Baldur's Gate 3 Steam Deck – Native Version
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Larian releases a native version of Baldur's Gate 3 for Steam Deck, sparking discussion about the benefits and implications of native Linux support for games.
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>>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.
My question was about; do they enforce a device label?
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.
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?
The window manager, package manager, etc are completely custom. The OS is a read only image based system.
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.
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
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.
There is an arch x86-64-v3 repo, but I found it to be very far behind in terms of the most current packages, and I've experienced bugs with it.
The alternative is using (what is effectively) a cross compiling toolchain to target Linux from itself! Or spin up an ancient Debian image (including ancient compiler) to build against ancient glibc.
It's hard to blame anyone for just using Proton, with the perma-stable Win32 API. No build containers, no chroot, no locking the build to Steam. Just the same build infra you already have.
One could argue that Proton is a kind of a container. It has a runtime system, filesystem, wine itself has several executables and interprocess communication, etc.
(Not saying mesa should be statically linked, but that we should be able to load and use it without libc)
That's irrelevant, because Proton is literally a Windows emulation layer, (the product of decades of cumulative work). "they" (Larian) didn't have to do anything for that.
Certainly Larian's effort for making a Steam Deck native version is commendable (I hear it was the result of one single employee's effort). Larian is a rare beacon in the video games industry biz for the amount of post-launch support and content they provide.
But my point remains: supporting Linux broadly is a far larger, and ultimately unreasonable, ask, than just supporting the Steam Deck.
Anyways, BG3 runs perfectly fine, natively, on my Ubuntu 25.04 RTX 4090 rig.
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.
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.
BG4 will almost certainly happen, but by some other studio.
You can classify a vendor as a pain in your ass but if they get results, it’s time to look in the mirror and think about why you kept telling them to go right when they went left, and everybody loves the results.
Though it’s also true that a lot of key people have now left WotC and we are slowly working toward a situation where a Darrington Press game is more likely than a WotC game.
WOTC were completely dysfunctional over the last few years and it nearly destroyed d&d.
- They tried to build their own bg3, except it was a VTT that they could fill with microtransactions, but they didn't know what VTTs needed to actually be used. They just thought: "Build something that we can nickle and dime all the users of"
- The new "backwards-compatible" edition that de jure isn't a new edition, but with the power creep is a de facto new edition.
- The OGL fiasco that shattered the community content creators who decided to attempt to make their own games "with blackjack and hookers". (e.g. daggerheart, dc20, draw steel, tales of the valiant, dragonbane, shadowdark, ) and bring their communities along to try the new games (including older offshoots like pathfinder 1e/2e, lancer, 13th age, etc...)
Imagine how much money they've had to pay their major community members (critical role, dimension 20, etc...) just to keep them playing the d&d branded games.
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.
Here's a review of Steam Deck performance from early 2024: https://steamdeckhq.com/game-reviews/baldurs-gate-3/
I'm assuming this is just an effort to slightly improve things.
I feel like this describe how I feel about life in general. maybe we really are living in a simulation.
You seem to comment with generalizations a lot.
Here is some data:
https://steamcommunity.com/stats/1086940/achievements
"The City Awaits (40.3%)"
So 59.7% of all players didn't make it to Act 3 on Steam, a bit under a "vast majority".
There are some hiccups at times, but it is acceptable, IMO.
To be fair, I've still spent a crazy amount of time with the Civilization games so let's say that was a partial success.
For the first few months, act 3 (in the city) was legitimately hard to play. Performance, stability, visual glitches, all pervasive. But later patches did do a better job of improving those points.
Act 3's still the most intensive part of the game by far so on many setups it's still wise to at least crank down the crowd density, but it's come a long way since the launch version of the game.
In terms of the wifi itself, I have two mesh routers in the house, one directly connected to the modem in the living room, and the other upstairs in my office, with the desktop plugged into it via ethernet. I'm lucky enough to be in an area with gigabit fiber, which made it seem worthwhile to invest in a good mesh setup, and I honestly might ended up with fairly low local latency mostly by accident from that. I've read some things that indicate that WiFi 7 might be a significant part of why this works well for me, but having never tried streaming games before having this setup, I don't have anything to compare it to.
On the software side of things, I mostly use the defaults that the AUR `sunshine` package comes preinstalled with for the server (although I'm not sure how much of that is tweaked from upstream). I don't have any ports exposed to the wider internet, and I have LAN encryption disabled, which likely reduces the overhead a bit. I'm not sure if it matters, but for the sake of completeness, but my GPU is a Radeon RX 6900 XT, and I'm running the standard Arch repo versions of of mesa, Plasma 6, and the `linux-zen` kernel (with Plasma configured to use Wayland rather than X11). On the client side, the Steam Deck is using Moonlight from the flatpak listed in the "Discover" app in desktop mode, with the resolution set to 1440p (since that what my monitor has, and I've found a lot of games lower the quality of the graphics if I lower the resolution to match my Steam Deck's native 800p) and the refresh rate set to 90 FPS, which the app then displays as converting to a bitrate of 49 Mbps. I have it set to fullscreen (since I don't really have any need to use the steam deck for other things when gaming, and it still does allow me to easily get back in to the local settings without much issue even with that set) and Vsync off, the boxes checked off for "Optimize game settings for streaming", "Capture system keyboard shortcuts", "Enable mouse control with gamepads...", "Enable HDR", and "Unlock bitrate limit" (the last of which presumably overrides the auto-computed bitrate mentioned above), as well as turning pretty much every audio setting I can off or at least to the lowest possible value since I'm pretty much always either watching TV or listening to music nowadays when playing. I left the video decoder and codecs as "automatic".
The only two things that ever seem to go wrong is that the Steam Deck sometimes seems to decide to render the on-screen keyboard below the streamed desktop rather than above it, and occasionally (maybe once every 10-12 hours of playing over several days?) the connection will start to degrade over the course of a minute or so and become unable to sustain the necessary bandwidth. The keyboard issue seems like it might be a bug in Moonlight, since I'm able to fix it by disconnecting and restarting the client itself, and the connection issue seems like it's either an issue with Sunshine or my network itself, since I can always fix it by simply disconnecting (without needing to restart Moonlight itself). The experience overall has been so good that I've almost completely stopped playing anything locally on the Deck itself (with the only exception being occasional emulation of Gameboy Color/Gameboy Advance games, which obvious don't require much in terms of hardware). I'm able to play games with much higher graphical settings than I could locally on the Deck, and the battery life is significantly improved (maybe around 6-8 hours of dedicated playing). It's such a smooth experience that I've been seriously considering upgrading to the Legion Go literally just to have a higher-res screen for this setup without having to change much (since SteamOS is supported for it nowadays; I don't have much interest in the Legion Go 2 with Windows, and the more powerful/efficient hardware wouldn't do much for me with my current setup).
[1]: I didn't have a ton of experience with mesh wifi honestly, but after some basic research I ended up buying of two of this mode (which seems to have a version of 6.1.0 from checking just now)l, and they seems to work reasonably well: TP-Link Deco BE25 Dual-Band BE5000 WiFi 7 Mesh Wi-Fi Router https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DKVKLJX3
* Based on my experience
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.
In hindsight, I really didn't need Windows, but I was impatient.
[1]: https://baldursgate3.game/news/room-temperature-fix-33-now-l...
The Deck is amazing but a hardware refresh would be helpful
Wouldn't that depend heavily on the game and developer in question? The Switch 2 has more than sufficient hardware to compete, with a particularly beefy GPU for a handheld.
I'd be more ready to blame the game and developer in question than this console, unless there are a lot of examples from capable developers performing measurably worse.
On Switch, I had to expensively rebuy games at high prices, which then ran poorly and didn't support any kind of settings to try to fix the situation.
On the Deck I get all my desktop Steam library and I can change game settings until they run as I like (within reason).
I don't see how those two are comparable purchases - I either get a console which runs poorly and demands 40$ for games that are like 5$ on Steam... or a console that already supports my existing library AND on top of that allows me to stream games from main PC at full detail and framerate.
Leaves the question who is to blame completely out.
And as a consumer I couldn't care less why it doesn't work. I paid for it, it doesn't work: I am not recommending it.
Easy as that. I don't have to write thesis about such stuff.
You're probably right though, if it's any consolation.
It doesn't change the reality though, that currently many of the cross platform titles don't work well on the Switch 2.
The Switch 2 and the Steam Deck are hugely different machines, despite sharing a form factor.
Obviously SD can be more than just "handheld console", but a lot of people won't need that.
I spent like 98% of my playtime on the original in handheld. That has switched completely. It’s not just the size but especially the weight I think.
Yeah, I know most people will say the Deck is already too slow for 800p, so why would it pull 1080p well?
I have two decks, one's got Deck HD, the other doesn't. I render the Deck HD one at 540 native and upscale 2x with FSR. It looks way better than the stock display one and runs better as well. Similar with HZD and other highly demanding games.
That said, 99% of my time on the Deck is spent playing retro games. Does that need 1080p? No. Can it use it? Yes, very much so.
I never pick up the original deck anymore - the Deck HD modded one is just better.
i guess that's that then!
I mostly use SD to stream from my main rig, so i can always have >60fps on my SD.
- https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/handheld/legion-go/len106g000...
- https://rog.asus.com/gaming-handhelds-group/
Honestly, I think a gaming laptop and a controller makes more sense for most things, if you don't need that little bit of increased portability.
I'd love to see a steamdeck lite, with a similar size and weight to the switch. But still with the rounded hand grips of the steamdeck. The deck as it is feels like a HN designed product with way too much stuff jammed in it with no regard to size and weight. The trackpads are cool for desktop mode but the space taken up for something so rarely used isn't worth it.
This has been so comfortable that this helped me ignore the pain in my arm after a fracture/surgery this year.
Yes it can't play Cyberpunk but it'll handle native Android games, classic emulation, and any cloud streaming very well. You can also install moonlight on it and stream full fat desktop games too.
Though if I was buying it now, I'd want to see what the next generation offers.
I am not trying to victim blame or anything, I just can’t imagine a situation where I could forget something so big.
I used to be a great fan of Prey Project, but I don't think it's installable on the Steam Deck without leaving Steam mode.
https://preyproject.com
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.
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.
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
huh? but Steam Deck is just normal Arch Linux with x86_64 ~~aarch64~~?...
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