God of War Ragnarök initially seems like it wouldn't have much trouble squeezing itself onto a Steam Deck. But like a bottle of honey mixed with Odin's raven piss, Ragnarök's seemingly crunchy treat of portable performance secretly masks an ugly mix of technical issues and an essentially always-online requirement.
Let's start with the positives. Ragnarök breaks a recent streak of big-money, big-show games being too much for this tiny Deck; it actually runs pretty smoothly, and not just by PS5 port standards. The full settings guide is below, but in short, you can get a pretty comfortable 40-50fps on a mix of Medium and Low settings, and while this is partly helped by the FSR 3.1 upgrade, you can keep it in Quality mode so it looks barely different from native 800p.
In a way, this is the Steam Deck at its most daring, and for a game that can run at the frames per second of the Argos catalogue, it's a surprisingly capable showing. It also controls well and never gives you any trouble with its quick suspend/resume feature. And, as Valve intended, full Steam Cloud support ensures that your save files will carry over between a Deck and a desktop PC if you switch between them.
After half an hour or so, it was looking like one of the better examples of the portable AAA form, even with some potential minor flaws. For one, it was a heavy smoker, running my Steam Deck OLED dry at 2s 08d – the shortest of anything I tested alongside Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth. And second, it won't fit on smaller Steam Deck SSDs, thanks to its massive 176GB install size. That includes the Valhalla roguelike mode DLC, but still.
Unfortunately, these are minor complaints compared to the other things that can go wrong with Ragnarök on the Steam Deck. The bugs can be both annoying and potentially game-breaking: I got so much constant audio crackling on my OLED that I switched to an older LCD Deck to escape it, as well as to try a different model. And on both machines, the controls became unresponsive when presented with a specific pop-up tutorial tip; this also force-pauses the game and makes it impossible to progress unless a solution is found.
In my case, I had to plug in a docking station, connect my PS5 controller, and press the annoying button on it to get the hint to turn off. A Razer-made Xbox controller I had on hand didn’t work either, and while I wonder if a touchscreen or on-screen keyboard would have helped in hindsight, I shouldn’t have been workshopping solutions to such a game-breaking bug in the first place.
There's at least a workaround there, though. The same can't be said for Sony's completely unnecessary PSN login requirement, which was imposed on Ragnarök just as it was on Ghost of Tsushima. The consequences aren't as devastating here as they were on Ghost, as there are no online multiplayer modes to block in God of War, but the need to connect to the PSN on every boot does create an extra problem for handhelds like the Steam Deck: if you try to boot up SteamOS in offline mode, as you're likely to do if you take the handheld anywhere outside your home, Sony's service gets so confused that it rages and crashes the game. Every time, without fail.
I don't think I need to explain why this is such a stupid input creep. But something that would be an inconvenience on a home desktop would clearly undermine the very reason a portable PC exists, so it's important that we vocally reject it at every halfway reasonable opportunity.
God of War Ragnarök Steam Deck settings guide
These technical glitches also undermine the game itself, which, as I said, performs quite respectably considering it comes from Sony's famously mercenary first-party factory. The Low preset at native 800p delivers a playable 30fps, but by switching to FSR 3.1 in Quality mode – which doesn't really seem much worse – you can crank up some individual settings to Medium while still enjoying a smoother 40-50fps range. Here's what I settled on when I wasn't frozen in time with tutorial magic:
- Scaling method: AMD FSR3.1
- Scaling quality: Quality
- Textures: Middle
- Models: Middle
- Anisotropic filter: Middle
- Lighting: Middle
- Shadows: Low
- Thoughts: Low
- Atmospheric: Middle
- Ambient occlusion: Middle
- Tessellation: Low
- Motion blur: 0
FSR 3.1 frame generation can also be attempted, but it typically only adds 4-5fps to what you'd get with the core settings above. In my opinion, this isn't worth the input lag and occasionally blurry motion it adds.