Avowed and the Steam Deck make for uneasy partymates

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I’m not advocating that you play Avowed on a Steam Deck, but rather, it is possible to play Avowed on this handheld device. Just as Nic discovered the game itself, fitting Obsidian’s latest RPG into a portable system can result in an experience that ranges from decent to frustrating, primarily due to the Steam Deck‘s limited power and Avowed’s propensity for stuttering, which seems to be hardware-agnostic.

Deliverance, the display resolution is sufficient enough to avoid frequent zooming in to read small details. You’ll soon get accustomed to distinguishing between the small pixel clusters representing 1 and 2.

Although it might challenge the boundaries of playability, Avowed can still be experienced without totally ruining the definition. By lowering the quality to the minimum settings, or using FSR/TSR scaling, you can maintain a stable frame rate of 30fps for a significant part of your gameplay. However, this smoothness is frequently disrupted by prolonged dips into the almost unacceptable 25-29fps range in urban areas, and more frequent, albeit brief, but steep drops whenever performance issues occur – which happens quite often.

During gameplay within the expansive yet not entirely open world maps of Avowed, the game may pause to load new data. This can somewhat spoil the enjoyment of exploring this well-crafted fantasy universe, especially when it happens unexpectedly. It’s worth noting that this issue might not interfere during intense moments like boss fights, but it certainly reduces the fun.

Additionally, the original LCD Steam Deck has a relatively short battery life of 1 hour and 17 minutes under normal conditions (with both speaker volume and screen brightness set to 50%). This is one of the shortest durations I’ve encountered, only surpassed by Helldivers 2 with its 1 hour and 12 minutes. Lowering settings might extend this time slightly on the OLED version, but it still ranks among the shorter playtimes in my experience.

As a gamer, I’ve got a hunch that playing Avowed comfortably on a Steam Deck would be smoother by streaming it through Xbox Cloud Gaming, especially if you’re not buying it from Steam but have it via Game Pass instead. Since we received review codes for the Steam version, I haven’t tried this method personally, but past experiences hint that it could maintain a steady frame rate better than relying solely on the Deck’s hardware. However, streaming does come with its own caveats; for instance, it heavily depends on a stable internet connection, which might limit your ability to fully leverage the Steam Deck’s portability when gaming away from home and a reliable Wi-Fi connection.

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2025-02-14 13:55