Xonotic by far and away!
Xonotic is like if you took the inspired weapon alt-fire modes from Unreal Tournament (video rundown of weapons) and bolted them onto the downright spiritual movement of Quake (I feel my soul drawing closer to the Flying Spaghetti Monster with every strafe jump I make). You might wonder how the hell you play one of the fastest Quake multiplayer derived shooters in existence using the joysticks on the Steam Deck (the answer is Gyroscope massively complements Joystick aiming once you get used to it). Check out my post on the Xonotic forums detailing the important bits of the control scheme.
https://forums.xonotic.org/showthread.php?tid=9846
Xonotic cont.
I am dead serious the Steam Deck should just come preinstalled with Xonotic and a control scheme like this, it is brilliant and Xonotic is probably the most resource efficient 3D competitive multiplayer game in existence so your Steam Deck battery will love it too… your deck’s fan can take a nap while you play, it is never needed with this game outside of one little brief whir to load a level.
yes that is a restaurant POS machine running objectively the best FPS ever, suck it DOOM
As a last note the bots in Xonotic can be set up to BRUTALLY hard difficulties but the bots are fun to play against so long as you set the difficulty right for you, they move how players should in a strafe jumping game, they push for good items when they spawn on the map and they try to escape when you pin them into a corner with a decisive advantage. It makes a superb pick up and play experience with no internet connection required that you can jump in and out of as chaotically as you want while you are on the go with your deck.
Beyond All Reason
https://www.beyondallreason.info/
Beyond All Reason is the latest in over a decade of Total Annihilation inspired games made on the open source Spring Engine (though I believe most energy is behind a recent fork of the Spring Engine called the Recoil Engine). The RTS genre picking to hedge it’s bets on StarCraft style rts games and not Total Annihilation style rts games I think is a tragedy (though understandable) and in my opinion helped lead to the stagnation of the genre (well except Forged Alliance Forever/SupCom 1 and well... Planetary Annihilation got pretty decent after I stopped paying attention it seems like). Thankfully the open source Spring Engine has been a perennial source of refinement and innovation on full scale RTS games, and the various TA inspired projects over the years have taken ideas originally introduced in TA and elevated them to a level that is honestly pretty shocking for a series of open source community projects in an essentially dead genre of games (classic RTS games).
Beyond All Reason cont.
Brilliant game and like the original Total Annihilation being able to hold shift and que up many commands as well as easily instruct units into formations makes playing BAR so much less of a headache than trying to micro the shit out of everything in a game like StarCraft (see 6:50 in this video). Also unlike StarCraft the fighters and bombers actually fly around like planes instead of being exactly the same as land units except they hover.
Really all you have to do to get the Steam Deck’s controls working well is start with the default WASD and Mouse template and bind a key to toggle gyroscope so you can use it for making your quick fiddly mouse movements with the joysticks perfectly precise and then figure out what key you want to bind shift to in order to make queuing orders up for a unit easy to do (with that template it defaults to a joystick click which for something you will do a bazillion times over the course of a battle ain’t gonna do it chief).
…and sure I wouldn’t jump into competitive games with mouse and keyboard players who have been munching on TA-style RTS mechanics for a good portion of their lives at this point but the reason I recommend this game is over the last 5 years or so the AI has gotten REALLY good, it isn’t like you are playing a dumb unit spamming algorithm that gets an upper hand over you by just cheating on eco, the AI plays fair (at least on moderate settings) and will probe your defenses, tech up and react to your choices. There is also a mode where you fight dinosaurs (called chickens) in a co-op horde survival fashion.
sigh it looks like most of the community has moved to discord though, I fear it will end up killing the community long term if the community only really gathers there to interact. Now is the time for a fediverse Beyond All Reason & Spring/Recoil Engine community on a fediverse reddit-like such as lemmy, kbin etc..!!!
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Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead taught me that in the apocalypse bicycles and slings (NOT slingshots) will be your two most useful tools.
…Or roller skates lol. Seriously though I love this game and the community around it from the bottom of my heart, what a stunning tour de force of an open world survival game. Check out the Sky Islands Mod (included in the vanilla game as an option) if the main game doesn’t feel focused enough to you. Also please join the Lemmy community around Cataclysm Dark Days Ahead, there is a decent amount of activity and it would be a perfect place to ask new questions as a newbie!
https://sopuli.xyz/c/cataclysmdda@lemmy.ml
I don’t have a control scheme for this one yet, but I have no doubt it will be easier to play this game on a Steam Deck than a normal laptop without the number pad (we can just use one of the joysticks!). One of the very very nice things about CDDA is that as overwhelming of a game as it is to learn the control scheme is actually very thoughtfully laid out and when you forget a command just press ? and you can search for commands by describing what they do. You just gotta remember ? and you can learn the rest of the keybindings on the fly.
**Edit: I just finished creating a Steam Deck mapping for Cataclysm DDA that maps the full keyboard to the Steam Deck in an intuitive (in my opinion lol) fashion.
https://sopuli.xyz/post/12374907
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Rigs Of Rods An odd one, an old one, it is an open source driving game with advanced physics.
If the point of the Steam Deck is to play games in contexts that you otherwise would never have been able to, having a game you can mindlessly drive around and crash into things while watching how pretty and cool it looks is a no brainer. This game has years and years of updates and is a quasi-predecessor to BeamNG which is another superb game (though not as resource efficient I believe). It also actually has a more generalist, capable engine than BeamNG appears to (with vehicles being able to have fully articulating parts like cranes that interact with the world).
I really think this game will just keep chugging along doing it’s own thing long into the foreseeable future and it makes a great companion to the deck especially if you have a kid that you might want to give them something to play that is more a simple physics toy than some complex game with lots of rules to memorize or comprehend. Bonus points, the realistic physics emulation of crashes will make it so your kid will never doubt how dangerous driving in reality is :)
