Hello y’all, I’m at my wits end. I got the GoG version of BG3 (cause DRM free yay!), but for the love of me I cannot get it to work. I’ve done so much googling and so many workarounds, I’ve installed .net, I’ve skipped the launcher, I’ve used the alternate .exe, I’ve tried proton experimental and 8 and hotfix, but nothing has got me even as far as a loading screen. I just get a flash of black then crashed back to desktop. If anyone has any insights or help I would greatly appreciate it, I’m using Heroic right now but honestly I’ll do whatever to get this thing working.

  • @zigguratEnglish
    1•1 year ago

    I got it working, I intend to buy the game on steam next payday (this week), until then I’ve borrowed the GOG version from a friend.

    1. I had the already installed files.
    2. I copied them over the the steamdeck, I picked /run/media/mmcblk0p1/steamapps/common/ to put the game, so it’s stored similar to other games which are on the sd card. I use Linux on my main computer so I used rsync to copy it over. With SSH enabled on the steamdeck it was something like rsync -r -azvhP "Baldurs Gate 3" deck@192.168.0.15:/run/media/mmcblk0p1/steamapps/common/ It took ages, maybe a few hours, I played Hades which I usually play on 3W TDP, I unlocked the TDP while playing Hades in game mode while copying the files, and Hades was stored on the same SD card which I was copying BG3 to. Hades just had slower loading times.
    3. I added a file called steam_appid.txt with the contents 1086940 only that as the contents, inside /run/media/mmcblk0p1/steamapps/common/Baldur's Gate 3/bin/ next to the bg3.exe file.
    4. I have GE-Proton installed. On my main comptuer which uses Arch I just have the AUR package installed, and it only keeps the newest version of GE-Proton. On the SteamDeck I sadly use ProtonUp-qt instead to update GE-Proton.
    5. Added "/run/media/mmcblk0p1/steamapps/common/Baldur's Gate 3/bin/bg3.exe" as a non steam game in desktop mode, remember to double check that the quotes are added, if not add quotes to the beginning and end of the string after wards. pick bg3_dx11.exe instead if you want the dx11 mode.
    6. Set GE-Proton as the compatibility mode.
    7. Go to Game Mode and try to launch the game. It looks like it doesn’t work, because the game doesn’t show up in the foreground, but if you press the steam button, so the left side menu shows up where it says Library, Store etc, the game is running and is in the list Above Library, so I can pick return to game or something.

    Bonus step (settings), I also added the mod that replaces DLSS with AMD FSR2, and I run everything at low, except shadows, and have TAA + FSR2 with the wrong name for the profile called Ultra Quality. I have the game locked to 30fps in the Steam Deck quick access menu. I am okay with 30fps, and I prefer to have a slightly longer battery life than eking out the very last bit of performance or visuals out of the game. It’s a bit blurry, but I found these settings were quite nice. Wish I could have higher texture settings, but it seams to not load in higher textures even if I try to pick it, since it looks like the VRAM is filled up without it. The menus are at native resolution, and the faces of the people seam very nice with these settings, so I call that a win. I have not tried DX11 though. Slow HDD mode seams to not work, as it should load more things into RAM to reduce issues with loading from a slow disk, but the memory and vram is already filled so It doesn’t seam to give better performance. Anecdotally turning off Slow HDD mode might reduce some frametime spikes, not sure.

    Note, Since I intend to just buy this game this week, I think I’ll just start a new game, but if I wanted to copy the save game files over, I would go to ‘/home/deck/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/’ find the randomly generated ID for the non-steam-game, would start with checking the most recently updated folder, enter that directory, then pfx/drive_c/ and look for the same game, and copy it over to the compatdata folder for the steam version of the game manually.