All hands on Steam Deck - Valve's handheld PC

I’ve played offline games, both because of lost connection and putting the Deck offline.

No, the button is greyed out. You can transition to offline mode if you’re already online and lose connection while playing. You can’t go to offline mode if you wake up the Deck while already offline.

Shrug, I don’t have one so I can’t test it, but the behavior Matt_W describes aligns pretty closely with all the complaints I’ve read.

You don’t say!

I disabled wifi so had no connection and was still able to launch games just fine. I’m not technically in offline mode, just no connectivity.

I was on a road trip yesterday with no connection. Games played fine, didn’t have to mess around with modes. Effectively works like any other handheld device.

I actually have one and it plays fine with no connection. Been doing it all week on a trip. Just finished using it on the hwy.

That seems dangerous, unless you pulled over first!

Not really it doesn’t seem to care if I’m offline and moving at 75 mph or just offline and not moving. Plays great either way!

No, I meant while driving, stupid joke.

Just got my shipping notice. Looks like my deck is currently parked in Carol Stream, Illinois. Sounds like a nice place. It is expected to get to my home across the border by the 4th of October.

Same, just got the notice, but supposed to be here Oct 6.

OK, well I don’t know what you guys were doing differently. It definitely would not play any Steam games for me at work with no connection, and no way to shift to offline. I was able to play Epic games through Heroic just fine though.

I’ve had success just flipping it to airplane mode. Have used it on planes that way, in fact! No problem at all, but this is within 12 hours of an active wifi connection at home.

New folks who like rhythm games: Muse Dash is back on sale. I’ve only played this for 20 minutes, but it worked great on deck. It’s got around 50 songs in the 50 cent version. It’s tagged with “sexual content” though so YMMV / NSFW. I didn’t see anything explicit, but I wasn’t looking for it.

Muse Dash has a lot of sexualized young looking anime girls across the product - as playable characters, song jackets, artwork, and UI themes. It’s a fun rhythm game if that doesn’t bother you and well worth the asking price for the base version!

LOVING mine. Played Ashen, Dragon’s Dogma, and Elden Ring on the couch and in bed, which is sort of amazing.

Changing the vibe of gaming is really interesting. I’m no longer sitting down for a session at my desk, I’m just pulling out a game for a little bit while my kids are still asleep are my wife fixes us a snack.

I think that’s why I’m interested in playing games I don’t normally play. I’ve had Mini Metro in my library for a few years, I was never interested, but last night I was happy to play it for 45 minutes just because of the different vibe. I saw a recent thread on Reddit calling the steam deck the backlog killer, and I think there’s something to that.

It also occupies this really interesting space, in that one half of it is a plug and play, easy to use gaming platform, and the other half is this super technical tweaky power-users heaven. So far I’ve installed games from the epic game store, streamed games for my desktop PC, and played games natively. I’m looking forward to getting emulation working and fooling around with Super Nintendo titles, and and and …!

On the Triple Click podcast, Kirk Hamilton was saying he hasn’t played a game outside of the steam deck since he got his in March, and though I’m only 3 days in, I may be heading down the same path.

I haven’t been playing my Steam Deck as much as I’d hoped, but most of my time on it over the last week has been in the original Dead Space – and it’s great. I’m a M+KB guy through and through, but it works well enough with the Steam Deck controls. I know some folks want a higher resolution screen, but I’m loving the screen on this thing.

I’m starting to get that vibe as well. It’s strange as I’m a diehard mouse and keyboard gamer but I have owned several consoles and used them quite a bit. I always draw the line at things I can find on steam though because I all about a, “superior experience,” for me. And I look up after -hours- on the couch using the Steam Deck and wonder what the fuck is happening.

What makes it stranger is I usually do not prefer using the controller on my PC rig unless I have to for a game. That may change as well.

Regarding offline, I am on a beach right now and without any issue (not using offline mode either) the games I have installed are working fine - Dragons Dogma, Cyberpunk 2077, American Fugitive, Ion Fury.