Baldur’s Gate 3 on the Steam Deck looks bad but plays great

theverge.com:

By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a delight on Steam Deck — even though I sometimes can’t tell what’s going on.

I suspected that might be the case going in. Everything I had seen about Baldur’s Gate 3 before I downloaded it promised a vast, sprawling adventure, and all the streams of the game I watched on Twitch featured incredibly detailed characters and worlds. I’m sure most of those streamers were running the game on top-of-the-line rigs. I suspected that the Steam Deck, which recently had some troubles with The Last of Us Part I, might not be the best place for me to play Larian Studios’ new RPG.

That said, the game just looked like so much fun, and since it won’t be coming to PS5 until September, I really wanted to find a way to play it sooner. I was even more intrigued after reading my colleague Ash Parrish’s beginner’s guide. And then, a few days after Baldur’s Gate 3 officially launched, I saw that it was Steam Deck verified. I knew that wouldn’t necessarily mean the game would be beautiful to look at, but it was enough for me to jump into Baldur’s Gate 3 on my Steam Deck.

If you also want to take the plunge, you should know a few things upfront. The game will render at a relatively low resolution of 1280 x 720. You’ll need a minimum of 150GB free just to be able to install it. You won’t need a mouse and keyboard thanks to Larian’s official controller layout (though, if you don’t like Larian’s layout, there are a bunch of community layouts you can pick from as well). And if you’re interested in mods, some intrepid players report that they’ve gotten them working but