Avowed Is Playable on Steam Deck, But Shows Some Warning Signs - First Impressions

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Avowed was provided by Xbox for review. Thank you!

I love Obsidian Entertainment and the way they make RPGs, which is why I have been excited about Avowed from day 1. The game looked fantastic, kind of like a more magical version of Skyrim, and I was fully on board with what they were trying to create. After playing it for a little, I can feel some of that magic as well. While the writing seems solid so far, the combat itself feels so fluid and enjoyable.

I can't wait to play more, but I feel I have played enough to gauge how I think performance on the Steam Deck will be, so I wanted to write up some impressions on how I think Avowed will perform, my thoughts so far, and whether I would recommend it based on my short time with it.

Avowed - Steam Deck Performance So Far

Before I get into it, this is a first impression and not a full review. I have not played the game entirely yet, so my assessment right now is more about how I think the full game will perform and my experiences so far. The performance could get better or worse later on.

Avowed didn't leave a good first impression with performance on the Steam Deck, but after some tweaking, it came around a bit more. The default settings do set everything at low and FSR 3 at Quality settings, but it did have raytracing on. I am not sure why exactly it defaults to on, but once you turn it off and restart the game, it runs much better on the Steam Deck.

In the opening area, I was easily hovering above 30 FPS, even in fights. The game still looks really solid with upscaling on Quality, and I didn't have much issue with keeping it there. I did check with the other upscaling settings to see if Performance or Ultra Performance is viable, and while it does improve the framerate, the game starts to look terrible when moving around and extremely pixelated. Because of this, I found the best compromise so far is to keep FSR 3 Balanced. It still looks solid, and we get a slightly higher FPS.

It looks like performance in closed-off areas or outside of cities will run pretty well, but cities are starting to show some warning signs. Similar to Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, running around crowded cities with lots of people and geometry can tank the framerate. The lowest I saw it go down was to around 22 FPS, and while it didn't stay there, it made fighting enemies around the cities much harder to do since framerate would continue to drop. Setting the upscaling quality to Ultra Performance did help this a little, but there were still drops in the end.

I also wanted to see if third-person mode would have any noticeable impact on performance. While my little test with it didn't show many drops, I can see it getting worse later on and in more crowded areas. I also want to share some appreciation for options to increase the UI text size, it makes the entire game significantly more legible.

I also checked out RPGSite's impressions of Avowed on Steam Deck from Mikhail Madnani, and it seems to confirm a lot of my thoughts so far. The game sounds like it can be played at 30 FPS most of the time, but cities are going to tank performance a bit. He also mentions that third-person mode did hurt performance a lot more, so I would probably say later parts of the game are not going to be fun in third person.

Steam vs. Xbox Game Pass

Not only is Avowed releasing on Xbox Game Pass as well as Steam, but it is also going to be downloadable and playable through Battle.net, Blizzard's client. While we can't get Game Pass downloaded on the Steam Deck, we can get Battle.net installed and running, so I decided to check it out to see if it would be possible to play this way. Unfortunately, I am coming up empty handed.

I can download the game through Battle.net, but as soon as it finishes, it asks for an update, which gives an error whenever I try to update it. I believe it could be trying to verify I have Game Pass installed, which stops the game from launching. I also tried adding the .exe directly, and while it does launch, it stops at the title screen because it can't connect to Xbox's servers. So, it seems right now, the only way to play Avowed on the Steam Deck is going to be through Steam.

Avowed With Frame Generation? It Isn't Great

On top of the regular settings, I also wanted to test Avowed with frame generation to see how it feels. Recently, I have been seeing a lot of people and content creators injecting FSR frame generation into games that don't have it and claiming to get a huge FPS boost. While it does artificially raise framerates, there are a lot of caveats, including possible stutters, slowdowns, noticeable input lag, floaty camera, and graphical artifacting or flickering HUD. There are fixes for some of these, but Avowed suffers from a couple of issues in this regard.

There weren't any graphical issues when I was playing, but I had slowdowns, stutters, input lag, and a floaty camera. Running around felt like a nightmare with the stutters and minor slowdowns, which were the result of a fluctuating framerate that couldn't stick to 60 FPS. The input lag and floaty camera movements made combat significantly harder. There were small pockets where the game felt smoother, but these are far and few.

Because of these issues, I highly recommend not using any frame generation or DLSS frame gen mods. I used the Decky Framegen plugin for my testing, and while there are other mods and you do have Optiscaler, I would have rather dealt with the mid-20 FPS drops versus the constant slowdowns and input lag.

So, Should You Play Avowed on Steam Deck?

This is a really tough call. On the one hand, I do see the game as playable and enjoyable, but on the other, it won't be a stable 30 FPS. If you prefer having a solid experience all the way through, using cloud streaming or playing on a more powerful computer is going to be your best bet. However, if you are okay with some drops and high battery drain in exchange for full portability, I can still see the experience being an enjoyable one. This is going to be purely up to preference and what you are comfortable with. Personally, I am okay with the drops so far, but this may change the longer I play.

Avowed can be purchased on Steam for $69.99 ahead of its February 18th release date. But if you want to play now, you can buy the Premium Edition for $89.99.

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