It’ll be the cheapest place, by an absurd margin, to play Baldur’s Gate 3.
Series S is the cheapest way to play the game by an absurd margin? Steam Deck is only about $100 more and it plays the game just fine.
Absurd is too strong of a word, but 100$ ain’t nothing. Not for everyone.
It’s literally 1/3rd more expensive and thats not an insignificant amount. If your rent increased by 1/3rd tomorrow you’d probably be pissed and if you had a 33.33 percent chance of getting struck by lightning by stepping outside tomorrow you’d probably stay indoors that day.
$100, plus the cost of the mandatory microSD or SSD you’ll need to add to even install the game on Deck, plus the $50 discount for the Series S if you have a modicum of patience. The difference is more like $175-200, and last year the Series S was $100 off for Black Friday. Assuming the game is targeting holiday 2023 for Xbox, you could potentially grab the Series S + BG3 for under $300.
I play at 900p60. Turn literally everything to low or off except textures at medium. Enable the AMD upscaling to the highest quality setting (forget what it’s called). Be sure to turn off Antialiasing (don’t really need it at high resolutions) and God rays. Turn off all optional things but those two are the most important. Also, if BG3 is installed to an SD card, then enable slow HDD mode.
It still stutters a little when transitioning to cut scenes, but I believe that exists in all PC versions.
Edit: And I have made it (what I think is) mostly through Act 2. I’ve also hosted an online session with my friend (who also plays on Steam Deck using my settings) and my husband (gaming laptop) with no issues.
Asking out of genuine ignorance here: is there a setup that allows a 100+ GB game to be played on the 64GB Steam Deck?
128GB micro SD cards are like $12. 512GB is maybe 40$. Can get a 1TB SD card for $100 but I think the 512 is a good middle ground between price and storage.
Yeah, 256 is around $20 last I looked, too. Not bad. Been considering getting one, probably not for anything with an install this large, but it’s nice to know I’d have the option.
USB-C SSD:
https://www.kingston.com/en/ssd/xs2000-portable-usb-c-solid-state-drive
I set up a 2TB Win 11 install.
God damn, I’m still somehow extremely impressed by how small storage has gotten. That’s wild.
Not currently, no. They burned enough dev cycles trying to get split screen co-op on the S that now BOTH the S and X versions are delayed, which I guess is better than “not happening at all.”
The S has every right to exist, but as soon as it starts interfering with Series X development (which has been for a while now), it’s time for it to go.
Microsoft needs to cut it loose like the boat anchor it is and just release a discless Series X and call it good.
It’s one game that actually utilizes the power of the series x, and isn’t watered down to work on the S.
Think of all the games that were made worse because they HAD to run on lower quality hardware
Wait until you hear about all of the dev cycles spent getting games on the Switch.
In most cases, Nintendo platforms are ignored by 3rd parties. Non-Nintendo games rarely sell well there:
https://www.vgchartz.com/article/449937/the-switchs-growing-third-party-problem/
Am I misreading your comment? You’re saying Series S is not the cheapest because Steam Deck is more expensive? Did you have a typo? Am I suffering CO poisoning?
I’m said the Xbox is not the cheapest, by a huge margin. It is, in fact, the cheapest by a $100 margin, which is not huge.
AAA PC exclusive titles also have the right to exists.
I miss playing good first person shooters…
I don’t blame the lack of good shooters on consoles. Consoles never interfered with that before. I blame the popularity of Battle Royale. Everything is a fucking BR now. And it’s not like they just took the gameplay style; they also took the jank.
All the best new shooters are indy developed boomer shooters with retro aesthetics. And I’m getting kinda over that, too. The genre needs some new ideas.
I miss playing good shooters since the PS360 era, way before the battle royale genre entered the game.
It’s when the genre exploded on consoles and it was when the genre was overly simplified and dumbed down
Before, some multiplatform FPS changed between the PC version and the console version. The console versions often had maps changed or even completely removed (and enemies where altered too) because they where too much for a controller
Me too, but some of my favorites were console exclusive. There’s really no reason for those games to be PC or console exclusive these days. The financial math tends to not work out either.
Some games simply won’t work on controllers, though. Like Arma, or Tarkov.
If it literally can’t be done on a controller, then sure, but I’ve now seen people happy with the controls for Age of Empires II on an Xbox pad, so Arma can probably be done too. I’ve never played Tarkov, so I can’t speak to it.
By an absurd margin? Motherfucker the steam deck is $400. If you buy a series s over a deck you’re a fool.
The Series S is very frequently on sale for $50 off, sometimes more, and often comes with a bundled controller or game.
The Deck is only playable in Act 1. The frame rate in other acts struggles to reach 20 FPS, even on low settings. Also, the $400 deck you’re referencing cannot even install the game unless you buy an accompanying microSD (which I can’t imagine provides a good BG3 experience) or an SSD which you then crack open the steam deck to install (which will be too intimidating to most casual, non-tech people).
$450+ is a more accurate price point for playing BG3 on Steam Deck; 50% more than the Xbox MSRP, which is significantly discounted every few weeks. The Xbox will also offer a much more convenient experience to those who want to play the game on their TVs, and the game will look nicer on that hardware.
The Deck is an awesome little device, but you’re overselling it here, and ignoring a lot of nuance.
I played the entire game on the steam deck AMA. I found it to be acceptable in act 3. I didn’t check the fps but it felt like 30-40
Curious to hear what settings you were using? Because after this steam deck fanatic kept harping about how it was a perfect experience from start to finish if you have the right settings, I went back and tried it on my Deck. In act 3, in a sparsely populated area of the city, I was hovering in the low 20s with frequent dips into the teens. With everything set to low (except textures on mediu) and all the visual flourishes like god rays, bloom, etc disabled. FSR couldn’t even improve things.
I mean it’s definitely not a great experience on the steam deck. I would imagine even the Series S can run the game better than the Deck can. Especially at 1080p since the deck only has an 800p screen. (Yes you can dock it but the experience will be even worse than the already reportedly poor visuals on the 800p screen)
If that report about the Series S losing split screen is true that seems like a pretty good compromise while also allowing a decent quality single player experience for Series S owners.
It is a great experience, I do not know where this sentiment keeps coming from.
How far are you in the game? It gets worse the further you get in the game.
The steam deck is about half as powerful as the Series S. If you don’t want mobile gaming, there’s zero reason to buy the steam deck over the Series S.
The steam library, full Linux operating system, and emulation of current gen Nintendo games is far from zero reason.
And if a person doesn’t care about the steam library, linux operating system or emulation? If they just want to play BG3 and other modern games on their couch, running natively on their machine in a convenient, no-fuss manner? Will you admit that, for that person, the Steam Deck is a terrible option and they’d be far better served, both financially and visually, by buying an Xbox Series S, even at MSRP?
Article is well written, and I agree with most of it actually.
Microsoft did the right thing by softening their stance on system parity. Insisting on it would have hurt the Xbox further along the line, but now devs know they can still release on Xbox if they can’t get one or two features to run on the S.
I didn’t know it wasn’t on Xbox, that’s GOTTA be hurtin em. I’m sure they’ll learn from this and make whatever exceptions need to be made far earlier next time.
If I’m not mistaken the only reason it’s not already on Xbox is because Microsoft insisted it needs to have shared screen on all models, which proved to be problematic and eventually impossible on S, but they refused to release it on X in the meantime.
Basically it’s very much Microsoft’s own doing.
Also while it’s neat that they made the game as pretty as they did, this is at the end of the day an isometric turn based crpg. It shouldnt be that hard to scale down.
It’s not exactly isometric considering you can tilt and zoom the camera and get it all the way down to over the shoulder adventure style, allowing you to see off into those beautiful vistas. It has some performance issues even on PC in some places like the mountains and the namesake city.
