While there is no officially supported launcher from HoYoverse that plays Zenless Zone Zero on the Steam Deck, you can use a program known as Lutris to run the game as if it were natively running on Windows – with almost similar performance.
This is rather surprising, given that HoYoverse’s prior games absolutely refuse to run on Linux out of the box, and is a rather pleasant surprise. The steps involved do take a fair bit of effort though, but once set up the game runs without hiccups.
A walkthrough of the steps involved can be found detailed below.
How to play Zenless Zone Zero on Steam Deck using Lutris
Make sure to download and install Lutris on your Deck before proceeding further. Next, download and/or copy over the HoYoPlay launcher for Zenless Zone Zero onto a directory of your choice.
Follow the steps in succession to get Zenless Zone Zero up and running on the Steam Deck:
- Enter into the Deck’s Desktop mode.
- Boot up Lutris and click on the Plus (+) icon.
- Click on ‘Install a Windows game from an executable’.
- Add in ZZZ or any other game name of your choice. Leave the options at their defaults.
- Click on ‘Install’.
- Click on the ‘Install’ button for the Wine Setup tab page. Wait for it to complete.
- Click on Continue. Make sure the ‘Create Steam Shortcut’ option is checked in order to be able to access ZZZ from the Deck’s usual Game Mode UI.
- Finally click on the ‘…’ button and select the HoYoPlay executable file you had downloaded earlier.
- Complete the installation, but do not launch the game yet.
- Close the installer, and wait for Lutris to finish the process.
- You should notice a new entry in the Lutris game menu.
- Double click on the pill, and complete the full download.
Once downloaded, hit the launch game option to enter into the game. Log in using your requisite ID. Close the application once you log in.
It should now be possible to launch Zenless Zone Zero on the Steam Deck using the default gaming mode. Simply select the game’s tile (located in the Non-Steam Games section) and hit Play.
Assuming a 900p image with the Low preset, you can expect an average frame rate of 40 FPS. For best results, set the TDP to 15 W and cap the frame rate via the Deck UI to 40 FPS.
