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v1ld/Dragon Age Origins Steam Deck Mods 2023.md

Last active November 8, 2024 17:36
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Dragon Age Origins Steam Deck Mods 2023.md

Dragon Age Origins on the Steam Deck in 2023

Steam Deck

Origins runs with no problems at all when installed through Steam on the Deck. Steam installs all the required dependencies like physx for you. Haven't tried the GoG or EA versions and don't plan to - but they may require you to install those dependencies yourself going from what I see on the net. Use Protontricks and protontricks-launch to do this.

The game uses a lot of power by default, but a few tweaks will reduce this dramatically and give over 4.5 hours on a single charge.

Go into the ... menu, Performance tab. Enable "Use per-game profile." Then set these values:
Framerate Limit: Unlimited
Refresh Rate: 30
Allow Tearing: On
TDP Limit: On
Watts: 5
Manual GPU Clock: On
GPU Clock Frequency: 600

The game will run at a solid 30 fps, which looks great on this screen. Battery draw will be around 9-10W, which is great and will allow for hours of play on a single charge.

You can bump TDP to 6W and GPU to 800-900MHz if you want to use the Deck's 40Hz mode, which you can activate by setting Framerate Limit to 40. Should give you a solid 40fps with a bit more power draw than 30 fps.

4GB / LAA patches

Proton runs applications in 4GB mode by defaut so you don't need to patch the DAO binary on the Deck. Nor do you need to download the "unencrypted binary" mod you can find on the Nexus. Steam's encrypted binary will be made into an LAA process by Proton under the hood, which is really sweet and painless.

Protontricks

Install Protontricks through the Discover app. This installs Protontricks as a flatpak which you can launch as a graphical applicationm by hitting the Steam Deck icon in lower left of Desktop mode and typing in "proton." Protontricks will let you install dependencies into a game's prefix.

Add the below alias to your ~/.bashrc file if you want to run other Windows programs in the same prefix as the game:
alias protontricks-launch='flatpak run --command=protontricks-launch com.github.Matoking.protontricks'

Once you've done this, start a new Konsole shell. You can then launch, say, DAUpdater.exe to install mods into your DA Origins prefix like so:
protontricks-launch --appid 47810 ~/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/common/Dragon\ Age\ Ultimate\ Edition/bin_ship/DAUpdater.exe

Steam appid 47810 is for Dragon Age Origins.

You can use this method to run any Windows binary you need to use for modding the game in the game's Steam prefix. For example, you could also use a mod manager like DAModder the same way:
protontricks-launch --appid 47810 DAModder.exe

When using DAModder, use the Install Mod button instead of dragging and dropping files onto the app - that latter sometimes causes the app to lock up.

Mods

Skip Launcher

Mod Manager

Bug Fixes

Console

Mechanics

UI

UI - Text

Visuals

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