One of the biggest RPG releases of all time on Steam, Baldur's Gate 3 has now been given the Steam Deck Verified badge of approval from Valve.
Valve did also upgrade Proton Hotfix for the game, which they've now set by default which works around some problems from the older version of Proton it was set for during Early Access. So you no longer need to set Proton Experimental on it.
Pictured - Baldur's Gate 3 on Steam Deck.
Seeing it get Verified is a surprise to me though actually, because I really don't think it deserves to be Verified. Playable? Sure, but the defaults given to the game give a really blurry picture thanks to the old AMD FSR it has and quite poor performance at times. Even turning the settings down gives you numerous areas that will drop it below 30FPS which is supposed to be the minimum acceptable performance floor for both Playable and Verified. Things I already mentioned in my original release article.
Even our friends at SteamDeckHQ wrote a bit recently on Deck Verified being problematic on what Valve sets as Verified. As we keep seeing games being Verified that have some big performance issues. Not all the time, the overall number being Verified is largely correct but it does make more of us question how these games are being tested for it.
Anyway, it's Verified now and it does work out of the box on Steam Deck but you really do need to change the graphics settings. I have some suggestions in my previous video on the full release:
Direct Link
There's also no such thing as "Best Settings" because it's highly subjective. Try tweaking it to your own liking.
I've chosen to spend the majority of my time with it on my Linux desktop (which is pretty rare now), because in this case it's just more comfortable and the battery life of BG3 on Steam Deck is quite poor too. Turns out you can also get around Larian's disabling of split-screen for Steam Deck too with a simple Steam launch command, as a Valve developer noted on X (formerly Twitter): SteamDeck=0 %command%
Still, once Larian get a few more patches in and add in AMD FSR 2.2 they said will come in September, it will probably run a whole lot nicer then so I will be keeping a very close eye on it.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: devlandReading the comments here makes me all the more happy that I didn't buy it day one.
It's sad that even Larian jumped on the "pay full price for the beta tester privelege" band-wagon.
It's best to just wait a year or so with titles as bis as this. That way you get a smoother experience and maybe even a lower price in the inevitable holiday sale entry.
brother they did that 3 years ago already
Quoting: 14I am not experiencing any problems with the game. I am not running any launch options, no MangoHUD, the normal Proton (not GE), mainline kernel. It's too bad several of you are mentioning bugs, but I have to wonder why. The game was in EA for a LONG time, so I was confident enough to buy it on release day. I'm quite happy.
Some people can't even get their stock SteamDeck to run this, so the issues feel very random. I have no idea what would cause such a wide range of experiences.
Quoting: ArehandoroPretty much my experience, too. Also with the traps xDSame here. Ditto. Though I did have an autosave that was only minutes old :-).
Still, saving often is certainly advisable.
soulsource Aug 7, 2023
Quoting: slaapliedjeI had two story bugs in 6 hours of gameplay. One was something minor in the Overgrown Ruins, where the dialogue with the locked book bugged out. The other was more annoying and quite weird, at the trap where one finds Lae'zel again, after the nautiloid crash. I chose to shoot the cage down, and immediately after that I talked to Lae'zel and sent her to the camp.Quoting: soulsourceHuh, the only bugs I've ran into so far with 6-ish hours of play, is graphical black boxes that kept appearing (this is on my desktop with 7900 XT).Quoting: RaabenI have had so many mechanical, UI, quest, and dialogue bugsThis. As much as I love the game, the bugs are extremely annoying. One really has to save every few minutes, just so one can reload if one runs into a game-breaking issue...
Granted, I lost an hour-ish of play because I ran into a room where a bunch of traps blew me up... and hadn't saved, since newer games tend to autosave every five steps... I need to get back into the habit of saving all the time again.
The Tieflings were still friendly, so I talked to them again, what caused Lae'zel to float mid-air, where the cage had previously been, acting like I never freed her. Next time I went to the camp she was there, but hostile. Seems she didn't like that I left her in the cage, even though she very clearly was at my camp, where i sent her, after I freed her...
Last edited by soulsource on 7 August 2023 at 6:26 pm UTC
Arehandoro Aug 7, 2023
Quoting: slaapliedjeQuoting: ArehandoroLast night I tried the game on the Deck, connected to the TV, and until FSR 2.2 comes out I will still play on my desktop. There was a weird granular effect that made the experience rather annoying. It was also quite late and having to adapt to the controller was not a fun thing to do.I've noticed that on my desktop, where things randomly become sort of grainy, like a bit of old style film... I actually kind of liked the effect, so kept playing haha.
When reading that the best way to play it on AMD is to use Vulkan, and one would think that's the case for Linux especially... but still it has big graphical issues with Vulkan... kind of sad. Still an annoyingly fun game. Still need to figure out where the Enlarge / Reduce spell is for my Duergar...
Interesting! I did not see that issue on desktop. The original Mass Effect had that grainy effect, and was lovely. The effect on the Deck was magnified by 10 at least xD
slaapliedje Aug 7, 2023
Quoting: soulsourceHa, this game is reminding me more and more of Ishar. You could hire people to come along, but they each had their own personalities and some would refuse to heal others. Cool game, I should actually play it seriously one of these days...Quoting: slaapliedjeI had two story bugs in 6 hours of gameplay. One was something minor in the Overgrown Ruins, where the dialogue with the locked book bugged out. The other was more annoying and quite weird, at the trap where one finds Lae'zel again, after the nautiloid crash. I chose to shoot the cage down, and immediately after that I talked to Lae'zel and sent her to the camp.Quoting: soulsourceHuh, the only bugs I've ran into so far with 6-ish hours of play, is graphical black boxes that kept appearing (this is on my desktop with 7900 XT).Quoting: RaabenI have had so many mechanical, UI, quest, and dialogue bugsThis. As much as I love the game, the bugs are extremely annoying. One really has to save every few minutes, just so one can reload if one runs into a game-breaking issue...
Granted, I lost an hour-ish of play because I ran into a room where a bunch of traps blew me up... and hadn't saved, since newer games tend to autosave every five steps... I need to get back into the habit of saving all the time again.
The Tieflings were still friendly, so I talked to them again, what caused Lae'zel to float mid-air, where the cage had previously been, acting like I never freed her. Next time I went to the camp she was there, but hostile. Seems she didn't like that I left her in the cage, even though she very clearly was at my camp, where i sent her, after I freed her...
So far my experience with BG3 is mixed. The controller experience is quite good, but the performance and battery life was not really good. I decided to lock the game at 20fps. It's not the best, but the game do not suffer from it gameplay wise, and at least I can get around 3 hours of playtime now.
I hope FSR 2.2 will help improve battery life and the general visual fidelity of the game, as on desktop it's stunning.
I haven't encountered bugs, but I don't have a lot of playtime so it might be why.
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