Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader Should Have Won Best Game on Steam Deck At The 2024 Steam Awards

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The 2024 Steam Awards winners were announced last week, and while all of the winners are amazing games, I found it very hard to agree with some of them. One of the ones that made less sense to me was the winner of the Best Game on Steam Deck award. God of War Ragnarok won the award, and while it's an amazing game, it isn't the greatest to play on the go. The four other nominated games are much better experiences, and I want to make the case for why I feel Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader should have won.

Now, all of the other nominated games deserve the prize, too. They are all amazing to play on the Steam Deck, but there's something special about Rogue Trader that sticks out. At 30 FPS, Rogue Trader is perfectly playable and runs quite well on the Steam Deck, but on top of that, there's something special about playing an immense game on a portable device. It makes the game feel that much more special to experience, and being able to sleep and resume the device whenever without closing the game feels essential for longer experiences like this.

On top of that, the amount of work the team put into making it as playable as possible on the Steam Deck is awesome. I had the chance recently to ask developer Owlcat Games a couple of questions about how they got the game running on the Deck and got it optimized for the smaller screen, and some of the answers really amazed me.

The questions were answered by two members of the team: Pavel Turchin, Lead UX/UI Engineer, and
Anatoly Shestov, Executive Producer.

Question:

What specifically did the team do to get it optimized and running well on the Deck?

Answer (Pavel):

The first thing we did was to play on the Steam Deck ourselves during the development
stage. Our team includes people who prefer playing with a gamepad instead of a PC, and some
of them choose the Steam Deck as their gaming console. I remember that before the main
release, there were quite a few specific issues, like unsupported video encoding or unreadably
small text in character barks or tooltips. Thankfully, attentive team members noticed and fixed
these problems in time. In general, the strict text size requirements are a key aspect of the
Steam Deck.

Question:

Were there any challenges you faced as you continued to optimize?

Answer (Pavel):

When we talk about optimization, it’s more accurate to consider optimization not just for
the Steam Deck but for all console platforms. This, of course, has been a big challenge for us.
Consoles are much more limited in terms of resources. Our developers worked hard to gather
every little improvement they could, piece by piece. We were very happy whenever we
managed to free up even 10 MB of memory.

We’ve always been committed to not compromising on the visual quality of the game. It seems
that we’ve succeeded in maintaining a high standard of visuals while ensuring the game run
smoothly on consoles. For the Steam Deck, we created a special video configuration designed
specifically for its specification.

Question:

Did the smaller screen size of the Deck pose any issues for text and UI size?

Answer (Pavel):

Yes, of course! When developing for the Steam Deck, font size is much more important than for standard consoles. The Valve team is also very thorough when reviewing builds for Steam Deck compatibility. To optimize the interface, we created a special tool that checks the screen and alerts the QA engineer if any text is too small.

An interesting moment of the development was redrawing the gamepad button icons to make
labels like R1 and L1 easier to read. While the size was fine for other consoles, we had to adjust
it specifically for the Steam Deck.

Question:

Now that you have gone through the optimization process on your end, would you say it was
worthwhile and recommend it to fellow developers to take the time to get their games playable
on the Steam Deck?

Answer (Anatoly):

Definitely. We see that the audience who prefer to play our games via steamdeck
increases - this clearly indicates that such efforts are worthwhile. And moreover, it’s great
platform for the games, where you don’t need to rush and have time to think before doing
anything.

Question:

How did you guys feel when you saw Rogue Trader nominated for the Best Steam Deck
Game award at the Steam Awards?

Answer (Anatoly):

We were quite surprised. Primarily because in direct communication with us, players
praise us for our careful presentation of setting, narrative, companions, and visuals, but the
sentiment about comfort never proves to be the most vocal.

Question:

And finally, what is your current favorite game to play on the Steam Deck?

Answer:

Pavel: Right now, I’m mostly playing Hades. Hades has only one problem! Unfortunately, it’s not a
game I can play on Steam Deck before bed—my wife says I press the buttons too loudly and
asks me to move to another room. 🙂 It’s such an amazing game! I’m thrilled that Rogue Trader
is nominated in the same category as Hades. It means our team did something right, and we’ll
keep striving to make it even better.

Anatoly: For me, it's Tactical Breach Wizards. This game, brilliant in its own right, seems to have been
originally designed for highly localized spaces, decisions, and narrative - so it reveals itself in all
its glory on the Steam Deck.

I have always loved seeing developers get their games running well on Steam Deck, and I learned a couple of interesting aspects of the optimization process for Rogue Trader. The fact that the team developed a specific tool to detect if text is too small on the screen so they know where to increase the text size was super cool to learn, and I appreciate that they went ahead to redraw certain glyphs and icons to cater specifically to the Deck.

There are plenty of amazing titles to play on the Steam Deck, but nothing beats playing longer RPGs on the go. Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader is definitely one of my favorites, and although it shocked me a little when it was nominated for the Best Game on Steam Deck award, I do feel it deserved to be there and even win completely.

I also want to give a big thank you to Pavel, Anatoly, and Owlcat for answering my questions. It's always a pleasure to see how developers optimize their games for the Steam Deck, and what special methods they have to get it working well.

Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader can be purchased on Steam for $49.99, but you can get it on GreenManGaming for $27.49.

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