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 the SteamGridDB Deckyloader extension 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.

Best Wuthering Waves Settings for Steam Deck

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

Graphics Quality: Medium Screen Mode: Full Screen Frame Rate: 45fps Shadow Quality: Medium Special Effects Quality: Medium LOD Bias: Low Capsule AO: On Volumetric Fog: Off Volumetric Lighting: Off FSR: On Motion Blur: Off Bloom: Off Crowd Density: High

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 was 34 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.