‘Starfield’ Steam Deck and Xbox Series X Review (in Progress) – The Final Frontier – TouchArcade
toucharcade.com
One of the advantages of not paying much attention to pre-release media, has been discovering many things directly in-game. Starfield is a huge game, and Bethesda Game Studios' most ambitious and polished one yet, but it still feels familiar in many ways.

“After dozens of hours on just Steam Deck, Starfield feels good in some parts, but really struggles in the bigger cities. Turning everything to low and enabling FSR2 is basically the only way to play it right now on Valve’s handheld, and even that drops to 20fps often in the first major city (New Atlantis). The game itself can look very good on the device screen in many parts, but it is very CPU-heavy right now. This has been tested after the day one patch as well.”

  •  Mars   ( @Mars@beehaw.org ) English
    2•10 months ago

    What I’m saying it’s that for many games and for many gamers it does not matter, and you can in fact play the game even if it goes bellow 30fps in the deck. But if you need a mouse for clicking “Start Adventure” you can’t play it without doing some hop jumping on your part.

    So, for the Deck Verified badge

    • Frame rate is not important (it’s a subjective opinion if 30fps, 40fps or 60fps are needed and for what percentage of the play time is acceptable to go bellow.
    • Game can be played with gamepad is important (objetive. If you need extra hardware you need to know it)
    • Game will launch is important (objetive. Non launching games can’t be played)
    • Game text can be read is important (objetive. Most games have text that you need to read to actually play them)

    In my opinion expecting the badge to mean any other thing than what Valve means with it will be an exercise in frustration on your part.

    “Technically good” or “Technically bad” are not the benchmarks for the label. Maybe you should look for that in another place?