The game seems to downscale and blur all textures, so the only thing that looks sharp is text and 3d models. Unfortunately some of the UI text seems to actually be a rendered texture, so the text of some UI elements can look blurry and pixelated. It also seems that the blurring is a live process, not a preprocess. This means that a lot of the UI elements are constantly flickering on top of being blurry.
Overall I love the game FWIW. I picked it up this week and love the gameplay loop. I'm just amazed it gets the green checkmark despite having such glaring UI issues with the default graphics settings (which are ostensibly tailored to the Deck)
Can anyone tell me if this can be fixed?
Edit: I had half-rate shading turned on and didn't realize it. I'm an idiot.
Make sure you don't have "half-rate shading" turned on the the deck battery settings. I do see a protondb report with similar issues, but everywhere else I see the game discussed no one seems to be complaining about it.
You're not an idiot, I had the same issue with last epoch and it took me a while to understand. Half rate shadering has no side effects on most games so I didn't see this coming 🙍♂️
Try setting it to use proton experimental, newer games sometimes depend on features that aren't in the stable versions of proton yet (or are at least buggier/worse in the stable versions)
Edit: also try launching the game from desktop mode. The compositor in steam mode is Wayland-based and desktop mode uses an X11 session by default. The issues you're describing sound a bit like something that's happened to me running games under Wayland on my laptop