Getting up and running on the new Steam Deck

As I reported in my previous post, I got a surprise new Steam Deck when my original one decided its battery was going to turn into a spicy danger pillow! So over the last day or so, I’ve been working on setting up the new device with all the games and playthroughs I had active on the previous one.

This post is about that, and about my overall impressions of this new Deck in general. It’s an OLED model, and yeah, there are some distinct differences between it and its predecessor.

This is not going to be a full review post. If you want an in-depth review of the OLED Steam Deck, there are plenty to choose from all over the web. As I’m a regular follower of Ars Technica, I’ll commend their review in particular to you.

What I want to talk about here instead are my overall personal impressions, what I’ve noticed so far that’s different from my original Deck, and what I had to do to get all my previous games and playthroughs back up and running.

Deets behind the fold. This’ll be a long post.

Overall impressions

The OLED flavor of Steam Deck looks a lot like its predecessor. The overall form factor is pretty much the same. But I noticed several differences on casual inspection, as soon as I started setting it up.

The Power button is red, rather than black, which makes it a lot more obvious. I never had a problem finding it before, but I could see the color change helping out anybody who did. Also, the logo that appears on screen once you boot the device has a red dot in the middle of it rather than a blue one. And having the Power button be red ties in with that, visually.

The thumbsticks are smooth along the top now rather than textured. I daresay this was to address the issue with that texture taking on a lot of weird white coloration after even a little bit of use? This was something I saw reported online by assorted sources, and I certainly had it happen on mine.

The power supply now has embossed logos on either side of it, and a much longer cord. Otherwise, according to the data printed on it, it’s functionally identical to the original.

The screen has narrower bezels on it. And boy howdy, yep, that screen sure is bright. I noticed that immediately on startup, and under some circumstances, it was actually too bright for my eyes. When I put up the same desktop background in Desktop mode that I had before, that yellow background was a trifle too bright. So were any windows with a white background that I opened in that mode. So I’ve addressed this by dialing down the brightness a bit.

Most importantly to me, I’d had some issues on the original Deck with its Bluetooth. This was making it maddening for my little Bluetooth keyboard to keep a connection to it, and I’d also had issues with my headset and my Nintendo Switch Pro controller keeping connections to it too. In my casual reading of reviews of the OLED Deck when it first dropped, I saw references to it having a better Bluetooth receiver in it.

And I can definitely say now that I’ve been playing with it for a day or so, the improved Bluetooth functionality is hands down my favorite thing about it. It means that that keyboard is behaving a lot better. Previously, I’d had to try three or four times to get it to keep a stable connection to my first Deck. Now, even if it happens to go to sleep, I just have to tap any button to wake it up again. At which point it reconnects to the Deck, and I’m good to go.

So now, let me talk about reinstalling all my games and playthroughs.

Elder Scrolls Online

I installed ESO first since it’s the thing I’ve been playing the most of this year. And to my surprise and pleasure, this was easier than it was when I installed ESO and fired up Gyllerah’s playthrough. Previously, I’d followed this guide for setup instructions. But this time through, I didn’t have to. I mostly just ran ESO’s installer.

There was one point in that installer where I had a bit of a hiccup, because the screen went black and I had no obvious way to proceed. So I wound up just quitting the game and restarting. But I did that, I was able to proceed, finish the install, and start the game normally.

I don’t know what’s changed between when I started Gyllerah’s run, and now. The improvements could rest with ESO’s launcher, but also with how Proton 9 is now the default Proton version on the device, and it just might be a lot better at running PC games’ installers? I don’t know! The end result though was a significantly smoother install experience for this game.

Reinstating my ESO addons was also smoother than before. I discovered that Minion, the tool commonly used by ESO players to manage addons (a.k.a., mods) is now available via Flatpak. Which meant I was able to just install it directly in the Deck’s Desktop mode, without having to go through any additional hoops to make it work as I’d had to do before.

Most of the work I had to do to reinstate my addons was just retrieving the addon files off of my computer. I’d been copying the relevant files back and forth anyway to keep my ESO in sync on Deck and computer, before. So it was very easy to just grab my AddOns directory and the SavedVariables directory, and plunk all the files they contained into the correct places on the Deck’s file structure.

Then I loaded ESO, went to the AddOns menu, accepted the agreement for running addons, and everything woke up again.

Lastly, I reinstated the custom set of radial menus I’d set up to launch off the Deck’s left trackpad. This is my solution for using all the various keybind shortcuts that players on computer use to do things, especially any functionality covered by addons. Typical ways I use such keybinds are to go to various player houses, or to bring up the settings for the addons I use the most. I’ve still got the keybindings that computer players would use. But I don’t normally need to use a keyboard when playing on the Deck, unless I’m specifically trying to talk to people in game chat. So instead, I made the radial menus to send the relevant keystrokes for me. Works like a charm.

Related to this, I installed Aenathel’s Keybinds, an addon that lets you extend how many keybindings you can use in ESO by allowing you to do key combos. Such as Shift+1, Alt+C, etc. I set that up while on the computer, but now that I had the new Deck, I needed to adjust one of my radial menus to use a new key combo I’d set up.

Which meant I needed to learn how to send a key combo on the Deck. Previously, I’d just had to assign a single key press to the various menu options. To send two key presses, I set the first one (Alt), and then added an option to send a sub-command, which in this case I set to C. So now I know how to do that!

Skyrim

Anyone who’s been following this blog since its early days may remember that I had a devil of a time getting my original Steam Deck set up to not only run Skyrim, but to also let me mod it. Y’all may also recall that my original solution for doing this was using a tool called Steamtinkerlaunch, which I later ditched in favor of much simpler helper scripts written by Pikdum, a user on Github.

I went back to Pikdum’s scripts for this effort, too. And as with ESO, setting up Skyrim this time through turned out to be significantly easier than it’d been on my original Deck.

First up, I installed the game and confirmed I could load my current unmodded playthrough with no issues, both in English and in German, after switching languages.

Then I set up Pikdum’s scripts in Desktop mode, and installed Vortex. I also copied back a small modification I did to one of those scripts, making a “vanilla” post-deploy script that basically reverted the change Pikdum’s post-deploy script did: i.e., renaming the Skyrim launcher to a backup name, and then renaming the SKSE64 launcher to be the usual name of the Skyrim launcher.

And I copied back in all of the mod files that I’d saved in the Downloads folder of the original Deck. I still had a bunch of them, since in many cases I’d had to download and install them manually.

And with my Vortex up in my Windows 11 VM on my computer, I re-established all my playthrough profiles in the Vortex on the Deck. Elessir’s playthrough at 113 mods, Kendeshel’s at 91, and Skyrim Together at 8.

Only the Skyrim Together profile took a little extra work, and that was because Skyrim Together, unlike most Skyrim mods, has its own separate executable you have to run. I still had to set a launch options string on that thing to work, and I also explicitly forced it to use Proton 9 once I added the STR executable to Steam. Once I did that, I was able to launch it and get back into my STR playthrough’s last save.

Morrowind

I reinstalled Morrowind and had to do absolutely nothing to it to get to work as before, yay. <3 My previous saves were available on the cloud, and Steam on the Deck had my previous controller config active as well.

Oblivion

For Oblivion, I followed much the same procedure I’d done with Skyrim, setting up the game to be managed by Vortex, and then copying in the various mods for it that I’d downloaded before.

The one main difference with this process for Oblivion is that I’d previously tweaked a couple of the controller settings, inside the game, using the NorthernUI mod I have installed. I had to re-do those same small tweaks. But that was quick and painless.

Fallout 3

Fallout 3 is the most recent game I’d previously installed on the first Deck, for values of “recent” meaning “when I actually installed it”, not “when it actually came out”.

But unlike the other Bethesda games I’d been playing, Fallout 3 for some damn reason does not save to the Steam cloud. So I’d specifically had to do a backup of the previous device’s save files, and copy them onto the new Deck.

The tricky part there was finding the correct place to put them, a question which was helpfully addressed for me by this thread.

Once I put the save files into the correct place on the new Deck, I was able to not only launch Fallout 3, but also have it actually find those saves.

One weird thing though was that the saves were not in reverse chronological order, as I expected! I doublechecked the files, and found that the file for the first save was for some reason missing its creation timestamp. The copy on my computer had the correct timestamp.

So the solution for this was for me to launch a sshd server on the Deck, so that I could use my computer’s command line and copy the relevant files over again. This time, I used the scp command in the command line, with the -p argument that told it to preserve all file attributes on the files being copied.

Instructions I followed to activate sshd on the Deck are here.

So then, finally, the save files showed up in the correct expected order. And that concluded reinstating all my previous games and playthroughs!

What’s next

I still have a bit more housekeeping I want to do on the new Deck. I do want to keep the sshd server active, and I also want to reinstate the VNC server I’d previously had installed on it. Those things made it a lot easier to do administration on the device from my computer, rather than directly on the device itself.

Right now I expect to still need to do that. The better Bluetooth functionality does mean my little Bluetooth keyboard works a lot better. But that doesn’t solve the Deck’s screen just being a lot smaller than my laptop’s monitor! And it’s a lot easier to read things on the laptop.

But now that the device is up and running again with all my games, my regular playthroughs will resume. As will my current work on trying to get caught up on my backlog of playthrough posts! So stand by for my next post to come!

And if anyone out there wants to know more about any of what I’ve covered here, drop a comment and let me know, okay?