A GTX 750 Ti Can Run Outward 2, Says a Potato

A GeForce GTX 750 Ti, 8 GB of RAM, and an FX 3600 X6 CPU. That's all you need to run Outward 2 at 720p and 30 FPS when it hits early access on July 7. Those are 2014-era components. Developer Nine Dots Studio delivered this information in the most appropriate way possible: through the mouth of a sentient potato.

The "Potato Specs" trailer, posted by Nine Dots, features a tuber narrating a walkthrough of the game's graphical settings on a rig powered by a "Fryzen 5 CPU" and "8 Gigabites YAM." It's goofy, it's self-aware, and I kind of love it as a marketing move. Most studios bury their minimum specs in a footnote on a Steam page. Nine Dots built an entire character around theirs.

The game does scale up considerably for beefier hardware. Ultra settings at 4K call for at least a GeForce RTX 4080 and 32 GB of RAM, while medium sits at a GTX 3060 with 16 GB. "Potato" appears to be a real in-game quality preset, not just a joke label for the trailer. The visuals at that tier are stripped back, obviously, but the footage looks perfectly playable. For anyone still running older hardware and tired of being locked out of new releases, this is a selling point.

Closed Beta Next Week

Before the July 7 early access launch on Steam, Epic Games Store, and GOG, Nine Dots is running a closed beta starting May 26 through June 8. According to the game's Steam page, you can request access there or through Nine Dots Studio's website, though signing up on the developer's site gets you priority. The beta features a forest area haunted by ghosts of a past massacre, which tracks with the series' tone of being dangerous and unforgiving.

If you missed the original Outward, the pitch is refreshingly anti-power-fantasy. You're not the chosen one. You're just some person trying to survive in a hostile open world, managing stamina, hunger, and the very real possibility that casting a spell might kill you before the enemy does. The first game sold over one million copies despite its rough edges, and built a dedicated following around that punishing design. Outward 2 keeps the two-player local split-screen co-op and online multiplayer from the original, with Nine Dots now self-publishing after parting ways with its previous publisher.

No console release has been announced. The early access launch is PC-only for now, which makes the low system requirements even more relevant. Nine Dots is clearly trying to cast the widest possible net on the platform where the game actually exists. Letting someone with a decade-old GPU play your game on day one is a better accessibility statement than most studios manage with ten times the budget.