Why Indiana Jones and the Great Circle Doesn’t Deserve Steam Deck Verified Status

An update to the texture pool setting is meant to improve the performance of Bethesda's Indy game on the Valve gaming handheld but it's not enough.

Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is now verified on Steam Deck due to a small change in the texture pool setting. However this is an example of a game being wrongly marked as verified because its performance doesn’t actually meet the standards for verification.

Not all games run smoothly on the best handheld gaming PCs. The Steam Deck with its older hardware is starting to have trouble with new big games. The system requirements for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle showed that the game would be hard to run on the Steam Deck. Although a new update improves performance. it's still not enough for the game to be rated higher than Playable.

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The update adds a new Steam Deck option in the texture pool size slider. This option stops the game from using too much RAM and crashing while still allowing other graphical settings to be changed.

Unfortunately while this new setting stops the game from crashing it doesn't make the game run well enough to deserve a verified rating. It’s still hard to reach 30fps and loading times are extremely slow.

This update made me hope that Doom The Dark Ages could do well on Steam Deck since it's the only other game using idTech 8. But my hopes were quickly crushed.

It's getting annoying seeing games get unfair ratings on the Steam Deck like Clair Obscur Expedition 33 and Oblivion Remastered. It seems like Valve isn't going to pay attention to fan feedback about it anymore.

The final result is a rating system that’s hard to trust now and only time will show if it harms gamers especially those who rely on the Steam Deck as their main console and expect the ratings to help them pick the right games.