I’ve got a substantial library of games on GOG and Epic that I wanted to play on the Steam Deck, and I’ve used the Heroic Launcher with some success to access a lot of my libraries on those two platforms, but managing the compatibility per game is a bit frustrating and sometimes after an update things break.
Can anyone else share any success or failure stories here? The only other place I’ve seen this discussion was on Steam itself and I wanted a non-steam take on the practice of running non-steam platform games and what works.
I normally check online to see if a particular Epic or GOG games is compatible with the Steam Deck before using Heroic to install it, but following that, I haven’t run into any big issues with getting the game to run with the latest Proton version. Though I suspect some games do work better on an older build.
deleted by creator
You have a third party app, boilr which do it, or a setting in heroic.
deleted by creator
I’ve had mixed success, but probably mostly as a result of it just being fussier to use Heroic and Lutris. Expect to go look up the game on ProtonDB and pay with settings.
Also, the downloading is less robust. I know with Cyberpunk 2077 from GoG, it took several tries before it downloaded successfully.
Overall, the experience of playing a Deck verified Steam game vs. the same game from GoG is like day and… dusk. It works, sometimes with little intervention, but expect to fiddle more.
As an aside, GoG should just support Heroic or Lutris development, and get them to have some streamlined “Community Settings” feature, letting Heroic or Lutris pull and apply an automated settings file.
Maybe a dumb question, but how do I go about getting heroic launcher on the deck?
This is the biggest reason for me considering wiping my steam deck and installing windows. I know that’s heresy in this community but, honestly, I don’t give two shits about my OS, I just want to play the games. If using the touch pad and a set of desktop icons (which is how my desktop pc is configured) works, fine. I’ve never owned a console and don’t need the console experience.
For now I have more Steam backlog than I can play, but when I get around to swapping the SSD…well , I’ll burn that bridge when I get there.
I have windows 10 installed on a micro SD card for those games that simply won’t play nice with steam OS, but I find myself using it less and less
wiping my steam deck and installing windows. I know that’s heresy in this community but, honestly, I don’t give two shits about my OS
Can you please explain why you think this would be heresy? Because, for example, if you hypothetically figured out a way to install MacOS on the thing, you’d be applauded. No one cares what OS you installed on it.
They are probably talking about the attitude r/SteamDeck had about installing Windows. Anything even mentioning that was often downvoted to oblivion. And since Lemmy users are probably more open to open source software they were expecting that to be the case here as well.
Personally I am done with Windows. I won’t install it on my Steam Deck or my desktop PC. But I see why someone would want to do that. If I were to install Windows on my Deck because of some multiplayer games or so I would probably not even dual boot and instead focus on making the experience on Windows as good as possible.
I have had pretty good success with Heroic and Alien Isolation, which was one of their free games. BUT, I didn’t play for a while and heroic was logged out and I am having difficulty logging back in and getting it working again.
Try using alternative login method, login issue is not platform related. I have very same experience on PC.
Try using alternative login method, login issue is not platform related. I have very same experience on PC.
Like the other commenter said, maintaining login session is a bit of a pain (particularly where online functionality is important in the gaming experience like Death Stranding) but it mostly works.
Cloud Save is definitely one of the big flaws. I barely salvaged my Death Stranding save after a Proton version switch (DO NOT do this for a game you have a lot of saves with), because Heroic doesn’t do automatic cloud Save (or maybe it does but it’s Beta? I don’t recall).
EGS logs itself out on windows desktops all the time too. Just terrible software and annoying.
I use Lutris for everything because I am already used to that from my desktop PC. It has installers for most games that would download the needed dependencies and make necessary configuration changes.
Disclaimer: I haven’t tried it.
BUT: I’m both a Deck user and Linux desktop gamer. I believe you should be able to install Epic and GOG both (the launchers) as non-Steam apps, and then they each get installed to fresh Proton prefixes in Steam. No additional tools should be needed besides Steam itself.
I think you can still select a default install location for their games too, since you do get Linux file system access from the prefix (it’s mounted as drive Z).
I’d probably run them both using Proton Experimental, since it tends to be better with other launchers. Or, a later version of Glorious Eggroll. The cases where something doesn’t run on GE or Experimental (but does work with some other Proton version) should be extremely minimal, so using one of those for the whole shebang should give good results. You can freely change the Proton version for the whole launcher if something gives you trouble.
Yes there are other solutions (Heroic, Lutris), but ultimately this should work as well with fewer components. I use this approach for Ubi games that use their daft launcher.
