ARC Raiders is now Steam Deck Verified

Valve recently published a Steam Deck Verified rating for the smash-hit extraction shooter ARC Raiders. I decided to see if it deserved the rating.

With close to 100 hours on my Linux desktop where it has been working beautifully, I feel like I have a decent enough grasp on how it should feel by now. It's also one of the few bigger games like this that actually has the anti-cheat enabled for Linux / SteamOS which is going to be a big problem for the Steam Machine, so it's quite an important one. There's many that simply disable Linux support as noted on our anti-cheat page.

Surprisingly, it actually does feel okay and with the defaults so far testing on Steam Deck across each map it has remained above 30FPS apart from some rare momentary drops below FPS where it shoots right back above. 30FPS is supposed to be the performance floor for being Steam Deck Verified from what I understand. So it hits it, but it looks a bit on the rough side.

Those are some funny looking trees.

You're not going to see much battery life either, with the Steam Deck LCD seeing less than an hour in it. The textures popping in and appearing as you're running through looks a bit terrible too on the default graphics settings.

You'll definitely want to do some graphics tweaks to make it feel better. I would put Textures on Medium and View distance up to High at a minimum, which gives you a better looking game and a better chance at survival. Plus with some upscaling like TSR, you can still keep performance to a reasonable level.

If this is your only way to play, then it's going to be somewhat doable, but you're at quite a heavy disadvantage on Steam Deck with it. Especially in the PvP elements of the game. It's certainly not going to be a recommendation from me on Steam Deck, but it's doable at least. As a way to run with some free loadouts to grab a little loot in bed? Not amazing, but not completely terrible either.

The biggest issue though? It crashes and quits to your library a fair bit. Realistically, at least testing with the Steam Deck LCD, it's not stable enough to be Steam Deck Verified in my opinion.

As long as it keeps working, it will probably be pretty good on the upcoming Steam Machine. But for now, I'll continue playing on my Fedora KDE desktop.