No Rest for the Wicked, the action RPG developed by Moon Studios, has received a major performance update with the first Early Access patch, lowering the recommended system requirements.
The developers' new patch focused on improving the user experience. Specific changes were made to the baseline performance of both CPUs and GPUs to ensure gamers weren't faced with troubles such as delayed texture loading, stutters, and performance drops. Apart from this, widespread measures are taken to reduce internal crashes, including time-slicing systems to improve the broadcast experience.
The new patch also came with updated PC specification requirements, and this time, Moon Studios has disclosed that in order to run the title at Performance Mode (1080p/30 FPS), gamers would require Intel Core i5 8400 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600, along with 16 GB memory and either NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 970 or an AMD Radeon RX Vega 56. For Quality mode (1080p/60fps), you'll need to opt for superior options, with recommendations being Intel Core i7 11700K or an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 or an AMD Radeon RX 5600 XT.
Here is the performance changelog of the first Early Access patch, which will give you an idea of what performance improvements we are looking at.
- Optimized Prologue Outro, Ship Attack, Phalen Armada, and Sacrament Intro Cinematics
- Mountain Pass Gate area optimizations
- Significant optimizations to content loading and unloading in order to reduce dropped frames and improve baseline performance while traversing through environments
- Improved performance for Ice and Frost enchantment and combat effects
- Optimized enemies making them faster to instantiate across the board
- Improved GPU visibility culling and general handling of off-screen content
- Optimized micro physics objects across the entire game
- Various cumulative improvements to baseline CPU performance
- Fixed various cases where internal errors were firing rapidly and constantly, leading to potential performance degradations
- Added preloading for frequently used objects to further reduce performance drops during gameplay
- Additional timeslicing systems for streaming performance improvements
- Optimization of the Pooling System to further reduce performance spikes
- Optimized vast amount of meshes and textures
- Optimized numerous Visual Effects
- Optimized pre-placed and dynamic enemy ragdolls
- Optimized Character Rendering across the board
- Rendering performance optimizations for better GPU performance across the board
- Cleaned up and archived duplicated content for decreased memory usage
- Cleaned up legacy content in all areas across the game to reduce memory usage
Further performance optimizations will undoubtedly arrive at some point with the addition of upscalers like NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR, which have been held back for now due to issues with sharpness.
No Rest for the Wicked is available on PC through Steam Early Access. A timeline for the game’s full release, which will include console versions, has not yet been provided. However, it'll definitely be worth following the early access progress as the game has a lot of potential, according to our Francesco De Meo:
Having been released as an early access title, it is undeniable that Moon Studios still has a lot of work to do on No Rest for the Wicked to improve gameplay and performance. The core gameplay, however, is very solid and engaging, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it will be refined in the coming months.
News Source: Moon Studios
