Is Assassin’s Creed Mirage coming to Steam Deck?

❘ Published: 2023-09-27T13:49:33

assassin's creed mirage art with a steam deck behind it

The next Assassin’s Creed game, Mirage, is taking it back to basics, but will it play well with Valve’s Steam Deck?

Ubisoft is pulling out all of the RPG guff they shoved into Assassin’s Creed since Origins and almost resetting the status quo. Mirage will return the game to its exploratory and parkour action roots, but how will it play on the Steam Deck?

From glancing at the recommended specs listed by Ubisoft, it would appear the Steam Deck has a good chance of playing the game at Low, 720p or 800p. While not as vast of a game as some others, it appears to require a fairly old PC to get 1080p, and 30FPS.

As long as you weren’t expecting a 60FPS adventure and don’t mind settling for either 30 or 40FPS, we think Assassin’s Creed Mirage is going to play just fine on Valve’s Steam Deck.

This year’s major releases have mostly played well on the Van Gogh APU powering the Steam Deck, and aside from Starfield, have been our preferred way to play some games.

Thankfully, the game will feature both AMD’s FSR and Intel’s XeSS supersampling software, which should let us squeeze even more performance out of the Steam Deck. These options take the image on the screen, shrink it, and blow it back to a native resolution through algorithms. In Spider-Man: Miles Morales, we found that XeSS performed and looked best.

Assassin’s Creed Mirage’s biggest Steam Deck hurdle could be Ubisoft itself

As of right now, the main thing to be concerned about is Ubisoft’s launcher. The Steam Deck utilizes Proton, a translation layer that mimics Windows to allow non-Linux native apps to run. It’s been incredibly successful, but a point of contention is that Ubisoft is one of the main culprits of breakages.

If Ubisoft’s launcher breaks its compatibility with Proton for whatever reason, it often renders the game itself inaccessible. While we don’t expect that Assassin’s Creed Mirage will tax the hardware much at Low, 720p, we are expecting the Ubisoft launcher to break at some point post-release.