One from earlier in February I missed was a Q&A post from Ubisoft about Assassin's Creed Shadows, and it's bad news for players hoping to run it on Steam Deck. It releases soon on March 20th.
In their Q&A post a question was posed from someone in the Ubisoft Creator Program of "Will the game be Steam Deck certified at launch?", to which Pierre F, Technology Director on Assassin's Creed Shadows, replied: "At launch, the game will not be compatible with Steam Deck, due to the fact it is below our minimum specs for PC".
Not exactly surprising though. An increasing amount of brand-new AAA games are just beyond the capability of the Steam Deck. However, their wording of "at launch" leaves me at least a little hopeful they might have some further optimisations they can do. Who knows, maybe Valve can get some updates into Proton to make it run better too, like we've seen numerous times in the past.
Direct Link
At least if you're on Desktop Linux or a more powerful handheld, you likely won't have too much trouble. Unless the Ubisoft Connect launcher ends up being a nuisance.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
fenglengshun 12 hours ago
Last edited by Stella on 3 Mar 2025 at 11:02 am UTC
An increasing amount of brand-new AAA games are just beyond the capability of the Steam Deck.
I view it more as "an increasing amount of brand-new AAA games don't run well on any hardware, but high-end rigs can power through for a mostly-tolerable experience if you don't mind stuttering."
Expensive hardware to mitigate the bad optimization costs the money of someone else.
But yeah, the Deck could need more power in the near future.
Mohandevir 8 hours ago
I view it more as "an increasing amount of brand-new AAA games don't run well on any hardware, but high-end rigs can power through for a mostly-tolerable experience if you don't mind stuttering."
Totally. Because most of these games run at high fps with high end hardware but still have pretty low dips, creating a lot of stuttering if run at anything else than 30fps. That's the reason I always come back to my Steam Deck. It's, by far, the best 30fps experience around. So, if it doesn't run on my Steam Deck, I won't buy it. Anyway, Ubisoft is already dead to me. I didn't intend on buying this game, anyway.
This seems like more of a situation where they, I guess, tested on the Deck and found it doesn't run well enough to be considered playable. I see no problems here, though perhaps an argument could be made about optimization.
At least it sounds like they aren't breaking Deck/Linux support on purpose.
At this point, I'd be happy with a guarantee that the publisher won't break games with an anticheat or launcher in the future so I can at least look at ProtonDB before buying a game. If there's a guarantee in place, I'd be willing to take my chances that a random update might accidently break compatibility. (No official support for Deck/Linux)
Caldathras 4 hours ago
Frankly, I've played AC2 and watched videos for Black Flag and Syndicate on "retro" hardware. I find the graphics in AC2 to be amazing. The same for the videos of the other two.
I honestly don't see any need to improve the graphics further. In terms of resolution, I've always felt that 720p/800p was good enough. Even though I have a 1080p screen, I usually set my resolution down to 720p anyway -- just to gain better game performance. IMO, developers should focus on story quality and a better gameplay experience instead.
Last edited by Caldathras on 3 Mar 2025 at 7:19 pm UTC
I'd imagine most devs/publishers do not actually support Deck/Linux. It's nice when they do, though.@rivalary
This is why Proton exist since most of these devs/publishers aren't going out of their way to support Linux natively and Value and their partners are the ones that do the heavy lifting to make these games work on Linux/Steam Deck using Windows builds.
Last edited by ToddL on 3 Mar 2025 at 6:44 pm UTC
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