This morning, I woke up to the over-excited pings from my phone and Discord over Valve’s latest device, the Steam Deck. It’s a neat little platform that I’m sure I’ll wind up using to take some of my staples around with me, like Final Fantasy 14 and Stardew Valley. I’m not particularly starved for mobile titles, I play my Switch and mobile games daily in bed, but in an attempt to always be on-brand, I immediately needed to know if the Steam Deck would play Genshin Impact. In short, it’s complicated. You can run third-party applications on the thing since it’s just a compact PC, but the OS apparently doesn’t play nice with the process. That would be fine and all, but without this device, I realize my mobile options for Genshin Impact are pretty limited.
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Right, now, before you get worked up and insist that I can play on my literal mobile phone, don’t bother. I do that—daily! It drives me absolutely mad, too. I’ve, unfortunately, chosen the path of an Android user. Typically, I prefer Android nine times out of ten—because fighting Apple and anything iOS related quickly sends me into a fit. Apple is also the only mobile device with controller support for Genshin Impact. But anyway, as an Android user, I’ve gotta use that really awful set of in-game controls Mihoyo has saddled us with. So yeah, I can use my phone, but not with a controller.
I don’t quite get it, either. I reckon I’ve been pretty patient for it this whole time. I’m definitely still clinging to my Genshin account, but I’m not always at my PC for my daily tasks, so sometimes I’ve gotta resort to mobile touchscreen options. It’s fine for like, doing some of the easier boss fights. But if it’s event time, and my friends are asking to turn on difficulty multipliers, I’m out of luck. I just can’t react as accurately, or as quickly, as I’d like to. Genshin Impact is obviously a mobile game, but it doesn’t play like a typical tap it and forget it gacha. It’s frustrating.
Compared to most, I’m not the biggest spender, but I do give myself a monthly allowance, and I reckon after inching up on a year now, we should probably have some of the bare bones bits like Android controller support, yeah? Mihoyo has acknowledged, on multiple occasions, that it’s coming, but its touchscreen options are such a slog I feel like my patience just wears thinner and thinner.
So, perhaps Switch is the solution? Except it’s not. Mihoyo has delayed the Switch port, too, and I understand that’s nothing to shrug off, it’s been a tough year for games. It’s the constant dangling carrot, though. A promise that it’s coming, a patch of silence, another promise it’s coming, it’s delayed, it’s this year, it’s who knows when.
Ultimately, I may just be retooling the Steam Deck a bit to make Genshin Impact play nice with it come December. Genshin Impact launched on PC and PlayStation consoles, too, but I’ll always associate it with being a mobile game first, and perhaps that’s just because of my history with Mihoyo’s other title, Honkai Impact 3rd. Regardless of what my next move is, I reckon I’m just kind of frustrated I’ve been here this long, and I still don’t really have a comfortable way to play a mobile game after so long.
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