The Exigent Duality
On the Steam Deck Fence - 16:38 CST, 2/25/22 (Sniper)
I should be getting emailed by Valve imminently, at which point I'll have seventy two hours to decide whether or not to follow through on my 650 USD "Steam Deck" purchase. If I do go forward with it, I can see the experience going one of two ways: either I will love it and not want to touch another piece of contemporary game hardware ever again, or the thing will sit in the carrying case and several months from now you'll see a blog post involving me lamenting the fact that I'd wasted my money.

To support the former timeline is the fact that I love playing games on Switch so much, even when the experience is dismal compared to other formats. I bought "Doom 2016" on Windows then again on PlayStation 4, and couldn't get into it either time. I bought the "lower than lowest quality, smeared in Vaseline" Switch port, and played all the way through it twice. And with the Steam Deck, it's not "lower than lowest quality": it's medium, high, or even ultra settings depending on the game and how long you want the battery to last, at the native resolution of the display, at a locked thirty frames per second!

Lending credence to the latter timeline is that there are better ways to experience these games. Why would I want to play "Elden Ring" in the future at medium quality at 720p, when I could just play it on my PlayStation 5 on my fifty inch 4K HDR TV with ultra quality settings? And the Switch is a smorgasbord for indie titles and collections of old games, even with frequent case and manual physical releases via companies like Limited Run Games. For my favorite kinds of modern games-- "Hi-Bit"-- the Steam Deck has no performance advantage, and lacks the Switch's wonderful OLED screen.

I think my whole experience with the Steam Deck would hinge on how well it would function for the hacker side of me. How easy is it to get a good RetroArch experience? How easy is it to get DOSBox working well? Can I run LibreOffice and VeraCrypt on it, and maybe even use it to replace my desktop PC altogether? Because if the Steam Deck became this magical 3DO, "EZWolf", "GZDoom", and "One Must Fall: 2097" handheld on which I can also do my taxes, I'd never desire anything else. Conversely, if it became one of those things where every time they roll an update everything breaks, I'd find it hugely disappointing. So far today, haven't yet found a single person who is looking at the Deck from this kind of angle.

Another use case could be as a development "workstation" of sorts. Regular readers know that I am a huge fan of "Fuze" on the Switch, and doing development straight on the handheld with a USB keyboard. I know that the "Godot Engine" guys have been working with Valve a lot over the past several months on having flawless support for the Deck. I've been wanting to make the leap from "Fuze" to the aforementioned "Godot Engine", and the Deck might get me motivated to follow through.

So we'll see. I probably won't know until I'm about to click the "Purchase" button on their web site, which way I'll go.