Neko-san
Published
(GOG) On Keyboard+Mouse, Game Would be Fine, but on a Handheld Gamepad Support is Partially Broken
Gamepad and controllers work BUT don't operate the radial menus properly, which breaks important functionality (like gadget selection, ammo types, and ability selection) and using a mouse trackpad is somehow blocked in these menus. Also, controllers are not automatically detected and must be enabled in the settings via mouse first. If the Deck is docked and you're using a different controller, having it disconnect for any reason will turn the setting back off (annoyingly).
To workaround a SteamOS/Client bug, you CANNOT use the "add to Steam" right-click context menu to add the installer to Steam. You MUST do so with the Steam client desktop CLIENT button otherwise EXEs won't launch. After choosing your install location (ideally not the default), you have to go into the Steam properties for the game and change the EXE and folder path to where "APGame.exe" is.
Set GPU clock to 800
The main menu and various in-game icons suffer from being heavily pixelated at the Deck's native screen resolution (1280x800); icons getting it the worst because they're small and sometimes are difficult to identify.
Upgrade menus suffer a massive frame hit (~30 to ~40 even at default GPU clock speeds) and the camp can take a performance hit depending on the scene complexity too. Not necessarily important but launching the game always introduces a hard stutter in the initial intro. Ocassionally the game stutters but this is likely shader compilation, I imagine. Waking from sleep mode causes an irritatingly large performance hit that requires a relaunch to fix.
The game infinitely loads on launch. Steam detects the process in the guide menu but the game window refuses to appear.
PULSE_MSEC_LATENCY=60 %command% -high
Lowered TDP to 10, changed shadow resolution to medium, set texture scaling to 100%, set resolution to 1280x800
Crackling is frequent enough that I attempted using an environment variable to mitigate it but the audio didn't improve by much.
All of the the games graphics had heavy aliasing issues that hinders the experience, despite having anti-aliasing enabled.
Controls work fine but the mouse appears when talking to NPcs outside of cutscenes.
I manually updated Proton's DXVK to version 2.1
Set Windows version to Win7 for multiplayer compatibility
Set L4 to left bumper (sprint) for ergonomic convenience
Set GPU clock to 1500 MHz because it strangely provided a slight frame boost while being the best performance to battery compromise above 30/40 FPS. Addionally, I enabled half-rate shading.
Had to compromise with the Steam Deck's hardware and play at mostly medium settings where, even then, the average frames were between 40 - mid-50ies; dipping to low wasn't too much of an improvement and was actually so graphically degraded I couldn't bring myself to play at settings that bad just for a possible consistent 60 frames.
Game requires Win7 mode in Winecfg to not crash with multiplayer; this isn't new info and Valve honestly should either fix the root issue or at least set the proper compatibility mode for it by default for a proper "playable" rating. Also, Undead Labs should consider optimizing performance for the hardware; battery life isn't great wih this game but better frames with this portable experience would be fantastic.
Dropped framerate to 30 and TDP to 6
Game is listed on Steam as having controller support but doesn't actually work
Game struggled to keep a consistent 60 frames, so I just capped the framerate to 30 to avoid it
No way am I playing this with emulated keyboard+mouse controls.
