God of War: Ragnarok Is Fantastic on the Steam Deck - First Impressions

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With PlayStation's move to implementing a PC overlay, we have all been a little worried on just how it will affect future single-player games on the Steam Deck. This is due to the overlay being incompatible with Linux, making it impossible to play some games. We saw this with Concord and with Ghost of Tsushima's multiplayer, which remains unplayable, but with God of War: Ragnarok, this was a legitimate worry we felt as well due to it mentioning that it needs to connect to a PlayStation account. Luckily, it seems we can actually play the game! Not only that, but it is also running significantly well so far.

When booting up the game, we do have to link our PlayStation and Steam accounts, which you will do from a web browser popup, but after that, you just back out and are good to go! It is an extra step, which is a bit annoying, but overall, it does work and will bring up the virtual keyboard once you select the text box.

After that, it should load right into the game, and it works like a charm. I was initially worried about performance, so I set the game to FSR 3 at Balanced mode, which looks incredible still, and the framerate was holding extremely well! I was getting around 39 FPS to 60 FPS depending on the scene, and no matter what has happened so far, it never went below 30. It uses a solid amount of RAM, and it's draining battery life at 23W, but it was holding so well. This is also with the recorder on, meaning it will likely stick to 40 in the opening areas.

There was also one moment where it seemed like I may be getting a RAM crash, and it was getting dangerously close, but it corrected itself and didn’t go too far over. There were also a couple of times where it seemed like my controls weren't working, like when I had to open the Skill menu and move a pillar out of the way. I am still figuring out what the issue is and it may be a one-off for my system (restarting my system fixed it, but still an annoying issue).

There's also a nice option to increase text size a little, which is a nice touch.

There's obviously still so much more to play before marking this game as completely playable on the Steam Deck, but this is showing a lot of promise. I am very curious to see how the final scenes of the game will perform since they are more intensive, but I am optimistic. I am blown away from what I have seen so far and I am very very optimistic for the rest of the game.

For now, I would say play at FSR 3 Balanced or Quality with a 30 FPS cap for the most stable experience, but it's very possible with some tweaking, we will be able to get a pretty solid 40 without too many sacrifices. More time is required and I need to see how future areas of the game will run, but I would say getting this on the Steam Deck and being able to fully play is a safe bet. I just wish the install size wasn't 170GB.

God of War: Ragnarok is available on Steam for $59.99.

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