surprisingly, I don't really notice any input latency even with my desktop upstairs in my office while I'm playing downstairs in my living room.

It'd be on the order of 10ms extra latency, while at 60fps, each frame takes 17ms.

Could you share your configuration? (Mostly interested in Network) I still see some noticeable latency if I stream from my PC through wifi to steam deck which is connected to a TV. At one point I just dropped the idea as I wanted to actually play the game instead of tinkering for too long.

I play on the Steam Deck directly rather than on a TV, which might be part of it. In the past, I've had noticeable input lag with some 4K TVs even when playing a Switch directly docked into it, so it might be worth ruling the TV itself out as a potential source of error (e.g. by seeing if the same input is noticeable from the PC to the Steam Deck directly, or if you use something hooked up to the TV directly).

In terms of the wifi itself, I have two mesh routers in the house, one directly connected to the modem in the living room, and the other upstairs in my office, with the desktop plugged into it via ethernet. I'm lucky enough to be in an area with gigabit fiber, which made it seem worthwhile to invest in a good mesh setup, and I honestly might ended up with fairly low local latency mostly by accident from that. I've read some things that indicate that WiFi 7 might be a significant part of why this works well for me, but having never tried streaming games before having this setup, I don't have anything to compare it to.

On the software side of things, I mostly use the defaults that the AUR `sunshine` package comes preinstalled with for the server (although I'm not sure how much of that is tweaked from upstream). I don't have any ports exposed to the wider internet, and I have LAN encryption disabled, which likely reduces the overhead a bit. I'm not sure if it matters, but for the sake of completeness, but my GPU is a Radeon RX 6900 XT, and I'm running the standard Arch repo versions of of mesa, Plasma 6, and the `linux-zen` kernel (with Plasma configured to use Wayland rather than X11). On the client side, the Steam Deck is using Moonlight from the flatpak listed in the "Discover" app in desktop mode, with the resolution set to 1440p (since that what my monitor has, and I've found a lot of games lower the quality of the graphics if I lower the resolution to match my Steam Deck's native 800p) and the refresh rate set to 90 FPS, which the app then displays as converting to a bitrate of 49 Mbps. I have it set to fullscreen (since I don't really have any need to use the steam deck for other things when gaming, and it still does allow me to easily get back in to the local settings without much issue even with that set) and Vsync off, the boxes checked off for "Optimize game settings for streaming", "Capture system keyboard shortcuts", "Enable mouse control with gamepads...", "Enable HDR", and "Unlock bitrate limit" (the last of which presumably overrides the auto-computed bitrate mentioned above), as well as turning pretty much every audio setting I can off or at least to the lowest possible value since I'm pretty much always either watching TV or listening to music nowadays when playing. I left the video decoder and codecs as "automatic".

The only two things that ever seem to go wrong is that the Steam Deck sometimes seems to decide to render the on-screen keyboard below the streamed desktop rather than above it, and occasionally (maybe once every 10-12 hours of playing over several days?) the connection will start to degrade over the course of a minute or so and become unable to sustain the necessary bandwidth. The keyboard issue seems like it might be a bug in Moonlight, since I'm able to fix it by disconnecting and restarting the client itself, and the connection issue seems like it's either an issue with Sunshine or my network itself, since I can always fix it by simply disconnecting (without needing to restart Moonlight itself). The experience overall has been so good that I've almost completely stopped playing anything locally on the Deck itself (with the only exception being occasional emulation of Gameboy Color/Gameboy Advance games, which obvious don't require much in terms of hardware). I'm able to play games with much higher graphical settings than I could locally on the Deck, and the battery life is significantly improved (maybe around 6-8 hours of dedicated playing). It's such a smooth experience that I've been seriously considering upgrading to the Legion Go literally just to have a higher-res screen for this setup without having to change much (since SteamOS is supported for it nowadays; I don't have much interest in the Legion Go 2 with Windows, and the more powerful/efficient hardware wouldn't do much for me with my current setup).

[1]: I didn't have a ton of experience with mesh wifi honestly, but after some basic research I ended up buying of two of this mode (which seems to have a version of 6.1.0 from checking just now)l, and they seems to work reasonably well: TP-Link Deco BE25 Dual-Band BE5000 WiFi 7 Mesh Wi-Fi Router https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DKVKLJX3

I had no idea this was a thing. Does it work from a Linux host? If the Deck is just acting as a streaming receiver, can it handle a 4k output? Or is the hardware limited such that it can only handle ~resolution of the deck?

As you would expect, wayland doesnt make a good host for remote playing. X11 should be fine though.

* Based on my experience

They are partway through creating two new games.

It’s possible that some of the engine improvements could be easily back-ported to BG3. Or even just compiler improvements could be a little more oomph.

Edit:

> Our Proton version runs on the Steam Deck via the Proton compatibility layer, which requires extra CPU processing power. Running the game natively on the Steam Deck requires less CPU usage and memory consumption overall!

Workaround for a performance regression helps some but I suspect more has gone on.

Shame they said they’re not going to do more in the Forgotten Realms though, I love this campaign setting

Same.

I would really love them to do a Fallout game. The original two games had a lot of properties to them that 3 and subsequent games just ignored or straight up went against, including NV. To me, as a fan who grew up with the first two, it's like a different game series.

They are currently building their capacity to do multiple games in parallel.

I suspect not wanting to do BG4 is at the end of the day a negotiation tactic. There’s an amount of money and consideration that will make them put it back in the queue. But it’s likely at least five years out before they start on such a thing.

They’ll want to avoid the Torchlight trap, where the team got sick of doing Diablo clones and the company kind of cratered afterward.

The path to BG3 existing involved people at WotC playing D:OS 2 and then convincing their bosses that they should partner with Larian. Everyone involved in that on the WotC/Hasbro side subsequently left the company while BG3 was in production, and their replacements are much less favored towards Larian.

BG4 will almost certainly happen, but by some other studio.

I suspect all the awards and giant piles of money may change that opinion back.

You can classify a vendor as a pain in your ass but if they get results, it’s time to look in the mirror and think about why you kept telling them to go right when they went left, and everybody loves the results.

Though it’s also true that a lot of key people have now left WotC and we are slowly working toward a situation where a Darrington Press game is more likely than a WotC game.

I completely agree, but it's hard to blame them though. I'm sure WOTC tightened the proverbial purse strings on their D&D IP after the success of BG3.

From what they've said, they were actually hired to work on Baldur's Gate 4 and got partway through development but chose to stop because they didn't love having to stick with the D&D ruleset and preferred doing their own thing: https://www.pcgamer.com/games/baldurs-gate/larian-nearly-mad...

It's a shame, BG3 is one of my all time favourite games. But I really have to respect a company that can make a decision like this, leaving a super successful title behind as they feel it's not a good fit for the team.

Fully agreed!

They tightened the purse strings regardless of bg3.

WOTC were completely dysfunctional over the last few years and it nearly destroyed d&d.

- They tried to build their own bg3, except it was a VTT that they could fill with microtransactions, but they didn't know what VTTs needed to actually be used. They just thought: "Build something that we can nickle and dime all the users of"

- The new "backwards-compatible" edition that de jure isn't a new edition, but with the power creep is a de facto new edition.

- The OGL fiasco that shattered the community content creators who decided to attempt to make their own games "with blackjack and hookers". (e.g. daggerheart, dc20, draw steel, tales of the valiant, dragonbane, shadowdark, ) and bring their communities along to try the new games (including older offshoots like pathfinder 1e/2e, lancer, 13th age, etc...)

Imagine how much money they've had to pay their major community members (critical role, dimension 20, etc...) just to keep them playing the d&d branded games.

They've supported the Steam Deck for a couple years now.

Here's a review of Steam Deck performance from early 2024: https://steamdeckhq.com/game-reviews/baldurs-gate-3/

I'm assuming this is just an effort to slightly improve things.

Yea, I could also blame steam's SD verification system, which just rates compatibility without giving much thought to performance. Cause I'm aware BG3 "works" on SD but walk into an area crowded with NPCs and it becomes an impressionist painting at 10fps

ProtonDB is better for gauging the performance penalty, giving different "medals" in accordance with how good/easily it runs on Linux: https://www.protondb.com/

> but walk into an area crowded with NPCs and it becomes an impressionist painting at 10fps

I feel like this describe how I feel about life in general. maybe we really are living in a simulation.

My guess is that it’s not so much an effort to improve performance (there are other, easier ways to do that and it runs ok as it is) but to experiment with supporting SteamOS as platform in future.

When was the last time you played? They've been making continuous performance improvements and act 3 hasn't chugged on my PC for a long time. Even steam deck seems to get a steady 30fps.

I played it on Steam Deck when it first came out (docked, standard HD display). It was perfectly acceptable, as long as you're fine with semi-stable 30 FPS and cranking down the graphics a tad. The only real problem that I encountered was that the game wouldn't recognize or remember my input settings, and would always default to controller-only, so I would have to attach a controller to navigate to the menu to switch it to keyboard; hopefully the Deck-native version fixes that.

It played tolerably until act 3, same with my M1 MacBook Pro. Act 3 was awful on both.

I fully admit that I spent 40 delicious hours faffing about in Act 1 and then put it down out of fear that I'd never get anything else done. :P

One big upside of single player games is that they have an ending. After playing MUDs back in the day, this was a decision I've kept -- no games without an end.

To be fair, I've still spent a crazy amount of time with the Civilization games so let's say that was a partial success.

You can make it run much better by increasing the game's process priority with `renice`. I know that sounds like something that should not work, but it does.

fwiw, my wife played through it on SD while i played through on my PC. it's a completely different experience, but it's very do-able. she also went on to replay it 4 more times after that, which is 5 more times than i finished the game.

It runs fine on a SD card on a steam deck for me. It is a good travel game.

To be clear, did you test the game in Act 3? Because Act 3 generally has significantly worse performance than other parts of the game

Yeah, I have played through the game like three or four times on a steam deck.

There are some hiccups at times, but it is acceptable, IMO.

Tbh the vast majority of players never made it to act 3

> Tbh the vast majority of players never made it to act 3

You seem to comment with generalizations a lot.

Here is some data:

https://steamcommunity.com/stats/1086940/achievements

"The City Awaits (40.3%)"

So 59.7% of all players didn't make it to Act 3 on Steam, a bit under a "vast majority".

Steam achievements say that 90% of players have beaten the tutorial and 40% have beaten act 2, so while it's not the "vast" majority, it is true that the majority of players never made it to act 3.

Going by steam achievements it looks like 40% of players make it to Act 3 and 23% finish it. So majority is accurate - but vast is hyperbole.

Chugs on PCs? What kind of PC?

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