It plays half as well as a console and compatibility is pretty impressive but far from consistent. Each game requires research just to see if it’s worth playing on it and will always look worse/play worse than on console by a large margin unless it’s an older or incredibly stripped down indie game.
Anybody who chooses it over a console wasn’t seriously considering a console in the first place. They don’t fill the same gap. The same way even switch and Wii owners often still got a PlayStation or Xbox. The libraries and the entire play experience are wildly different.
I really really like the deck but I don’t recommend it to most people because it’s fun like having Linux on your personal computer is fun. You like to tinker and see what it can do, you like a specific kind of ecosystem, and you like that the restrictions on it are few and far between (aside from performance). But this comes at a cost of UX. The fact that you need to reboot it 50% of the time you swap between handheld and desktop mode is emblematic of the entire experience. If I’m on a switch and dock it, I press a button on a controller and I’m instantly going. Deck? Controller might need to be reconnected to Bluetooth from scratch, the aspect ratio might be completely wrong, the game might panic with the change, lots can go wrong and often does.
Again the fact that a simple update can soft lock your deck until you connect to home wifi is terrible. You have to deal with a lot of little frustrations that no other system has and it just isn’t seamless like other experiences.
It plays half as well as a console and compatibility is pretty impressive but far from consistent. Each game requires research just to see if it’s worth playing on it and will always look worse/play worse than on console by a large margin unless it’s an older or incredibly stripped down indie game.
Anybody who chooses it over a console wasn’t seriously considering a console in the first place. They don’t fill the same gap. The same way even switch and Wii owners often still got a PlayStation or Xbox. The libraries and the entire play experience are wildly different.
I really really like the deck but I don’t recommend it to most people because it’s fun like having Linux on your personal computer is fun. You like to tinker and see what it can do, you like a specific kind of ecosystem, and you like that the restrictions on it are few and far between (aside from performance). But this comes at a cost of UX. The fact that you need to reboot it 50% of the time you swap between handheld and desktop mode is emblematic of the entire experience. If I’m on a switch and dock it, I press a button on a controller and I’m instantly going. Deck? Controller might need to be reconnected to Bluetooth from scratch, the aspect ratio might be completely wrong, the game might panic with the change, lots can go wrong and often does.
Again the fact that a simple update can soft lock your deck until you connect to home wifi is terrible. You have to deal with a lot of little frustrations that no other system has and it just isn’t seamless like other experiences.