There is a lot of public misunderstanding of the rodent studies that linked aspartame to cancer, which are very flawed and essentially come from a single Italian research group.

There is still no definitive link to cancer risk in humans so I would continue to be skeptical. The maximum recommended safe exposure for aspartame is the equivalent of 12 cans of coke, and the strong effects from the rodent study were using exposure amounts equivalent to 5 times that amount, or 60 cans daily, every day of their life after day 12 of fetal life (i.e. before birth).

Almost anything can cause long-term health risks and toxicity at such massive exposure levels.

https://www.cancer.org/cancer/risk-prevention/chemicals/aspartame.html

Link to the free Pubmed link to one of the original source studies from 2008 so you can see their methodology and the absurdly massive exposure amounts needed to ovserve these effects:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17805418/

Those tags don’t work on Wefwef either ☹️

The only issues I have are with the Battlenet launcher, it sometimes crashes during startup when first opening D4 seemingly at random but once the game is running I don’t have any issues. Currently running it on Proton Experimental.

As far as settings go, at default settings D4 seems to be extremely taxing on the GPU (constant >=97% usage, high temps, crashes regularly after running for a while), although this seems to be common to all systems including PS5/Xbox.

Locking refresh rate and in-game menu FPS to 50fps keeps the power and GPU usage much lower and I get stable performance with no crashes.

Play it on the couch sitting next to my wife while we watch tv or movies in the evenings.

Spending nights sitting at a desktop (or monopolizing the TV) is frequently impractical and honestly unappealing to me, the SD makes it extremely convenient to play whenever.

The other big appeal is emulation- it wasn’t why I purchased one, but setting up Emudeck and Steam Rom Manager is incredibly convenient and lets you easily run anything up to WiiU/PS3 gen seamlessly from game mode. For that alone I would recommend it, the ease of access and convenience is amazing.

I would not recommend Lutris/wine for D4 since it tuns perfectly on Proton Experimental, at that point you are just introducing another layer of potential compatibility issues that are completely unnecessary. I tried using Lutris on launch day and it was a total headache with various components being incompatible.

Just install the launcher in desktop mode and add it as a steam game, then set compatibility mode to Proton Experimental. Done.

I have not been able to stop playing D4, but Grim Dawn plays absolutely perfectly on the Deck, one of the games I would recommend the most.