As we come closer to the February launch date of the Steam Deck, it appears Valve are now starting to actually go through and tick titles for their Deck Verified program.
Reports coming in that were noticed thanks to updates on SteamDB, showing that Portal 2 has been through verification. It's not exactly surprising, since it's Valve's own title and Portal 2 has long worked nicely on Linux with their native port. That, and it was recently upgraded to use DXVK-Native, to give it Vulkan support too.
We expect plenty more news on titles being Deck Verified over the rest of this month and next, considering how close we're getting to the first batch of customers being invited to actually purchase a unit. The question remains though: exactly how many will actually stick with their reservation? It's likely plenty won't due to various reasons.
In other Steam Deck news, it appears to be quite a sturdy device, as developer Rami Ismail found out noting on Twitter "Happy to report that the Steam Deck can survive a drop from countertop height" and as an amusing follow-up asking about "How's that heart rate though haha", Ismail replied "didn't measure but I guess higher than the resolution of the screen". I can't imagine how bad I will feel the first time mine gets dropped, whenever I manage to get one that is.
What games are you really hoping to see updates to make them work well on the Steam Deck?
So the Deck will be a couch device for games like RogueBook, Griftlands, Children of Morta, Ring of Pain, Wildermyth, Death Trash, The Fall and Loop Hero. And who knows, maybe it'll pull me back into Slay the Spire!
I made a forum post about Deck-style games here a while back.
But we'll see, maybe the Deck changes my behavior and preferences. Only time will tell.
Mostly I'm interested in the side effects of the Deck. That's its hardware and resulting updates to games, to make it work smooth on the Deck. And software, as Proton has already evolved and will evolve more, and hopefully helps publishers and devs to enable EAC for Proton/Wine. Things have changed already! We see a constant rise of Linux in the Steam hardware survey, big youtubers like LTT and Epos Vox gave Linux some screentime, Valve finally enabled CEG in the Linux Steam client, etc... and I can't wait to see what's more to come.
Despite not being a geek anymore, my plans for the deck are:
Try to install other Linux distros (while keeping a copy of SteamOS handy) I'm curious to see how well a regular distro will work with it. Namely I plan to try Fedora, Tumbleweed, Arch and they don't work, gentoo for latest packages (give it best chance of working).
My guess is that Arch, Tumbleweed and Fedora should just work without needing to go the Gentoo route.
I also want to try to get a completely Free version of GNU/Linux on it like Guix or Trisquel.
If it works well, great I'll probably end up using whichever works best. If not, back SteamOS will go onto it.
I'm also waiting for the dock valve announced for it I'm very interested to see how it adapts for possibly not only being a games console but also partially a work laptop. In theory it could be used for both if it works the way valve says it does.
Now games, mostly regular games like DiRT Rally, Tomb Raider, Valheim and a few other steam titles.
I will also try to get non-steam games running, I want to try PS2 games, PSP games, older sega/nintendo games and my GOG games.
Naturally I'll also be checking games in regular wine (non-proton).
Basically, for now these are just ideas, until I actually have the deck I won't know what can or cannot work.
Either way I'll be waiting until probably November or later for delivery of the deck (I didn't pre-order until Jul 17th so I'm at the back of the queue.)
Just saying...
Quoting: einherjarPortal 3 would have been the cooler announcement.
Just saying...
This was not an announcement, just some steamdb data mining.
Quoting: rustybroomhandleQuoting: einherjarPortal 3 would have been the cooler announcement.
Just saying...
This was not an announcement, just some steamdb data mining.
LOL, yeah sorry, I had to make clear that I am talking about the news here on GOL.
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