Baldur's Gate 3: Initial Steam Deck Impressions After 25 Hours

I've been playing Baldur's Gate 3 for about 25 hours now exclusively on the steam deck and so I wanted to give you my thoughts on playing the game on this system hello everyone and welcome back to the channel so Boulders 3 seems to be taking the gaming World by storm all of my feeds seem to be absolutely chock full of clips of people playing the game you know doing really silly things finding ways in to and out of crazy situations falling for the various Companions and just generally having a really good time with the game I've been playing along too but I've only been playing on the steam deck and I've only been playing the game in handheld format and so today I wanted to make maybe a bit of a shorter video just talking about my experience of playing the game in handheld form I do really enjoy playing border skate on the steam deck but just to sum things up I don't think this is the best way to play the game so why don't I think it's the best way well first of all the graphic settings I'm going to show what settings I'm using on the screen at the moment I spent a fair bit of time messing around with the settings when I first launched the game tweaking them trying to get a good stable frame rate I kind of struggled the ones that I've got at the moment are the best ones I've been able to find and they give me sort of a stable ish 25 to 30 frames per second most of the time but not all of the time nothing I could do ever really got me over 30 to be honest and quite often I will sometimes dip towards the 20 region playing this game on Steam deck now when you ask the game to detect what the best settings for your device are FSR gets turned on by default at least it did for me when I first started to play the game around launch maybe that's changed now but just watch out for that FSR setting because there seems to be some kind of bug with it at the moment no matter which FSR setting you pick whether you go for sort of like the performance side of things or the graphic side of things everything just immediately becomes blurry especially character models so just watch out for that I've had that set to off basically for the entire time that I've played through the game and switching it on just seems to make things worse so I would leave that off for now supposedly FSR 2.0 is coming to the gaming in a future patch so I would just leave it off for now and then when 2.0 does come we can have a look and see if that makes things any better or not you can see overall though that even on sort of the medium to low graphic settings that I'm using the game does look quite nice on Steam deck on a handheld screen and because it's not a fast-paced game I don't think you need to worry too much about not having the smoothest frame rate you definitely don't need 60 frames for this type of game and I think 30 20 to 30 is pretty much fine I mostly stopped noticing the frame rate after a little while but just to sort of warn you that if you are somebody who doesn't like that kind of thing a bit of variance in the frame rate then this might bother you and especially when there seems to be fire fire seems to make everything so much worse for the frame rate so just watch out for that now when it comes to controls I would say that actually it does work pretty well with the GamePad if you've played Divinity original sin 2 then you sort of know what to expect you can move around using the control stick highlight things use action buttons to activate like levers for example and you can press the left bumper or right bumper to bring up your action menu to allow you to switch between the skills and yeah overall all I think it does work pretty well I'm quite surprised at how well they managed to get this to work on a Gamepad just given the amount of stuff you can do the amount of things there are to click on and interact with I am really quite pleasantly surprised that it does work on a Gamepad I do think they've swapped some things around from Divinity original sin 2 though I got quite excited for this game just before releasing dive back into Divinity original sin 2 for a little while and if you're used to playing that game you might accidentally end your turn a bit too soon I'm pretty sure they've swapped those buttons around it used to be that why open the action menu on original sin 2 and on balder's gate why enter your turn so there's been quite a few times when I've accidentally ended my turn when I didn't mean to and that has kind of affected combat when you accidentally take no action at all in your turn so just keep that in mind other than that though everything you can do exactly the same basically as a mouse and keyboard and I'll be quite happy to keep playing the game the whole way through Using a Gamepad you know it's a little clunky sometimes to sift through a huge number of items or a huge number of spells but it's not too bad and yeah I think they've done a really good job to bring this over onto Gamepad I think it's coming out on Playstation soon I think PlayStation players are going to have no problem at all to get to grips with this game only one small thing that maybe could be a little bit better by playing mouse and keyboard is I don't really move objects in the world as much as I think mouse and keyboard players do it's not as intuitive on a Gamepad you have to walk up to the object press the action button press X and then go through the options and pick move and then you sort of move the object that way whereas on a mouse and keyboard it's very easy you just put your mouse over the object say a barrel and drag it to where you want it's much more intuitive on mouse and keyboard and playing on Gamepad I end up either not really bothering or some I just forget sometimes that I can even do that so when I'm trying to work out where to go next or if there's a puzzle to solve I often forget that I can move things around finally the touch screen of the steam deck the touchscreen does work but as soon as you press onto the touchscreen what happens is it sort of freezes up for a few seconds and then the game switches over to mouse and keyboard mode it thinks that by pressing in the touch screen you are trying to emulate a mouse and that can be kind of annoying especially if you're the kind of person who accidentally presses the touchscreen sometimes I've known it too many times luckily just once or twice and then if you just press a button again it freezes up for a couple of seconds and switches back to the GamePad control scheme not a huge issue but I've not really found a reason to use the touchscreen the only thing really that I've used the touchscreen for is once or twice the camera will just endlessly pan to the bottom left of the screen and it'll just keep going that way and just by pressing the touchscreen and so changing that control scheme over to Madison keyboard and then back again that seems to have fixed it the battery life on Boulders Gate 3 on Steam deck is not brilliant I usually get less than an hour and a half most of the time it kind of seems to equate usually to about one minute per one percent of battery but then when you do enter some of these areas with more stuff going on then you burn through a bit faster and so yeah overall it seems to work out to be about a little bit less than an hour and a half usually I will say that this is the first game that I've played on Steam deck where I have been annoyed by the battery life I've not really been very happy with how little I can play it I'm always next to a plug in my house when I'm sat down down on the sofa or at the table or anything like that and especially that first weekend was that the game had come out that battery warning notification popped up far too soon and far too often So eventually I did end up digging a plug out sort of moving where I was sat to so that I could be sat plugged in most of the time because yeah it doesn't charge very quickly either when you're playing this game so yeah battery life is definitely a factor to be aware of and one of the reasons why I'm wondering if maybe it's not the best way to play this game my final reason then and the reason why I decided to make this video now is I've just got to act two so as I say I'm about 25 hours in and I've got to act two and I've been walking around ax2 for a little while I know a lot of people have been playing just in act one for a lot longer than 25 hours but just I just happened to get to act two and I've noticed that since reaching the new act the performance has got on noticeably worse I don't really want to show any footage because I feel like in this game even just seeing the environments are kind of spoilery but but I I have noticed that the performance has gotten significantly worse sort of 20 to 25 instead of that 25 to 30 FPS most of the time and it can dip a little bit lower than that I've been using research and you know depending on where you look and who it is that's commenting some people say on PCS it's absolutely fine some people say on PCS they've got the same thing some people on Steam deck are saying that it's absolutely fine and some people on Steam deck are also saying that it's getting worse the further through the game they go and that's sort of been my experience so far I've gotten to X2 and it seems to have gotten a bit worse performance wise now Larry and have been saying that there's multiple patches coming some small patches some bigger patches and so I am feeling quite confident in that hopefully that performance will be addressed and little bits and pieces will be tied up and you know smoothed out over the next few months and it also is a very big game I've seen people talking about spending 30 40 50 hours in act one which seems to work pretty well so depending on your kind of play style you might want to pick up the game now knowing that you're not going to get to act 2 for you know a couple of months time but I didn't think it was worth pointing out because it is making me consider not continuing the game on Steam deck you know I might actually play it on PC and see if my PC runs it better which I would hope it would but I'm not sure because I have seen people say that act two and three also don't run super great on their PC so we'll have to see how that goes the game itself though is absolutely phenomenal I have to say that I love d d anyway I really love RPGs as well and there's just so much love put into this game so much to do so much lore so many interesting characters so many different decisions that you can make just a character creation at the start gives you like hundreds of choices there's so many classes and subclasses you can pick you can customize your character endlessly it really does have absolutely tons and tons of content if you're looking for a game that you feel like you could replay over and over and make loads of different decisions this is definitely one for you it's really hard to give specific examples without spoiling something but I'll try and do it as spoiler free as possible so at one point in act one I was approaching an objective I had to talk to a group of people for one of my quests and I had with me in my party somebody who is allied with that group of people and because of the interaction between this group of people and my party character who I had with me things didn't go very well and I ended up in a fight and I couldn't win this fight I lost I had to reload and instead of going at it again I decided to go and look to do something else while I leveled up and later I came back and I didn't have that same party member with me anymore I'd left them back at Camp because I'd found some more party members and I just decided to travel with them instead I liked them more and interestingly enough not having that party member completely changed the conversation that I was had with this group of people even though the new party would have been completely strangers to this group that I was talking to somehow that ended up being not a fight compared to somebody who was supposed to be an ally with them being in the party and that's kind of the point that I'm trying to get across not only is there so many different ways you can approach things depending on who you're with who you're playing as you know if you want to persuade people if you want to fight people if you want to sneak if you want to lie and cheat and I don't steal things for example there's so many different ways to do things not only that but also sometimes things just won't work out the way that you expect them to at all and you'll be constantly surprised by this game which I think is another really good thing it's really nice these days to be surprised by something in a game a lot of plots these days are you know very obvious you know kind of what's going to happen but not this game at all in theory I'm about a third of the way through this game there's three acts of the game I've played through act one and I'm still not really sure where the story is going to go from here it could go in all sorts of directions and I'm loving it and as I say with all the decisions you can make there's so much replayability to this game that I think everybody should at least have a go if they're at all interested I think a lot of people will love it and it seems to be doing really well in reviews and also just in general people's opinions it's it's really good game so there we have it I wasn't tending to play the game for longer on Steam deck before I made this video but with the performance getting worse the further through the game I went I thought maybe it would be better to make it now like I said because I'm considering not continuing to play it on the steam deck I do think it's an incredible game though and I think everyone should have a go if they get the chance how about you though are you playing Baldur's Gate 3 are you loving it are you playing it on Steam neck have you been trying it out on there or have you sort of stayed away from the handheld side and you're playing it on your PC instead let me know how you're finding it thank you so much for watching and I hope to see you in the next video [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Tom Finler

Views: 22,207

Keywords: baldurs gate 3, baldur's gate 3, steam deck, baldurs gate 3 gameplay, baldurs gate 3 steam deck, baldur's gate 3 steam deck gameplay, baldur's gate 3 steam deck performance, baldur's gate 3 steam deck settings, bg3 steam deck, steam deck performance, steam deck gameplay

Id: U1lT_-Epaxo

Length: 12min 14sec (734 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 19 2023