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Developer Hexworks has finally released the highly anticipated Unreal Engine 5 developed Souls-like and several fans are overjoyed. This new title will be the successor to the popular 2014 Lords of the Fallen and it will feature several overhauls from the previous entry. Players can traverse between two different realms called Axiom and Umbral, the first one being the land of the living while the latter is the land of the dead.
With many people calling it the next-gen Souls-like, the game certainly seems to back up the claim, and this has been reflected in its system requirements, requiring at least an RTX 2080 for recommended settings. Considering all of these factors, many Steam Deck users might be wondering if this new title will run on their handheld. Let’s jump right in and figure it out.
How Does Lords of the Fallen Run on the Steam Deck?
Although Lords of the Fallen has not been added to the list of verified games for the Deck, the developer Hexworks’ homepage states that they are working on the title for PC, Steam Deck, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X/S. This gives us immense hope that the game will be optimized further for the handheld.
Regardless of that, the game does seem to run on the Steam Deck in its current state. Although we cannot expect the game to run on high settings, the game can still maintain a stable 30 to 40 FPS on medium to low settings, which is really impressive work coming from the RDNA 2 graphics and the Zen 2 CPU.
Here are the recommended settings in the Graphics tab of the game:
Graphics Preset: Custom
View Distance: Low
Shadows: Low
Anti-Aliasing: High (TAA)
Texture Quality: Medium
Visual Effect Quality: Low
Post-processing Quality: Low
Reflection Quality: Low
Global Illumination Quality: Low
Foliage Quality: Off
Motion Blur: On
Film Grain: Off
Chromatic aberration: Off
For the display, you can set the default resolution at 1280 x 800 and turn off V-Sync. It is recommended to lock your FPS to 30 through your Steam Deck’s settings.
Do note that these graphic settings are based on data from Santiago Santiago’s testing of the game on the console. According to his findings, Steam Deck seems to have FSR enabled and it is set to the Balanced or Performance mode to provide decent frame rates and stability. This means that the game is rendering at 50% resolution at 400p and then being upscaled to the device's native resolution of 800p.
At the time of writing, the game does not seem to showcase or tweak the settings for FSR but we can be optimistic that this will be fixed soon, considering that the devs have mentioned that they would offer support for Valve’s handheld.
