Mundfish Removes Graphical Options from Atomic Heart on Steam Deck

Update 5/18/23: Mundfish has posted another tweet earlier today that states they are going to add specific graphics settings "relevant for Steam Deck" in future patches for Atomic Heart. We have reached out to Mundfish for a bit more clarification on this and have asked why they made the decision to cut graphics settings out altogether over using a preset. We will update the article again once we hear back!

Well this is definitely a weird one I didn't expect to see. It appears Mundfish, the developers of Atomic Heart, has made the decision to remove graphical options from the game if you are playing on the Steam Deck. According to a tweet directly from Mundfish, they mentioned that this was a decision made to provide the best experience on the device:

I wanted to see this for myself and verify, so I bought the game and booted it up. Lo and behold, I only had Audio, Gameplay, and Controls options. Starting it up on my PC, I got these 3 settings, as well as Display and Quality ones.

After playing for a little bit, I can say performance felt a bit all over the place. The visuals were a hit or miss at times with some shadows not showing, models looking much less detailed, and some slight pop-in on the ground. The framerate fluctuates wildly depending on where you are looking, but for the most part, the game can handle 40 FPS at around 18W drain.

This seems to have come from its 1.6.0 update which lists that theh improved dialogues and game stability, as well as fixing issues with saving the game. This is speculation as this wasn't listed in the patch notes and 1.6.0 was the most recent update, but it could have happened sooner and not announced it.

In my opinion, this is one of the weirdest ways I have seen any sort of optimization for the Steam Deck. CD Projekt Red just recently created a preset for The Witcher 3, but you could still change the settings at will. Personally, I feel this goes against what makes the Steam Deck and PC gaming so great. Getting rid of options so nobody playing on the Steam Deck has a choice to make visuals better or even change resolution goes against a lot of the freedom that PC gamers expect from heavier games. You can still force a different resolution through Steam, but there are no options in-game. They should have added a configured preset instead of getting rid of the choice entirely.

What do you guys think of this solution to optimizing for the Steam Deck? Do you feel other developers should prioritize ease of use over configurability?

Atomic Heart is currently on sale on Steam for $45, though if you are subscribed to Humble Choice, you can get it on the Humble Store for $38.

The Humble Bundle link is an affiliate link which gives us a little back from sales at no extra charge to you. All proceeds go back into SDHQ and its development.

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