If I had to boot a game and shut it down each time, I’d only pickup the device when I had set aside time to game.
Since I can suspend and resume whenever, I pickup my steam deck all the time. I can play in the car and just suspend when we arrive or I can play for a few minutes while waiting for a meeting to start.
I can play while my wife gets ready.
Sometimes meets get canceled or there is traffic, so gaming sessions can really stretch out into a longer play time.
If I couldn’t suspend, I wouldn’t have played in those moments.
My experience with suspend has not been good - causing glitching and requiring shutting the game down and reloading from a previous save whenever I suspended in a cut scene. As a result I haven’t used it much due to those first couple of trials; maybe it’s better now.
If you don’t use suspend mid game, what do you do? Do you shut the device down in between gaming sessions? Or do you just save and exit the game and suspend the OS level?
I was in the middle of Witcher 3 when I got my deck, and pausing during a cut scene (and some are feature film length, it fells like) caused the video to go slide-show and the audio to get choppy, and there was no recovering the game. I basically had to go back to the previous save and play back to that point. PITA. Something similar happened in one other game (can’t remember at the moment) and I just gave up suspend unless it was something simple / mindless like Yoku’s Island Express.
I’ve seen a ton of digital ink spilled on all manner of positives, such as how amazingly-portable it is, or how it’s been doing wonders for the advancement of Linux gaming.
But, I’ve yet to see anybody—outside you—speak about how amazing the suspend/resume is. And, that for me, is the reason why I play on a SteamDeck almost exclusively these days—even though I have a small collection of games I can play on Mac. I have such small windows of opportunity, and appreciate I can still play a game, even for a little as a few minutes.
Yeah same, being able to stop playing immediately is huge for me. There are a lot of games I would struggle to play through without it.
Diablo 4 not playing nice with suspend (due to the always online requirement) was the main reason I couldn’t get into it and didn’t buy it after the free to play week ended.
The suspend feature is wildly important for me.
If I had to boot a game and shut it down each time, I’d only pickup the device when I had set aside time to game.
Since I can suspend and resume whenever, I pickup my steam deck all the time. I can play in the car and just suspend when we arrive or I can play for a few minutes while waiting for a meeting to start.
I can play while my wife gets ready.
Sometimes meets get canceled or there is traffic, so gaming sessions can really stretch out into a longer play time.
If I couldn’t suspend, I wouldn’t have played in those moments.
My experience with suspend has not been good - causing glitching and requiring shutting the game down and reloading from a previous save whenever I suspended in a cut scene. As a result I haven’t used it much due to those first couple of trials; maybe it’s better now.
If you don’t use suspend mid game, what do you do? Do you shut the device down in between gaming sessions? Or do you just save and exit the game and suspend the OS level?
I have noticed a slight reduction in framerates when loading back in from a suspended state but only on certain games. Namely High On Life
I was in the middle of Witcher 3 when I got my deck, and pausing during a cut scene (and some are feature film length, it fells like) caused the video to go slide-show and the audio to get choppy, and there was no recovering the game. I basically had to go back to the previous save and play back to that point. PITA. Something similar happened in one other game (can’t remember at the moment) and I just gave up suspend unless it was something simple / mindless like Yoku’s Island Express.
I feel like this really the killer feature.
I’ve seen a ton of digital ink spilled on all manner of positives, such as how amazingly-portable it is, or how it’s been doing wonders for the advancement of Linux gaming.
But, I’ve yet to see anybody—outside you—speak about how amazing the suspend/resume is. And, that for me, is the reason why I play on a SteamDeck almost exclusively these days—even though I have a small collection of games I can play on Mac. I have such small windows of opportunity, and appreciate I can still play a game, even for a little as a few minutes.
Yeah same, being able to stop playing immediately is huge for me. There are a lot of games I would struggle to play through without it.
Diablo 4 not playing nice with suspend (due to the always online requirement) was the main reason I couldn’t get into it and didn’t buy it after the free to play week ended.