Path of Exile 2 now in Early Access and it works on Steam Deck / Linux

Path of Exile 2 from Grinding Gear Games has officially arrived, although it's not quite finished yet as it's in Early Access. Note: personal purchase.

The developer didn't reply to my request, so I've only just briefly jumped in today to check and see if it actually runs on Steam Deck and Desktop Linux. The good news there — is that it does! The game does launch right out of the box with the latest stable Proton 9.0-3.

Grinding Gear said they expect it to remain in Early Access for "as long as needed" which they expect will be "at least 6 months". Even though it's not done, it's still absolutely huge. There's somewhere around 400 different types of monsters, about 50 bosses and a whole lot of end-game content to play through. This game will keep you going for a long time, just as the first game did.

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Steam Deck

Testing on a Steam Deck LCD 512GB, with the game on the SSD and the game loaded up fine! Gamepad input detected as soon as I moved a thumbstick and so away we go. The game is definitely playable on Steam Deck.

Performance has been a bit…strange. On the lowest settings I've seen times where the same area will barely hold 30-40FPS, and other times it will give me a drastically smoother 50-60FPS. It's been thoroughly confusing that's for sure, and I've had to re-write this section a few times after doing repeated testing when fully reloading the game. So, your mileage here may vary, it might perform well for you, it might not. Entirely possible it's some server instancing issue messing with the performance at times.

Pictures below on Low settings, AMD FSR Performance, 60FPS limit, Dynamic Resolution On:

You won't get much more than 1hr 30mins on the LCD Steam Deck battery.

One big problem though is that lots of the text is small. There's some UI scaling, but seemingly no text scaling, so I still had to pull the deck up close to my face to read some parts. Especially annoying for a game like this, where you'll be reading over items and skills quite often. Higher levels of UI scaling can also cause some parts of the UI to go off the Steam Deck screen cutting it off.

Pictures below on Low settings, AMD FSR Performance, 30FPS Limit, Dynamic Resolution On:

That was one heck of a boss fight…

There's also some clear bugs, with it being in Early Access and all, like my first crash to my Steam Library when entering a portal the game just threw this up at me:

Overall: definitely playable! I just hope the weird performance issue is figured out.

Desktop Linux

Considering it ran on the Steam Deck, I wasn't expecting any trouble on Desktop Linux (Kubuntu 24.10) with an AMD GPU and as expected, no real issues there.

However, for NVIDIA users, you may see a black screen. One fix there is to force the game into DirectX12 mode, which it seems you need to do directly in a configuration file. This file can be found somewhere like this depending on where you have it installed:

~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/2694490/pfx/drive_c/users/steamuser/Documents/My Games/Path of Exile 2/poe2_production_Config.ini

Inside there set "renderer_type=DirectX12" on Line 7 (it will be Vulkan by default). Then you should be good to go.

Another potential fix I've been told that works with NVIDIA is to run the game with Gamescope.

On mostly High settings with my Ryzen 5800x, Radeon 6800 XT:

Initial Launch Issues

The actual launch was just a bit rocky, with the login not working as the developer had to do some truly last-minute upgrades on their database system. So over 400,000 people we're playing a loading screen simulator. I'm not exactly complaining though. Launching games is hard, especially online connected games such as this when a ridiculous amount of people are trying to jump in all at the same time. The community even took down SteamDB as people were hammering it trying to see what was happening.

Still, when the servers went up, seeing then 19,658 people ahead of me in a queue was quite frustrating to say the least. A queue that seemed like it wasn't actually going anywhere. Got there eventually though, only another 5 minutes staring at the red number of people ticking down until it was my turn. At last! At least, that's what I thought, I had a brief 30 seconds of bliss with a cut-scene and the game booted me back to the login screen. A "configuration problem" the developer said this time.

40 or so minutes later, and I'm back into a queue. Just a few ahead of me, only 17,430 people and so another 4 minutes sat watching it tick down again. Got there eventually…for 5 minutes, then the London Realm and others went down and I was kicked out again. At this point, you get the idea, the launch has not been the best. Clearly, the login screen is the hardest boss of them all.

Anyway. Wonderful to see another huge game launch working on Linux platforms at release just like with Marvel Rivals.