Update, September 24: Larian boss Swen Vincke has shared a bit of insight into how the Steam Deck port of Baldur's Gate 3 came to be. Apparently, we can thank a single engineer who took the initiative into his own hands.
"The story of how this came to be really is one of true passion," Vincke says on Twitter. "The Steam Deck native build was initiated by a single engineer who really wanted a smoother version of the game on Steam Deck and so he started working on it after hours."
Once the studio saw this Steam Deck port in action, "we were all surprised by how good it felt and so it didn't take much to convince us to put our shoulders behind it and get it released. It's this type of pure passion for their craft that makes me fall in love with my developers over and over again. Considering myself very lucky to have people like him on my team. Try it out!"
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Original story, September 23: The launch of Baldur's Gate 3 catapulted developer Larian into a whole new stratosphere of popularity in the larger gaming fandom, and the studio's commitment to post-launch patches – which have now stretched over two years after the CRPG's 1.0 launch – have certainly helped the studio's reputation. Larian is now arguably going even further above and beyond than ever before with a native port to Steam Deck.
Hotfix #34 went live today with a number of bug fixes across all platforms, rather amusingly including better audio levels for "a rat in the Lower City that you, tragically, couldn't hear squeak when it squoke." But the new Steam Deck version is certainly the biggest change here.
Most modern PC games are only compatible with Windows, and the Steam Deck runs a version of Linux. The vast majority of games on Valve's platform make use of a compatibility layer called Proton to essentially translate themselves into a form that can run on Linux.
That's how Baldur's Gate 3 has run on Steam Deck up to this point, and outside of some performance issues, it's been fine – so fine, in fact, that it's been wildly popular on the handheld.
But Larian explains in its announcement, "Baldur’s Gate 3 now features a native Steam Deck build! This means the game can now be run natively on the platform, resulting in a more stable framerate, lower loading times, and smoother gameplay."
This is very much an 'above and beyond' kind of move. Few other games, even Steam Deck Verified titles, actually run natively on the handheld. Doing a proper port like this means that Baldur's Gate 3 now "requires less CPU usage and memory consumption overall" on the handheld.
Technically, this also means that Baldur's Gate 3 has been ported to Linux, but Larian is quick to note in its support article that it "does not provide support for the Linux platform." But for Steam Deck users, this is a treat well beyond any reasonable expectation.
Baldur's Gate 3 continues to top our list of the best RPGs you can play today.
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