I recently discovered that Throne and Liberty launched into open beta! Fortunately, it's running better on the Steam Deck than I expected, despite some server capacity issues with over 50,000 players trying to get in.
It’s not surprising, but it does struggle to hold 30 frames per second in very populated areas, especially when moving around town. This is somewhat expected, given how New World performs on the Steam Deck. However, when out in the world, even with the spectacular graphics and morph abilities, it pushes 40 to 60 frames per second, which is quite surprising but definitely good.
I’m running the game at 1280x800 with a 60fps cap and AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution 2 on quality mode. This setup produces a bit of fuzziness, but it’s not too bad. I prefer the sharpening off for the most part. For the graphic settings, I started with the low preset, then adjusted the anti-aliasing to high, character quality to medium, shadow quality to medium, texture quality to medium, and vegetation quality to medium.
I also turned off depth of field and motion blur, set lighting quality to medium, and shader preloading to high. These settings provide a pretty stable experience between 40 and 60 frames per second in the open world. However, it constantly pushes over 22.5 watts, so you’ll only get around two hours of gameplay.
The morph abilities are awesome. You can run around as a tiger or puma-type animal for speed, glide long distances as an eagle to avoid fall damage, and swim great distances quickly as an eel-like creature. This makes traversing the world in a variety of ways pretty enjoyable. Combat feels really good, and the full controller mappings are well thought out.
You can access every single menu with a controller combination, though it sometimes switches from using the d-pad to a mouse-like joystick configuration. Keep an eye out for that. All the abilities can be mapped to your controller bar, and the game seamlessly switches between mouse and keyboard and controller on the fly. If you accidentally switch your configuration on the Steam Deck, it won’t completely ruin your experience.
Even at nighttime, with its good day-night cycle in-game, we’re still pushing 50 frames per second or more with these settings. As this is the open beta, expect some bugs and issues, but this is a very promising start for running this on the Steam Deck.