God of War Ragnarok At first it seems like he doesn't have much trouble fitting in… Steam coverYet, like a flask of mead mixed with Odin's raven urine, the seemingly cool pleasure of Ragnarök's portable performance masks an unpleasant mix of technical issues and what is, essentially, a sneaky always-online requirement.
Let's start with the positive: Ragnarök breaks the silence. recent streak In fact, big-budget, big-spectacle games are just too much for the little Deck to handle – it runs pretty well, and not just by the standards of PS5 ports. There’s a full settings guide below, but in short, you can get a comfortable 40-50fps with a mix of medium and low settings, and while that’s helped in part by FSR 3.1’s upscaling, you can keep it in Quality mode so it barely looks any different than native 800p.
In some ways, this is the Steam Deck at its finest, with surprising capability for a game that could have run at the frame rates of an Argos catalogue. It controls well, too, and never struggles with the quick suspend/resume feature. And, as Valve intended, full Steam Cloud support also ensures that save files transfer between a Deck and a desktop PC, should you switch between the two.
After half an hour or so, it really did seem like one of the best examples of the portable AAA form, even with some potential minor flaws. For one, it's a great drinker, running my OLED Vapor Deck dry in 2h 08m – the shortest of all I have tried, along with Like a dragon: infinite wealthSecondly, it simply doesn't fit into the smaller size. Steam Deck SSD Drivesthanks to a colossal 176GB install size. That includes the Valhalla roguelike mode DLC, but still…
Sadly, these are paltry complaints compared to everything that can go wrong with Ragnarök on a Steam Deck. Bugs can be annoying and potentially halt gameplay entirely – I had so much continuous audio noise on my OLED that I ended up switching to an older LCD Deck, both to escape it and to try a different model. And on both machines, the controls became unresponsive when shown a pop-up with a particular tutorial – this also forcefully pauses the game, making it impossible to progress unless a fix can be found.
In my case, I ended up having to plug in a docking station, connect my PS5 Controllerand press the offending button to make the tooltip disappear. A Razer-made Xbox controller I had on hand didn’t work either, and while in retrospect I wonder if the touchscreen or on-screen keyboard might have helped, I shouldn’t really have to think about workarounds for a game-crashing bug like this in the first place.
However, there is at least a workaround. The same cannot be said for the totally unnecessary PSN login requirement that Sony has imposed on Ragnarök. Just like Ghost of Tsushima wasThe consequences aren't quite as disastrous here as they were in Ghost, as God of War has no online multiplayer modes to block, but the need to sign in to PSN on every boot does cause additional problems for portable devices like the Steam Deck: if you try to boot into SteamOS's offline mode, as you probably would when taking the portable PC anywhere outside your house, then Sony's service gets so angry that it crashes the game every time, without fail.
I don't think I need to explain why this is a total nonsense for login purposes, but what is inconvenient on a desktop can obviously undermine the whole point of a laptop, so it's important that we strongly reject it whenever we have the opportunity.
God of War Ragnarök Setup Guide for Steam Deck
These technical issues also undermine the game itself, which, as I say, performs very respectably considering it came out of Sony’s famously wealthy in-house factory. The Low preset at native 800p allows for 30fps gameplay, but if you switch to FSR 3.1 in Quality mode (which actually doesn’t look much worse), you can afford to bump some of the individual settings up to Medium while still enjoying a smoother 40-50fps range. Here’s what I chose, when I wasn’t frozen in time by the tutorial’s magic:
- Scaling method: AMD FSR 3.1 version
- Scaling quality: Quality
- Textures: Half
- Models: Half
- Anisotropic filter: Half
- Lightning: Half
- Darkness: Low
- Reflections: Low
- Interferences: Half
- Ambient Occlusion: Half
- Mosaic: Low
- Motion blur: 0
FSR 3.1 frame generation It's also available, though it typically only adds 4 or 5 fps to what you'd get with the basic settings above. In my opinion, that doesn't make up for the input lag and occasional motion blur it adds.
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