jokes_on_youHow is Diablo 4 on Steam Deck long term
AnissemBeen playing since first beta exclusively on Steam Deck. No issues on SteamOS. I’ve clocked 4-6 hours non stop during some sessions without a hiccup or crash. Once it’s setup in SteamOS you don’t need to do any further fiddling.
Setup and you’re good to go. The game actually runs fantastically well on the Deck. Medium settings with FSR 2 Balanced drains 15W in dungeons and the open world, 23W in town. Hits a flat 40fps so if you frame limit in-game and set the Steam Deck to run in 40Hz mode, you get ultra smooth gameplay.
What are the controls like? I'm used to playing Diablo type games with mouse and keyboard. How does it translate over to game pad? Or do you run anything special with the track pad?
The game fully supports gamepads. Your basic skill and interact are mapped to A, core to X, skill 1 to Y, and the rest on LT, RT, and RB. LB is for potions. They’re all remappable too, so you can configure how you like. Personally, I have basic and core on the triggers, and then the skills on my face buttons.
Honestly, it feels like playing a Gauntlet style game, feels very arcadey in a good way. The only downside is that if you’re a caster, it’s somewhat hard to aim your spells since you don’t have a precise mouse cursor. This makes placing your hydras or your teleport destinations a little bit annoying. They’re always placed at a constant distance away from you in the direction you’re looking. For enemies, there’s lock on targeting though.
Gamepad plays great! I’m actually much preferring it to mouse and keyboard for Diablo. It was designed for Xbox Series and PS5, so the controls are pretty intuitive. I prefer it because I can move my character with the stick rather than having to click around or hold the mouse down as I move
Which class do you recommend playing with for gamepad so it doesn't rely too much on auto locking or aiming?
I played 2 and 3 with a mouse and keyboard wasn’t too sure getting into 4 on PS5 but overall it’s been a great experience. You can definitely tell they took the time to design this game for controller support.
My only qualm is occasionally I attack an npc while trying to target another.
The only issues I have are with the Battlenet launcher, it sometimes crashes during startup when first opening D4 seemingly at random but once the game is running I don’t have any issues. Currently running it on Proton Experimental.
As far as settings go, at default settings D4 seems to be extremely taxing on the GPU (constant >=97% usage, high temps, crashes regularly after running for a while), although this seems to be common to all systems including PS5/Xbox.
Locking refresh rate and in-game menu FPS to 50fps keeps the power and GPU usage much lower and I get stable performance with no crashes.
Following up again. It’s much better playing with a 45 FPS cap and with FSR off than 60 cap and FSR on.