I got my Steam Deck a week ago today and like many people I’ve been wondering for months just what “unsupported” means. So far there appear to be three basic categories of unsupported games: VR games that will never work, multiplayer games that use an anti-cheat system that is totally out of Valve’s hands and is up to developers to add support, and a mysterious third category only described as “Valve is still working on adding support for this game”. Pretty much all of my games in the unsupported list fall into this catch-all category, since I don’t play multiplayer games.
I wasn’t really in any hurry to investigate this yet, due to how many supported and untested games I wanted to try first and the fact that there isn’t much free space on my 64GB Steam Deck. But then when redeeming some old Humble Bundle keys I accidentally installed a game without realizing it was unsupported, so I figured that since it was already installed I might as well try it and find out. It launched and played, so then I decided to start investigating further and try out some other unsupported games to see what’s causing them to be considered unsupported.
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Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon: The Ubisoft launcher hangs during the “searching for patches” step and never actually launches the game. From what I’ve found online this is the case with many Ubisoft games, including most of the Far Cry games, they all have the same issue with the launcher but the games probably run fine if you can get past that. But as it turns out it’s actually possible, just super tedious and annoying, to get it to work (and it sounds like this trick may work for most Ubisoft games with this issue). First, force Proton version 6.3-8 (I have no clue if this step is actually necessary, but I saw complaints that the next step stopped working at some point so I rolled it back just to be safe). Set the launch option to “PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1 %command%”, this will allow Ubisoft Connect to push past the “looking for patches” error, though in my case it still hung on the first try, I had to quit and restart but then it worked. But when I finally got it all set up and it launched Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon the game instantly crashed with some kind of error related to Wine. So just to eliminate any possibilities I went back and reset it to not force Proton 6.3-8 and that seemed to fix it. Now the game launches and plays great. This is one I was most looking forward to playing on the Steam Deck since I’ve never had a computer capable of playing it well. It sure thinks it’s a modern AAA game, only running at 40-50fps at ultra settings, but that’s the reason I’ve never actually been able to play it for as long as I owned it, it’s way more resource intensive than most games of the era.
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System Shock Enhanced Edition: This one I can’t quite figure out. It launches and runs great, it even uses a Steam Controller profile that’s been heavily customized for the game, everything works and I get 60fps, but then sometimes the frame rate just tanks. I first noticed this when trying to calibrate the right analog stick, it will hesitate for a moment any time I push it (in joystick mouse mode) while using the trackpad or gyro to control the mouse works perfectly with no hiccups. This issue doesn’t make any sense to me, because the game shouldn’t care how the mouse input is created, you’d think it would respond to all mouse inputs equally regardless of how they’re generated. But then if I try to change it to a true joystick (as the game seems to support game pads natively) the whole game just freaks out and will freeze (sound and all) for a second or more any time I attempt any kind of movement or input. I can’t figure out if this is related to the Steam Deck or Proton and that’s why it’s unsupported or if this is some weird glitch where the game doesn’t like mouse and gamepad inputs simultaneously, but if I set it back to joystick mouse and avoid using the analog stick (which is fine for me because I prefer trackpad anyway) it seems to work fine so far. The only other issue, and maybe this is the reason that it’s unsupported but I’m pretty sure the same issue would exist on Windows, is that there’s no music. At least I assume there’s supposed to be background music, I’ve never played the game before, but it’s just silent apart from sound effects and dialog. This game uses MIDI for music like most early ‘90s games, and I’m guessing there’s something going wrong there, the Steam Deck doesn’t have any way to interpret that MIDI signal. There are settings for music but no matter what MIDI setting I select there’s no music anywhere. I’ve seen posts saying you should run a MIDI decoder in the background to get music but I’m not sure how to set that up on the Steam Deck.
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Snake Pass: This game just plays perfectly. Full stop. I don’t know if there was some issue with a previous version of Proton and they just haven’t managed to retest it yet or if there’s some problem I haven’t come across yet, but it runs better than some Verified games and looks fantastic (it’s an Unreal Engine 4 game so performance isn’t incredible, around 40fps at max graphics and it will eat up battery life, but it still looks and runs way better than when I played it on Xbox One). The only issue I’ve noticed is some rare sound/music glitches that occasionally happen after waking from sleep mode, but I’ve seen that issue pop up on all kinds of games including Verified ones.
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Thomas Was Alone: This one also plays perfectly, for the most part. One noticeable issue is that every time you launch the game antialiasing is somehow off (despite it defaulting to ultra settings and not having an option for it), fiddling with the graphics settings (not actually changing them, just switching them around to get the game to reset) seems to bring back antialiasing. Another weird thing is that sometimes the music will overlap, like the music from the previous level will continue in the background of the next level, but I have no idea if this is a Steam/Proton issue or just a bug in the game. Apart from that it runs at a locked 60fps at max visuals and battery is estimated at about 6 hours, as you’d expect for a decade-old 2D platformer. The only other thing I’d point out is that it‘s letterboxed, it doesn’t fill the whole screen, but I think this might be an aesthetic choice since the settings clearly recognize that the resolution is set to 1280x800, not 720, and the letterboxing looks a bit thicker than what I’d expect from 16:9 (maybe it’s running at a more cinematic 1.85:1).
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Risk of Rain: As far as I can tell the only issue with this one is that gamepad compatibility is turned off by default and the Steam Deck defaults to being a gamepad so the game doesn’t respond to controls. Just use the touch screen to enable gamepad support, and it seems to run perfectly fine (you might as well reset the trackpad to act as a mouse with mouse click since the menu is mouse-based and using the analog stick or D-pad just controls a mouse cursor, which is slow and annoying).
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Star Wars Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast: This one has two major problems. The first is that it needs a custom controller profile, it doesn’t respond to anything when you boot it up. This may be as simple as Risk of Rain above where you just need a mouse to navigate menus, but I don’t know, it says it has partial controller support on the Steam page. The second and much bigger issue is that when I click to start the game it just shows a full screen image that appears to be some kind of texture map for a lightsaber. I can hear the game happening in the background, it will even react when I press a face button which makes me think maybe it does work with controllers, but all I see is the unwrapped lightsaber texture, the game is totally unplayable. The first and so far only game I’ve come across where “unsupported” means that it literally won’t run at all, though maybe like Far Cry there is some workaround I don’t know about. I’ve seen reports of people running it on Proton or even the Steam Deck, but even if I roll back to 6.3-8 which supposedly works fine I still get the random texture taking up the screen.
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HROT: This is a retro Quake throwback that launches and runs, but the frame rate is abysmal at maybe 10-15fps at the very best. Rolling back to older versions of Proton can boost the frame rate to around 25 but then you lose sound (there’s a workaround posted online but that didn’t work for me). I still think there’s something really wrong here because there’s no reason such a simplistic game should run so poorly, and in the options the lowest frame rate limiter is 120fps, so the game is clearly assuming you’re getting Quake-like frame rates, not sub-30fps. This one I’d almost call unplayable, except that 15fps is pretty true to the original mid-‘90s Quake experience...
I think I should probably go ahead and wrap this up for now. I still have several other games in my “unsupported” list that I plan to try, and I can make another post like this detailing what I’ve found if anyone’s interested, but for now I’m low on SSD space and most of the other games are much larger installs that won’t fit on my Steam Deck until I delete some other games or get an SD card.
But the bottom line TL;DR is that, from my admittedly very small sample size, “unsupported” almost never means truly unplayable. Almost all of these games can be made to launch and run, many of them work perfectly with no obvious issues at all and others have some very minor setup required to get things working right. Obviously this doesn’t apply to VR games or multiplayer games that use an incompatible anti-cheat, but if you’ve been wanting to try one of the many games that still says Valve is working on adding support go ahead and try it, chances are it will work at least in some capacity.
I honestly think Valve should make a new category for games that can be fully playable but will require tinkering to get them working and will run fine after that, because it feels wrong to call a game unsupported when it literally only takes five seconds of changing the default control scheme to get it working perfectly. But then again the kind of person willing to spend some time tinkering isn’t going to be deterred by “Unsupported”. But especially with larger games it would be nice to know for sure whether a game just has minor solvable issues or is truly a lost cause that won’t be playable at all before spending all the time and bandwidth downloading it.
Submitted by SFArtAndDesigns | #Specialdealer Special Offer Online Shopping Store 2016
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