Post by account_disabled on Jan 28, 2024 6:29:06 GMT
Balkur Gates 3 is a delight on the Steam Deck - although sometimes I can't tell what's going on. I thought that might be the case. Everything I'd seen about Balkur Gates 3 before I downloaded it promised an expansive and expansive adventure, and all the gameplay streams I watched on Twitch showed incredibly detailed characters and worlds. I'm sure most of these streamers were playing the game on high-end devices. I thought that Steam Deck, which recently faced some difficulties with The Last of Us Part I , might not be the best place for Larian Studios' new RPG game. That said, the game looks like a lot of fun, and since it's not coming to PS5 until September , I really wanted to find a way to play it faster. After reading my colleagues, I became even more interested in Ash Parrish's Beginner's Guide . And then, after a few days Balkur Gates 3 was officially launched, I saw that it was confirmed on Steam Deck . I knew it didn't mean the game was going to be pretty to look at, but it was enough for me to jump on Balkur Gates 3 on my Steam deck. Screenshot of Baldur's Gate 3 on Steam Deck.
Screenshot of Baldur's Gate 3 on Steam Deck. These were non-fatal knockouts, I promise. Screenshot by Jay Peters/The Verge Here's what I encountered after downloading the massive 122GB game: Characters often had a blurry glow to them, and when walking around Faerûn, faces would sometimes appear as amorphous, pixelated blocks. In battles, I sometimes had trouble distinguishing enemies from the environment. My Steam Deck steams like a jet engine and the back of the unit gets very hot to the touch. Balkur Gates chew 3 batteries Steam Deck; from a full charge, my Dec Country Email List projects it for an hour and 40 minutes while playing. (Though that's without me having to fiddle with any settings to get more juice.) Sometimes, I play with Steam Deck connected to my 55-inch TV, which means any visual problems are magnified on the bigger screen. I even found a way to enable local co-op in the game on Steam - something Larian specifically disabled on the platform - meaning the game had to run to control both of our characters at the same time. (And we always play on TV.) You will see that the screenshots of this article are not beautiful, but for some reason, they seem worse than they should be. I promise I didn't go out of my way to make the game as scary as possible.
After I published this story for the first time, Shawn Hollister and I may have found some inconsistencies with Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck default settings, and we think something is happening that made the game look worse for me. Probably something to do with AMD's FSR AI boost, which can improve game performance by running the game at a lower resolution before blowing it up. Both Shawn and I actually started playing on Steam Deck with the default graphics settings, and we both remember having blurry and/or pixelated images like the screenshots in this story right from the start. But when Sean did a clean install again on Friday, he said the game's "default" settings now look better than my screenshots. Shawn noted that AMD's default settings set FSR 1.0 to "Balanced" and that his game still claims to be the default. But when I used the "restore defaults" option today while testing things, the default for FSR is off. But we are also on the latest version v4.1.1.3648072. (Yeah, that doesn't make much sense - also my setup defaults to Ultra spec for some reason, while his defaults to Medium.) Despite Shawn's copy of the game claiming it is set to FSR 1.0 Balanced by default, when he manually balances the game from FSR 1.0 and back again, the game looks more blurry than it did on first launch. We've reached out to Larian to try and clarify a few things, including the default FSR mode for the Steam Deck, and we'll update if we hear back.
Screenshot of Baldur's Gate 3 on Steam Deck. These were non-fatal knockouts, I promise. Screenshot by Jay Peters/The Verge Here's what I encountered after downloading the massive 122GB game: Characters often had a blurry glow to them, and when walking around Faerûn, faces would sometimes appear as amorphous, pixelated blocks. In battles, I sometimes had trouble distinguishing enemies from the environment. My Steam Deck steams like a jet engine and the back of the unit gets very hot to the touch. Balkur Gates chew 3 batteries Steam Deck; from a full charge, my Dec Country Email List projects it for an hour and 40 minutes while playing. (Though that's without me having to fiddle with any settings to get more juice.) Sometimes, I play with Steam Deck connected to my 55-inch TV, which means any visual problems are magnified on the bigger screen. I even found a way to enable local co-op in the game on Steam - something Larian specifically disabled on the platform - meaning the game had to run to control both of our characters at the same time. (And we always play on TV.) You will see that the screenshots of this article are not beautiful, but for some reason, they seem worse than they should be. I promise I didn't go out of my way to make the game as scary as possible.
After I published this story for the first time, Shawn Hollister and I may have found some inconsistencies with Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck default settings, and we think something is happening that made the game look worse for me. Probably something to do with AMD's FSR AI boost, which can improve game performance by running the game at a lower resolution before blowing it up. Both Shawn and I actually started playing on Steam Deck with the default graphics settings, and we both remember having blurry and/or pixelated images like the screenshots in this story right from the start. But when Sean did a clean install again on Friday, he said the game's "default" settings now look better than my screenshots. Shawn noted that AMD's default settings set FSR 1.0 to "Balanced" and that his game still claims to be the default. But when I used the "restore defaults" option today while testing things, the default for FSR is off. But we are also on the latest version v4.1.1.3648072. (Yeah, that doesn't make much sense - also my setup defaults to Ultra spec for some reason, while his defaults to Medium.) Despite Shawn's copy of the game claiming it is set to FSR 1.0 Balanced by default, when he manually balances the game from FSR 1.0 and back again, the game looks more blurry than it did on first launch. We've reached out to Larian to try and clarify a few things, including the default FSR mode for the Steam Deck, and we'll update if we hear back.