"Handheld consoles are getting more popular each year, but the ROG Ally and Steam Deck have lost sight of what made them so accessible."
These are the best Lies of P Steam Deck settings to ensure smooth gameplay and fewer frame drops as you beat bosses!
How does this Pinocchio-inspired soulslike stack up on Steam Deck? Timo Schmidt for overkill takes a look if this dark horror experience and sums up whether it gets its wires crossed or if there’s no string attached when playing on Valve’s handheld.
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In this interview with AYANEO CEO Arthur Zhang, Chris Brandrick asked him about creating handhelds, the Steam Deck, and what the ultimate handheld would look like.
ROG Ally and steam deck are better than the switch
I like the switch but it's outdated tech that can't run games of this generation.
The argument here is at the very least muddled and shows that the author never actually used the devices that she is comparing to the Switch. To start the ROG Ally and the Steam Deck are not exactly the same nor do they have the same objective.
Valve's idea was a compromise between a full PC and a console and a lot of the "issues" mentioned by the author are "fixed" by the automatic Steam Deck profiles. That will basically make the device work as a console, with both the benefits of the plug and play nature of them as well as the limitations of being required to keep within the approved library.
Asus solution however is more or less a full-fledged PC in the shape of a handheld. That indeed makes it a more enthusiastic device. They tried to streamline the process for at least the performance profiles and to some degree they achieved that. But is still much more of a PC than it is a console.
As for the point about price. Yes, they are more expensive than the Switch, but they come with completely different baggages. With Ally in particular offers a ridiculous high value, cause not only it will carry all the library that you might have already built on PC - and EGS alone gave out hundreads of games at this point - but you have access to the best deals in the form of bundles, different stores and Game Pass. And they also have access to a ridiculous amount of other libraries, by means of emulation.
So while they are more expensive to front. They will pay themselves much faster when you actually start to play games on them.
And as a side note:
"Simply slot in your triple-A game and enjoy a refined experience"
It's really a matter of taste. But I wouldn't consider games that literally go from below 480p resolutions and run at below 30 fps as refined. But that might just be me.
What makes portable consoles great is that they're portable.
This is just a ridiculously contrarian argument for the sake of saying something negative about something popular for hits.
My take on this is as follows:
I have a switch since its release and a Steam Deck for 10 months now.
While Steam Deck is a clear winner in the graphics department, with access to Sony, PC and Xbox games as well as better joysticks, it is simply not that accessible or easy to use.
With Steam Deck I have over 10 games that while playable according to Steam, can not be played on the Deck for many reasons (control schemes not supported by community, random crashes, freezing bugs, not starting, endless booting loops etc)
Graphic settings have to be continually adjusted to reach an acceptable level of performance as default settings dont always work.
On the Deck I have 37 games installed on a 512 GD SSD whereas on switch I have over 70 on a 400GB micro SD with another 120GB free (including many storage demanding games).
If I purchase a game and begin downloading, on the Deck I have to keep the handheld on whereas on switch it continues downloading when you press the power off button.
When I resume a game on Switch after powering off, I almost never after 6 years had any issues with the game booting normally, whereas with the Deck I encountered too many freezing issues (notably on the Ascent, God of War, Serious Sam 4, Devil May Cry 5)
Lastly the battery life is very limited (1 hour play on demanding games despite lowering performance and settings) whereas on Switch you can regularly hit 2-2,5 hours of gameplay even on demanding games and it never get uncomfortably hot.
So while the Steam Deck opened new possibilities for me and access to new libraries (especially indie horror games & triple A titles), it does have some drawbacks which may inconvenience the casual gamer.
Games make Switch for me otherwise I wouldn’t own one.