Firaxis has announced that Civilization 7 has been ahead of its launch on February 11. This will be the first entry in the series to get the full green checkmark seal of approval on [[link]] Valve's popular Linux-based handheld.
Civilizations 5 and 6 are both playable, but with caveats on Steam Deck: The primary hang-ups for both seem to be text legibility on the Deck's small screen, and the need to manually invoke the Deck's keyboard for certain functions. Neither of those is usually a dealbreaker for me when considering games for Steam Deck, though Civ is such a wordy series, I could see eye strain from small text being more of an issue than usual. Like both of those games, the system's raw graphical grunt is not at all a problem with Civ 7—it has some very breezy and lightweight system requirements:
Minimum
- OS: Win 10 64 Bit
- Processor: Intel i5-4690 / Intel i3-10100 / AMD Ryzen 3 1200
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 1050 / AMD RX 460 / Intel Arc A380
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 20 GB available space
Recommended
- OS: Win 10 64 Bit
- Processor: Intel Core i5-10400 / AMD Ryzen 5 3600X
- Memory: 16 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA RTX 2060 / AMD RX 6600 / Intel Arc A750
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 20 GB available space
I can't imagine it took too much development effort to make sure Civ 7 plays nice with the Steam Deck, and it strikes me as a no-brainer move too. Civilization 6 was successfully ported to the Nintendo Switch after all, and the series' relaxed pace of play should make the transition from mouse and keyboard to a pad more comfortable than with other [[link]] PC-first games. Between taking Civ 7 handheld at launch and the structural changes Firaxis has promised for the game, it should be easier than ever [[link]] to actually finish a game of Civilization with this one. For more on Civilization 7, you can read about why it's our .