Valve has been hard at work lately getting Steam Deck Beta Client updates and new Verified/Playable games out, but it seems we may be seeing a new Proton version soon! While checking games for this week's Verified/Playable list, I caught on to a couple interesting entries on SteamDB.

For Dark Souls 3, Gord, and Coral Island, each game had their configured/recommended layer changed to "proton-8.0-3".

CoralIslandProton803
DarkSouls3Proton803

At first, I thought this was maybe signaling for Proton Experimental, since Proton 8.0-3 hasn't appeared on the official changelog, but there was a couple new games that did switch to "proton-experimental".

Checking Coral Island and Dark Souls 3 on the Steam Deck, it does say that Experimental is being selected by default. This could be due to 8.0-3 not being formally released yet and Experimental is being selected until then, but this is all speculation.

We have reached out to Pierre-Loup Griffais, a software engineer at Valve that is working with the Steam Deck and its software components, for clarification.

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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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