2023 was a pretty amazing year for games, but I’m also interested to hear what didn’t meet expectations or didn’t run as well as you expected it to.
2023 was a pretty amazing year for games, but I’m also interested to hear what didn’t meet expectations or didn’t run as well as you expected it to.
The game that surprised me the most was Murder by Numbers. It’s a very nice hybrid of a visual novel and a puzzle game. When I had more time I played the story mode, and when I didn’t I played the challenges.
My biggest disappointments were games from Sony — Horizon and Spiderman. Both of them are verified, but both of them crash at start-up.
HZD I hadn’t tested but both Spider-Men games run great?
According to other people, Horizon worked but a recent patch broke it. Spiderman (the first one) launches, freezes after a few seconds, and then the Deck restarts. 🤷♂️
Have you done the usual, verify game files, trying a different version of proton, and then reinstall if issues persist?
I tried a bunch of versions of Proton, verified the game files, redownloaded the game, installed a previous version of the game. Sadly nothing worked.
Did you undervolt your SD? Is it the steam version of Spiderman? Did you install it on your SD card or main memory?
Since it works for everyone else really well it has to be an issue with your deck, specifically.
Do you have power tools installed? Make sure you don’t have SMT disabled, that will cause some games to crash on launch.
I’ve also known people to get results like that from undervolting. Unfortunately it’s possible it that you could have borderline passable hardware that has the same instability people get from undervolting at default values.
I don’t have anything special installed, I didn’t undervolt anything. My Deck is an officially refurbished unit, so the borderline passable hardware is unfortunately likely. :(
Uninstaller the game. Restart your deck. Install it again, and if the issue is still there I’d open a support ticket over it. If it’s a refurbished deck you couldn’t have owned it that long and it should still have a warranty on it?
I’m responding to both your comments here.
The Deck’s basically new, I haven’t done anything to it (yet): No undervolting, no SD card, no non-steam games (except Minecraft).
I’ve tried this already, but it did not work. I’ll try it again, but it’ll take a while, because my internet is really slow.
Sounds like it’s my a fault of my particular unit. 🫠 As I said, I’ll try to reinstall the game again and if that doesn’t work, I’ll open a ticket. Thanks for the suggestion.
I haven’t played many games on my Deck yet, but all of them—except the two I mentioned—worked very well. Even Baldur’s Gate 3 runs fine and it is a very demanding game. I wonder why just the games from Sony are problematic. The worst thing about this is that they load, seem to run fine for a few seconds, then freeze and crash.
Maybe I’ll bite the bullet and not worry about it now and later I’ll buy Steam Deck 2 sooner rather than later.
I’d just be worried about running into issues or crashes later with other things as well. Some games hit your hardware just right in just the right way to make an error to cause a crash. My home pc spent two years running games without ever crashing. Then I ran into a game that would crash maybe once or twice an hour. I after a lot (a flipping lot) of testing I determined it was a ram issue and I had to loosen my timing up a bit on it.
It seemed like it would be a ram issue pretty early on in my diagnosis and by its behavior, but getting my confirmation took forever. I had to run the extended 8+ hour worth of meanest before it would finally hit my ram in just the right way to log an error.
It sounds like you may have more or less the same issue, though. Only your system isn’t running right when it’s on default values. You may have a ram chip in there (i think theres like 8) that is just slightly flawed or isn’t quite getting power to it correctly and something about Sony just happens to tweak on it in just the wrong way.
For real, just have valve get you another. No reason to put up with a system that isn’t quite right, and it could get worse.
Lol I just posted that the Sony games were some of my favorites. I didn’t have any issues playing them on deck, I wonder what the difference is.