Lately I have been mainly playing my usual, Operation Harsh Doorstop. OHD is a free and moddable, big map vehicle and infantry (including helis) multiplayer game like Project Reality but the big difference is that OHD is moddable and so the whole game is a really exciting platform for all kinds of games with functioning client side downloading of mods so you can just connect to a multiplayer server and go!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/736590/Operation_Harsh_Doorstop/
I sing the praises of the game a lot, but to be fair it has a lot of rough edges. OHD runs decent on the Steam Deck (keep view distance as high as possible, turn down everything else, lock the max framerate of the deck at like 40fps). Gunplay is fairly realistic, the bipod mechanics are awesome, APCs and AFVs feel weighty and powerful but this is definitely a game where unprotected armor gets eaten for lunch by infantry since… pretty much everybody on the other team who doesn’t have a better plan or wants an smg is strapping a RPG or other form of AT too. You have to turn the graphics way down on the Steam Deck… but I just don’t really care? I think the realism of OHD helps in that if you get the drop on someone you will probably win if you are smart, and pretty much any gun in the game can be used in any situation this isn’t some crazy confusing game like COD, Apex or another game with constantly changing gun metas and hyper specific strategies. Just pick a gun and go, it will work great lol.
The real reason OHD is one of my favorite Steam Deck games is flying helicopters on the Steam Deck it is an absolute joy, I mean driving any kind of vehicles is a blast (holy shit I have spent so many hours in Motortown powersliding around corners and I regret none of it lol) too but specifically helicopters become a form of psychedelic drug as your mind locks into flying them organically and it is a thrill to master using helicopters (transport and attack) effectively in a semi-realistic game like this. The skill ceiling is intimidatingly high, both for the crazy variable way you can apply attack helicopters in this game and also for the way you can realistically shift the momentum of entire matches by making effective troop drops with the transport helicopter.
Also if you aren’t looking for a realistic shooter… again this is a moddable platform and there are already mods like casualfield that make the game play more like call of duty or battlefield.
I have shared this game as a recommendation so many times but the reason I am sharing it this time is I ran into another player playing on the steam deck the other day and that was the first time that had happened!
Subscribe to the workshop mod “OHD Vehicle Overhaul” and you can mess around with flying helicopters in singleplayer if you are curious (pick singleplayer then ohd vehicle overhaul for mode and then jaziira for map).
Specifically on Deck, I think I’ve been relegated to just Pokemon Rejuvenation, Baba Is You, and Gemcraft Frostborn Wrath.
I tried getting gyro controls working for Dolphin to play the 2 Sonic book based games, but I can’t figure it out with my stupidity and cannot find a used compatible USB or bluetooth IFR sensor online for the wii remote I can connect to my deck.
Minecraft when I want to chill, Helldivers 2 when I don’t
You play Helldivers 2 on the deck? What’s the performance like? I imagine, especially at higher level dificulties, the Deck must be struggling.
I play on diff 7 mostly, I use the deck presets with the regular eye candy things turned off (motion blur, bloom, others) and average around 40 frames. It’s a worse experience than desktop (my gaming PC is pretty beefy and plays it at 4k/60fps native) but totally playable. Even at diff 10 it’s not that bad but with many things on screen and explosions and stuff I’ll drop down to about 30. I grew up on PlayStation 1 and N64 so I’m used to trash frame rates, if you have lower tolerance for that it might be frustrating but personally I don’t care.
I also grew up with the first gameboy, nes and n64. But nowadays, especially for something like helldivers 2, the bare minimum for me is a constant 60fps.
I was wondering because I tried to play Outward split screen on my friend’s TV and, even turning resolution and graphics way down, the Deck barely got to 40 FPS.
not a deck, but a legion go and I am enjoying satisfactory a ton.
Sea of stars, brotato
Sea of Stars is a masterpiece.
Death Must Die. Just a few more runs, I swear.
V Rising. I’d rather play it on my desktop most of the time but I just want that couch chill at the end of the day
I’ve been playing a lot of Nexomon Extinction, Slay the Princess, Sonic Mania, and Resident Evil 7
Fallout 4 for those end world vibes.
Waiting to see if Clair Obscura gets any performance patches. Heard mixed reviews about it running on Deck.
I’m playing Clair Obscur. It runs at about 30 fps if you put everything on Low and use TSR with 60% resolution.
Are the biomes really big? Have you experienced any dips in fps in higher demand areas?
So far every area seems to be relatively small. Like Doom 2016 arenas. Dungeons seem to be self contained and the Overworld is zoomed out, so it’s not so large either. Only stutters I have noticed were shortly after resuming from standby but they are gone after a minute. But I don’t play with an FPS counter visible so that’s only based on my feelings.
At the beginning there are huge crowds of people but that doesn’t seem to influence FPS at all. And at some points I was astonished at how good a cut scene looks, thinking it was pre recorded but then I noticed the characters wearing my custom clothes
In the end FPS are only important in the fights to hit the QTEs. And they are very limited in scope. Only effects could be a problem, that’s why they are most important to keep at Low.
Thank you. I was worried that it would slowdown in bigger areas. I heard the QTEs are punishing but happy to hear the game is playable.
I’m playing Clair Obscura and it’s running acceptably well by my standards.
The game hides some graphics settings on deck by default and uses a deck specific present. You can re-enable the settings by using the launch option
SteamDeck=0 %command%, and customize it to your liking. I’ve been following this video’s settings and have been pretty happy with the results. Basically it’s TSR to low, shadow and post processing to low, film grain off, chromatica off, motion blur off, any other option to medium, FPS cap to 30.Clair’s default graphics on Deck are unbelievably ugly, doing the SteamDeck=0 thing is mandatory. I was never great with reaction games, so the slight framerate loss means I go from “missing counters 98% of the time” to “missing counters 98.2% of the time”. I’ll take that.
Thanks for the video. Looks pretty good to me. I’m usually more concerned about stable framerate even if it’s 30fps. I’ll probably pick it up this weekend now.
Valheim.
Valheim somehow still feels underrated to me even though it is a massively successful game, it is just so damn good at it’s fundamentals.
Aurelia
Having looked that up, I’m curious how you hold your deck with only one hand.
https://getmechanism.com/en-ca/products/gaming-pillow
If there’s a will, there’s a way.
My big two games recently have been Blue Prince (which I made a post raving about a week ago), and Clair Obscura: Expedition 33.
Blue Prince is a fantastic puzzle game/rogue-likes mix, and as someone who enjoys both genres I’ve found their combination is fantastic. Really satisfying game for me, I didn’t close the game on my deck for about a week after first trying it. I’m not done with it yet either, lots more to discover.
Clair Obscura Expedition 33 is a really flashy turn based JRPG made by a team of 30 people who quit Ubisoft because they wanted to make good games. It has incredible production values for such a small team and puts a lot of AAA games to shame. It pushes the deck performance wise, but I think it performs acceptably after tweaking some settings. I’d recommend people follow this guide for making it run it’s best, but the TL;DW is:
The game hides some graphics settings on deck by default and uses a deck specific present. You can re-enable the settings by using the launch option
SteamDeck=0 %command%, and customize it to your liking. Basically it’s TSR to low, shadow and post processing to low, film grain off, chromatica off, motion blur off, any other option to medium, FPS capped at 30.I’ve been playing Expedition 33 on desktop Linux, and it’s really great. It really does put a lot of other games to shame. Good to know it works acceptably on the Deck.
Pkmn unbound, magicraft, modded balatro
Heck of a time
Astral ascent just got a new 2.0 update for like 10 bucks. Great little roguelite and I’m excited to play it again with the new content when I get home.
