Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 gets offline mode, but only on Steam Deck

destructoid.com:

The critically acclaimed Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2, a remake of the classic original games, launched on PC via the Epic Games Store back in 2020, but it wasn’t until October 3, 2023 that the game came out on Steam proper.

Since then, Steam Deck users have been complaining about THPS‘s befuddling always-online requirement, which meant that any connection issues—which can be common on the go—would terminate the game outright. Just over a week later, out of the blue, Activision’s Vicarious Visions and Iron Galaxy pushed out a small patch dedicated specifically to Deck users.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2‘s patch 1.1 mentions just two Deck-specific tweaks that are very welcome indeed:

Now, while the patch notes obviously specify that Steam Deck users, in particular, can play the game offline, the obvious expectation is that this implementation would work for Steam users across the board, on any given PC. Not the case, as it turns out.

While the addition of a dedicated offline mode to Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 is obviously a good thing, it’s a bit strange that the feature would be kept exclusive to Steam Deck users.

It didn’t take long at all for community members to try testing the ‘steamdeck=1 %command%’ launch command to try and bypass this lockout, as was the case with Forspoken, but this will only work for Linux users, specifically. “Can confirm it returns an error,” said Reddit user LuntiX. “I’m the user who did the testing on r/pcgaming.”

This, of course, was immediately taken as a challenge by some prospective users, with Omac setting up a Steam guide on how to enable THPS‘s offline mode on Windows PCs, too. The specific techniques used could cause issues in other games, however, so it’s a YMMV sort of thing.

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