Crimson Desert might actually run on Steam Deck – here’s why | Gaming | Entertainment
Crimson Desert might just run on Steam Deck – if we’re lucky. (Image: Pearl Abyss | Getty Images)
The latest RPG from Pearl Abyss, Crimson Desert, is shaping up to be one of the year’s most ambitious titles. Incorporating a massive open world complete with deep combat systems, long quest lines and countless gameplay systems to uncover, gamers are so far comparing it to a mega-mix of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, The Witcher 3 and Dragon’s Dogma 2.
For a project with such scale and ambition, plenty of gamers are likely to write it off as being completely unplayable on portable gaming devices such as the Steam Deck or Xbox ROG Ally.
However, taking a look at the minimum PC specifications, we think that there’s a good chance gamers may well just be able to explore the world of Pywel while on the go after all.
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Ahead of launch, Pearl Abyss is currently recommending that PC players need at least an Intel i5 8500 CPU paired with an Nvidia GTX 1060 and 16GB or RAM. While there’s no word on what sort of resolution and frame rate that will grant you, they’re fairly low specifications to run a game that looks as good as it does – at least in the footage we’ve seen so far, that is.
What gives us hope that the game will run on Steam Deck is that there’s another game that has very similar minimum specification requirements to this that is currently verified on Valve’s portable device – Cyberpunk 2077.
In fact, comparing the minimum requirements for both Cyberpunk and Crimson Desert, they’re almost exactly the same. Cyberpunk also requires a GTX 1060 graphics card, and an Intel i7 6700 CPU.
Crimson Desert looks impressive in early footage. (Image: Pearl Abyss)
Of course, no two games will run the same – especially since both of these titles use completely different game engines. Crimson Desert is running on Pearl Abyss’s own inhouse engine, known as BlackSpace.
This will be the first game that the studio has built with the technology, so we don’t have any prior experience to go off. However, early signs are that this is one impressive engine that’s capable of making the most out of limited hardware.
As reported by Digital Foundry, an early preview build of the game was shown running at native 4K 60fps on an AMD Ryzen 9 7900X3D 12-core processor, an AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX and 32GB of RAM. A beefy PC, yes – but still impressive performance to get without using any resolution upscaling.
The major limiting factor that I can see being an issue for Crimson Desert running on Steam Deck is the strain on the CPU. The game appears to be very heavily systems based, with lots of NPCs on screen at the same time in some cases.
It could be that the sheer density of Crimson Desert takes portable play completely out of the question. However, if we go on the raw system requirements alone, there’s hope that gamers could potentially take this massive RPG on the go, just like Zelda.
Pearl Abyss is yet to confirm whether Crimson Desert will have official support or graphics presets dedicated for Steam Deck or other handheld PCs.
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