A triple-A game I’ve been eyeing is finally down to a reasonable price on a third party website.
But after seeing how much better Diablo IV performs on my friend’s Xbox, I am really disappointed in myself for buying the PC version to play on my Steam Deck. I play mostly docked and connected to a TV, so the visual experience is something I value.
Diablo IV isn’t the first game I’ve regret purchasing on PC instead of Xbox. For older games, the Steam Deck is great; but it seems like modern games I really need to be wary of. You know what they say, fool me once, strike one, fool me twice… strike… three.
Has anyone else had a similar experience, wishing they’d spent the money on another platform? Is there a rule of thumb you follow on what to purchase, where?
Would it be okay to list the specific games I’m wondering about for input? I love my Steam Deck; but I’d rather not feel platform envy again.
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The Steam Deck shines as a handheld because you only have middling graphics power but it’s only trying to drive a small screen (small in both size and pixels). If you plug it into a TV then that tradeoff stops working and it’s going to look worse than any console (except the Switch).
I do use my Deck on the TV and it isn’t as bad as I was expecting, but I’ve got a PC as well for demanding games.
Diablo IV is amazing on the deck for me, but I only dock the Deck occasionally. I already have a mid-high end PC at the desk with an HDMI running to the TV. Only thing that bummed me out was lack of local co-op for PC. Would love to share the Diablo experience locally.
Personally the Deck docked isnt really for AAA titles, but more for all the lighter indie games and even better party games like Jackbox, PlateUp!, and all the emulated games I can bring to a LAN party and everyone pairs their controller to.
IMO the Steam Deck is one of those machines that takes the “sure, we don’t recommend it, but we’ll let you do it” approach. You can run AAA games, and some even run surprisingly well, but in general I find that I would really much rather play AAA games on my PC than on my Steam Deck. It’s really best for indies, AA, and emulation, where the convenience of the Deck over a PC significantly offsets the comparatively weaker performance
Yeah, “AAA games on high / beautiful graphics settings” isn’t really the Deck’s forte. FSR upscaling covers up a lot of the worst of docked ugliness, but it has its limits.
If visual fidelity is a huge deal for someone, and they are going to play docked 90%+ of the time, then they’d probably have been better served by a gaming laptop instead of a Steam Deck. And if one picked up the Deck because it was the best overall value for what they could afford, then they should probably be happy with the capabilities it has, and adjust their expectations a bit.
Steam Deck seems to be the wrong device if you are docking it to a TV most of the time… The SoC is optimized for low-to-mid quality on the 800p screen. The situation is similar if not worse than docking a Switch to a large flatscreen TV.
