The Outer Worlds 2 Gets Steam Deck Verified, But Don't Expect Better Performance

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Xbox has been on a roll with its game releases, especially towards the latter half of last year. I fell in love with Ninja Gaiden 4, but The Outer Worlds 2 was also an amazing experience. The open-world RPG is a treat to play, filled with a great story, solid gameplay, and lots of weird humor. And recently, Valve updated its rating to give the game a green checkmark.

The Outer Worlds 2 received the Steam Deck Verified badge two days ago, and I was very curious to see why. The badge is used to note whether a game is a solid experience on the Deck, with Valve noting how the default graphical settings work, text size is big enough, the gamepad inputs have no issues, and controller icons are accurate.

Since the game got the Verified badge, I also wanted to check it out to see if there had been any noticeable improvements to make it a “great experience”, and it’s around the same as it used to be. It runs at 30 FPS most of the time on lower settings, and there are still drops into the 20 FPS range sometimes. It’s still very similar to what we found in our review. So, in this case, the Verified badge does not mean it is now better to play on the Deck.

Getting the badge is most likely a delayed response, since there haven’t been any fixes specifically for the Steam Deck since November of last year. And I would consider this another game that proves that Valve’s system has flaws. The fact that they tout any Verified game as a “great experience” comes with lots of issues, especially since there are still a good chunk of Verified games that aren’t stable or have huge compromises to play. Hopefully, there will be a refinement of the system now that Valve has publicized how the Verified system for the Steam Frame and Steam Machine will be handled.

The Outer Worlds 2 can be purchased for $69.99 on Steam.

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