Yes, you can play Starfield on Steam Deck, but really, you shouldn’t

Starfield, Bethesda’s epic planet-hopping first-person RPG, is now widely available, and that includes on handheld gaming PCs. Both Valve’s Steam Deck and the Asus ROG Ally picked up recent system updates that made it possible to play the game without crashes.

I can confirm the game runs on both systems, having experienced early access crashes and now a bit of normal gameplay today. But I don’t think there’s much point to playing locally on either system. Streaming remotely with Game Pass, or locally with Moonlight or Xbox Remote Play, is a better option, presuming you can do so without much input lag.

If you do try to force Starfield to load on your handheld, the graphics and frame rates will range from muddy to just acceptable, the battery life will be quite bad, and your experience with perhaps the best part of Bethesda RPGs—the sense of wonder and discovery in wide-open spaces—will be severely limited.

On the Steam Deck, you’ll need to make sure you’re on the latest system update, then head into the game’s Compatibility settings and choose “Proton Experimental” to have the game launch. Even then, it might not always launch, in my experience, but it should eventually work. Once you’re at the title screen, you should head into the Display settings and choose which kind of deeply compromised experience you’d prefer. PC Gamer suggests running on medium-ish settings and sacrificing some frames per second. Rock Paper Shotgun pushed everything to low and still thought it was barely keeping up.

Yes, that’s 29 frames per second on the Steam Deck on “Low” settings, but at what cost?

Bethesda Game Studios

Yes, that’s 29 frames per second on the Steam Deck on “Low” settings, but at what cost? Bethesda Game Studios

It gets a bit better when you slow down to talk to somebody, but it definitely doesn’t look like living in the future.

Bethesda Game Studios

It gets a bit better when you slow down to talk to somebody, but it definitely doesn’t look like living in the future. Bethesda Game Studios

Yes, that’s 29 frames per second on the Steam Deck on “Low” settings, but at what cost? Bethesda Game Studios

It gets a bit better when you slow down to talk to somebody, but it definitely doesn’t look like living in the future. Bethesda Game Studios

Another Steam Deck screen from Atlantis, showing a mix of loaded-in and fuzzed-out textures.

Bethesda Game Studios

Another Steam Deck screen from Atlantis, showing a mix of loaded-in and fuzzed-out textures. Bethesda Game Studios

Getting close to your bot, or other objects, brings them into sharper relief, but you still feel like you’re wearing glasses dipped in Vaseline.

Bethesda Game Studios

Getting close to your bot, or other objects, brings them into sharper relief, but you still feel like you’re wearing glasses dipped in Vaseline. Bethesda Game Studios

Another Steam Deck screen from Atlantis, showing a mix of loaded-in and fuzzed-out textures. Bethesda Game Studios

Getting close to your bot, or other objects, brings them into sharper relief, but you still feel like you’re wearing glasses dipped in Vaseline. Bethesda Game Studios

My Steam Deck went from fully charged to about 79 percent after roughly 20 minutes of loading, configuration, walking, and screenshot uploading. I can’t give you broader Starfield battery life figures because I refuse to keep going with it. Bethesda told Starfield reviewers in the pre-release period that it did not recommend playing the game on the Steam Deck or ROG Ally because “performance runs below PC min[imum] spec.” Starfield is currently rated as “Playable” on Steam. That is different from “Verified,” which means it “works great,” and instead means the game may “require some manual tweaking.” Further patches may improve the game’s performance, perhaps even specifically on lower-power devices. But right now, it seems like more tweaking than it’s worth.

I have a gaming PC on my network with an RTX 3070 inside, so I tried Steam’s built-in game streaming on the Deck. The results were still limited by the Deck’s 60 Hz/800p screen but far more enjoyable. Likely even better results could be achieved with Moonlight or by altering Steam’s default streaming settings.

Streamed version of Atlantis’ concourse entrance, for comparison. Note that the frame rate on the Steam Deck (upper left) takes a dip when taking screenshots; compare to the PC’s own frame rate (upper right).

Bethesda Game Studios

Streamed version of Atlantis’ concourse entrance, for comparison. Note that the frame rate on the Steam Deck (upper left) takes a dip when taking screenshots; compare to the PC’s own frame rate (upper right). Bethesda Game Studios

It’s still a bit fuzzy for my taste, but this Bethesda-standard dialogue shot is better streamed than strained through the Deck’s hardware.

Bethesda Game Studios

It’s still a bit fuzzy for my taste, but this Bethesda-standard dialogue shot is better streamed than strained through the Deck’s hardware. Bethesda Game Studios

Starfield, running on a Steam Deck streaming from a Windows PC with an RTX 3070 GPU.

Bethesda Game Studios

Starfield, running on a Steam Deck streaming from a Windows PC with an RTX 3070 GPU. Bethesda Game Studios

It’s still a bit fuzzy for my taste, but this Bethesda-standard dialogue shot is better streamed than strained through the Deck’s hardware. Bethesda Game Studios

Starfield, running on a Steam Deck streaming from a Windows PC with an RTX 3070 GPU. Bethesda Game Studios

On the ROG Ally, local play looked better and ran smoother than on the Steam Deck when running in “Turbo” (25-watt) mode. But you can’t get that much of it, at least without a power cord. Playing on the medium settings the game suggested from the start, with a few tweaks to cycle-eaters like the film-grain filter and shadows, and the system’s native resolution set to 720p, things looked much better than they did on the Steam Deck. But even with all those compromises, the system drained from 60 percent battery charge to 30 percent in the time it took me to load the game, change the settings, walk around a bit, and take and offload screenshots. It should go without saying, but streaming the game to the Ally, with its 1080p screen and 120 Hz refresh rate, should work better (again, with variable mileage for lag and network hiccups).