2023 was a pretty amazing year for games, but I’m also interested to hear what didn’t meet expectations or didn’t run as well as you expected it to.
My favorite would probably be No Man’s Sky. I had known about it for years but never tried it until this year. I was completely unprepared for how much I would get into it, and how much time I would spend in it. It worked so well on deck too, being able to put the deck to sleep, and then wake it up hours later to collect the harvest from a plant or mineral extractor was very convenient.
My most disappointing was Diablo 4. I was really glad to see it come to steam and thought I would love it, but the always online requirement and how they handled disconnects really killed my enjoyment of the game. One of my favorite things with the Deck is being able to suspend my game anytime and pick it up later, but suspending the deck with D4 means it will disconnect and I’ll have to restart the game when I return. It wouldn’t be so bad if I just had to wait on the game to reconnect or something similar. It’s also a game where you can’t pause, and setting it down with the game running always seems to result in my character getting killed by some monster that wandered too close and agro’d. Some other games with always online requirements (like Honkai Star Rail) handle internet much better, I can suspend at anytime and just have to wait for it to reconnect when I wake it back up.
Felt the same with the witcher 3, can’t put it down!
Yeah, D4 and PoE aren’t very good “pick up, put down” games. If you want an ARPG on the Deck, I would think that Grim Dawn would likely be the best, but I haven’t tried it yet. I played it with a controller, so I assume it should work great.
I have thought about playing NMS on my steam deck but didn’t know how well it would work on the small screen. I had maybe 40 hours in on my PC, but I got the SD because I didn’t have the time chunks to be on my PC to game with very often.
What controller set up have you been using on NMS? I think I’ll have to pick it back up again if it really does work well on there. Right now I’m in the middle of Southpark the stick of truth and it works out perfect on my deck.
Honestly the default controller bindings work really well, I barely changed anything with the setup.
Can you see and read everything easy enough?
I could see plenty well enough.
My most pleasant surprise on the Deck this year has been Shadow of War. It plays on high settings at a smooth, consistent 60FPS, even in big battles. As a fan of its predecessor, Shadow of Mordor, I’ve been loving it!
Worst was definitely American Truck Simulator. I’d been interested in the game for a long while, and finally decided to buy it when it was only $5. I got about halfway through the tutorial before I refunded it and added it to my Ignore list.
What made you uninstall American Truck Sim? I played a bit of Euro Truck Sim on my computer and I was satisfied; it’s good for what it is.
The UI was immediately very off-putting, feeling like a 90s sim game, and not in a good way. Definitely didn’t translate well to Steam Deck.
Additionally, the lack of any direction whatsoever was very unappealing to me.
Maybe I just don’t like sim games. It’s been decades since I was really into them, after all.
Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War are both on my deck backlog, I bought the first one years ago and couldn’t get it to run on my computer at the time, and got the second one from a recent bundle.
One of these days I’ll finish my installed games and play through them.
The game that surprised me the most was Murder by Numbers. It’s a very nice hybrid of a visual novel and a puzzle game. When I had more time I played the story mode, and when I didn’t I played the challenges.
My biggest disappointments were games from Sony — Horizon and Spiderman. Both of them are verified, but both of them crash at start-up.
HZD I hadn’t tested but both Spider-Men games run great?
According to other people, Horizon worked but a recent patch broke it. Spiderman (the first one) launches, freezes after a few seconds, and then the Deck restarts. 🤷♂️
Have you done the usual, verify game files, trying a different version of proton, and then reinstall if issues persist?
I tried a bunch of versions of Proton, verified the game files, redownloaded the game, installed a previous version of the game. Sadly nothing worked.
Did you undervolt your SD? Is it the steam version of Spiderman? Did you install it on your SD card or main memory?
Since it works for everyone else really well it has to be an issue with your deck, specifically.
Do you have power tools installed? Make sure you don’t have SMT disabled, that will cause some games to crash on launch.
I’ve also known people to get results like that from undervolting. Unfortunately it’s possible it that you could have borderline passable hardware that has the same instability people get from undervolting at default values.
I don’t have anything special installed, I didn’t undervolt anything. My Deck is an officially refurbished unit, so the borderline passable hardware is unfortunately likely. :(
Uninstaller the game. Restart your deck. Install it again, and if the issue is still there I’d open a support ticket over it. If it’s a refurbished deck you couldn’t have owned it that long and it should still have a warranty on it?
I’m responding to both your comments here.
Did you undervolt your SD? Is it the steam version of Spiderman? Did you install it on your SD card or main memory?
The Deck’s basically new, I haven’t done anything to it (yet): No undervolting, no SD card, no non-steam games (except Minecraft).
Uninstall the game. Restart your deck. Install it again.
I’ve tried this already, but it did not work. I’ll try it again, but it’ll take a while, because my internet is really slow.
I’d open a support ticket over it. Since it works for everyone else really well it has to be an issue with your deck, specifically.
Sounds like it’s my a fault of my particular unit. 🫠 As I said, I’ll try to reinstall the game again and if that doesn’t work, I’ll open a ticket. Thanks for the suggestion.
I haven’t played many games on my Deck yet, but all of them—except the two I mentioned—worked very well. Even Baldur’s Gate 3 runs fine and it is a very demanding game. I wonder why just the games from Sony are problematic. The worst thing about this is that they load, seem to run fine for a few seconds, then freeze and crash.
Maybe I’ll bite the bullet and not worry about it now and later I’ll buy Steam Deck 2 sooner rather than later.
I’d just be worried about running into issues or crashes later with other things as well. Some games hit your hardware just right in just the right way to make an error to cause a crash. My home pc spent two years running games without ever crashing. Then I ran into a game that would crash maybe once or twice an hour. I after a lot (a flipping lot) of testing I determined it was a ram issue and I had to loosen my timing up a bit on it.
It seemed like it would be a ram issue pretty early on in my diagnosis and by its behavior, but getting my confirmation took forever. I had to run the extended 8+ hour worth of meanest before it would finally hit my ram in just the right way to log an error.
It sounds like you may have more or less the same issue, though. Only your system isn’t running right when it’s on default values. You may have a ram chip in there (i think theres like 8) that is just slightly flawed or isn’t quite getting power to it correctly and something about Sony just happens to tweak on it in just the wrong way.
For real, just have valve get you another. No reason to put up with a system that isn’t quite right, and it could get worse.
Not sure if I should post since I’ve just had mine for a week, but my highlights so far are Stardew Valley and Sonic All Stars Racing Transformed.
Stardew Valley is a charming game that’s really nice to play while watching something with my wife. It’s chill, and doesn’t take much attention usually, so it’s perfect for the mobile nature of the Deck to play in bed.
Sonic Racing I’ve been playing with my 5y.o. son. I suck at it, lol. I can’t consistently get 1st place in normal mode yet, but it’s fun, looks great, and plays smooth as silk.
The one game I tried and immediately put down was Against the Storm. I’m really excited to play it, but the controller is just moving a mouse cursor around. From the little I played, I was instantly frustrated that I needed to move the cursor over small UI buttons to open menus; it doesn’t seem to have a sensible control scheme for the Deck, and I mostly play in bed, so a mouse isn’t really an option for me. Disappointing, since I was so excited for it!
My least favorites have to be Call of Duty Black Ops, and Black Ops 3. BO1 doesn’t let you play Zombies EVEN IN SOLO if you aren’t connected to the internet. Black Ops 3 crashed every time I tried to play zombies.
My favorite has to be Cyberpunk 2077. I didn’t expect to love the thumbstick+gyro controls for aiming as much as I did. And driving with a controller in that game is too much fun. It’s making me want to get an OLED just so it’ll look even better in HDR.
STAR OF PROVIDENCE!! I bound movement to the left trackpad too, for real precise maneuvers. Amazing game
Biggest disappointment? That’s tough, I’ve enjoyed most games I’ve played this year. Probably Risk of Rain Returns? Nothing to do with the deck, just didn’t feel as fun as the first