Join The Club
As my ancient PC gets ever older and my hopes of upgrading it someday grow ever dimmer, I spend a lot of time peering through skeptical eyes at upcoming game trailers. "Looks good, but will I be able to run it? I bet those slick graphics are going to set my GPU on fire. Reflective puddles? In this economy?"
At least one game I won't have to worry about is Outward 2. Nine Dots' survival RPG sequel is launching in early access on July 17, and according to the talking potato in the video below, it'll run on just about anything—and still manage to look good, too. And yes, when I said talking potato, I meant talking potato:
As Mr. Potato points out, Outward 2 looks lovely at max settings, which will need at least a GeForce RTX 4080 with 32 GB of RAM. That's nice, but I sure as heck don't satisfy those requirements.
But if, like mine, your gaming rig is a bit creaky these days, you'll also be fine at medium settings (GTX 3060, 16 GB RAM) and even on "potato" settings (GTX 750 TI, 8 GB YAM RAM). Better still, the game will still look pretty darn good at those ultra-minimum settings (running at 30 FPS) as you can see in the trailer above.
"Potato" does appear to be a genuine quality setting in-game, by the way, not just a cute way to talk about lower-than-minimum graphics. Unless something catastrophic happens to my PC between now and July, I won't have to go quite that low to play Outward 2, but it's nice to know I could if I needed to.
Here are the complete system requirements for Outward 2:
For me, knowing a game will run smoothly without increasing the temperature under my desk by 30 degrees is a huge plus, but it's not the only reason I'm excited for Outward 2. I loved the deep and unforgiving survival systems in the original RPG, which made everything from using magic to traveling between cities feel like a major risk. I'm pretty keen to see what Nine Dots has been cooking up for the sequel.
If you're eager to play it too, and simply can't wait for July, the trailer also shows a closed beta beginning on May 26. I don't have the details on how you'll be able to join that closed beta yet, but I'll find 'em and add 'em to this article as soon as I can.
