Gunfire Games' determination to polish up Remnant 2 proceeds apace—I've already been mighty pleased with tweaks to the Orb of Undoing respec cost and changes to its archetypes system. Ben Cureton, the game's Principal Designer, teased an upcoming patch on Twitter/X yesterday.
Alongside general fixes to weapons, items, and mods, Cureton also revealed a few quality of life options. You'll soon be able to choose whether you want your aiming and sprinting to be toggles or keypress holds—and if you've elected for the summoner archetype, you'll no longer have to worry about them snagging your EXP rewards when they last hit beasties. The most interesting inclusion by far, however, is the promise of a dev-endorsed 'potato mode'.
If you're unfamiliar with the phrase, 'potato' graphics settings are ones you could run off a potato—not literally, 'potato PC' is a running gag, but it's welcome news since Remnant 2 did have some gnarly performance on launch. This included the game being designed around upscaling, which went down about as smoothly as a fistful of bullets. PC Gamer's Jacob Ridley summed it all up well:
- Need to relax? Grab a coffee, kick back and submerge yourself in the sound of Hades 2's narrator reading the patch notes for its latest massive update
- Hyper Light Breaker gets a community-driven update that makes 'some pretty big changes' to the game's enemies and medkit system, following its debut to mixed reviews on Steam
"These upscalers' proficiency is diminished on much older or entry-level cards. The way these technologies work is they still require some amount of speed to deal with upscaling, and if your card is running absolutely max speed to spit out 15fps, you don't usually have enough horsepower leftover."
So throwing in a potato mode as an alternative to hitting the upscaling wall with a less powerful card seems like a logical solution. While I'd have much preferred the game to be optimised without needing to lean on upscaling tech, Gunfire Games are hardly the first to adopt them as a standard part of modern gaming.
After all, when games get it right, it can be effective—or it can make things a blurry mess and start console-war style bickering between which scaling method is best, like the whole fiasco with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor earlier this year. Granted, some methods do jive better with certain graphics cards, so it's—it's all a bit of a mess.
Remnant 2's performance hiccups have been getting better with each patch, but they remain a minor thorn in a solid soulslike romp, which delivered on what it promised to be—the first game, but better. I'm looking forward to seeing just how far the potato mode will go, and how that'll interact with the game's current upscaling options. While most of it ran decently for me, a specific late-game boss named Venom tanked my frames for seemingly no reason, and I'd like to dunk on him at a solid 60 in revenge.
