Dynasty Warriors: Origins' Demo Shows Promise For Full Game on Steam Deck

If you haven't yet, follow us on X (Twitter), Mastodon, or Bluesky to know when we post new articles, and join our Reddit or Subscribe to us on YouTube to check out our content and interact with our awesome community. Thank you for supporting us!

Note: This is an impressions article of a demo version of Dynasty Warriors: Origins. It is possible that the final release will differ in performance and features.

The latest installment of the Dynasty Warriors franchise will soon be upon us, with Dynasty Warriors: Origins launching on Steam on January 17th, 2025. But although the full game is a couple of months away, a demo is already available which features a pretty epic battle, as you might expect from the franchise. So let's take a look and see how it plays, as well as what kind of performance we can expect from the game on the Steam Deck.

Dynasty Warriors: Origins Demo - First Impressions on Steam Deck

Sadly, Dynasty Warriors: Origins doesn't support the 16:10 aspect ratio, so we do have black borders along the top and bottom of our Steam Deck, and we have to play at 1280x720 resolution. Hopefully, the full game will have support for it, but the demo at least, doesn't. The game does have excellent controller support though, both in menus and in gameplay.

The game actually defaults to some great settings for the Deck, with a default Steam Deck preset, which recommends that you play the game at 30 FPS with some decent visual quality, and from what I can tell, at these settings, despite some minor drops in huge battles it's largely a good and stable experience.

I did attempt to get a higher framerate by lowering settings, but even at the absolute lowest settings, with FSR3 on Ultra Performance, the game barely holds 40 FPS, still dipping to 36-37 in intense battles due to high CPU demand. The game also looks awful by this point, so I would recommend you stick with the Steam Deck preset, as the developers actually seem to have put some serious effort into optimizing the settings for the Deck themselves, which makes my job much easier!

Power draw was mostly in the higher end, around 18-21W, so don't expect more than a couple of hours of playtime on an LCD model and around 2.5 hours on an OLED model. Temperatures were around 65-70C during most of the playtime, with some audible fan noise.

Text is also a tad small in places, especially button prompts, but once you get used to what the prompts are, it shouldn't be too much of an issue.

Judging by the fact that the developers have already put in a Steam Deck preset in the options menu, we can be confident that the final release will work well on the Deck, good job Koei Tecmo!

Dynasty Warriors: Origins will be available on Steam on January 17th, 2025, you can pre-purchase it right now for $69.99 or you can try the demo out for yourself, as well as wishlist the game so you can be notified when it launches.

Will you be trying out the demo or purchasing the full game when it releases next January? Let us know in the comments below!

If you enjoyed this article, check out the rest of the content on SteamDeckHQ! We have a wide variety of game reviews and news that will help your gaming experience. Whether you're looking for news, tips and tutorials, game settings and reviews, or just want to stay up-to-date on the latest trends, we've got you covered!