Update 17:09 UTC: they said in a new Twitter post, that they're now going to be adding specific settings just for the Steam Deck:
Our team, striving to provide all players with the best experience, continued looking for ways to maximize #AtomicHeart performance and is glad to announce that it has been made possible to add specific graphics settings relevant for Steam Deck with the future patches. Stay tuned
So we've gone from having all settings, to having none and next we're getting dedicated settings. Okay then.
Original article below:
This is just weird. Developer Mundfish seems to have intentionally removed all graphics options for Atomic Heart on Steam Deck.
Originally, they seemed to be claiming it as a bug and that it would be fixed. A month later though, and their team on Twitter has made it clear it was intentional:
We hear all your feedback.
Removing the graphics settings in Atomic Heart on Steam Deck was a hard decision for us to make in order to maximize performance, Steam Deck battery and gameplay stability.
Our main goal here is to provide best game performance on every platform.
Respectfully, I'm going to have to firmly disagree. Removing player choice like this is not acceptable in my opinion. Give the game good defaults (like a "Steam Deck" preset), and then let people tweak it as they wish afterwards - that would be the proper way to do it. Also have an option to reset to the defaults as well, this is all just basic stuff for a PC platform.
Hiding options in the name of maximising performance? That just doesn't make any sense.
Good intentions perhaps but simply the wrong way to go about this. It ends up feeling like they're trying to cover something up. It doesn't affect desktop Linux with Proton at least (I checked) just the Steam Deck.
It feels just as silly as Striking Distance Studios hiding the benchmark mode for Steam Deck in The Callisto Protocol.
You can see a whole bunch of gameplay on Steam Deck from release in my video below:
Direct Link
What do you think? It's weird right?
You can buy it on Humble Store and Steam.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
edit: They now say they will implement "Steam Deck dedicated settings"? Less stupid is still, well, you guessed it.
Last edited by dpanter on 18 May 2023 at 5:44 pm UTC
On my Deck I almost always tweak the settings no matter what they default to for it; some games will run well enough for me if cranked up more and some I want to sacrifice a bit from the defaults for more stable performance.
Having options is just gaming 101, and to take them away makes no sense.
if they are trying to write an more optimized code specifically for the deck, having people changing settings all the time may make it harder to know if the code you written harmed the performance in this scenario (number of enemies on screen, that part of the map, that angle, etc) or the slow down was due to something else.
later on they an add back more options for people who want to make some tradeoffs or fine tune it even more to try to squeeze more performance.
if the game was in "early access" or anything like that, i think the reception of this move wouldnt be so bad...
but being realistic here: they probably wont optimize their code and probably received an bag of cash from MS for doing stuff like that...
Removing the graphics settings in Atomic Heart on Steam Deck was a hard decision for us to make
You chose... poorly.
Idiotic.
That's because the preprocessor or the compiler itself cannot optimize the code in advance to avoid possible code branching, precalculate things and so on.
I don't know if this is the case, but I'd think twice before shooting in the legs someone that *probably* knows better than us his work.
Instead, I'd applaude their work because that would mean that they are really pursuing better performance, which today is a very, VERY rare thing.
Last edited by kokoko3k on 18 May 2023 at 5:37 pm UTC
kaktuspalme May 18, 2023
In one Game the resolution was set to 1280x800, I changed some settings, and somehow it also changed the resolution to 1280x720. I couldn't change the resolution back it was not in the list of supported resolutions. So it seems the resolution was hacked into the configuration file. So changing back to "optimized" Settings wasn't easy after that, not doable within the game.
I kind of like the idea that I don't have to tweak the config on Steam Deck. Or the best of both worlds would IMHO of be you can tweak, but you can easily switch back to "recommended" Steam Deck Settings.
Last edited by R3BiRtH on 18 May 2023 at 7:56 pm UTC
Isn't this what normally happens with consoles?The entire appeal of the Deck is that it's not just a console, but a full-fledged handheld PC. Dumbing down desirable features that are common on PC but not on console is antithetical to its purpose.
I've since learned, for any game that does this, to just launch the game with "SteamDeck=0 %command%" in the properties. It sucks that the game was forcing settings however.That would be a good compromise. I can understand treating the Steam Deck like a console by default, but at the end of the day it's still a PC.
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