Remnant 2 was provided to us by Gearbox Publishing. Thank you!
The sequel to Remnant: From the Ashes is here and so far, it is fantastic. Remnant 2 takes everything that its prequel did right and cranks it up, bringing more worlds, loot, making combat feel much better, and much more. On top of that, the addition of procedurally generated content makes this a damn fun and replayable experience that I have been increasingly excited for the more I play. And with coop, taking down the deadly souls-like enemies can be a bonding, rewarding time.
While I haven't had much time with it just yet, I have been increasingly excited to get in and report on the game. So, while I do need to play more for the full review, here are my first impressions of how the game runs on the Steam Deck right now.
Pre-Release Marketing?
Before the game was live to play, and before I had access, the developers/publishers made a couple statements that seemed to promote how well it runs on the Steam Deck, though it wasn't all true.
First, one of the official accounts for Remnant 2, specifically the Europe account, tweeted that Remnant 2 is Steam Deck Verified.
While this doesn't necessarily prove how well it will run, I started to have confidence in the game being decently playable on the Steam Deck. I decided to look and see for myself, but oddly enough, the game had no Verified badge on its store page. I even went through the SteamDB update history for Remnant 2 and there was no indication of any Steam Deck rating.
It's possible the account meant to say it will be on release, but the tweet said it IS verified, implying it was now. On top of that, the game still has no Verified badge as I am writing, even though the ultimate edition is now publicly available for all to play.
Then, there was an image that was posted to the Steam Deck subreddit seemingly showing a developer claiming the game can be played at native resolution at almost 60 FPS. I decided to dig around and find the comment to confirm its validity and, with some searching, I found the original comment:
I have about 14 hours so far on the steam deck. Keep it at 1200×800, You will want to raise up the Hud scale. Make sure settings are low with shadows on medium, and upscale set to performance. The only change from default is the shadow settings. I feel like that is the perfect balance. 60 fps for the most part dipping in combat but it honestly felt great IMHO.
Ashmon - Remnant Subreddit
Ashmon is a dev for Gunfire Games and worked on Remnant 2, but the game is in no way getting close to 60. I have followed up and sent a message to clarify the statement or provide his configuration as to how he got close to 60. For a game with a minimum GPU requirement of a GTX 1650, I had no confidence that 60 FPS would be possible, so seeing a comment like this from a developer is a little disheartening when paired with the tweet claiming the game to be Steam Deck verified.
With all of this happening, my game had finally finished downloading and I decided to just get in and test things myself. So what can you expect from Remnant 2 on the Steam Deck right now? Well, if you want a stable 30 FPS, be ready for a blurry image.
Remnant 2 on Steam Deck - A Bit of a Blur
Starting up Remnant 2, I went straight into the character creation screen and was met with my default character and a solid 20 FPS. This isn't the best way to start the game, but I soon realized it was the hair that made it so bad. Taking away hair and making my character bald immediately pushed the game up to 58 - 60 FPS. Much better than before, though this change really only makes the character creation and some menus perform a bit better.
As soon as I get into the game though, I am met with performance hitting around 32 - 33 FPS without TDP limit. The default settings are all on low, 1280x800 resolution, and FSR set to Performance. The only thing I could change to make it run slightly better was put FSR on Ultra Performance, making the game blurrier and still needing a 30 FPS cap. And yes, there were still drops below 30, especially when in combat. We can, however, make a change to help this a good bit, even though it will hurt visual quality.
The only way I was able to hold anything close to a stable 30 was dropping the full resolution of the game. I set the game to 853x533 and kept everything else the same. This resulted in an extremely blurry image, so I used SteamOS FSR to make up for it however I could. In the end, I was able to keep Remnant 2 at 30 FPS in most occasions.
There were still the spots that had drops, like in the open areas, but the closed off ones were comfortably 30.
I had thought that since the corridors were smaller, the game could handle more there at these lower resolutions, but since the game continued to spike up to a 20W drain in some of these corridors, I knew it would have those drops. Remnant 2 does have small text in some parts as well, but the smaller ones were unreadable with these changes. I did try 985x615 resolution as well, and the text was more legible, but the framerate had way more drops during combat and running around.
I did try changing the Upscaler to Intel's XeSS, Proton GE, and CryoUtilities to see if any would improve, but there was nothing significant. XeSS did help framerate in some areas, but overall it had the same amount of drops. And no setting changes affected the menu framerate, it will always be below 30. Not unusable, since it is a menu, but it hasn't improved under any changes.
Current Remnant 2 Settings
If you want to try my settings, I didn't change nearly as much due to the game already starting on the lowest visual quality settings. All I changed was Display Mode to Fullscreen, Resolution to 853x533, and then put SteamOS's FSR on with a sharpness of 0. I left everything else the same, including keeping FSR to Performance.
Should You Buy Remnant 2 on the Steam Deck?
Now I know what you must be thinking, all of this sounds horrible, and it isn't great, but I still found myself enjoying the game and getting lost in it. Yes it is blurry and that will bother some people a lot, and to a degree it still bugs me, but I wasn't turned off from the experience. I was still having a blast roaming through dungeons, killing off enemies, dying hundreds of times, and slowly upgrading. Did the visuals hurt my experience when I was focused on it? Absolutely. But I rarely had time to focus on it as I was trying to time dodges and shoot enemies.
Thinking objectively though, this is no way to experience such an awesome game, or really any game on the Steam Deck. And with what has been mentioned already by the official account and developer, I am holding on to hope that a patch is coming that will greatly optimize the game in ways we haven't seen yet. The game is built on Unreal Engine 5,