Bethesda, in its infinite wisdom, got rid of the launcher for Fallout 4 on the Steam Deck earlier this week (on April 25) with the release of the game’s first major patch in years. They did this, allegedly, to get the game the Steam Deck Verified badge — possibly because the launcher experience presumably doesn’t meet Valve’s requirements for that badge. This is, to put it lightly, Big Dumb.
Restoring the Fallout 4 launcher is simple.
- Navigate to the game on your Steam Deck.
- On the Steam game page, open the game settings (cog icon), on the right hand side of the screen near the top.
- From the list of options, select “Properties“
- Under the “General” screen (which is what opens by default), scroll to the bottom — there should be a heading called “Launch Options“
- In launch options, type (no quotes) “SteamDeck=0 %COMMAND%“
That’s it, you’re done. The Fallout 4 launcher will now work.
Why did the Fallout 4 launcher disappear on Steam Deck?
Bethesda updated Fallout 4 to add some new content alongside the launch of the Fallout TV show. As part of this “next gen” update, Bethesda said the game would now be Steam Deck Verified, giving it a green badge in the Steam store for Deck owners. But, apparently the Fallout 4 launcher was at least one of the reasons the game hadn’t been verified playable in the past, so… Bethesda removed it. This is especially perplexing given that The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is Steam Deck Verified and has a near identical launcher experience to Fallout 4.
Regardless, Bethesda was either unwilling or unable to find a way to keep the options menu — and thus graphical settings — intact as part of this change. It’s completely boneheaded, and I truly can’t understand the reasoning myself. Given how annoying it is to get Fallout 4 running respectably on a Steam Deck in the first place, it’s baffling that Bethesda thought getting rid of graphics settings was an acceptable tradeoff for that green badge. But Bethesda gonna Bethesda.
One response to “How to restore Fallout 4’s launcher on the Steam Deck”
[…] helpful performance overlay, it’s immediately obvious in titles like The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, and No Man’s Sky that GPU temperatures drop substantially. Whereas I might see anywhere from […]