Steam Deck?

[Eagle_of_Fire]

Alright, so I'm already extremely biased against the Steam Deck. I think that's a very backward decision to go with a console level item to play PC games. If anything in the past decade I think console games already managed to take way too much space in PC gaming, to the point of completely degrading most PC games content. How? Well for starters and just off my head, how about the fact that we have at least 256 buttons on our keyboard but when you play games you suddenly only seem to have like 5 available to you. With some games not even offering remapping at all.

This however, and I completely realise it, is only my opinion. Not going to start whining and try to stop people from getting themselves a deck and try using it... However... Since I need to start somewhere so I can form a realistic and honest opinion and that I just saw Rimworld News snippet about them working on integrating the game for the Steam Deck...

Here is the question: how on earth is it worthwhile for someone (anyone really) to go and play games like Rimworld with what is basically a weak computer linked to a controller..? I seriously question the quality of life option of playing such a game with a controller instead of a mouse. More over, how could a glorified (quite beefier) GameBoy compete with an actual computer in term of lag and game experience?

I'm really puzzled about this. For me, the first thing going thru my head is always "but why?" followed by "this is wasted dev time". What about you guys?

[Vermillion Cardinal]

I do agree with the view that some games are better experienced with a keyboard, mouse, and a sizeable screen (years back I couldn't wrap my head around the idea of playing an intensive RTS or a game like Tropico on mobile platforms; it just feels clunky and cramped to me), and that any concessions that negatively impact the PC experience are a potential cause for concern.

Beyond that, the whole thing just flies under my radar because I'm not the target group that's interested in it. I'm not bound to play on the Deck because it exists, and I'm not an authority to deny others from doing so if that's what they want.

Whether it's really a waste of dev time is up to the devs themselves to decide; to me as a consumer the only potential loss for now would be delays in DLC releases which isn't a big deal in this case as we've got great modders coming up with stuff to entertain us in the meantime (aside from the fact that the gaming world doesn't only consist of RimWorld, of course).

[Jigain]

Originally posted by Eagle_of_Fire:

how about the fact that we have at least 256 buttons on our keyboard

What kind of monster keyboard do you use? Standard is just over 100.

[Wasted]

some games are better on a controller. an example is racing games and fighting games like street fighter type. also some types of platformers

for a game like rimworld im not at all interested in trying to play it on a steam deck.

some games are also much better with a touch screen. mobile game clash of clans for example

[Eagle_of_Fire]

Originally posted by Jigain:

Originally posted by Eagle_of_Fire:

how about the fact that we have at least 256 buttons on our keyboard

What kind of monster keyboard do you use? Standard is just over 100.

Yeah, you're right. Must be an artifact of me counting those double keys we get with other languages. My first language is French (Canadian) and so we have a lot of combinations to get the accents and the like.

My point still stand tho.

Edit: I guess I maybe should have said 256 characters instead?

[Tomibouzu]

Originally posted by Eagle_of_Fire:

Alright, so I'm already extremely biased against the Steam Deck. I think that's a very backward decision to go with a console level item to play PC games. If anything in the past decade I think console games already managed to take way too much space in PC gaming, to the point of completely degrading most PC games content. How? Well for starters and just off my head, how about the fact that we have at least 256 buttons on our keyboard but when you play games you suddenly only seem to have like 5 available to you. With some games not even offering remapping at all.

This however, and I completely realise it, is only my opinion. Not going to start whining and try to stop people from getting themselves a deck and try using it... However... Since I need to start somewhere so I can form a realistic and honest opinion and that I just saw Rimworld News snippet about them working on integrating the game for the Steam Deck...

Here is the question: how on earth is it worthwhile for someone (anyone really) to go and play games like Rimworld with what is basically a weak computer linked to a controller..? I seriously question the quality of life option of playing such a game with a controller instead of a mouse. More over, how could a glorified (quite beefier) GameBoy compete with an actual computer in term of lag and game experience?

I'm really puzzled about this. For me, the first thing going thru my head is always "but why?" followed by "this is wasted dev time". What about you guys?

thing you're missing about the steam deck is it doesnt directly run the game. you're using your pc to stream to the steamdeck. It does have the physical controls, but also customizable touch screen controls you can set. I wouldnt say its for everyone, but I imagine there is a decent market for the ability to turn their beefy rig into something portable with no or minimal performance loss. On a game like rimworld i can see it being quite good. There are obviously a ton of games i wouldnt even try to touch with the steam deck.

[Wasted]

The steam deck is a mini steam os PC with an AMD APU, i think you are thinking of steam link?

[Eagle_of_Fire]

I'm sure that there is many "games" on Steam which are not hardware intensive... But Rimworld certainly is not one of them for sure. Especially when you use mods. And I'm pretty sure a very big amount (maybe even the majority) of Rimworld players are going to tell you they don't find it worthwhile playing without mods.

Heck, the only reason why I even still play this game is because of Save My Ship 2. And I play with bigger size maps. Are you telling me that a hardware a third of the size of a laptop is able to do what most laptops would not be able to? I very seriously doubt that.

Originally posted by Tomibouzu:

thing you're missing about the steam deck is it doesnt directly run the game. you're using your pc to stream to the steamdeck. It does have the physical controls, but also customizable touch screen controls you can set. I wouldnt say its for everyone, but I imagine there is a decent market for the ability to turn their beefy rig into something portable with no or minimal performance loss. On a game like rimworld i can see it being quite good. There are obviously a ton of games i wouldnt even try to touch with the steam deck.

See, I of course didn't know that but it make it even more stupid to me. It also confuse me the heck of a lot when people like the above quote in this post try to pretend they are simply going to use it to play "simple" games or the like.

If I were to "stream" a game from my PC, personally speaking, I'd simply get a second monitor. All the experience I personally have (and many others I believe) with Wi-Fi and other streaming options like Remote Play Together is enough for me to never want to go this route ever in the first place. Heck, I even still have a cord mouse and a cord headset just because of the same general idea that I don't want to lose quality or battery in the middle of something I might not be able to pause.

This is one thing. The second is that most people look at hardware like a Steam Deck and they think that's an entry level to playing games. Isn't true? Especially when you keep hearing people saying stupid things like "not everyone can afford to have a nice PC" as if it was harder nowaday to get a "decent PC" than it was 20 years ago when I started buying my first one. I have to say that's very puzzling considering an average person can easily build himself a "decent PC" for under a thousand dollars. Or if you really can't because you're poor as heck (like I was 20 years ago) then you do with what you have. A Steam Deck is for sure not going to be in your cards in such a situation so how is this kind of argument not simply moot by default?

[Eagle_of_Fire]

Judging by the specs you are telling me it is absolutely nonsense that a rig with those specs would run about anything modern. 4gb of ram is generally almost exactly what Windows 10 need just to run. 1gb of HD space? Doom, that you just mentionned is about 70gb by itself. Your argument make zero sense.

Since it was mentioned earlier that it is a stream based portable console (thus my reference to a GameBoy in the OP) then it make a lot of sense that you actually need a beefy PC in the first place which is the hardware actually doing the job. The Steam Deck would simply become a media device to which the visuals and the control are given for the game, and THAT don't require much hardware at all to achieve.

Still mean that you need that PC before hand tho. Which mean that arguments about "can't afford a nice PC" don't hold up. It is like an extra that you add to your PC simply to have a portable hand held hardware with you. Sorry to break it to you guys but this is far from a new concept. Heck, you could buy yourself a small laptop and do exactly the same thing.

[Wasted]

just to be clear you do NOT need any PC to use steam deck.

also while im not interesting in this initial iteration of steam deck. for the price point the hardware performance is unbeatable

[Eagle_of_Fire]

Originally posted by Jack Reaver:

Just to add on, the reason I'm being such a unbelievable ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ is you clearly have done less than zero research on the Steam Deck and immediately went onto the forums to complain because you don't use a Steam Deck, therefor it's useless to you.

I came here to forge an opinion as I've clearly stated in my OP. So if you are intentionally being misleading and an "unbelievable something" as you are saying then you are doing of your own volition. I take absolutely zero responsibility in this and I also simply roll my eyes at your pretension of even having a hint of my intentions or judgement of the subject.

Not to mention the fact that nobody would ever run Rimworld with such specs. Since when do someone look at the minimum requirement of a game and expect same game to actually perform under those? Even 20 years ago we used to double those specs to make sure you had a computer able to handle any game seriously. This is why I thought you were talking about the specs of the Deck instead because it never dawned on me that someone would use this to run Rimworld.

Originally posted by Jack Reaver:

Processor
AMD APU
CPU: Zen 2 4c/8t, 2.4-3.5GHz (up to 448 GFlops FP32)
GPU: 8 RDNA 2 CUs, 1.0-1.6GHz (up to 1.6 TFlops FP32)
APU power: 4-15W

RAM
16 GB LPDDR5 on-board RAM (5500 MT/s quad 32-bit channels)

Storage
64 GB eMMC (PCIe Gen 2 x1)
256 GB NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4)
512 GB high-speed NVMe SSD (PCIe Gen 3 x4)

Originally posted by Wasted:

just to be clear you do NOT need any PC to use steam deck.

also while im not interesting in this initial iteration of steam deck. for the price point the hardware performance is unbeatable

I guess I'd need to make research myself about the specs of the Deck. It does look good on paper at first glance but where have I not heard that before? I'm pretty sure for the size those have to be laptop parts or similar and they never match up to a real tower in term of performance.

It is however not really the point of this discussion tho. As everybody keep saying over and over, Rimworld is not really the kind of game which would be interesting to use with the Deck. This in fact is more the kind of info and discussion I was interested to see.

[glass zebra]

I've run Rimworld with those minimum specs until ~2 years ago (I did not use win10 of course) without a problem. Had a colony with 700 rats that lagged at night.

There have been posts in the past in this very forum about people asking about a mobile version or sharing their "tablet" experience with other people. People also play this game with a steam controller (as seen by the recent threads when the steam controller stopped working for Rimworld).

People like being able to play games at other places and sometimes pay extra money to have a worse performing experience. The gameboy was already not the newest technology at its time, but that didn't matter. On top of that, Steam is known to jump onto "new" stuff a few years after it has actually been a new thing (streaming, VR etc)

[CunkFeatures]

Runs fine on my Ryzen 4800H laptop only using the iGPU. 15-20Wh usage.

Deck has all the cores and a better GPU, its fine.

Great use of dev time for a great use of todays low powered tech.