I’m not saying you should play Avowed on a Steam Deck, merely that you can play Avowed on a Steam Deck. Much like how Nic found the game itself, squishing Obsidian’s latest RPG into a handheld makes for a sometimes-good, sometimes-terrible time, for reasons mostly shared between the Deck’s relative lack of horsepower and Avowed’s hardware-agnostic proclivity for stuttering.
Most of the basic needs are met: Avowed does well, for example, to shuffle the UI and inputs for its ability-heavy combat in such a way that plays well with the Deck’s limited buttons. While there are some cases of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2-style readability issues with the main HUD, the 800p display also isn’t so undersized that I ever had to stop and zoom in on something. You’ll quickly learn which tiny pinch of pixels is a 1 and which is a 2.
Performance, though, stretches the definition of playable, even if it never goes as far as to snap it entirely. Stooping to the lowest of low quality settings, FSR or TSR upscaling included, will keep Avowed at or above 30fps for a decent percentage of your time with it – but that will also be regularly broken up by sustained dips into the borderline 25-29fps range in towns and cities, with more short-lived but steeper drops whenever that stuttering problem flares up. Which is often.
This is triggered by the game trying to load in new data while you’re exploring its large, if not truly open world maps. Thus, while it’s unlikely to trip you up during, say, a boss fight, it definitely sucks some of the fun out of roaming Avowed’s (often beautifully built) fantasy realm. It’s not the only source of interruptions, either, as battery life on the original, LCD Steam Deck comes in at a paltry 1h 17m. That’s with both speaker volume and screen brightness set to 50%, so you could tack on a few more minutes with lower settings – maybe an hour or so on the more efficient Steam Deck OLED – but that’s still the second-shortest time I’ve got in the books, after the 1h 12m of Helldivers 2.
I have a feeling that the more comfortable way to play Avowed on a Steam Deck is to stream it via Xbox Cloud Gaming; indeed, this will be the only way, if you’re getting it with Game Pass rather than on Steam. Our review codes were all for the Steam version so I haven’t tried this method yet, but prior experience suggests it’s far more likely to keep a stable framerate than if you were to keep relying on the Deck’s own hardware. This approach comes with its own catches, mind, not least the fact that any streaming service is reliant on a solid internet connection – so you might struggle to take advantage of the Steam Deck’s defining portability when trying to play away from home, and the warm embrace of your Wi-Fi.
Avowed Steam Deck settings guide
If you do intend to stick with the locally-running Steam version, you can at least take comfort in knowing that you don’t actually have to run Avowed on its worst visual settings. That might sound like deluded burblings when an all-Low configuration won’t even secure a firm 30fps, but some of the individual quality settings have more of an impact than others, so it is possible to sneak a few of them upwards without tangibly harming performance any further. If it’s going to stutter, it may as well stutter with slightly nicer textures, dammit.
After much testing and tweaking, I’ve settled on the following:
- Motion blur: 0%
- Ray tracing: Off
- Upscaling: AMD Fidelity FX 3 on Performance (overrides anti-aliasing setting)
- View distance: Medium
- Shadow quality: Low
- Texture quality: Medium
- Shading quality: Medium
- Effects quality: Medium
- Foliage quality: Low
- Post processing quality: Medium
- Reflection quality: Medium
- Global illumination quality: Low
On a meaty desktop graphics card, the only non-ray tracing effects that seriously hurt performance are shadows and global illumination, but this is the humble Steam Deck and we really are fighting for every frame here. Hence why some of the settings that only very slightly affect chunky PCs, like foliage and reflections, need toning down here.