Steam Deck

So I’m super happy with my OLED, I switched my Switch for in and have zero regrets. I play mainly on my PC and use the Deck for couch gaming mainly for games that don’t use mouse/keyboard, like older games, emulation, rpgs, twin sticks shooters, etc. I play most of the time in handheld mode.

But there are a few things I would wish they were better, some are personal preferences so take them as they are:

• I wish the screen was larger. Im in my mid forties and on games with tiny characters (e.g. Hades) thi is particularly noticeable.
• The back buttons suck big time, like really, you then go back to your controller of choice with back paddles and it’s even more noticeable how bad they are. In general the controls could use some better ergonomics.
• The whole dock situation is very broken in my opinion, especially if you compare it to something as seamless as the Switch. For several reasons: when docking, sometimes the image doesn’t fill the TV screen because the Deck is 16:10 and the TV is 16:9 and they have different resolution. There is a setting to mitigate that, sometimes it works, sometimes it’s not. And when it’s not you either have to deal with it or restart the game. HDMI CEC is a whole world of its own, you may have a dock that supports it or not and if not is a pain to deal with. Have a third party controller for when it is docked? Well, you’ll have to fiddle in the settings every time you dock or undock for it to work properly.
• The cloud save thing is finicky too. You will be surprised at how many games in your library don’t support it, well, at least in my library, probably because I play lots of older games. But even in the games that support it, it lacks a lot. See. The point of cloud saving would be to be able to seamlessly switch between your Deck and PC and vice versa and continue playing there, right? Well, not quite. In order for Steam Cloud to work you need to EXIT the game first (and pray that the game you are playing allow for saving freely anytime), then wait a few seconds for it to sync (sometimes up to half a minute). It might sound picky but you are playing on the Deck, you want to just press the standby button, leave it resting on the dock and go play to your PC. Well not so fast.
• There are other minor gripes like when sometimes it takes an eternity to wake from standby or when the mouse doesn’t work on desktop mode for some reason and you have to keep the Steam hey pressed for it to work.
• Getting your GOG, Epic or Amazon games to work is not always as straightforward as Heroic Launcher makes it seem and sometimes you’ll need to troubleshoot stuff.

Is still a great machine that allows your entire PC library on the go and works great on all games I throw at it but my point is that it is not as seamless as some people want to make it look. It is not a console and it shows. I don’t have a problem with that but it is worth noticing it.