How to Install and Play Wuthering Waves on Steam Deck

Jul. 1, 2024

Wuthering Waves has sent ripples throughout the gacha gaming category and is easily one of the best games you can play right now. While the game is available across multiple platforms such as Android, iOS, and Windows, and has partnered with Epic Games, the game isn’t available on Steam. Due to the built-in Anti-cheat in the game, it wasn’t available on the Steam Deck either until version 1.1 of the game dropped last week, enabling support for SteamOS and Steam Deck. Here’s how to install and play Wuthering Waves on Steam Deck.

Now, since the game isn’t officially available on Steam, you will need to download the standalone installer for Windows and use Steam’s “Add a non-steam game” feature. For a better experience, we recommend installing it on an SSD.

Install Wuthering Waves on Steam Deck

We’ll start off by installing and setting up the Heroic Launcher so that you’re all ready to play the game.

Voilà! You’ve successfully installed Wuthering Waves on Steam Deck. Now go back to Game Mode and start launcher.exe to play Wuthering Waves. You can change the name by going into Properties. Similarly, you can use theSteamGridDB Deckyloaderextension to select a thumbnail and a wide capsule to make the game look more presentable in your library. You can now go ahead and delete the WutheringWaves.exe we added at the beginning.

The best graphics settings to play Wuthering Waves are as follows:

When adjusting the frame rate in-game, make sure you enable the per-game profile and limit your Steam Deck’s refresh rate to 40Hz. Given the game is new, it feels extremely unoptimized for Steam Deck-like hardware, which becomes evident with significant stuttering at times.

The average FPS we could get on Steam Deck when exploring the city was34 fps. However, the overall FPS tends to drop significantly (up to half, at times) when in combat. We hope it only gets better over time, with Proton devs and the game developers taking time to optimize the game for Windows and Steam Deck.

The game doesn’t particularly look good on the Steam Deck, especially compared to Genshin Impact, which runs phenomenally well at constant 45fps no matter what the scene. There’s still a lot of work to be done in terms of optimization.

Moreover, Kuro Games hasn’t made an official announcement of Wuthering Waves working on the Steam Deck or Linux. Hence, it’s possible that the availability was unintended. If that’s really the case, running the game on the Steam Deck probably breaks anti-cheat, which might result in an account ban. Hence, until it’s confirmed as intentional, we recommend you tread carefully and not use your main account on the Steam Deck.