In a surprise moment today, BioWare’s upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard has popped up as Steam Deck Verified. We don’t know what the system requirements, minimum or recommended, are yet. But from that bit of information, at least, we know that Valve has tested it on Proton and says that it works well enough on their little handheld gaming PC.
“We’re making great progress towards our fall launch date and can confirm early that #DragonAge: The Veilguard is going all-in on @Steam features!,” posted BioWare on Steam.
“We’re verified on Steam Deck,” they followed up, then saying that “We’ll be Steam native—meaning the EA App will not be required to play the game.”
The second statement will probably be of great interest to people who hate logging in to more than one thing at once, which given most game launches is either the majority or an extremely vocal subset who if I were a developer I would not want to anger—just look at what’s happening to poor Earth Defense Force 6 as we speak, which has a “Mostly Negative” rating on Steam due to its Epic account requirement.
How well Veilguard runs on Steam Deck is another thing entirely. 1280×800 at 30 FPS would be good, right? But we have no real guarantee it’ll do that consistently. On the other hand, maybe it’ll do great. If so, well, the console-optimized controls will probably be delightful. We’ll find out more when it releases some time this fall.
The PC Gamer team is pretty hotly divided on Veilguard, either of the opinion that the things the developers are saying about it just aren’t quite right or pretty optimistic about it. Either way, the best details so far are that the penis is a spoiler and you can be voiced by the guy who did the sex noises for Baldur’s Gate 3.
Cheers for the spot, Gaming on Linux.