Dead Island 2 Gets Steam Deck Playable Badge Ahead of Release

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Dead Island 2 may have been out for around a year now, but finally, it is making its way to Steam after being an Epic Games exclusive this whole time. It's exciting to see, since the game is quite awesome to play. A couple of hours ahead of its release, the game went through the Steam Deck Verification system, and it sounds like it will be a pretty good experience overall!

Dead Island 2 has officially been rated Steam Deck Playable, letting us know it should be okay to play on the Deck. It wasn't rated Verified though, due to the game showing incorrect controller icons, needing to bring up the virtual keyboard manually, and some small in-game text. While the rating doesn't generally predict how a game will perform, a representative from PLAION, the publisher, did leave a developer comment to make some notes about playing on Deck!

In the comment, they note that Dead Island 2 is playable on the Deck and has been tested for smooth gameplay without significant bugs. They also mention that cross-play with Epic Games players is possible but requires additional setup. And no, you are not required to log into Epic to play the game!

They also mention that you can't adjust the font size in the game, so that small text can't be resized, and there are two issues they are aware of. It's possible the game will stall on the Steam logo screen after first installing the prerequisites, and they couldn't find a way to bring up the virtual keyboard automatically. To fix these, just close and relaunch the game or press and hold the STEAM button and press X for the virtual keyboard to appear. You can also access the Epic overlay by pressing L4, and you can control it with the right trackpad.

I love that PLAION took an extra step to address the issues with the game and some of the reasons it was rated Playable instead of Verified. While I don't trust performance until I have it in my hands, it was very playable from the Epic version and 30 FPS should be possible no matter what. Hopefully, with some tweaking, we can push the framerate to 40 or 45 for extra smoothness!

Dead Island 2 is currently 50% off until April 29th for $29.99 to celebrate it coming to Steam!

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