NTE: Neverness to Everness Has Some Trouble On Steam Deck

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I’m not sure why, but I’ve been on a gacha game kick lately. I got back into Wuthering Waves and found myself turning my AYN Odin 3 into a Gacha game machine. I downloaded Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, Zenless Zone Zero, and a new one I’ve been playing more of, NTE: Neverness to Everness. It’s been a lot of fun to play, and it was perfect timing because the game just recently launched on Steam. With that in mind, I wanted to check it out and see how the game is running on the Steam Deck and how the experience compares to the standalone version that we can manually install via the game’s launcher.

For those who may not know, NTE: Neverness to Everness is a gacha game created by Hotta Studio. We run around in an urban open-world city, taking on missions, getting into flashy combat, and collecting new characters through its gacha systems. There’s a lot more to it that makes me think of GTA or Marvel’s Spider-Man world than we can get cars to drive around the city quickly or fast travel. It seems very F2P-friendly as well, with lots of unlockables for free and a lot of chances to get the characters we want. Just recently, with the 1.2 update, the team gave out a free character and about 2200 of their premium currency, which is just a treat.

However, performance on the Steam Deck isn’t always the greatest for these kinds of games. A lot of them are very CPU-heavy, which leads to a good chunk of stutters that can harm the experience. Almost every gacha game I’ve played has similar problems, and that includes NTE.

In contained fights, on the lowest possible settings, it can stick to 30 FPS for the most part, though it does stutter and drop here and there when a lot of flashy effects are on the screen. So, some combat scenarios are a bit worse than others. However, running around the city can cost some drops, and driving around is significantly worse. So, I would consider it somewhat playable for minor grinding, but it’s definitely going to have its issues when trying to get around without fast traveling or in large fights.

I also took some time to compare the Steam and Launcher versions of the game. Usually, Steam versions will have slightly better performance and fewer stutters due to the shared shader cache system on Steam. However, it is a fairly new release, so the cache isn’t there yet. Because of this, performance is relatively the same, with the Steam version performing slightly worse. As we can see in the visual below, I tested both games with the same “Smooth” preset on the Fourth Stop of the Gloaming Circle Ghost Train with the same exact characters, and the results are pretty similar to each other.

Ultimately, it’s possible that within the next week, we will see the shader cache appear, and performance will get better, especially when it comes to stutters. However, it’s still going to need those compromises, including lower settings and a 30 FPS cap for stability, and we probably will still have some CPU bottlenecks that result in other stutters, especially when driving around. I do see some possibilities to play on the Steam Deck this way for some of its content, but it’s not something that’ll be stable throughout the entire game.

NTE: Neverness to Everness is currently free to play on Steam right now.

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