Enlarge / Playing Starfield on the Steam Deck does not feel like reveling in mankind's great capacity for wonder and discovery. (credit: Bethesda Game Studios)

Starfield , Bethesda's epic planet-hopping first-person RPG , is now widely available, and that includes on handheld gaming PCs. Both Valve's Steam Deck and the Asus ROG Ally picked up recent system updates that made it possible to play the game without crashes.

I can confirm the game runs on both systems, having experienced early access crashes and now a bit of normal gameplay today. But I don't think there's much point to playing locally on either system. Streaming remotely with Game Pass, or locally with Moonlight or Xbox Remote Play , is a better option, presuming you can do so without much input lag.

If you do try to force Starfield to load on your handheld, the graphics and frame rates will range from muddy to just acceptable, the battery life will be quite bad, and your experience with perhaps the best part of Bethesda RPGs—the sense of wonder and discovery in wide-open spaces—will be severely limited.

Enlarge / Certified refurbished Steam Decks can save you a little money without sacrificing performance or warranty. (credit: Valve)

Valve's Steam Deck hardware has been consistently available to buy for over a year now, but if the price has put you off, Valve has a new option for you. The company is now selling official, certified-refurbished Steam Decks with the same one-year warranty as new models at prices that are between $80 and $130 lower, depending on the configuration you want.

A basic Steam Deck with 64GB of eMMC storage costs $319 refurbished, compared to $399 new. The 256GB model runs $419 refurbished, compared to $529 new. And the 512GB model costs $519, compared to $649 new. All have the same Zen 2-based AMD CPU and integrated Radeon GPU, the same 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM, a charger, and a carrying case. Buying refurbished hardware directly from the manufacturer—from Apple's refurbished site , the Dell Outlet , and other places—is usually a great way to get like-new hardware for less money without sacrificing software and warranty support as you might if you bought from a third party.

If you want to save even more money on a Steam Deck, consider that iFixit , Framework , and a growing number of SSD makers are also releasing (physically) smaller SSD models that users can buy to save some money on storage or upgrade beyond that 512GB maximum.

Enlarge / With the advent of the Asus ROG Ally, you can take Windows gaming anywhere! Should you? That is a good question. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Geralt of Rivia looked good, moved smoothly, and responded swiftly to commands. There was just one problem: He was constantly sucker-punching the villagers of White Orchard. Over and over again, he raised his fists against tavern keepers, kids running in the street, and detachments of Nilfgaardian soldiers. That last one begat a brutal death. Sometimes, right after taking an unprovoked swing, the camera would furiously spin around my white-haired avatar, making me feel like I, too, had caught one in the head.

I played the latest version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt on Asus' new ROG Ally handheld gaming PC ($700, available June 13, preorders start today) as a personal benchmark. Having completed the game three times previously (Xbox/PC/Switch, Yennefer/Triss/neither), I was looking to spot differences on this emerging platform. Asus' new device can run The Witcher 3 —and Assassin's Creed: Odyssey , Forza Horizon 5 , and Hitman 3 —more powerfully than the Steam Deck or almost any other "portable" device around, minus questionably portable gaming laptops. The device runs Windows, so it has fewer game compatibility issues than Valve's Steam Deck (however admirably far that system has advanced). What would make The Witcher or any other playthrough different on the Ally, a Switch-sized device that boasts 7–13 times the power of that platform ? "Random violence" wasn't the answer I expected, so I dug in.

My first thought was that the thumb sticks could be the problem, as they seem to have bigger dead zones and feel less sturdy than the ones on the Steam Deck. Or maybe it was pre-release video hardware reacting to a game known for uneven performance . I updated everything I could, recalibrated the sticks, and double-checked my in-game settings. I played the same build of the game on a Steam Deck with Windows loaded, in the same location, but couldn't recreate the problem.

Valve is celebrating the first year of official availability for the Steam Deck with the hardware's first-ever official sale. Those looking to buy Valve's portable hardware can get a unit for 10 percent off until March 23 as part of Steam's regular spring software sale.

In the US, that translates to the following price reductions for the various Steam Deck configurations:

• 64GB eMMC: $399.00 down to $359.10
• 256GB NVMe: $529.00 down to $476.10
• 512GB NVMe: $649.00 down to $584.10

Even a temporary price drop would have been hard to picture for the Steam Deck just a few months ago, when the hardware was still enjoying a months-long run atop Steam's top-sellers list and Valve was still struggling to fulfill launch-day preorders in a timely manner. But Steam Deck units have been available without a preorder since October and are now set to be delivered one to two weeks after an order is placed.

Enlarge / Calendar Man is marking the many, many days until a more powerful Steam Deck shows up.

If you're waiting for a more powerful version of the Steam Deck before diving in on Valve's Linux-based portable hardware, you may find yourself waiting a little while longer. In a recent interview with Rock Paper Shotgun , Valve designer Lawrence Yang says it will be "a few years" before the company releases "a true next-gen Deck with a significant bump in horsepower."

A look at the Steam Deck's performance over its first year of availability helps show why Valve might not be in a hurry to release a more powerful portable. The current Steam Deck now supports over 8,000 titles that are either rated Playable or Verified by Valve's official Compatibility program . And that list isn't just low-end indie games, either; heavy hitters like Cyberpunk 2077 , Elden Ring , and the recent Dead Space remake run great on the handheld, and the device can even handle ray tracing on slightly older games like Doom Eternal .

That said, the Steam Deck hardware is already beginning to show its age on some recent releases. Games like Wild Hearts and Returnal will technically run on the Deck but reportedly show some significant frame rate and performance issues on the portable. While future software or OS patches could help a bit for these bleeding-edge games, the Steam Deck's unchanging hardware may start to look increasingly dated as PC gamers continue to upgrade their rigs with plentiful graphics cards (and PC game makers continue to target those high-end desktop users with their newest titles).