“The power of the sun, in the palm of my hand.” Dr. Octavius may have been too preoccupied with trivial matters such as fusion power in Spider-Man 2 (2004), but you can now have something much better: ruling the entire world with a handheld console.
As reported by Rock Paper Shotgun, the upcoming grand strategy title Civilization VII will come with a Steam ‘Deck Verified’ tag at launch.
In plain terms, this means that Civilization VII passed Valve’s round of testing to ensure that the game gets along with the Steam Deck without issues.
Getting a Steam Deck Verified badge requires good marks in four categories: input, display, seamlessness, and system support.
The input field translates into comfortable controller input icons, and smooth usage of the on-screen keyboard as needed.
As the Steam Deck has a much smaller screen than your average computer, the games need to support the console’s native resolution of 1280×800 (or at least run on 1280×720) with adequate performance on the default settings, and legible text across the board.
Seamlessness relates to how the game itself interfaces with the Steam Deck. To earn a pass here, the game needs to behave the same as it would on the PC. In other words, no warnings left and right about compatibility.
System Support specifically relates to games running through Proton. If you launch a game in this mode, all peripheral services like anti-cheat engines need to run through it as well.
There is less than a month left until the release of Civilization VII, planned for February 11. Handheld gamers were already excited for the title before news of the verification broke.
The main reason why most players were not particularly worried is because Civilization VI runs decently well on the Steam Deck.
Per Steam, Civilization VI is ‘playable’ rather than ‘Deck verified’. The gripes listed on the store page are small text (something Civ games do poorly even on PC), non-Deck controller icons here and there, and the on-screen keyboard often requires enabling manually.
The game also runs decently well on the iPad Pro, which is the real test for how a game survives without a mouse or keyboard.
Civilization VII will be available for PC, Steam Deck, and macOS on February 11. The game has relatively modest system requirements, with a minimum of 8GB of RAM and 2GB of VRAM.
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Source: https://www.dualshockers.com/civilization-7-steam-deck-verified-launch/