To start with, this is not officially supported, so my feedback here is mostly going to be targeted more to inform those who play the way I do. Also, I use controller, not keyboard and mouse. If you play the expected way, sitting at a Windows PC with mouse and keyboard like Rex/Rhyker/Asmongold and all the other streamers, then this feedback won’t resonate with you and that’s fine. Enjoy!
Also, I loved the game overall, but given some of the issues, I won’t be an early adopter and I’ll be waiting a couple of months for things to be ironed out and systems/setups to be updated to support everything.
The Steam Deck is my primary way to play for the portability and was the first thing I wanted to test out to see how it ran. I saw a lot of reviews of people getting it running and that it ran really well. I can confirm that it does run well…kinda.
Installation is non-intuitive as a lot of the guides out there almost work. I used the trick to run the installer through Proton. It’s clunky as hell, but it does work.
- Add a shortcut to steam for the battle.net installer.
- Use Proton Experimental (IMPORTANT)
- Run installer. Don’t log in.
- Delete steam shortcut.
- Add new steam shortcut to battle.net.exe with the launch option --exec “launch Fen”
- Run game and log in.
And this is the biggest problem you’ll have with a deck experience: the launcher. If you run the launch with the expected arguments in a steam shortcut, /path/to/battle.net.exe --exec “launch Fen”, it will NOT launch directly into Diablo 4 like it does with Starcraft 2. I was hoping it would but oh well.
The launcher will show up and you will still need to click “Play”. In handheld mode, this isn’t too bad; I can just tap the button, but if you have the deck docked with no mouse/keyboard attached, this is awful. Please, please, please Blizzard, add support for navigating the launcher with a controller. Most launchers do this; even FFXIV’s horrendous launcher can at least be started using a controller. Either that or just launch straight into the game when the --exec “launch Fen” argument is provided like Starcraft II.
You still have to close the ads too. On a side not, I’ve already got your game installed; I don’t need to be told it is open beta weekend every time I open this thing. Anyway, Play button clicked, the game is started. And nothing…
The game is completely broken when ran through Game mode. Might just be me, but I get to the character select screen after a 15 minute queue and everything seems to be frozen - great. Try it again in desktop mode, works just fine. But now I have to be in desktop mode on both docked and handheld mode, which makes it so I cannot use the steam menu anymore. Sigh - whatever.
Get into the game for the first time, and…it crashes after I take a step with my necromancer. Back to another 20 minute queue. Get in the 2nd time, had to turn down all the settings to low. This doesn’t bother me that much because I have reasonable expectations when it comes to the steam deck and what it can handle. Everything is on low, and now we’re cooking. Still looks pretty decent.
On low, the game runs just fine at 60 FPS and battery life will run a little over 2 hours. There is some stuttering and texture popping that occurs in the major city hubs, but that seems like it’s more because of the general lag rather than it’s a steam deck and uses Linux.
Other than the above issues, I didn’t have any other problems while actually playing, and my experiences are reflective of those that have been having a fun time. It’s just really hard for me to overlook the launcher problems, so I’m just going to wait a bit instead of jumping in right away.