Genshin on Deck

My girlfriend got me into Genshin Impact recently and I immediately wanted to get it running on the Deck. Now, unfortunately MiHoYo has not enabled their anti-cheat on SteamOS yet, so I had to turn to running Windows to get Genshin running on the Deck.

After getting Windows installed, I first tried using the GlosSI method of using the Deck’s controllers in Genshin (as by default, they are not detected by the game). In brief, this involves configuring Steam to run as administrator (as Genshin requires running as admin) and setting up the GlosSI tool on a per-game basis.

This was okay but required Steam to be running and felt clunky to set up.

This worked fine for a while but I then decided to try Ayufan’s Steam Deck Tools which also provide a way of forwarding gamepad input to your games. This one lets you use the default Genshin Impact launcher instead of having to run the game through Steam. I installed the tool, rebooted my Deck, changed the input mode in the taskbar and it Just Worked. So, this is the setup I will be playing around with for a bit. The only shortcoming I can see so far is I haven’t been able to configure the touchpad to allow me to use the gyro as a stick for aiming (a big benefit if you’re using any bow users!)