Areinu
Published
TDP=8
I could fully operate launcher in game mode using steam button+right trackpad, no issues closing settings window. Unfortunatelly the game syncs video settings, so you have to change resolution every time you switch.
The game looks very blocky on SD in 720p. By enforcing 1080p you can get it to look much better.
Once in game I encountered no issues.
Most videos work fine, but introduction for the main city didn't play - I instead saw tv error-like screen.
As everyone mentions you have to use touchscreen or trackpad to interact with the launcher, but the buttons are huge. It uses very little power, I run it at 1080p (so it downscales to 720p) and with no tinkering it gets 4+ hours. I'm not sure if that was the only video that glitches or if there will be more later on, but most of the game is on in-game engine.
On proton experimental opening movie and some random town intro movies work. Other movies show "broken video" screen. Ending crashes the game. With each experimental update I experienced when playing the game the list of working videos changed, so maybe it's being worked upon right now.
I suggest using GE7-49 currently. All movies work under it with no sound. Except for opening and ending credits all movies are VERY short and consist mostly of subtitles on the black background. At least they don't crash. All videos are available from the in-game gallery once you saw them, so if you have access to Windows you can watch them later with sound.
All in all the game works pretty much perfect. I completed most of it on SD. It's good to set the rendering to 1080p even when playing portable, as the game looks much better in that res (going higher doesn't work, as then the game renders in native 720p anyway). There's slight stutter each time a text window is shown, but it's like this on Windows as well, and it's known bug of all Dusk series games.
WINEDLLOVERRIDES="d3d11=n,b" %command%
With default proton intro and the plot summary movie wouldn't play, the game would just return back to menu. Works well on experimental.
When limiting FPS below 60 the game physics gets broken. There aren't that many items with physics to them, but dress of one of the alchemists is shaking instead of slowly waving, in some cutscenes clothing on Sophie's arm gets crazy. Unfortunatelly there's nothing that can be done, as SD won't hold 60 outside of smaller rooms.
The game configuration gets reset with no aparent reason. After each crash it would reset to max settings and the FPS would drop (due to shadow quality setting being back at high). Sometimes the autosave would get me back into a cutscene so I had to watch it in 25FPS.
Without the fix mentioned by other reports the game barely holds 20FPS in cities on lowest settings. With the fix you get stable 40 with highest settings, except for shadow quality.
The game crashes pretty often - stops loading during scene change. The game autosaves often, but the loading times are pretty long for bigger locations, so restarting the game takes a lot of time.
Even with fix at https://github.com/doitsujin/atelier-sync-fix the game is barely worth playing on steam deck. It is borderline playable, as long as you have patience to crashes and visual glitches. Without the tinkering the game is unbearable. Missing videos, low framerate, and possibly also crashes.
I haven't changed any settings, but I've noticed the game now defaults to the encoding suggested in other reports. I haven't experienced any aliasing, glitches, or any other sound or video related issues. I've completed the whole game and the DLC chapter.
The default controller layout works very well, I've used left stick to rotate, and touchscreen to interact with everything.
I swapped the behaviour of right and left trackpad clicks to match SD default (left mouse button on right trackpad). I found it to give me a better experience.
The game played on 40hz, so I limited the screen to match. You can put TPD to 3W and you won't notice any performance issues too, but on default this game had great battery life anyway.
This is a point and click adventure not designed around controllers, but SD trackpads mostly do the job. It's a bit hard to click on options in notes, I suggest targetting them with left trackpad and confirming with RT/RB or A button.
Some of the puzzles require you to type in text into ingame "search engine", the keyboard opens on its own, but just be prepared to use the onscreen keyboard. It's about 24 words you have to type in during 7 hours.
I had console-like experience. Everything was perfect. Didn't touch any ingame settings either. 3h of playtime with no issues.
The game goes trough EA launcher properly, and then loading scren appears. After few seconds the game crashes. I read other reports that game randomly does that, but even though I tried 50+ times, on different protons suggested in other reports the game never once gone to the main menu (at least 5 tries on each proton I tried).
I got banned from using the game for 2 days for using too many proton versions. Then I continued testing solutions.
Also note that the game seems to sync settings between computers, so if you set the game to 4k on PC it will try to launch at that resolution on SD(which I suspected might have been a reason for crashes, but it wasn't).
I tried on desktop, in big picture mode, in game mode. I also tried using a save past initial cinematics.
PROTON_NO_ESYNC=1 PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1 %command%
I added native d3d8.dll to support autolink mods.
Autolink mod works, but don't add the other native .dll that comes with the autolink mod - it will introduce huge issues, with no benefit.
TDP to 7
Green bar on the bottom of cutscenes, I tried multiple protons, but it happens on all of them, so I just settled on autoselected by Valve 7.0-5
I experienced all the game modes(daily life, investigation, trial), and saw all the trial minigames on Steam Deck(including the ones that only appear in later trials). The special place from chapter 4 also runs without problems.
The stylish transition animations are choppy below 60 FPS so I choose 60. The framerate is stable everywhere outside of 3D exploration, which sometimes drops a few frames.
The only issue is the green bar, which is a little distracting, but doesn't cover enough to cut off anything important.
By default the resolution launches at 1080p on SD, and the lowest it can go is still above SD res. But I think the game actually scales well to the screen regardless of setting.
You will have to use trackpad as mouse a lot, as many things in the game don't have a keybind, and there's so many keybinds it would be very hard to make extensive controller layout.
Since I wanted to play sidewise I've adjusted left stick to move according to new orientation(so the menus and the gameplay all work fine when rotated to the right), I've also made L4 and L5 my shoot buttons, and L2 my bomb button.
The game uses very little power draw, with no TDP limits and at 60FPS the game gives close to 6 hours of gameplay.
With some in-game setup you can use most of your screen and play with SD rotated, which makes all the bullet hell action possible to do on small screen.
DXVK_ASYNC=1 %command%
The game would have shader-comp-like stutter during gameplay each time any new thing happened, despite having shader pre-comp downloaded. DXVK_ASYNC improved the issue.
The game will only run at 30 or 60 FPS nothing inbetween, unless patched. With patch it ran with unstable 45FPS. Disabling SMT cores in Powertools plugin bumped the FPS to unstable 60(depending on scene the game drops into 5x).
The game still gets very low FPS during battle transition, but it's masked by the battle transition.
There is fan-patch that basically removes all crashes, but without it the game would crash each time it would need to use 2GB of vram.
Out of the box the game will be a fine 30FPS experience on Steam Deck. With fan patches and some tinkering you can improve it to a great 40/60 FPS experience depending on your preference. Even on 60FPS the battery life is pretty good for such a good looking game.
I'm still not very far, so later denser locations might make 60FPS too unstable, but I think 40 should keep trough the whole game, since there's buffer of 20+ FPS with SMT cores disabled.
Videos won't work
The game runs without videos on Proton 5 and Proton TKG. This game has important story beats in the videos, so without them you can't play properly.
I've spent two hours fiddling with mw-install to fix the videos, but whenever I would run it it would break the game (it would show C++ runtime library errors). I tried multiple versions of proton GE mentioned in other reports, I tried proton 5, I tried TKG. I tried multiple versions of necessary .dlls from different windows versions - everything ends up with game breaking.
Some less important text in menuses is hard to read.
The game update is tied to framerate, so even dropping to 55 feels real bad. There are some stages that with default settings will cause slowdowns to 40 or so. You can avoid it by dropping your visual settings to Low preset, and then setting the scaling factor to 85(this is the highest I could get to get consistent 60 on all stages, you might need to lower it even more if they add even more demanding map in the future). If you play local co-op only and can just avoid problematic stages you can go with much higher and better looking settings. Alternatively you can go low, scaling 100 + smaller resolution to let FSR handle scaling. The ingame scaling doesn't affect the UI though, so I think it's better in this case.
While SD might not be the best platform to play Strive, it's still the best way to play Strive portably. If you're using this as secondary platform to play on the go it's really good option.
If you want to experience the story mode on SD you can up all settings to ultra, the movies perform well even then.
Proton-wise there are no issues that I could find.
Finished whole game on SD. Trackpad works perfecty for it. No issues during my 90 or so minutes playtrough. Had very good battery life without any tinkering in energy tab.
There was no button needed to favorite song(I think select was unasigned)
Worked flawlessly for me. No issue with reversed buttons the others mentioned. I never experienced the game showing different controller buttons as in Steam compatibility description.
The default controller setup works, but is very bad.
Be sure to change the scaling to integer, makes all the pixel art fonts look better (but you get black border on all sides).
Sometimes I would hold an arrow to move and the character would stop. I had to release the button and press it again to start moving.
The game seems to run flawlessly at first, but on some maps the FPS drops to 5. The CPU and GPU usage stay around 10%, but the game is unplayable. For some strange reason some of the affected areas are very small, while huge city map, or dungeons work well. With this framerate even just moving to the exit of the room is a challenge. If you open a menu or enter shop in the area with FPS drop the game again renders at 60, but as soon as you close the menu it drops to 5.
This game doesn't work on default proton version Steam Deck uses. Experimental didn't work about a month ago when I tried it, but it works now. Most of proton GE versions work as well. The framerate issues persist between all versions.
Some boss descriptions before battles were cut off, maybe due to 720p resolution.
In 33h of gameplay I had one crash when game wanted to show end credits. Other than that it was pretty flawless. I used touchscreen a lot to navigate the menus, as that was most comfortable (the menus don't support controllers as it's mobile port).
When SD is put in sleep mode the game still counts game time, so my in-game saves say I have hundreds of hours of playtime ;)
Other than that it worked perfectly fine.
WINDLLOVERRIDES="xaudio2_9=n" %command%
The audio issues might be also happening on Windows, I'm not 100% sure.
Crashes few seconds after pressing "new game" without tinkering.
Copy xaudio2_9.dll from windows/system32 folder on windows machine(or get it from a friend, or internet) to the directory where game .exe is located. Use launch options from this report and ProtonGE. The game will work with audio and video intact. Seems stable.
With version 1.4.0 of the game and steam default proton (experimental) it can now be run without any custom launch parameters or other forms of tinkering. I've played with new versions up until beating first boss and a little bit after that. All videos played, had sound, no glitches, no crashes. Codec calls worked fine. All things that used to crash the game previously now run smoothly. I couldn't get crackling voices to occur, which was constant issue for me on launch version with tinkering. Since I didn't get too far I can't comment on the full experience yet, but it's promising.
WINDLLOVERRIDES="xaudio2_9=n" %command%
The audio issues might be also happening on Windows, I'm not 100% sure.
Crashes few seconds after pressing "new game" without tinkering.
Copy xaudio2_9.dll from windows/system32 folder on windows machine(or get it from a friend, or internet) to the directory where game .exe is located. Use launch options from this report and ProtonGE. The game will work with audio and video intact. Seems stable.
Main menu of the launcher works with audio.
It seems that anything related to video playback in this bonus content is borked. You can download digital novels, but once you launch them you're met with silence and black instead of logos. After that you have digital novel main menu, but once you start the novel the game just freezes at black screen.
Soundtrack starts, but you can't hear any music.
The ROMs for MG1 and Snake's Revenge work, with audio.
You need to go into menu and assign the controller buttons to be used during gameplay. There are some instances where game will show you "F1" and you really need to press X on the gamepad.
You can save the game at any time, so even if the voice is broken after sleep you can save and restart.
A button mapped to left mouse button, so I could forward text with that, B to right mouse button (which is cancel) I also setup shortcuts to quick save(F2), tips(T) window, repeat voice(F9) etc.
You can safely limit TDP to 3W and GPU clock to 200Mhz and you'll still be getting flat 60FPS at any time. But even without this the battery life was very good.
After exiting sleep mode, about 90% of the time, the game will have completely broken audio. The music will be playing at ultra speed, crackle, the voices of characters will sound like chipmunks. The only fix is restarting the game, thus negating benefit of sleep mode.
My shortcuts to keyboard menus stopped working for no reason after a restart of the game, and they never came back. I tried updating my configuration again, but no matter what I do the game doesn't register the shortcuts properly. I know the keyboard IS detected, because I can get into menu for setting up shortcuts, and press a button that is assigned to "T" key, and the game registers it as new keyboard shortcut, but the shortcut doesn't work.
The game detects the controller as xbox controller, and shows proper button icons everywhere. I quickly tested everything offline I could think of and I had no issues. I didn't test online.
The text would be unreadable on internal screen since this is split-screen. Play on external display.
It works flawlessly regardless of your vsync settings, so even though you can't change them easily it's fine.
Toggle to Vsync settings in the launcher requires F4 to be pressed, which is not very easy on Deck.
By default the resolution is set to 700x400 and some of the text is cut off. Changing to 720p fixes the issue.
Boss cutscenes wouldn't work on default proton. You could skip them by holding a button, but they wouldn't end by themselves even if you waited forever.
Works perfect once you fix proton version and then resolution.
RF5Fix for BepinEx support and graphical tweaks Less Compressed Textures for making things look better Controller Fix for patching in controller buttons
Each time you interact with anything the cursor reapears and is moved to the middle. I set back grip button to "T" which hides the cursor, but it comes back every single time you talk to an NPC, open a menu, or use anything. The cursor is huge, gold thing that covers whole middle of the screen all the time. This seems like proton-related issue, since on Win the cursor doesn't get centered, so users can just move it out and keep it there.
You need at the very least the mod for gamepad inputs since the game doesn't recognize steam deck as a controller. And even then pressing T to hide the cursor every 2 seconds it just too distracting too play. Having the cursor in the middle of everything that is happening is also too distracting.
This is a huge shame since the game is running just about perfectly otherwise - I didn't even get issues with the cutscenes on proton experimental.
Steam lists this as playable because enterring text makes you manually invoke on-screen keyboard... But I don't even know WHERE to enter any text in this game. Maybe when naming you custom character creations...
With 30+ second cache compilation drops it's just unplayable. Being banned by DRM makes it literally unplayable.
All of the text is small, for me it was on verge of being readable, but I have perfect eyesight. Some of the text is very tiny and almost impossible to read, but most of it is stuff that is not important to read(like party names in the menu, you still can see portraits).
The game syncs settings in the cloud, so if your settings vary between desktop and Steam Deck you'll have a terrible time.
There is no shader pre-cache share downloading in steam yet, and on SD I couldn't trigger the shader builder included in the game. Each time new shader would appear the game would drop to 1FPS, often for 30+ seconds. I think the game saved the info that the shaders are generated as part of its savefile, and now it just won't happen even if I use setting in the menu to re-do it.
If you get blocked by denuvo and try to exit the game it will be stuck in "exiting" forever. The only solution for it is to reset the SD.
I hoped I could trigger cache rebuild on proton experimental. When I switched the Denuvo DRM blocked my Steam Deck.
Changed trackpad click to LMB for easier launcher usage
The launcher won't auto-open keyboard. The launcher won't let you start the game when you're offline, even if you played and activated the game previously. Even if you go online when the launcher prompts you to you won't be able to start the game, unless you restart it fully trough steam.
If you get into the game, and then sleep -> awake the Steam Deck the game will continue to work properly.
The launcher starts Ubisoft overlay in background. If you open it in any way (for example by trying to check in-game Achievements option) it starts draining battery with 20W, and if you have TDP limit it will be basically unusable(you can otherwise set the limit to 3W and keep 60FPS). It is a problem, because you can get into overlay by accident just by using in-game menu, with no warning that you'll be redirected to the overlay.
Trying to find online match returns RYAN-3033 error. When trying to host a game there's "Invite a friend button" but it opens Ubisoft client and it says I can't send an invite because I'm not in a multiplayer game session, so I don't think it works.
Works perfectly fine if you're playing offline, assuming you were online when launching the game. I tried local co-op with 4 controllers and it all worked fine, but I had to set gamepad layout for all 4 controllers (they all default to KB+M). Ubisoft launcher is a pain, the game doesn't integrate well with Steam features, and if you're looking for an online experience I don't think it works. Although I couldn't get it to work even on Windows.
Added quick save and load
You can limit TDP to minimum.
You need to use mix of mouse (touch, Guide+trackpad) and d-pad inputs to navigate display settings of the launcher and select 800p. There are options for resolution in the game, but they don't go up to 800p.
Dialogue subtitles are quite small, but it all has voice over.
For some reason the game wouldn't keep perfect 60, but it does keep perfect 55(I lowered refresh rate).
With high preset the game loads almost instantly, same for going between levels, and works smooth. When you play as mech and have to face humans they can be very hard to locate on small screen. I can't compare it to how it works on Windows, as it doesn't, but for me it looks exactly as I remember it from childhood.
It could crash randomly after any match, sometimes when loading match. I managed to get trough SF5 arcade run and it crashed when uploading score.
The matches worked perfect, but after each match you risk a crash. I cannot reccomend when you crash the game after 9 out of 10 matches.
When one of the external controllers disconnected and we re-connected it there was no way to "reattach" it to one of player characters. It seemed to be detected as completely new controller. We tried changing Steam Deck order of controllers, but no matter the settings none of 3 controllers would be able to control the character. We had to restart the game to fix it.
On deck takes full use of 800p with no bars, works flawlessly. I also tried docked mode with my 4k TV. Deck is able to do 1080p with 30fps limit fully stable.
I've played on regular proton, but about 1 hour into the game there's mandatory card-game minigame, which freezes with black screen. On Experimental it works properly.
The game also works properly docked, and can go up to 1080p with 30FPS limit.
I couldn't find any issue with the game on Experimental.
If you choose to have sound effects on your CG they will glich out and cover the original mage with checkered overlay. Everything is fine if you set CGs to version without sound effects.
Works fine with or without full game patch.
All Blackwell games have right mouse button on right trackpad, and left mousebutton on left trackpad, and I find having it the other way is much better experience, since it matches SD defaults.
The game plays at 40hz no matter what I did, so limiting refresh rate to 40 is an obvious step.
This is point and click adventure that was not designed around controllers, but it's still quite a good experience on SD. Everything is easy enough to click with trackpad, and there's not much time limited actions. This part doesn't have any puzzles that require typing text.
I've completed most of the game on SD with no issues.
You can get into the launcher to change visual settings to your liking. The default scaling is not the best. I've tried them all. The in-game setting I liked the most was no scaling, windowed. This enabled FSR, which I set to 4. You might like other scaling modes available, they honestly look pretty close.
You can make dialogue font bigger in settings. It doesn't increase the size of dialogue choices, but should still make strain on the eyes much lower.
It's sometimes impossible to drag items from inventory to the place you want to use them at using trackpad with default configuration. Use touchscreen instead. There are some timed sequences, but they are still perfectly doable with trackpad/touch.
It even has it's own on-screen keyboard build in, so typing is nice. The game worked perfectly.
Refresh rate set to 40Hz.
When the launcher starts in Steam Deck game mode you will see the black screen and you might think the game crashed. If you press A button the launcher will actually close and start the game properly. After that everything runs perfect.
Also, once you've set the settings during first start you won't be able to access the settings window again outside of desktop mode, as you need to actually see the launcher to select configuration.
Most of the text is very small, but for me at the verge of being readable. The combat log though is just too small. I turned it off in the options, since I couldn't decipher it anyway.
You need to add F4 and F5 somewhere on your controller. F5 changes game frame limit - by default starts with 15FPS. Press F5 2 times to get into 60FPS. F4 changes screen size.
The game always launchew by default in too big window, which will cut off bottom 30% of the screen. Press F4 to toggle to a size appropriate for Steam Deck.
The nature of this game means you probably will want to install official patch from Kagura games. You can do so using Bottles, for example. It requires a bit of configuration, and needs to all be done in desktop mode. In this report I tested the game both with and without patch and the results were exactly the same - the patch is not needed to run the game.
You can launch into the game directly or into the launcher. The launcher doens't work on any proton version I've tried - it only shows a white screen. It's the only way to change the game settings, except for modyfing the config.ini. The game launched by default windowed in very low resolution.
After SD sleep the game would get about 20 seconds of audio lag. It applied to SFX, dialogues and music.
Every time there's full-screen effect, or a flashback, there are 1-2 pixel lines on top, bottom and right of the screen trough which you can see covered image.
I tried few proton versions, includig suggested by others 4.11-13. On 4.11-13 it doesn't even launch. On default(7.0-5), experimental, GE 7-35, next(7.0-6) it launches but crashes very often. I have played for 45 minutes and experienced 9 crashes.
While lack of ability to change graphic settings without editing config.ini is just a minor inconvenience, and graphical and audio glitches could be tolerated, the constant crashing makes it pretty much unplayable. Sometimes the crash would occur 1 minute from loading the save.
The launcher doens't work, so you need to edit config.ini in prefix steamuser\Documents\My Games\Zero Escape\ to get native resolution rendering. By default the game stars in very low resolution and looks bad.
You can choose to run the game directly, but if you choose launcher/configurator the electron app only shows white screen.
The game sometimes overlays an image over currently rendered 3d scene. The image doesn't cover bottom and top 1 pixel line of the screen. The same happens to full screen effects, fade in and fade out etc. It's a bit distracting.
There was one minigame that was impossible to control with controller, I had to use mouse to go trough the scene.
At first I was getting crashes every few minutes no matter which proton version I used. The one recommended by steam would crash very often too. I got 10 crashes in 50 minutes. I used the version 4 recommended by others and at first I couldn't run the game. About around 20 tries it actually ran, and after that I didn't encounter even a single crash until the end of the game, and it ran every time I tried afterwards.
This is the worst experience I had with "Steam Verified" game yet.
To get native resolution use
"window-mode": "Fullscreen"
"fullscreen": {
"resolution": {
"widtht": 1280,
"height": 720
},
"vsync": true
},
The demo works perfectly on Steam Deck. I've finished all of it without any issues. The full game is not out yet.
