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The Heroic Launcher is easily one of the best ways to play any games from Epic, GOG, and Amazon on the Steam Deck, and I use it all the time. The UI is easy to use and there are tons of great features like integrated Winetricks, ways to download new compatibility layers to try out, and so much more. Now, a new update is here, and it brings some great new features, fixes, and enhancements for us to use.

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With the new features, we have a couple of great new ways to affect how the games run. There are now ways to easily customize game fixes with environment variables for better compatibility, game arguments can be passed directly through protocol URLs for more streamlined launching, and Steam Shortcuts can be added for games that aren't installed yet. We can also now see anti-cheat details in logs for easier troubleshooting and we have a new Gamescope option to stop the cursor from escaping full-screen games.

As for the rest of the update, there are a solid amount of bug fixes and enhancements to the UI. DXVK uninstallation is now fixed, older GOG games will set up correctly again, the Epic library has been cleaned up so no Unreal Engine items clutter your library, non-Latin font translation has improved, you can now style Heroic's look with Custom CSS, you can enable/disable logs per game, Proton GE is now the default over Wine GE, and the backend protocol is now faster without any delays from the frontend.

For those playing on the Steam Deck, UMU, the unified launcher for running games outside of Steam, is now the default for Proton games to keep compatibility, and we will now get alerts if pre-caching is off when using UMU. The team also disabled MangoHUD when the Deck is in Game Mode to make sure there are no conflicts.

There is a bit more to this update, and you can check out the full changelog on the Heroic Launcher's GitHub release page.

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You can download the Heroic Launcher from the Discover Store in Desktop Mode, and I highly recommend doing so if you want to take advantage of the free games you may get from Epic's weekly giveaways.

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Noah Kupetsky
A lover of gaming since 4, Noah has grown up with a love and passion for the industry. From there, he started to travel a lot and develop a joy for handheld and PC gaming. When the Steam Deck released, it just all clicked.
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