Looking for some advice. My Switch Lite is approaching the end of its life and given that a Switch 2 is basically the same price as an OLED Steamdeck I was thinking it might be a good time to jump back to PC gaming.

I’m not much of a gamer. I got the Switch Lite because of portability and the ability to wake it up, play for ten minutes and then toss it back in my bag. My only beefs with the Switch ecosystem is that you can’t download DLC - for Cities Skylines I have the bare game on Switch but a pile of DLC on my laptop for example.

So - would going with a Steamdeck make sense? Any gotchas I should know about? Is there a better option?

Thanks all!

**edit: y’all rock. I’m ordering an OLED Steamdeck

  • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    The joysticks are way better than the Switch and comparable to regular controllers. I haven’t had any issues with stick drift, and generally find it quite pleasant.

    What exactly were your issues with the joysticks?

    And yeah, being able to replace them a/ hall effect sticks is awesome, and I plan to do so if the sticks ever run into issues or I need to open it up for some reason. But I have no complaints, and in fact love playing with gryo aiming.

    • TheFeatureCreature@lemmy.caEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      They were much too big for my thumbs (going off the theme of the Deck in general being made for hands clearly bigger than mine). Too tall, too wide on top, and while I never had to deal with any drift - the deadzones suck to play games with. I keep a gamepad at my desk for racing and flying games and I switched it to a hall-effect gamepad about a year ago and I’ve never looked back. Potentiometer-based joysticks just feel like garbage in comparison and I think are inexcusable to use in a highend gaming product these days. I ended up using the touchpads instead for many things.

      • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        3·
        2 days ago

        the deadzones suck

        You can tune those, though the tighter you make it, the more likely you’ll run into drift issues. Replacing with hall-effect sticks is absolutely reasonable if you’re playing a lot of racing and similar games that benefit from slight adjustments near the neutral point. I mostly play action games, so I slam my sticks against the edges most of the time.

        I totally understand size issues though. The Deck works a lot better with larger hands, so if yours aren’t large enough, it could be uncomfortable.

        highend gaming product

        I don’t consider the Steam Deck “high end” at all. There are handhelds with hall effect sticks and higher end graphics.