You might've seen it coming from our testing with Monster Hunter Wilds' benchmark, but the modest hardware of Valve's Steam Deck isn't up to the task of running the game at anything close to playable framerates. In fact, it barely runs at all, though it is possible to at least boot up Wilds and tinker with its settings, which I did in the vain hope of seeing the framerate counter reach the 30 fps mark. Alas, it was not to be.
I installed all 60 GB of Wilds on my Steam Deck and loaded up my cloud save, which spawned me in the starting zone's bustling base camp. It's full of NPCs puttering around, and even without the complex processing requirements of a big monster battle the Steam Deck was struggling. Wilds wisely (perhaps desperately) kicked its settings down to the "Lowest" preset as soon as I loaded it up on the Steam Deck, which includes:
