In a surprise turnaround after previously stating the Steam Deck would not be supported for Assassin’s Creed Shadows, Ubisoft have now said it actually will be.
The official Assassin’s Creed account on X/Twitter posted:
Many of you have been asking about Steam Deck. We are happy to say that we are supporting Steam Deck at launch and are currently awaiting the level of classification from Valve. More info to come soon.
Previously, Valve rated it as Unsupported on Steam Deck with their rating that went live on February 8th. At time of writing, the Steam page still shows this Unsupported rating so it will be interesting to see what Ubisoft have changed to actually get it supported. Hopefully Valve will give it an appropriate rating and not just bump it up to Verified if it has poor performance like we've seen a couple of times in the past. Valve's rating is usually correct though, just a few random outliers that don't match up.
The game is due to release on March 20th on Steam so we don't have long to find out.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/1ja6rfh/steam_version_of_assassins_creed_shadows_does_not/
No Ubisoft Connect required... which should help with the Steam Deck. But there's still a mini-version of it running? Not sure.
Of course, needing an account for a singleplayer game bought on a different storefront is dumb.
But it's still a major improvement. The annoyances with the launcher and issues with offline play are quite common with 3rd party integrations.
We'll see on launch but this might be another case of the Steam Deck incentivizing companies to improve user experience.
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