Dragon Age: The Veilguard Steam Deck Impressions – Recommended settings, PC port features, and more
Dragon Age: The Veilguard from BioWare and EA is finally available worldwide on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (Steam). Read Josh's full review of the game here. Over the last few days, I've been playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard on Steam Deck, and I've been curious to see how it feels given how it was promoted as being Verified from a few months ago. Given I've only been playing Dragon Age: The Veilguard for a few days on Steam Deck, these are my impressions from about 10 hours of testing across different parts of the game across my own and Josh's characters tested at different parts of the game.
Before getting into how Dragon Age: The Veilguard is on Steam Deck, this specific release deserves some context. Dragon Age: The Veilguard not only arrived Steam Deck Verified, but is a native Steam app with no EA Play launcher required. BioWare then went on to confirm that Dragon Age: The Veilguard does not use any third-party DRM on any platform. When those bits of information were revealed, it felt like BioWare and EA were actually pushing to make sure Dragon Age: The Veilguard is a good experience on PC with none of the nonsense that takes away from the actual game, and it shows.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard Steam Deck impressions with default settings
Out of the box, Dragon Age: The Veilguard launches with no trouble on both my Steam Decks (the LCD model running the newest SteamOS beta and the OLED model using the stable SteamOS 3.6.19). Text entry correctly invokes the on-screen keyboard, it has 16:10 support, and Steam Cloud works as it should. The game itself also has quite a few accessibility options that help on the Steam Deck's smaller display like text sizes. On the Steam Deck OLED, HDR is also available.
The default Dragon Age: The Veilguard graphics and display settings on Steam Deck are not good. It essentially launches with almost everything on the lowest preset with AMD FSR set to Ultra Performance. The image quality is abysmal when you get into combat, but the performance isn't terrible. I wasn't happy with the visuals and after spending most of today and yesterday testing the game across saves and locations, I've found what I consider Dragon Age: The Veilguard's best settings on Steam Deck so far.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard PC display and graphics options
Dragon Age: The Veilguard on PC lets you adjust window mode, active monitor, screen resolution, refresh rate, frame rate limit, toggle v-sync (with a few options), toggle triple buffering, adjust brightness, adjust contrast, enable HDR, calibrate HDR, adjust upscaling (DLSS, FSR, and XeSS), adjust resolution scaling (above and below 100%), enable dynamic resolution scaling, and set a minimum resolution scale for the display options.
On the graphics side, you can use one of a few presets, adjust texture quality, texture filtering quality, lighting quality, enable contact shadows, ambient occlusion, screen space reflections, adjust volumetric lighting quality, sky quality, ray tracing options, adjust level of detail for geometry, enable strand hair with a big performance cost, adjust terrain quality, terrain decoration quality, visual effects quality, toggle depth of field, vignette, motion blur, adjust post processing quality, and finally adjust field of view.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard Steam Deck recommended settings for OLED and LCD
As of this writing, I made some tweaks to the default Dragon Age: The Veilguard settings on Steam Deck. The main changes I made are field of view down to 90, upscaling to Intel XESS set to performance rather than FSR set to ultra performance, and the render scale for resolution set to 85%. Note that changing the render scale and upscaling will see the game freeze for a few seconds as it adjusts, but it gets back to normal after that.
These settings have worked out well for a 30fps target so far with some minor drops. If you play uncapped, it even goes well above 30fps indoors and in less demanding areas. I tested these settings across 5 different points of the game including a late game area and an optional boss fight. Let me reiterate that this is again based on the time I've spent with the game over the last few days so I might find better options as I put more time into it. I expect to improve these even more once I cross the 30 hour mark in Dragon Age: The Veilguard.
While I've left the game uncapped for some of the screenshots you see here, I recommend playing with the game capped to 30 for the most consistent experience. I left it uncapped just for testing purposes.
Note that even with these settings, don't expect it to look amazing. There are compromises to get it running well, but I believe my settings are much better than the default it ships with.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard HDR support on Steam Deck OLED
When launching Dragon Age: The Veilguard on Steam Deck OLEd for the first time, you can enable HDR and adjust some of the brightness settings for it. If you skip this, you will be able to toggle it on later. I did all my testing with HDR enabled on my Steam Deck OLED and obviously no HDR on the Steam Deck LCD. I need a bit more time for definitive Dragon Age: The Veilguard Steam Deck HDR settings so stay tuned for that.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard late game on Steam Deck tested
I also tested the late game on Steam Deck. I'll be uploading some more screenshots without spoilers when I update this article after playing more of the game on other characters, but I wanted to confirm that my current recommended settings hold up well even there and through optional bosses assuming you are ok with the image quality hit.
Does Dragon Age: The Veilguard deserve to be Steam Deck Verified?
On paper, Dragon Age: The Veilguard fulfills the requirements for Steam Deck Verification, but the main issue I have with the rating is the default graphics preset is a visual mess on Steam Deck. After spending a few hours to find a good balance in image quality and performance, I think BioWare and EA should change the defaults a bit to not give Steam Deck players a bad first impression of Dragon Age: The Veilguard. I hope we see more improvements to an already great PC port for Steam Deck.
I will be updating this as I make my way through the full game on my own character played exclusively on Steam Deck (LCD and OLED) and also comparing it with the console versions, so treat this as an impressions feature with potentially more improvements coming soon.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard is now available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC (Steam). If you are planning on getting it, check out our Dragon Age: The Veilguard guide hub here to help you on your journey.