No Rest for the Wicked lowers its recommended specs as first big patch brings “significant” performance boosts

After a bit of a bumpy landing on PC, it looks like No Rest for the Wicked is finally finding its feet. The early access action-RPG launched with notable performance problems that developers Moon Studios promised they’d address, starting with several hotfixes over the last few weeks that managed to claw back some frames. The game’s first big patch goes a step further, seemingly boosting the game’s performance to a degree that its minimum and recommended hardware specs have been lowered as a result.

The first major early access patch for the Diablo-cross-Souls-game-like particularly offers “significant” improvements in traversal zones and typically GPU and CPU-heavy areas, according to Moon Studios’ patch notes, with further optimisations made around the way content is loaded and unloaded while travelling across maps to recover some dropped frames and generally boost performance.

The upshot is that No Rest for the Wicked’s minimum specs - targeting 30 frames a second at 1080p - now start with a GTX 970 or RX Vega 56 plus an i5-8400 or Ryzen 5 2600, while its recommended specs to bring the framerate up to 60fps at 1080p asks for an RTX 2060/RX 5600 XT paired with at least an i7-11700K or Ryzen 7 5800X.

There are plenty more improvements and additions in the patch beyond polishing performance, too. You can now rebind keyboard controls as you like, as well as switching to an entirely new default mouse and keyboard control scheme. The expanded control options join quality-of-life improvements such as being able to access your resources in storage directly from vendors and crafting tables or refineries, the chance to gain housing earlier in the game - after the Sacrament quest - and better sorting across a plethora of item categories. For those on Steam Deck, controller icons have also been made clearer, with controller button remapping planned for a future update.

Behind the scenes there have been dozens of bug fixes and other tweaks, such as boosting inventory stacks and changing bows to use stamina instead of focus when attacking, which you can check out in the full rundown.

Moon Studios CEO Thomas Mahler recently said that the Ori studio plan to support No Rest for the Wicked for up to a decade, with its exiting of early access into 1.0 “just the beginning” for the game - which Mahler described as “our 'Fellowship of the Ring’” and “magnum opus”.