No my friends, that isn’t a trick of the camera. It’s not even Photoshopped. That is Guild Wars 2, on my Steam Deck. A game that doesn’t even support the deck. But, I have the means to play it with my own mouse and keyboard.
How? The Steam Dock. It’s a good thing I paid for it, for the reason I need to use it. If you’ve been following my General blog, the back airflow fan of my computer case is showing its age. Last night I took it out, going by Jero’s suggestion. And it seems to be working just fine. However, I have a hard time believing it’ll be the same when the hardware is on load, playing a game.
Kovo, when I went to bed gave me this beautiful idea to use my Steam Dock to turn my deck into a laptop, by hooking up my mouse and keyboard to it. And it works!!
So I tried to play Guild Wars 2 on my deck and it works really good. I even managed to plug in my primary monitor, so I can actually see better. And the Plug And Play is
just, beautiful. No need to restart the Deck, or set up drivers. Just plug in what you need into the Dock, and it does what you want.
However it presents a few problems;
1. Not being able to use my computer (at all). I don’t have a spare keyboard and mouse I could use just for the Dock.
2. Needing to plug in the mouse in my computer just to join the call and use my headphones, then switch back to the Dock.
3. The Dock has no mic jack, so I don’t think it’ll be possible to play VRChat like this (won’t be able to talk to people).
4. Not having control of my computer, I’m unable to set the headphone volume (for some reason).
5. Guild Wars 2, for some reason thinks the Deck can barely handle it (by setting almost everything in the graphics settings to Low). …Really? The APU is better than my entire computer!
6. Using my wifi instead of my Ethernet, I get latency. Only way to fix that is to find
an Ethernet cable, and connect it from my router to the Dock. To use my main cable would be bad.. not only would I not be able to use Discord, but I wouldn’t be able to play the game.
7. The game crashed on me when loading into a new area, but just once.
And after the several hour long gaming session (where I was feeling as tired as Kovo and Nova), and plugging everything back in my computer to continue this blog post, I checked the temps and, was very surprised the idle temps haven’t gone up any higher than when I first started monitoring them.
I’m now tempted to play the game normally (on my computer), and see if there would be a problem.