Steam Deck

I am also consistently impressed with the Deck and what it manages to achieve across a variety of games. I’ve been using it docked with a 1080 screen for the last couple of weeks due to travelling, and with some tweaking I am playing all of the games I want to play. Sure, some run better than others, but with some concessions they all run in an acceptable manner.

Yeah me too, it really isn’t that powerful of a machine on paper.

I think it is also a testament to the vibrancy, artistry and vision of indie game developers too though that so many highly critically acclaimed classics in the video game world are graphically relatively simple affairs (from a technical perspective, not artistic or aesthetic). Enter The Gungeon, Dead Cells, Rogue Legacy 2, Spelunky 2, Death Road To Canada, Factorio, Hyper Light Drifter, Caves Of Qud, Helldivers, Deep Rock Galactic, Armored Brigade, Rainworld, Risk Of Rain, Stardew Valley, Slay The Spire, Monster Train….. the list goes on and on and on.

It blows my mind, as brutal as the game industry is to work in, so many artists have elevated and evolved video genres over the past 15 years that “next-gen” doesn’t mean anything substantiative anymore. Yeah maybe the next big video game will be a Cyberpunk type game with crazy good graphics but maybe it will be a game about 2d cubes bouncing off walls that somehow has amazing gameplay or something totally out of left field that revives a genre that has been dead for 10 years, who knows?

It is a testament to the creative vision of the artists in this medium that “new” doesn’t just mean another marvel movie with an even more insane budget that tells the same exact old story except with more underpaid vfx artists working on set pieces…

It makes me not give two flying shits about if my steam deck is powerful enough or not to run stuff and just enjoy when it somehow beats the odds and is.

edit sorry to write a book, no pressure to read it lol

There are definitely community made control schemes for the deck that get you most of the way there. Controller based shooters have been around for long enough that it feels like there are established norms, it’s mainly a question of what you do with the two trackpads (I don’t use them for aiming, I don’t need them for aiming because I I use joysticks + gyro) and four back buttons.

For more tactical shooters (which DayZ certainly fits the bill in terms of mechanics even if it doesn’t sell itself as one) it often makes sense to make two of the back buttons dedicated lean buttons.

Then you have your steady aim button, which I normally map to full pull on the left trigger in a game like battlebit, but DayZ requires a button to raise your weapon, so then the obvious choice there is to bind soft pull to raise weapon and full pull to ADS. This means that one of the unused back buttons needs to be bound to steady aim. If you are planning on jumping a lot the other back button clearly should be jump, though in DayZ that jumping/mantling can just go on the A button.

One trackpad becomes your top row numbers and the other can be whatever else you need. There are different choices to be made I guess, but this general pattern pretty much follows in any shooter.

As a cherry on top, steam allows you to set a command to be sent when a joystick is pushed to its maximum extent, it takes adjustment to fit your comfort but this allows you to never have to click a thumb stick to sprint again by setting the outer command as sprint.

I don’t use touchscreen for inventory management, I just muscle through it with joysticks, you can really tweak your joysticks on steam to be very responsive but yeah it’s still annoying. If I was playing a game like apex where very fast looting/inventory management is an absolute core requirement of gameplay I would fiddle with things more.

Final note, I recommend buying a pack of rubber thumbstick caps that fit over the joysticks of the steamdeck (really I recommend them for all joysticks), you can get a pack of different height ones for like $12 and try out different heights until you find one you like. I use a tall one on my right joystick and a stubby short one on my left joystick. These massively improve fine aim adjustment control on joysticks since the sensation of needing to overcome a real or perceived dead zone before input begins to be received by the game goes away almost completely. Get rounded top ones, not concave ones. They will randomly shoot off your joysticks and attempt to hide in annoying places like under your couch or somehow all the way across the room from where you were sitting so get extras, you will lose them.

(I’m assuming you’re mostly a windows player outside of the deck)

Lol I always run into other steam deckers that just bought a steam deck as a fun complement to their gaming rig and they always assume I also have a $3000 gaming pc….. nope I am broke. This is my gaming rig, I can barely afford to feed myself hahahahaha starts crying….

Yes I did mostly game on windows before but that was playing games like cataclysm dark days ahead, board game arena, xonotic or other random games that run well on potato computers.

Errr I didnt mean to come off negatively about your response if I did. I appreciate the advice! I am still figuring out how to use wine, proton and the deck so I always appreciate advice!