Nah actually Assassin’s Creed Shadows will get Steam Deck support after all, Ubisoft say

Assassin’s Creed Shadows will in fact be compatible with the Steam Deck, Ubisoft say, despite a previous tech Q&A on the sneaky-stabby ninja sim declaring point-blank that it won’t. Announced on whatever the fuck Twitter is these days, the confirmation that Shadows will play nice with the Deck comes as a pleasant surprise – even without that prior naysaying, games with a GTX 1070 listed among the minimum specs typically don’t cope too well on the handheld’s frugal hardware.

The only question, suggesteth the tweet, is whether Shadows will get a full-on Verified stamp of approval from Valve’s compatibility testers, or the Playable classification, which is normally handed to games that run well enough but might have awkward controls or tricky-to-read text. It’ll help, at least, that this particular Assassin’s Creed is launching with a native Steam version, and won’t solely be yoked to Ubisoft Connect (though there are other ways of installing that launcher on your Steam Deck too).

Another barrier that Ubisoft have seemingly both erected and cleared is Shadows’ mandatory ray tracing. While not slathered in always-on megalighting like Indiana Jones And The Great Circle, it won’t be possible to entirely switch off ray traced effects, as they’ll always be enabled in the player’s hideout hub at minimum. With few exceptions, ray tracing will cut down Steam Deck performance like an impertinent daimyo’s neck, but Ubisoft have also created a more easygoing, software-based version of these effects, which will supposedly function adequately on lower-end GPUs. Which would explain why the GTX 1070 is in the minimum specs and not, say, the RTX 2060, with all its hardware-based ray tracing tools.

Whatever you might play it on, Assassin’s Creed Shadows launches next Thursday, April 20th. Ed (RPS in peace) had a play in January, finding it a competent open-world yarn, though was less impressed with the dual-protagonist gimmick that left hulking samurai Yasuke feeling less fleshed-out than stealthy shinobi Naoe.