18 ms·

Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version

626 points by _JamesA_ 1y ago

snvzz 1y ago
(from the FAQ) >>Now that there is a Steam Deck Native build, is Baldur’s Gate 3 supported on Linux? >Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck. Only half a step forward.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- gbraad 1y ago
  I don't have BG3, but wondetr if this 'works' on Bazzite in that case.
  - appleaday1 1y ago
    I recommend cachyos over bazzite for steamdeck.
    - gbraad 1y ago
      Running Bazzite on a Legion Go, and got gaming and productivity device at the same time. My question was about; do they enforce a device label?
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  This is not a huge issue though. The game runs perfect on Proton on Linux, the problem is really just on the Steam Deck it had poor performance. But on the average desktop it runs flawless. I'm just happy the Steam Deck seems to be pushing devs to make sure their games run on low power hardware. Really any game should be able to run fine on the Steamdeck, there's no gameplay that isn't possible to run on the hardware. It's just the lack of engineering time spent on making sure the graphics have a proper low option.
  - extraduder_ire 1y ago
    The existence of "steamdeck" as a graphics preset in a bunch of games is really a boon for anyone using a gaming handheld, especially as hardware improves. Provides a bar for manufacturers to clear too.
- jchw 1y ago
  I think from Valve's end you can't really do one without the other, so at the very least I am sure it will run just fine elsewhere. This sort of mentality will probably slowly fade if more SteamOS devices hit the market successfully.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- saubeidl 1y ago
  I bet it still works, it's just not supported. It's just arch on an AMD chip after all.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    And honestly I'm fine with that. Given the permutations involved I think it's reasonable for Larian to not commit to supporting them all. And as you said, it will probably work fine.
  - recursivecaveat 1y ago
    It works, I played the entire back half of the game on Linux. A lot of games fall into this bracket with proton of "devs not willing to commit to Linux support, but does actually work".
    - foresto 1y ago
      > It works, I played the entire back half of the game on Linux. How could you already have done this with the native linux build, which was just released today? I would think BG3 too long a game for that. Or are you talking about playing the Windows build in Proton?
  - Gigachad 1y ago
    SteamOS isn’t just Arch, it’s significantly custom and doesn’t have access to the arch repos. The window manager, package manager, etc are completely custom. The OS is a read only image based system.
- AceJohnny2 1y ago
  Meh, useless purity check. Gaming on Linux is hard because there's not one Linux, there's tons of Linuses. What version of the glibc/libstdc++/mesa/xorg/wayland/kernel/drivers are you running? The Linux ecosystem is fragmented in such a way that only open-source and an army of volunteers can really work around. It is really not binary-friendly at a fundamental, philosophical level. (You're not going to get game companies to open-source their games, except as an exception, and after their economic life is finished) The Steam Deck provides one well-known hardware and software platform that a vendor can reasonably target. Don't expect much more except by the most dedicated developer.
  - hurricanepootis 1y ago
    Valve provides a common runtime/build environment for Linux devs in the form of the Steam Linux Runtime. There is version 1 (Scout), which uses an LD_PRELOAD system. There is version 2 (Soldier), which uses cgroups (podman) and is deprecated. Then, there is version 3 (Sniper), which is the current target. As of right now, proton and proton-ge both build in and require Steam Runtime Version 3 to run in. The steam client itself is running in a runtime, and I think it is the scout runtime, so LD_PRELOAD based. This means that steam has its own common platform to "deploy" against, and all Linux native games have a common platform to deploy against. It used to be that games had to be compiled in a chroot for Steam runtime 1.0, but now with Steam runtime 3.0, developers are heavily recommended to build their game in a "OCI-based container framework"—so podman basically—and enable the Steam Runtime 3.0 on steam. I know that TF2 and Dota 2 use steam runtime 3.0, and apparently so does Retroarch. Of course, since there is a podman/docker image, you can also test existing games to see if they run in the runtime too. You can find a lot of more information about the steam runtime 3.0 here: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/sniper/sdk https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/sniper/sdk Valve has a gitlab with lots of great docs for developers who want to publish a linux native game. I think all native linux games will run in the Scout 1.0 runtime by default Edit: I will say that as an end-user, running an up-to-date Linux kernel and Mesa stack is important for gaming. I know some people who run Mint and are surprised that their Radeon RX 9060 runs like ass. As long as you aren't using a Debian based LTS distro, like mint or ubuntu lts, or you are running those distro but get a newer kernel, you should be fine. This matters less for older hardware, but having a newer kernel and especially a newer mesa version is important.
- chowells 1y ago
  Not supported means they're not debugging your broken system. It doesn't mean the game doesn't work when your system isn't broken.
- jakebasile 1y ago
  This is extremely common. There's a vanishingly small number of games that officially support the Steam Deck that do NOT unofficially run on any given Linux box. That small number seems to be exclusively gacha games. A number of those can be made to run by setting `SteamDeck=1 %command%` as the launch command. Anyways, BG3 runs perfectly fine, natively, on my Ubuntu 25.04 RTX 4090 rig.
Vilian 1y ago
That's amazing, it would be interesting to see benchmarks comparing the two versions
- rbits 1y ago
  Yeah that would be nice. Some native Linux versions actually have worse performance than Proton when they're done poorly. I got ~60fps on the Linux version of Silksong, but 400fps running the Windows version through Proton.
  - neuroelectron 1y ago
    Wow, I wonder if it would be easier to just target proton directly
    - Telaneo 1y ago
      It would be, since targeting proton is largely just targeting Windows and not falling into a few traps most games don't fall into anyway.
    - johncolanduoni 1y ago
      It definitely is if you have an engine with a DX12 backend but no Vulkan backend. Nothing stops you from detecting Proton and then tweaking uses of the DX12 APIs that translate poorly to Vulkan, and there's no way adding a whole new rendering backend will be easier than writing the extra code paths in the DX12 one.
  - hunterloftis 1y ago
    That sounds like possibly a configuration issue rather than strictly performance (although I agree the symptom is worse performance). For instance, specifically the value "~60fps" vs something as high as 400fps sounds like running with vsync enabled vs. with it disabled.
  - nullbyte808 1y ago
    sounds like the game was capped to 60
rfarley04 1y ago
I really appreciate this. But color me skeptical that the late game will work on SD. It chugs on PCs. Hopefully they conjured a miracle!
- hinkley 1y ago
  They are partway through creating two new games. It’s possible that some of the engine improvements could be easily back-ported to BG3. Or even just compiler improvements could be a little more oomph. Edit: > Our Proton version runs on the Steam Deck via the Proton compatibility layer, which requires extra CPU processing power. Running the game natively on the Steam Deck requires less CPU usage and memory consumption overall! Workaround for a performance regression helps some but I suspect more has gone on.
  - alexchantavy 1y ago
    Shame they said they’re not going to do more in the Forgotten Realms though, I love this campaign setting
    - boltzmann-brain 1y ago
      Same. I would really love them to do a Fallout game. The original two games had a lot of properties to them that 3 and subsequent games just ignored or straight up went against, including NV. To me, as a fan who grew up with the first two, it's like a different game series.
    - hinkley 1y ago
      They are currently building their capacity to do multiple games in parallel. I suspect not wanting to do BG4 is at the end of the day a negotiation tactic. There’s an amount of money and consideration that will make them put it back in the queue. But it’s likely at least five years out before they start on such a thing. They’ll want to avoid the Torchlight trap, where the team got sick of doing Diablo clones and the company kind of cratered afterward.
      - 1y ago
bigyabai 1y ago
Slick! Worth noting that Baldurs Gate 3 runs fine through Proton already - I played it on Linux at release with zero issues.
- giancarlostoro 1y ago
  Worth noting that some games run better on Linux than on Windows and have for a few years now. Crazy.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    Yeah, I noticed this myself ~4 years ago when I was playing Overwatch on a relatively low-spec PC. Gave me 10-20% GPU headroom and ~2gb of extra RAM I never had on Windows.
  - Podrod 1y ago
    And sometimes the Windows version runs better under Proton than the native Linux build due to the port being so poorly done which is kinda funny. Occasionally I do still run things under Windows though like Cyberpunk 2077 as I got about 15 more frames under Windows which let me bump the graphics up a bit more. Or Assassin's Creed Mirage which got me double the FPS somehow. Currently playing AssCree Shadows on Windows too as it just refuses to run at all via Proton. Other people seem to get it running fine so I dunno why I can't. Ah well.
    - keyringlight 1y ago
      As much as linux for PC gaming has made huge strides over the past few years, it seems really hard to avoid having a dual boot to keep windows available if you're serious about the whole breadth of available games. Or if you want to avoid pitfalls on those titles that run with a list of caveats, you can go exploring on protondb and some games need a collection of commmandline tweaks to get going well. It'd be nice to have a better experience for enabling those or opt-in to commonly used configs on particular games
      - 1y ago
reilly3000 1y ago
Whatever they are doing to make the image fit 100% is not retaining aspect ratio on mobile Safari. The cookies banner was initially full width and the content was in a small column to the left and I had to zoom to get to it. I’ve never viewed a Steam Deck web layout outside of its element before.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
nsagent 1y ago
Bought the game when it came out, but still haven't had the time to play. Just flew out for a three week vacation with my Steam Deck in tow. Unfortunately, I left it on the plane and I haven't heard back from lost and found yet (seems unlikely I'll get it back considering it was an international flight). Oh well.
- jsheard 1y ago
  If it's any consolation, the Deck LCD is discounted by 20% for the next few weeks if you need to pick up a new one.
  - brokencode 1y ago
    May as well get a Switch 2 at this point. Then at least it’s something new.
    - petralithic 1y ago
      A Switch and a Steam Deck are orthogonal purchases.
      - brokencode 1y ago
        Not really. The Switch 2 has many of the most popular games available on other platforms. Plus a lot of Nintendo exclusives. They are not the same for sure, and YMMV for specific titles.
        baby 1y ago
        I have both and I would agree with GP on that, the switch is really exclusively for Nintendo games. Cross platform games don't run really well, I just get them on the deck instead.
        myko 1y ago
        Cross platform games tend to run better on Switch 2 than the Deck, which is showing its teeth. E.g., Cyberpunk The Deck is amazing but a hardware refresh would be helpful
appleaday1 1y ago
Nice the steamdeck sub that I mod will be happy to hear this.
- boltzmann-brain 1y ago
  Which one is it?
  - daemonologist 1y ago
    Judging by their username, probably r/steamdeck
- dabluecaboose 1y ago
  I wouldn't brag about that if I were you. That sub is mostly pictures of "jUsT bOuGhT a StEaM DeCk", sob bait, random steam sales, and rarely ever anything useful related to the Deck itself. Every now and then I go to check top posts from the past month to see if anyone has posted anything significant, like the DeckMate or EmuDeck or actual useful stuff. Inevitably, it's all standard reddit garbage.
  - Taek 1y ago
    That type of community may not be your cup of tea or what you are looking for but that doesn't mean GP shouldn't be proud of building it. The world is plenty big enough for all types of communities. Its okay for people to be proud of the things they lead, even if they aren't things that are interesting to you or me.
    - boltzmann-brain 1y ago
      I agree, building a community is very difficult, I've built a few myself. But sometimes something merely existing can prevent other things from flourishing, e.g. due to the mechanism of Schelling points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schelling_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schelling_point
    - dabluecaboose 1y ago
moelf 1y ago
>Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck. huh? but Steam Deck is just normal Arch Linux with x86_64 ~~aarch64~~?...
- pxx 1y ago
  it's not even aarch64. but what they're saying is they don't want to deal with the support nightmare of supporting anything but the unmodifiable SteamOS image.
  - moelf 1y ago
    oh right, it's just AMD Zen2...
  - armada651 1y ago
    Yeah that was my take as well, it's more of a nod to the fact that you _can_ run it on other devices but you should expect not any help from them.
- viraptor 1y ago
  Every distro is a bit different though. And there's kernel / libc versions and the whole gui server on top of that. Windows gives you a few configurations to check, Mac does as well. But Linux means hundreds of possible setups before you even get to hardware differences. They just don't want to deal with that.
  - tapoxi 1y ago
    Steam runs all games in a container called the Steam Linux Runtime, so the only difference is the kernel and host Mesa drivers.
    - demonshreder 1y ago
      Not to nitpick, there is a 'native' option. Atleast it has been available on Arch for many years now (when SteamOS was on Debian?). In most cases we just the symlink the newer versions of libs to the older versions and the games run fine / better.
appleaday1 1y ago
The trick to playing BG3 is to play it on your deck by streaming, you can play so many games via streaming via usb-c to ethernet, always wire your house and every room with ethernet PEOPLE.
m00dy 1y ago
I just finished playing all the acts in the game. An amazing game, what can I say ?
- yugioh3 1y ago
  Yeah it really was a revelation. I didn’t know much at all going in and was constantly amazed. I’ve since tried a number of highly touted recent CRPGs and RPGs… and gave up on all of them; BG3 really spoiled me I guess, but I’m also a pretty selective gamer.
  - somenameforme 1y ago
    If you have the tolerance for dated visuals a lot of the best stuff is in the long since past - Planescape Torment and Baldur's Gate 2 are amazing. The Neverwinter Nights series is also great. Fallout 2 is probably one of the best games ever in terms of atmosphere as well as gameplay, but the visuals there are extremely dated. And finally there's also Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.
    - infofarmer 1y ago
      Holding Fallout 1/2 as the best gaming experiences of my life for a long time, just recently discovered Fallout Nevada and Sonora that some kind talent also ported to WASM/Web — and it finally hit the spot for me after ~25 years.
    - PetitPrince 1y ago
      > The Neverwinter Nights series is also great To be noted: the main appeal of Neverwinter Nights 1 is the player created content. In particular the main campaign of NWN1 is pretty "meh" and is better thought as a showcase of what's possible with the scenario toolkit (the expansion - what we call now DLC - are better in that regard though). The creativity deployed by some creator is quite astonishing; shootout to the Bastard of Kosigan (James Bond-esque adventures in a kinda alternate historical France), and HeX Coda (magipunk setting where you fight as a champion of open-source magick against corporate wizards). But as somenameforme noted, you have to content with early 2000 production value .
CivBase 1y ago
> Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. This is a huge nitpick but I wish they'd just say "other Linux distros" instead of the "Linux platform". It's fine to pick and choose one (or a few) popular distro(s) to support, like SteamOS. It's not reasonable to expect support for all possible Linux software environments. It's already crazy that they support so many hardware combinations, even on just Windows.
- pretzel5297 1y ago
  Makes me think they might not have the most knowledgeable people on the job. Hopefully they didn't just throw some unwilling Windows devs into the unknown.
- acc348 1y ago
  They have native macOS version too.
aaronbrethorst 1y ago
I have played a couple hours of BG3 on PlayStation (time-limited demo), and a couple hours on my Mac (purchased on Steam), and I found the controller UI to be really weird and counterintuitive compared to the mouse-driven UI on the desktop computer. Does it get easier? Does anyone have any suggestions for coming to terms with the controller weirdness? I would much rather play BG3 on my Steam Deck than on my computer.
- moonshinefe 1y ago
  yeah I played bg3 with controller split screen with my wife the entire playthrough. Normally, I would've strongly preferred KB+M for such a game. We definitely got used to it after several hours. I'm not sure if I can recall any tips other than just keep at it and it'll eventually become muscle memory. I don't think it's as good as KB+M but it wasn't something that was bugging me once we got significantly into the game. YMMV.
- saghm 1y ago
  As a Steam Deck player (who mostly streams from my desktop at this point but still pretty much exclusively games with controller inputs nowadays), I got frustrated with a lot of the "automatic" management of the radial menus. Quite often, when the game adds a new ability to the radial menus, it completely rearranges them, and for some reason it really likes to automatically add things even if you manually remove them, so it becomes very unwieldly especially for spellcasters at higher levels. My frustration reached the point where I realized I either needed this problem solved or I just wouldn't be able to play anymore, which was disappointing for me given how much I've enjoyed it, so I decided to bit the bullet and start developing a mod to try to impose some semblance of order on the radial menus myself. Unfortunately it relies heavily on the Script Extender, which isn't available on consoles (and also doesn't work on the Steam Deck native version, since it's provided as a DLL that gets loaded by the game and presumably would require a non-trivial amount of effort to port to a native Linux shared library), but so far I've implemented a number of specific settings (which can each individually be enabled or disabled) around automatically preventing changes to the radial menus in certain certain circumstances and clearing them in certain other ones (e.g. for new games or when changing ca character's class). Most recently, I added a way to define a custom keybinding to manually lock the radial menus for the currently controlled character until manually toggled off by hitting the keybinding again (which currently doesn't persist past a reload, but I'm fairly close to being done integrating it with a Script Extender feature to preserve arbitrary data alongside save files so that it's possible to save them so that they get restored to the same state they were when a given save was made. Given the reception when I starting publishing this, there seem to be a small but passionate set of players with the same frustrations as me, which helped motivate me to spend the time to keep working on it. To me, the modding ecosystem is probably one of the two most important things about this game (the other being that Larian seems to be pretty awesome as far as studios go nowadays, with their CEO taking a firm stance against "crunch" to get games out and in favor of the model of offline games that don't require paid DLC or microtransactions, as well as their continued support of the modding ecosystem itself). Long before I ever considered writing any mods myself, I started referring to BG3 as similar to Skyrim in that the mods will likely keep things fresh long after new official content stops coming out. I still think this is true, but I also keep being surprised just how much work they're continuing to put into the game even with new content presumably finally having come to an end.
klardotsh 1y ago
This 12GB update managed to trigger the bizarre Steam behavior on my Linux desktop where the game patching process pegs all cores to 100% and thrashes the disk so hard the system eventually stops allowing eg. launching new processes (though the system isn't frozen stiff like running out of RAM - switching Niri desktops is fine, but launching eg. htop hangs forever, and eventually browsers stop responding). After walking away for two hours and coming back to the system still in this state, I gave up and hard-rebooted with the power button. But if you survive the 12GB update process, I'm sure this is great news :) Maybe I'll finally have to make some time to play this game - bought it two years ago, but never ended up making time for it, despite having played Cyberpunk 2077 a time and a half, and most of Factorio: Space Age, since then.
- skavi 1y ago
  A bit of a tangent, but I’ve seen these issues mentioned before and to me it’s always felt like more the OS’s fault than Steam’s. Like shouldn’t Steam be free to express full utilization of the available resources? And isn’t it the OS’s job to manage QoS? What am I missing here?
  - colechristensen 1y ago
    Systems tend to not have particularly strong guardrails against pathological access patterns which aren't trying to use 100% but a large multiple of that or are abusing some subsystem or another. The application is almost always also unresponsive. Putting up those guardrails temporarily hides big problems more often than it avoids needing to have them solved.
    - cyberpunk 1y ago
      BEAM handles this very gracefully. Shame preemptive scheduling isn't more common..
- kaztal 1y ago
  Update was intense for me too. 12 gb with hotfixes, downloaded after kids had gone to bed. It took about 30 minutes to apply. That was about the allotted time for me.
energy123 1y ago
Solasta COTM is a similar game with good steam deck support (native controls) and many community made campaigns for replayability.
mbStavola 1y ago
I had tried to run BG3 on my Steam Deck a couple months back. It ran... okay. Lot's of hitches and I had to tune things way way way down, but somewhat playable. I'm very grateful that they took the time to build a native Steam Deck release for the game, not really something I had ever expected. Hopefully with this I can actually jump in and enjoy the game!
- october8140 1y ago
  I played the entire game on Steam Deck and had a great experience. 100+ hours
  - whatevaa 1y ago
    No offense, but some people requirements are really, really low. I played God of War on Steam Deck and it was not a good experience, it was at the bottom of 'okay', and only because at that moment I wasn't at home to play on better hardware. This is the reason why I don't believe when people say that it runs great without trying it myself.
    - mbStavola 1y ago
      > No offense, but some people requirements are really, really low. I think you kinda hit the nail on the head, but I believe there is an extra dimension to this: desire. For BG3, it looked fun and I had good memories of BG2 so I was interested in playing it. After tuning the settings a bunch and not being able to get a consistent framerate / not have micro-freezing, I just said "oh well, I'll play it on some other platform in the future." I cared about BG3, but not that much. This is in contrast to Elden Ring Nightreign, which also had issues. I was able to get it to a somewhat stable 30FPS and celebrated that success before dumping 100+ hours into the game. Why? Well, because I love FromSoft games! I really really really wanted to play the game and was willing to put up with a somewhat subpar experience in order to get it. BG3, among other games, is just not that exciting for me personally so my tolerance of technical hitches is very different. ... which brings us right back to this native release. Hopefully the improvements we see are enough to get me over that "hill" and actually enjoying the game. I have the update queued on my deck now so I can try it out after work.
username12349 1y ago
[flagged]
pjmlp 1y ago
This is how it is supposed to be, not by doing API translation. Kudos to Larian.
- ffsm8 1y ago
  Let's keep in mind that this API translation is more performent then the original API though (as you can see from the ROG ally windows vs steamOS) outstanding work by larien however, I just felt strange reading your comment which somehow implied that the translation is the reason for bad performance, when it is actually more performent then the original
  - pjmlp 1y ago
    Naturally, because it doesn't take into account that the OS does much less. Less see how those benchmarks compare, now that just like with netbooks, Microsoft is finally acknowledging they need to react. The translation is the reason SteamDeck will suffer the same fate as OS/2, and netbooks, building castles on other companies kingdoms. For that not to happen, the SteamDeck needs to be sold on its actual capabilities, not by pretending to be someone's else platform.
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      You suuuuure love to talk... https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/11 https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/11
drnick1 1y ago
It's worth noting that the native Linux version of games is often buggy and a far worse experience than the Windows version running on Proton. Valve itself is infamous for this: the Left 4 Dead 2 native game has multiple very annoying bugs that have been known for 15 years, and that Valve still hasn't fixed. Unfortunately, there is (another) bug that prevents the Windows version running on Proton from connecting to VAC-secure servers or I would have ditched the Linux version long ago. At this point game devs should just discontinue the native version if they aren't going to properly support it and just make sure the game runs flawlessly on Proton.
- arcfour 1y ago
  I've had the opposite experience, getting great performance in TF2 for example and even Rust on Linux (but with Rust you couldn't connect to EAC secured servers, so, useless outside of testing stuff on a private server).
- izacus 1y ago
  Is this the case for BG3?
  - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
    This is specifically a Steam Deck version and _not_ a general Linux version, so it's likely not applicable in this case. Think of it more like a console native port.
    - gpderetta 1y ago
      I would be surprised if it was hard to run it on a generic Linux.
  - SchemaLoad 1y ago
    Often the linux builds do work when they are released, but then an OS update changes some dynamic linked library which then breaks them.
rb666 1y ago
If there was ever a game to play with KB+M, this is it. I don't get the need to stuff everything into a handheld. It's not Mario kart!
- darthcircuit 1y ago
  I love my steam deck over my desktop pc anymore. Once I had kids, I never got to have my desk in a place that’s safe from being climbed on, so I hooked it up to the tv. But then they started taking over the tv, and the only way I could game was on a handheld. I mostly play older stuff, so it’s plenty powerful for what I do most of the time. I still have the desktop and and Xbox to offset anything else.
- INTPenis 1y ago
  I agree with you. Steamdeck is amazing but people are often over-enthusiastic about what a handheld device can do. The most comfortable and consistent gaming experience is still a regular stationary PC. But if you really want to play Civ5 on a train then sure the Steamdeck is there for you. I just never felt the need to game something that bad.
  - gambiting 1y ago
    I just don't want to sit at my desk after a whole day of work, and I've got an RTX5090 PC for some stupid reason. I'd much rather play games on the sofa on my steam deck sitting next to my wife or play in bed.
  - wiseowise 1y ago
    > The most comfortable and consistent gaming experience is still a regular stationary PC. That would be playing console on an 80 inch screen from a couch.
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  I just don't want to play anything with a kb and mouse anymore because it just feels like being at work when I'm sitting at a desk using the same setup I just spent all day on.
thefz 1y ago
This is a gigantic effort from Larian, who among all things is still updating its software instead of resting on its own laurels. But the Deck is limited in hardware. It makes sense that it has some difficulties running gigantic games and is more aimed towards simpler games. In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  The Steam deck is really not that limited. Every game could be made to run well on it if some time was spent actually making the low settings work well. Something often skipped on modern games which optimise only for people with a $1000 GPU chugging 400w.
  - KeplerBoy 1y ago
    It's not like we have seen anything in gaming that wouldn't be possible on PS3/Xbox360 era hardware, certainly not in terms of complexity. Just remember that stuff like red dead redemption ran on those things with all of 512 MB of unified memory. It ran and looked better than borderlands 4 does on current consoles.
    - fendy3002 1y ago
      Deck can run witcher 3 and mh:world decently (maybe some hiccup and lower graphic setting). There should be not a big problem to make games run on steam deck (ignoring controller support since it's a separate matter).
      - secabeen 1y ago
        MH: World runs fine, but MH: Wilds does not, so it's right at the edge.
    - LoganDark 1y ago
      Portal RTX might not be possible on that hardware without some severe compromises. But then again, RTX is pretty much Brute Force: The Renderer
DeepYogurt 1y ago
You love to see it
maxlin 1y ago
After all that effort, I'd be legit pissed at the website maintainer for screwing up the image scaling in the blog post, making this release look like some bootleg readme ... The images themselves are fine, just the post's formatting squishes them.
swiftcoder 1y ago
> Now that there is a Steam Deck Native build, is Baldur’s Gate 3 supported on Linux? > Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck. "does not support" is not the same as "no", right? In theory it should be possible to run this build on other arm-based linux?
- Thev00d00 1y ago
  Steam deck is x86_64. It would probably run but they won't accept bug reports.
- omnimus 1y ago
  It will most likely run fine. Steamdeck has AMD x86 APU. I guess gpu might be a problem. They simply dont want to provide official support for the variety of linux.
- easwee 1y ago
  I finished the game on Ubuntu when it came out, so it should work fine since ever. You can check out https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940 https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940 for more info.
  - jon-wood 1y ago
    The whole point of this post is that there’s a native version that doesn’t use Proton now, so checking ProtonDB isn’t going to tell anyone anything beyond the previous version being fine.
- haunter 1y ago
  You can download the native version on any Linux distro https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/larian_studios_announces_native_port_of_baldurs/nfsehnf/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/laria...
marhee 1y ago
Anyone knows what does "native" means here precisely? Steam Deck has a x86-64 instruction set AFAIK, so it's just same as a the Windows version? Or has it to do with the GPU / OS? Or does it just mean "properly configured"?
- Thev00d00 1y ago
  Native as in it's a Linux binary, no wine/proton involved
- teamonkey 1y ago
  It means compiled for Linux/SteamOS instead of being compiled for Windows and using a compatibility layer to play.
nottorp 1y ago
What does native mean? Is this a linux binary? Using wine directly linked under the hood? Or did they actually build a native application with no translation layers, no matter how they're added?
- haunter 1y ago
  >Is this a linux binary? Yes https://steamdb.info/depot/2330359/ https://steamdb.info/depot/2330359/ You can download the native version on any Linux distro https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/larian_studios_announces_native_port_of_baldurs/nfsehnf/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/laria...
  - nottorp 1y ago
    Well I could, but I already finished the game using the Mac version :) Thanks to Larian for doing cross platform.
krzat 1y ago
This is random, but I wonder if it would be possible to render BG3 with isometric camera, and then, on the fly, convert most of 3d objects into sprites.
aucisson_masque 1y ago
> Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck. I though the steam deck would be the reason why developper start building their game for linux, but it seems like it's a bigger issue than just making a "linux file". Once they have rewritten the code for the steam deck, what would prevent them to compile the game for Debian and other linux distributions ? I really have no idea how much more work it is but assumed it would be straight forward.
- shortercode 1y ago
  I would assume the issue is all the variation in different distros. Plus the driver/hardware combinations. While some setups would just work they don’t see it as worth spending the time doing the validation/patching required. The steam deck is 1 device to test, with a single software stack. Much easier to target, and with a known customer base. Which brings up the other issue that they would be unlikely to make their money back on a general Linux release. Companies have cited this as a reason for not doing macOS releases in the past and based on the last steam survey Linux usage is in a similar ballpark (2.6% vs 1.8% for Mac ). Despite all this I think it’s still a move in the right direction.
  - jeroenhd 1y ago
    Valve released a runtime specifically to combat the variation problem. This allows developers to target a specific runtime and Valve will make the software stack work with as many distros as possible. On the other hand, that stack can only contain so much, and a lot of Linux bugs involve sound subsystems, GPUs, and compositors/X11/window manager configuration issues. You can't quite target the Linux runtime and assume everything will just work, but at least you don't need to target specific versions of glibc and libxml2 anymore.
- rtpg 1y ago
  > Once they have rewritten the code for the steam deck, what would prevent them to compile the game for Debian and other linux distributions ? You can install Steam on Debian. I think the value here is that with Steam being the "approved launcher" you offload a lot of "distro weirdness" over to Valve. The value of a standalone build seems fairly low for most game devs.
Temporary_31337 1y ago
Wow, I bought Baldur's Gate 3 out of nostalgia before a very long (20hours + ) flight and played some good long hours on the plane. Unfortunately the Proton version meant the game was unplayable on the Deck later in the game. I'm so happy I can finish it now. Coincidentally I also realised I can play it on my Mac too...
sylware 1y ago
Proton titles on steam are illegal in tons of countries: there is no official support and real money is involved. Some say there is some special refunding policy with proton titles: well I have not seen any "legally binding" document about a game patch or a proton patch killing your game for good on elf/linux, and that anytime during the life cycle of the game. Only whining when that happens, no official support to turn to. Basically PROTON = ZERO BUCKS is the only sane way. I am playing proton titles: gacha games which are kind of free-to-play friendly, well... those without 'anti-non-steamdeck-elf/linux' software like ACE(cf WuWa). They have the windows whales to finance them already, and we are only penguins which dislike to be scammed. But now elf/linux people will be able to buy this game with the legally required official support. This game is really not my thing, but I'll go back to banging my head against the wall and throwing my keyboard thru the window, aka I am going back to play silk song natively on elf/linux available since day one of its release (well, this is a unity game, then ez).
donohoe 1y ago
Can someone phonetically spell out “Baldur” for me? I’ve seen the term across my life but I have never heard it spoken. I think how I imagine it and how it’s said are different - like I discovered from reading LOTR books and then watching the movies…
- iknowstuff 1y ago
  Look for baldur’s gate reviews on youtube?
- opan 1y ago
  AFAIK it's just ball-der. I've seen it win awards at The Game Awards and such, plus heard it discussed IRL, everyone seems to say it that way. If that's not the correct pronunciation, it's at least the popular one.
haunter 1y ago
Native vs Proton benchmark https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/10 https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/10 https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/11 https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/11 Roughly ~10% better FPS in Act 3 but the first benchmark average is pretty much the same. You can download the native version on any Linux distro https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/larian_studios_announces_native_port_of_baldurs/nfsehnf/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/laria...
- 3ll10t 1y ago
  Those are huge frametime spikes for the native during benchmark #10. Maybe shader comp?
- Night_Thastus 1y ago
  Just goes to show how impressive Proton really is. It has overhead, but it's tiny in most use cases.
KolibriFly 1y ago
Nice to see Larian putting in the effort for a native Steam Deck build, especially considering how resource-heavy BG3 can get
bloqs 1y ago
can someone explain why this is a big deal to me compared to any game being released on multiple platforms? Surely making games for the switch/ps5/etc is hard too?
Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y ago
Can I get the native linux build on gog?
sombragris 1y ago
> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings. I won't leave a bad review or whine on BG3, and my (otherwise very capable laptop) is just 6 years old with an Intel UHD 620 integrated GPU, and BG3 barely reaches the 10fps level on 1024x768 with lowest settings on everywhere. So it's not even 720p, and BG3 chokes a lot in this somewhat recent hardware. I see BG3's graphics and while they are beautiful, they're nothing out of the ordinary in comparison to other games. That is, there are good games that could run very well in my laptop and which look good. In sum, I see BG3 as being needlessly demanding, and pushes out a large sector of machines and potential buyers. I'd love to have an RTX-class GPU (and have the cash to afford it), but all I have it's a laptop whose GPU cannot be upgraded, and that is perfectly capable in all other areas. Every time when I point out this limit in games, which I see as silly, I get flamed to death. People in the gaming communities are seemingly unable to understand why making extremely high minimum requirements is not a good sales strategy. Games can look good with integrated GPUs. See the Wolfenstein games (id engine). Even more recent games like Generation Zero (Apex open world engine) can be run decently at lowest settings on my hardware. MGS5:PhantomPain also runs and looks very good. But no luck with BG3.
- sailingparrot 1y ago
  To be fair, there is world between "extremely high minimum requirements" and a 6 years old laptop, considering laptop of even the current year are never considered super high end rigs.
  - sombragris 1y ago
    If you had s/minimum/recommended I would agree. But no, we are talking about minimum requirements. I submit that a game should be playable even on 10-year old hardware. Of course, the devs can blow the ceiling in their highest settings. Do they need three RTX-7000 series in parallell cooled with liquid nitrogen and eating 3000W of electricity in order to run at the highest/ultra settings? Yeah, be my guest, more power to them. But we are, I insist, talking about minimum requirements. These should be as broad as possible in order to keep the entry barrier low. In a game which doesn't even look especially good, I see the very demanding hardware requirements as just a contribution to planned/artificial obsolescence. (and yeah, I got downvoted as expected. This is getting old...)
sleepybrett 1y ago
I hope to see more games go steamdeck native in the future. While the proton layer is great it would be a nice way to start choking windows out of the games industry. I hate that I have a PC that really does nothing by play games.
freehorse 1y ago
Baldur's gate 3 was one of the first (if not the first) big game to run natively on apple silicon. I am glad Larian takes this kind of stuff seriously instead of doing the bare minimum, in an industry that often even the bare minimum is not to be taken for granted.
throwawayk7h 1y ago
For some unfathomable reason, they disabled local multiplayer on the steam deck version of the game. You need to supply a command-line argument to re-enable it. I honestly don't know why they did this.
mzmzmzm 1y ago
Not to overly praise Valve which does have a profit motive, but their ecosystem + the Steam Deck + the openness of SteamOS really changes the landscape to where the "gaming on linux" punch line could really clear the hump and reach critical mass for developers. Something to fantasize about with each Windows update that adds new privacy converns and nothing else.

626 points by _JamesA_ 1y ago

(from the FAQ) >>Now that there is a Steam Deck Native build, is Baldur’s Gate 3 supported on Linux? >Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck. Only half a step forward.

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gbraad 1y ago
I don't have BG3, but wondetr if this 'works' on Bazzite in that case.
- appleaday1 1y ago
  I recommend cachyos over bazzite for steamdeck.
  - gbraad 1y ago
    Running Bazzite on a Legion Go, and got gaming and productivity device at the same time. My question was about; do they enforce a device label?
SchemaLoad 1y ago
This is not a huge issue though. The game runs perfect on Proton on Linux, the problem is really just on the Steam Deck it had poor performance. But on the average desktop it runs flawless. I'm just happy the Steam Deck seems to be pushing devs to make sure their games run on low power hardware. Really any game should be able to run fine on the Steamdeck, there's no gameplay that isn't possible to run on the hardware. It's just the lack of engineering time spent on making sure the graphics have a proper low option.
- extraduder_ire 1y ago
  The existence of "steamdeck" as a graphics preset in a bunch of games is really a boon for anyone using a gaming handheld, especially as hardware improves. Provides a bar for manufacturers to clear too.
jchw 1y ago
I think from Valve's end you can't really do one without the other, so at the very least I am sure it will run just fine elsewhere. This sort of mentality will probably slowly fade if more SteamOS devices hit the market successfully.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
saubeidl 1y ago
I bet it still works, it's just not supported. It's just arch on an AMD chip after all.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  And honestly I'm fine with that. Given the permutations involved I think it's reasonable for Larian to not commit to supporting them all. And as you said, it will probably work fine.
- recursivecaveat 1y ago
  It works, I played the entire back half of the game on Linux. A lot of games fall into this bracket with proton of "devs not willing to commit to Linux support, but does actually work".
  - foresto 1y ago
    > It works, I played the entire back half of the game on Linux. How could you already have done this with the native linux build, which was just released today? I would think BG3 too long a game for that. Or are you talking about playing the Windows build in Proton?
- Gigachad 1y ago
  SteamOS isn’t just Arch, it’s significantly custom and doesn’t have access to the arch repos. The window manager, package manager, etc are completely custom. The OS is a read only image based system.
AceJohnny2 1y ago
Meh, useless purity check. Gaming on Linux is hard because there's not one Linux, there's tons of Linuses. What version of the glibc/libstdc++/mesa/xorg/wayland/kernel/drivers are you running? The Linux ecosystem is fragmented in such a way that only open-source and an army of volunteers can really work around. It is really not binary-friendly at a fundamental, philosophical level. (You're not going to get game companies to open-source their games, except as an exception, and after their economic life is finished) The Steam Deck provides one well-known hardware and software platform that a vendor can reasonably target. Don't expect much more except by the most dedicated developer.
- hurricanepootis 1y ago
  Valve provides a common runtime/build environment for Linux devs in the form of the Steam Linux Runtime. There is version 1 (Scout), which uses an LD_PRELOAD system. There is version 2 (Soldier), which uses cgroups (podman) and is deprecated. Then, there is version 3 (Sniper), which is the current target. As of right now, proton and proton-ge both build in and require Steam Runtime Version 3 to run in. The steam client itself is running in a runtime, and I think it is the scout runtime, so LD_PRELOAD based. This means that steam has its own common platform to "deploy" against, and all Linux native games have a common platform to deploy against. It used to be that games had to be compiled in a chroot for Steam runtime 1.0, but now with Steam runtime 3.0, developers are heavily recommended to build their game in a "OCI-based container framework"—so podman basically—and enable the Steam Runtime 3.0 on steam. I know that TF2 and Dota 2 use steam runtime 3.0, and apparently so does Retroarch. Of course, since there is a podman/docker image, you can also test existing games to see if they run in the runtime too. You can find a lot of more information about the steam runtime 3.0 here: https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/sniper/sdk https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/sniper/sdk Valve has a gitlab with lots of great docs for developers who want to publish a linux native game. I think all native linux games will run in the Scout 1.0 runtime by default Edit: I will say that as an end-user, running an up-to-date Linux kernel and Mesa stack is important for gaming. I know some people who run Mint and are surprised that their Radeon RX 9060 runs like ass. As long as you aren't using a Debian based LTS distro, like mint or ubuntu lts, or you are running those distro but get a newer kernel, you should be fine. This matters less for older hardware, but having a newer kernel and especially a newer mesa version is important.
chowells 1y ago
Not supported means they're not debugging your broken system. It doesn't mean the game doesn't work when your system isn't broken.
jakebasile 1y ago
This is extremely common. There's a vanishingly small number of games that officially support the Steam Deck that do NOT unofficially run on any given Linux box. That small number seems to be exclusively gacha games. A number of those can be made to run by setting `SteamDeck=1 %command%` as the launch command. Anyways, BG3 runs perfectly fine, natively, on my Ubuntu 25.04 RTX 4090 rig.

Vilian 1y ago

That's amazing, it would be interesting to see benchmarks comparing the two versions

rbits 1y ago
Yeah that would be nice. Some native Linux versions actually have worse performance than Proton when they're done poorly. I got ~60fps on the Linux version of Silksong, but 400fps running the Windows version through Proton.
- neuroelectron 1y ago
  Wow, I wonder if it would be easier to just target proton directly
  - Telaneo 1y ago
    It would be, since targeting proton is largely just targeting Windows and not falling into a few traps most games don't fall into anyway.
  - johncolanduoni 1y ago
    It definitely is if you have an engine with a DX12 backend but no Vulkan backend. Nothing stops you from detecting Proton and then tweaking uses of the DX12 APIs that translate poorly to Vulkan, and there's no way adding a whole new rendering backend will be easier than writing the extra code paths in the DX12 one.
- hunterloftis 1y ago
  That sounds like possibly a configuration issue rather than strictly performance (although I agree the symptom is worse performance). For instance, specifically the value "~60fps" vs something as high as 400fps sounds like running with vsync enabled vs. with it disabled.
- nullbyte808 1y ago
  sounds like the game was capped to 60

rfarley04 1y ago

I really appreciate this. But color me skeptical that the late game will work on SD. It chugs on PCs. Hopefully they conjured a miracle!

hinkley 1y ago
They are partway through creating two new games. It’s possible that some of the engine improvements could be easily back-ported to BG3. Or even just compiler improvements could be a little more oomph. Edit: > Our Proton version runs on the Steam Deck via the Proton compatibility layer, which requires extra CPU processing power. Running the game natively on the Steam Deck requires less CPU usage and memory consumption overall! Workaround for a performance regression helps some but I suspect more has gone on.
- alexchantavy 1y ago
  Shame they said they’re not going to do more in the Forgotten Realms though, I love this campaign setting
  - boltzmann-brain 1y ago
    Same. I would really love them to do a Fallout game. The original two games had a lot of properties to them that 3 and subsequent games just ignored or straight up went against, including NV. To me, as a fan who grew up with the first two, it's like a different game series.
  - hinkley 1y ago
    They are currently building their capacity to do multiple games in parallel. I suspect not wanting to do BG4 is at the end of the day a negotiation tactic. There’s an amount of money and consideration that will make them put it back in the queue. But it’s likely at least five years out before they start on such a thing. They’ll want to avoid the Torchlight trap, where the team got sick of doing Diablo clones and the company kind of cratered afterward.
    - 1y ago

bigyabai 1y ago

Slick! Worth noting that Baldurs Gate 3 runs fine through Proton already - I played it on Linux at release with zero issues.

giancarlostoro 1y ago
Worth noting that some games run better on Linux than on Windows and have for a few years now. Crazy.
- bigyabai 1y ago
  Yeah, I noticed this myself ~4 years ago when I was playing Overwatch on a relatively low-spec PC. Gave me 10-20% GPU headroom and ~2gb of extra RAM I never had on Windows.
- Podrod 1y ago
  And sometimes the Windows version runs better under Proton than the native Linux build due to the port being so poorly done which is kinda funny. Occasionally I do still run things under Windows though like Cyberpunk 2077 as I got about 15 more frames under Windows which let me bump the graphics up a bit more. Or Assassin's Creed Mirage which got me double the FPS somehow. Currently playing AssCree Shadows on Windows too as it just refuses to run at all via Proton. Other people seem to get it running fine so I dunno why I can't. Ah well.
  - keyringlight 1y ago
    As much as linux for PC gaming has made huge strides over the past few years, it seems really hard to avoid having a dual boot to keep windows available if you're serious about the whole breadth of available games. Or if you want to avoid pitfalls on those titles that run with a list of caveats, you can go exploring on protondb and some games need a collection of commmandline tweaks to get going well. It'd be nice to have a better experience for enabling those or opt-in to commonly used configs on particular games
    - 1y ago

reilly3000 1y ago

Whatever they are doing to make the image fit 100% is not retaining aspect ratio on mobile Safari. The cookies banner was initially full width and the content was in a small column to the left and I had to zoom to get to it. I’ve never viewed a Steam Deck web layout outside of its element before.

bigyabai 1y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
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nsagent 1y ago

Bought the game when it came out, but still haven't had the time to play. Just flew out for a three week vacation with my Steam Deck in tow. Unfortunately, I left it on the plane and I haven't heard back from lost and found yet (seems unlikely I'll get it back considering it was an international flight). Oh well.

jsheard 1y ago
If it's any consolation, the Deck LCD is discounted by 20% for the next few weeks if you need to pick up a new one.
- brokencode 1y ago
  May as well get a Switch 2 at this point. Then at least it’s something new.
  - petralithic 1y ago
    A Switch and a Steam Deck are orthogonal purchases.
    - brokencode 1y ago
      Not really. The Switch 2 has many of the most popular games available on other platforms. Plus a lot of Nintendo exclusives. They are not the same for sure, and YMMV for specific titles.
      - baby 1y ago
        I have both and I would agree with GP on that, the switch is really exclusively for Nintendo games. Cross platform games don't run really well, I just get them on the deck instead.
        myko 1y ago
        Cross platform games tend to run better on Switch 2 than the Deck, which is showing its teeth. E.g., Cyberpunk The Deck is amazing but a hardware refresh would be helpful

appleaday1 1y ago

Nice the steamdeck sub that I mod will be happy to hear this.

boltzmann-brain 1y ago
Which one is it?
- daemonologist 1y ago
  Judging by their username, probably r/steamdeck
dabluecaboose 1y ago
I wouldn't brag about that if I were you. That sub is mostly pictures of "jUsT bOuGhT a StEaM DeCk", sob bait, random steam sales, and rarely ever anything useful related to the Deck itself. Every now and then I go to check top posts from the past month to see if anyone has posted anything significant, like the DeckMate or EmuDeck or actual useful stuff. Inevitably, it's all standard reddit garbage.
- Taek 1y ago
  That type of community may not be your cup of tea or what you are looking for but that doesn't mean GP shouldn't be proud of building it. The world is plenty big enough for all types of communities. Its okay for people to be proud of the things they lead, even if they aren't things that are interesting to you or me.
  - boltzmann-brain 1y ago
    I agree, building a community is very difficult, I've built a few myself. But sometimes something merely existing can prevent other things from flourishing, e.g. due to the mechanism of Schelling points: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schelling_point https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schelling_point
  - dabluecaboose 1y ago

moelf 1y ago

>Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck. huh? but Steam Deck is just normal Arch Linux with x86_64 ~~aarch64~~?...

pxx 1y ago
it's not even aarch64. but what they're saying is they don't want to deal with the support nightmare of supporting anything but the unmodifiable SteamOS image.
- moelf 1y ago
  oh right, it's just AMD Zen2...
- armada651 1y ago
  Yeah that was my take as well, it's more of a nod to the fact that you _can_ run it on other devices but you should expect not any help from them.
viraptor 1y ago
Every distro is a bit different though. And there's kernel / libc versions and the whole gui server on top of that. Windows gives you a few configurations to check, Mac does as well. But Linux means hundreds of possible setups before you even get to hardware differences. They just don't want to deal with that.
- tapoxi 1y ago
  Steam runs all games in a container called the Steam Linux Runtime, so the only difference is the kernel and host Mesa drivers.
  - demonshreder 1y ago
    Not to nitpick, there is a 'native' option. Atleast it has been available on Arch for many years now (when SteamOS was on Debian?). In most cases we just the symlink the newer versions of libs to the older versions and the games run fine / better.

appleaday1 1y ago

The trick to playing BG3 is to play it on your deck by streaming, you can play so many games via streaming via usb-c to ethernet, always wire your house and every room with ethernet PEOPLE.

m00dy 1y ago

I just finished playing all the acts in the game. An amazing game, what can I say ?

yugioh3 1y ago
Yeah it really was a revelation. I didn’t know much at all going in and was constantly amazed. I’ve since tried a number of highly touted recent CRPGs and RPGs… and gave up on all of them; BG3 really spoiled me I guess, but I’m also a pretty selective gamer.
- somenameforme 1y ago
  If you have the tolerance for dated visuals a lot of the best stuff is in the long since past - Planescape Torment and Baldur's Gate 2 are amazing. The Neverwinter Nights series is also great. Fallout 2 is probably one of the best games ever in terms of atmosphere as well as gameplay, but the visuals there are extremely dated. And finally there's also Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura.
  - infofarmer 1y ago
    Holding Fallout 1/2 as the best gaming experiences of my life for a long time, just recently discovered Fallout Nevada and Sonora that some kind talent also ported to WASM/Web — and it finally hit the spot for me after ~25 years.
  - PetitPrince 1y ago
    > The Neverwinter Nights series is also great To be noted: the main appeal of Neverwinter Nights 1 is the player created content. In particular the main campaign of NWN1 is pretty "meh" and is better thought as a showcase of what's possible with the scenario toolkit (the expansion - what we call now DLC - are better in that regard though). The creativity deployed by some creator is quite astonishing; shootout to the Bastard of Kosigan (James Bond-esque adventures in a kinda alternate historical France), and HeX Coda (magipunk setting where you fight as a champion of open-source magick against corporate wizards). But as somenameforme noted, you have to content with early 2000 production value .

CivBase 1y ago

> Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. This is a huge nitpick but I wish they'd just say "other Linux distros" instead of the "Linux platform". It's fine to pick and choose one (or a few) popular distro(s) to support, like SteamOS. It's not reasonable to expect support for all possible Linux software environments. It's already crazy that they support so many hardware combinations, even on just Windows.

pretzel5297 1y ago
Makes me think they might not have the most knowledgeable people on the job. Hopefully they didn't just throw some unwilling Windows devs into the unknown.
acc348 1y ago
They have native macOS version too.

aaronbrethorst 1y ago

I have played a couple hours of BG3 on PlayStation (time-limited demo), and a couple hours on my Mac (purchased on Steam), and I found the controller UI to be really weird and counterintuitive compared to the mouse-driven UI on the desktop computer. Does it get easier? Does anyone have any suggestions for coming to terms with the controller weirdness? I would much rather play BG3 on my Steam Deck than on my computer.

moonshinefe 1y ago
yeah I played bg3 with controller split screen with my wife the entire playthrough. Normally, I would've strongly preferred KB+M for such a game. We definitely got used to it after several hours. I'm not sure if I can recall any tips other than just keep at it and it'll eventually become muscle memory. I don't think it's as good as KB+M but it wasn't something that was bugging me once we got significantly into the game. YMMV.
saghm 1y ago
As a Steam Deck player (who mostly streams from my desktop at this point but still pretty much exclusively games with controller inputs nowadays), I got frustrated with a lot of the "automatic" management of the radial menus. Quite often, when the game adds a new ability to the radial menus, it completely rearranges them, and for some reason it really likes to automatically add things even if you manually remove them, so it becomes very unwieldly especially for spellcasters at higher levels. My frustration reached the point where I realized I either needed this problem solved or I just wouldn't be able to play anymore, which was disappointing for me given how much I've enjoyed it, so I decided to bit the bullet and start developing a mod to try to impose some semblance of order on the radial menus myself. Unfortunately it relies heavily on the Script Extender, which isn't available on consoles (and also doesn't work on the Steam Deck native version, since it's provided as a DLL that gets loaded by the game and presumably would require a non-trivial amount of effort to port to a native Linux shared library), but so far I've implemented a number of specific settings (which can each individually be enabled or disabled) around automatically preventing changes to the radial menus in certain certain circumstances and clearing them in certain other ones (e.g. for new games or when changing ca character's class). Most recently, I added a way to define a custom keybinding to manually lock the radial menus for the currently controlled character until manually toggled off by hitting the keybinding again (which currently doesn't persist past a reload, but I'm fairly close to being done integrating it with a Script Extender feature to preserve arbitrary data alongside save files so that it's possible to save them so that they get restored to the same state they were when a given save was made. Given the reception when I starting publishing this, there seem to be a small but passionate set of players with the same frustrations as me, which helped motivate me to spend the time to keep working on it. To me, the modding ecosystem is probably one of the two most important things about this game (the other being that Larian seems to be pretty awesome as far as studios go nowadays, with their CEO taking a firm stance against "crunch" to get games out and in favor of the model of offline games that don't require paid DLC or microtransactions, as well as their continued support of the modding ecosystem itself). Long before I ever considered writing any mods myself, I started referring to BG3 as similar to Skyrim in that the mods will likely keep things fresh long after new official content stops coming out. I still think this is true, but I also keep being surprised just how much work they're continuing to put into the game even with new content presumably finally having come to an end.

klardotsh 1y ago

This 12GB update managed to trigger the bizarre Steam behavior on my Linux desktop where the game patching process pegs all cores to 100% and thrashes the disk so hard the system eventually stops allowing eg. launching new processes (though the system isn't frozen stiff like running out of RAM - switching Niri desktops is fine, but launching eg. htop hangs forever, and eventually browsers stop responding). After walking away for two hours and coming back to the system still in this state, I gave up and hard-rebooted with the power button. But if you survive the 12GB update process, I'm sure this is great news :) Maybe I'll finally have to make some time to play this game - bought it two years ago, but never ended up making time for it, despite having played Cyberpunk 2077 a time and a half, and most of Factorio: Space Age, since then.

skavi 1y ago
A bit of a tangent, but I’ve seen these issues mentioned before and to me it’s always felt like more the OS’s fault than Steam’s. Like shouldn’t Steam be free to express full utilization of the available resources? And isn’t it the OS’s job to manage QoS? What am I missing here?
- colechristensen 1y ago
  Systems tend to not have particularly strong guardrails against pathological access patterns which aren't trying to use 100% but a large multiple of that or are abusing some subsystem or another. The application is almost always also unresponsive. Putting up those guardrails temporarily hides big problems more often than it avoids needing to have them solved.
  - cyberpunk 1y ago
    BEAM handles this very gracefully. Shame preemptive scheduling isn't more common..
kaztal 1y ago
Update was intense for me too. 12 gb with hotfixes, downloaded after kids had gone to bed. It took about 30 minutes to apply. That was about the allotted time for me.

energy123 1y ago

Solasta COTM is a similar game with good steam deck support (native controls) and many community made campaigns for replayability.

mbStavola 1y ago

I had tried to run BG3 on my Steam Deck a couple months back. It ran... okay. Lot's of hitches and I had to tune things way way way down, but somewhat playable. I'm very grateful that they took the time to build a native Steam Deck release for the game, not really something I had ever expected. Hopefully with this I can actually jump in and enjoy the game!

october8140 1y ago
I played the entire game on Steam Deck and had a great experience. 100+ hours
- whatevaa 1y ago
  No offense, but some people requirements are really, really low. I played God of War on Steam Deck and it was not a good experience, it was at the bottom of 'okay', and only because at that moment I wasn't at home to play on better hardware. This is the reason why I don't believe when people say that it runs great without trying it myself.
  - mbStavola 1y ago
    > No offense, but some people requirements are really, really low. I think you kinda hit the nail on the head, but I believe there is an extra dimension to this: desire. For BG3, it looked fun and I had good memories of BG2 so I was interested in playing it. After tuning the settings a bunch and not being able to get a consistent framerate / not have micro-freezing, I just said "oh well, I'll play it on some other platform in the future." I cared about BG3, but not that much. This is in contrast to Elden Ring Nightreign, which also had issues. I was able to get it to a somewhat stable 30FPS and celebrated that success before dumping 100+ hours into the game. Why? Well, because I love FromSoft games! I really really really wanted to play the game and was willing to put up with a somewhat subpar experience in order to get it. BG3, among other games, is just not that exciting for me personally so my tolerance of technical hitches is very different. ... which brings us right back to this native release. Hopefully the improvements we see are enough to get me over that "hill" and actually enjoying the game. I have the update queued on my deck now so I can try it out after work.

username12349 1y ago

[flagged]

pjmlp 1y ago

This is how it is supposed to be, not by doing API translation. Kudos to Larian.

ffsm8 1y ago
Let's keep in mind that this API translation is more performent then the original API though (as you can see from the ROG ally windows vs steamOS) outstanding work by larien however, I just felt strange reading your comment which somehow implied that the translation is the reason for bad performance, when it is actually more performent then the original
- pjmlp 1y ago
  Naturally, because it doesn't take into account that the OS does much less. Less see how those benchmarks compare, now that just like with netbooks, Microsoft is finally acknowledging they need to react. The translation is the reason SteamDeck will suffer the same fate as OS/2, and netbooks, building castles on other companies kingdoms. For that not to happen, the SteamDeck needs to be sold on its actual capabilities, not by pretending to be someone's else platform.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    You suuuuure love to talk... https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/11 https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/11

drnick1 1y ago

It's worth noting that the native Linux version of games is often buggy and a far worse experience than the Windows version running on Proton. Valve itself is infamous for this: the Left 4 Dead 2 native game has multiple very annoying bugs that have been known for 15 years, and that Valve still hasn't fixed. Unfortunately, there is (another) bug that prevents the Windows version running on Proton from connecting to VAC-secure servers or I would have ditched the Linux version long ago. At this point game devs should just discontinue the native version if they aren't going to properly support it and just make sure the game runs flawlessly on Proton.

arcfour 1y ago
I've had the opposite experience, getting great performance in TF2 for example and even Rust on Linux (but with Rust you couldn't connect to EAC secured servers, so, useless outside of testing stuff on a private server).
izacus 1y ago
Is this the case for BG3?
- trenchpilgrim 1y ago
  This is specifically a Steam Deck version and _not_ a general Linux version, so it's likely not applicable in this case. Think of it more like a console native port.
  - gpderetta 1y ago
    I would be surprised if it was hard to run it on a generic Linux.
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  Often the linux builds do work when they are released, but then an OS update changes some dynamic linked library which then breaks them.

rb666 1y ago

If there was ever a game to play with KB+M, this is it. I don't get the need to stuff everything into a handheld. It's not Mario kart!

darthcircuit 1y ago
I love my steam deck over my desktop pc anymore. Once I had kids, I never got to have my desk in a place that’s safe from being climbed on, so I hooked it up to the tv. But then they started taking over the tv, and the only way I could game was on a handheld. I mostly play older stuff, so it’s plenty powerful for what I do most of the time. I still have the desktop and and Xbox to offset anything else.
INTPenis 1y ago
I agree with you. Steamdeck is amazing but people are often over-enthusiastic about what a handheld device can do. The most comfortable and consistent gaming experience is still a regular stationary PC. But if you really want to play Civ5 on a train then sure the Steamdeck is there for you. I just never felt the need to game something that bad.
- gambiting 1y ago
  I just don't want to sit at my desk after a whole day of work, and I've got an RTX5090 PC for some stupid reason. I'd much rather play games on the sofa on my steam deck sitting next to my wife or play in bed.
- wiseowise 1y ago
  > The most comfortable and consistent gaming experience is still a regular stationary PC. That would be playing console on an 80 inch screen from a couch.
SchemaLoad 1y ago
I just don't want to play anything with a kb and mouse anymore because it just feels like being at work when I'm sitting at a desk using the same setup I just spent all day on.

thefz 1y ago

This is a gigantic effort from Larian, who among all things is still updating its software instead of resting on its own laurels. But the Deck is limited in hardware. It makes sense that it has some difficulties running gigantic games and is more aimed towards simpler games. In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings.

SchemaLoad 1y ago
The Steam deck is really not that limited. Every game could be made to run well on it if some time was spent actually making the low settings work well. Something often skipped on modern games which optimise only for people with a $1000 GPU chugging 400w.
- KeplerBoy 1y ago
  It's not like we have seen anything in gaming that wouldn't be possible on PS3/Xbox360 era hardware, certainly not in terms of complexity. Just remember that stuff like red dead redemption ran on those things with all of 512 MB of unified memory. It ran and looked better than borderlands 4 does on current consoles.
  - fendy3002 1y ago
    Deck can run witcher 3 and mh:world decently (maybe some hiccup and lower graphic setting). There should be not a big problem to make games run on steam deck (ignoring controller support since it's a separate matter).
    - secabeen 1y ago
      MH: World runs fine, but MH: Wilds does not, so it's right at the edge.
  - LoganDark 1y ago
    Portal RTX might not be possible on that hardware without some severe compromises. But then again, RTX is pretty much Brute Force: The Renderer

DeepYogurt 1y ago

You love to see it

maxlin 1y ago

After all that effort, I'd be legit pissed at the website maintainer for screwing up the image scaling in the blog post, making this release look like some bootleg readme ... The images themselves are fine, just the post's formatting squishes them.

swiftcoder 1y ago

> Now that there is a Steam Deck Native build, is Baldur’s Gate 3 supported on Linux? > Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck. "does not support" is not the same as "no", right? In theory it should be possible to run this build on other arm-based linux?

Thev00d00 1y ago
Steam deck is x86_64. It would probably run but they won't accept bug reports.
omnimus 1y ago
It will most likely run fine. Steamdeck has AMD x86 APU. I guess gpu might be a problem. They simply dont want to provide official support for the variety of linux.
easwee 1y ago
I finished the game on Ubuntu when it came out, so it should work fine since ever. You can check out https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940 https://www.protondb.com/app/1086940 for more info.
- jon-wood 1y ago
  The whole point of this post is that there’s a native version that doesn’t use Proton now, so checking ProtonDB isn’t going to tell anyone anything beyond the previous version being fine.
haunter 1y ago
You can download the native version on any Linux distro https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/larian_studios_announces_native_port_of_baldurs/nfsehnf/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/laria...

marhee 1y ago

Anyone knows what does "native" means here precisely? Steam Deck has a x86-64 instruction set AFAIK, so it's just same as a the Windows version? Or has it to do with the GPU / OS? Or does it just mean "properly configured"?

Thev00d00 1y ago
Native as in it's a Linux binary, no wine/proton involved
teamonkey 1y ago
It means compiled for Linux/SteamOS instead of being compiled for Windows and using a compatibility layer to play.

nottorp 1y ago

What does native mean? Is this a linux binary? Using wine directly linked under the hood? Or did they actually build a native application with no translation layers, no matter how they're added?

haunter 1y ago
>Is this a linux binary? Yes https://steamdb.info/depot/2330359/ https://steamdb.info/depot/2330359/ You can download the native version on any Linux distro https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/larian_studios_announces_native_port_of_baldurs/nfsehnf/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/laria...
- nottorp 1y ago
  Well I could, but I already finished the game using the Mac version :) Thanks to Larian for doing cross platform.

krzat 1y ago

This is random, but I wonder if it would be possible to render BG3 with isometric camera, and then, on the fly, convert most of 3d objects into sprites.

aucisson_masque 1y ago

> Larian does not provide support for the Linux platform. The Steam Deck Native build is only supported on Steam Deck. I though the steam deck would be the reason why developper start building their game for linux, but it seems like it's a bigger issue than just making a "linux file". Once they have rewritten the code for the steam deck, what would prevent them to compile the game for Debian and other linux distributions ? I really have no idea how much more work it is but assumed it would be straight forward.

shortercode 1y ago
I would assume the issue is all the variation in different distros. Plus the driver/hardware combinations. While some setups would just work they don’t see it as worth spending the time doing the validation/patching required. The steam deck is 1 device to test, with a single software stack. Much easier to target, and with a known customer base. Which brings up the other issue that they would be unlikely to make their money back on a general Linux release. Companies have cited this as a reason for not doing macOS releases in the past and based on the last steam survey Linux usage is in a similar ballpark (2.6% vs 1.8% for Mac ). Despite all this I think it’s still a move in the right direction.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  Valve released a runtime specifically to combat the variation problem. This allows developers to target a specific runtime and Valve will make the software stack work with as many distros as possible. On the other hand, that stack can only contain so much, and a lot of Linux bugs involve sound subsystems, GPUs, and compositors/X11/window manager configuration issues. You can't quite target the Linux runtime and assume everything will just work, but at least you don't need to target specific versions of glibc and libxml2 anymore.
rtpg 1y ago
> Once they have rewritten the code for the steam deck, what would prevent them to compile the game for Debian and other linux distributions ? You can install Steam on Debian. I think the value here is that with Steam being the "approved launcher" you offload a lot of "distro weirdness" over to Valve. The value of a standalone build seems fairly low for most game devs.

Temporary_31337 1y ago

Wow, I bought Baldur's Gate 3 out of nostalgia before a very long (20hours + ) flight and played some good long hours on the plane. Unfortunately the Proton version meant the game was unplayable on the Deck later in the game. I'm so happy I can finish it now. Coincidentally I also realised I can play it on my Mac too...

sylware 1y ago

Proton titles on steam are illegal in tons of countries: there is no official support and real money is involved. Some say there is some special refunding policy with proton titles: well I have not seen any "legally binding" document about a game patch or a proton patch killing your game for good on elf/linux, and that anytime during the life cycle of the game. Only whining when that happens, no official support to turn to. Basically PROTON = ZERO BUCKS is the only sane way. I am playing proton titles: gacha games which are kind of free-to-play friendly, well... those without 'anti-non-steamdeck-elf/linux' software like ACE(cf WuWa). They have the windows whales to finance them already, and we are only penguins which dislike to be scammed. But now elf/linux people will be able to buy this game with the legally required official support. This game is really not my thing, but I'll go back to banging my head against the wall and throwing my keyboard thru the window, aka I am going back to play silk song natively on elf/linux available since day one of its release (well, this is a unity game, then ez).

donohoe 1y ago

Can someone phonetically spell out “Baldur” for me? I’ve seen the term across my life but I have never heard it spoken. I think how I imagine it and how it’s said are different - like I discovered from reading LOTR books and then watching the movies…

iknowstuff 1y ago
Look for baldur’s gate reviews on youtube?
opan 1y ago
AFAIK it's just ball-der. I've seen it win awards at The Game Awards and such, plus heard it discussed IRL, everyone seems to say it that way. If that's not the correct pronunciation, it's at least the popular one.

haunter 1y ago

Native vs Proton benchmark https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/10 https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/10 https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/11 https://flightless.yobson.xyz/benchmark/11 Roughly ~10% better FPS in Act 3 but the first benchmark average is pretty much the same. You can download the native version on any Linux distro https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/larian_studios_announces_native_port_of_baldurs/nfsehnf/ https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1nokcej/laria...

3ll10t 1y ago
Those are huge frametime spikes for the native during benchmark #10. Maybe shader comp?
Night_Thastus 1y ago
Just goes to show how impressive Proton really is. It has overhead, but it's tiny in most use cases.

KolibriFly 1y ago

Nice to see Larian putting in the effort for a native Steam Deck build, especially considering how resource-heavy BG3 can get

bloqs 1y ago

can someone explain why this is a big deal to me compared to any game being released on multiple platforms? Surely making games for the switch/ps5/etc is hard too?

Am4TIfIsER0ppos 1y ago

Can I get the native linux build on gog?

sombragris 1y ago

> In parallel I don't understand gamers with 15 years old hardware leaving bad reviews or whining when a game chokes above 720p with minimum settings. I won't leave a bad review or whine on BG3, and my (otherwise very capable laptop) is just 6 years old with an Intel UHD 620 integrated GPU, and BG3 barely reaches the 10fps level on 1024x768 with lowest settings on everywhere. So it's not even 720p, and BG3 chokes a lot in this somewhat recent hardware. I see BG3's graphics and while they are beautiful, they're nothing out of the ordinary in comparison to other games. That is, there are good games that could run very well in my laptop and which look good. In sum, I see BG3 as being needlessly demanding, and pushes out a large sector of machines and potential buyers. I'd love to have an RTX-class GPU (and have the cash to afford it), but all I have it's a laptop whose GPU cannot be upgraded, and that is perfectly capable in all other areas. Every time when I point out this limit in games, which I see as silly, I get flamed to death. People in the gaming communities are seemingly unable to understand why making extremely high minimum requirements is not a good sales strategy. Games can look good with integrated GPUs. See the Wolfenstein games (id engine). Even more recent games like Generation Zero (Apex open world engine) can be run decently at lowest settings on my hardware. MGS5:PhantomPain also runs and looks very good. But no luck with BG3.

sailingparrot 1y ago
To be fair, there is world between "extremely high minimum requirements" and a 6 years old laptop, considering laptop of even the current year are never considered super high end rigs.
- sombragris 1y ago
  If you had s/minimum/recommended I would agree. But no, we are talking about minimum requirements. I submit that a game should be playable even on 10-year old hardware. Of course, the devs can blow the ceiling in their highest settings. Do they need three RTX-7000 series in parallell cooled with liquid nitrogen and eating 3000W of electricity in order to run at the highest/ultra settings? Yeah, be my guest, more power to them. But we are, I insist, talking about minimum requirements. These should be as broad as possible in order to keep the entry barrier low. In a game which doesn't even look especially good, I see the very demanding hardware requirements as just a contribution to planned/artificial obsolescence. (and yeah, I got downvoted as expected. This is getting old...)

sleepybrett 1y ago

I hope to see more games go steamdeck native in the future. While the proton layer is great it would be a nice way to start choking windows out of the games industry. I hate that I have a PC that really does nothing by play games.

freehorse 1y ago

Baldur's gate 3 was one of the first (if not the first) big game to run natively on apple silicon. I am glad Larian takes this kind of stuff seriously instead of doing the bare minimum, in an industry that often even the bare minimum is not to be taken for granted.

throwawayk7h 1y ago

For some unfathomable reason, they disabled local multiplayer on the steam deck version of the game. You need to supply a command-line argument to re-enable it. I honestly don't know why they did this.

mzmzmzm 1y ago

Not to overly praise Valve which does have a profit motive, but their ecosystem + the Steam Deck + the openness of SteamOS really changes the landscape to where the "gaming on linux" punch line could really clear the hump and reach critical mass for developers. Something to fantasize about with each Windows update that adds new privacy converns and nothing else.