One of the biggest RPGs of the fall, as well as one of the biggest games of the year, is imminently releasing: The Outer Worlds 2, Obsidian Entertainment's ambitious follow-up to the original 2019 sci-fi adventure. It's coming to Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, PS5, and Xbox Game Pass on October 29, with its full launch just a few days away and Early Access for Premium Edition owners already underway.
Remarkably, it's the third 2025 title from the studio after Avowed and Grounded 2, and has reviewed quite strongly across outlets and Metacritic ahead of its scheduled release. Windows Central's own Samuel Tolbert gave it a glowing 4.5/5 stars in his review, writing that "Better exploration and combat buoy a tight role-playing experience that feels crunchy and isn't afraid of cutting off branches depending on player skills."
Indeed, critics in general have praised The Outer Worlds 2 highly for its impressively deep and "crunchy" RPG systems, complete with countless options for combat and quest solutions, strong reactivity from the game world to player actions, and plenty of choice-based narrative depth.
In many ways, it's the Fallout: New Vegas sequel that we never got, built by the same studio a full 15 years later — and with that in mind, it's not hard to imagine why the game has garnered quite a bit of excitement and hype from RPG fans and the wider community overall.
Naturally, that interest has led to many PC players wondering if their rig is capable enough to run The Outer Worlds 2. Thankfully, the game's system requirements and recommended specs have been made available on its Steam page, and I've organized them into the table below for quick and easy viewing.
Minimum |
Recommended |
|
|---|---|---|
OS: |
Windows 10/11 with updates |
Windows 10/11 with updates |
Processor: |
AMD Ryzen 5 2600 / Intel i5-8400 |
AMD Ryzen 5 5600X / Intel Core i7-10700K |
Memory: |
16 GB RAM |
16 GB RAM |
Graphics: |
AMD RX 5700 / Nvidia GTX 1070 / Intel Arc A580 |
AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT / Nvidia RTX 3080 |
DirectX: |
Version 12 |
Version 12 |
Storage: |
110 GB available space |
110 GB available space |
Additional notes: |
SSD required. Performance scales with higher-end systems. |
SSD required. Performance scales with higher-end systems. |
Some good news here is that The Outer Worlds 2's minimum requirements aren't very demanding at all, and feature extremely outdated pieces of hardware like the Intel i5-8400 CPU (bless the longevity of that chip) and NVIDIA's GTX 1070. These are upwards of 10 years old, now, so if your gaming PC is even somewhat modern, it's all-but-guaranteed to meet these requirements, and the game should at the very least run for you with Low settings and a basic FHD 1080p resolution.
Things take quite a jump up with the recommended specs, however, which you'll need to aim for if you're looking to play The Outer Worlds 2 with higher resolutions, settings, and framerates. You'll need some performant 2020-era kit like the AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and the NVIDIA RTX 3080 to match them, or equivalents from newer hardware generations (many options from these lineups will exceed them).
Some good news here is that The Outer Worlds 2's minimum requirements aren't very demanding at all, and feature extremely outdated pieces of hardware
Overall, the requirements for high-quality play still aren't too bad, but they're certainly nothing to scoff at, either, especially since even the five-year-old components they list can often still be expensive to get your hands on.
Storage is the other major hiccup, here, with The Outer Worlds 2 requiring the use of an SSD and clocking in with a file size of 110 GB. Most folks have an SSD now, but if you're still using an old hard disk drive (HDD), you'll need to upgrade (here are some of the best SSDs to consider picking up).
110 GB is also quite large and may require you to uninstall some games, though sadly, file sizes this big have become increasingly common — especially for huge expansive RPGs like this one.
One thing to keep in mind is that these minimum requirements and recommended specs were listed without any mention of technologies like Super Resolution upscalers such as NVIDIA DLSS and AMD FSR, or AI-powered Frame Generation. This presumably means they were chosen without their use.
The Outer Worlds 2 supports these tools, so your rig will run the game better if you enable them and may achieve good, stable performance even if you fail to match the recommended specs listed above. They'll also come in very handy if you want to push for the absolute best framerates you can get, and don't mind a small downgrade in overall visual quality (often impossible to notice, now, with how advanced upscaling has become).
Curious if you meet the RPG's requirements or want to see how your system compares to the recommended specs? You can do so easily by typing "dxdiag" into the Windows search bar and viewing the diagnostic window that opens.
Curious if you meet the RPG's requirements or want to see how your system compares to the recommended specs? You can do so easily by typing "dxdiag" into the Windows search bar and viewing the diagnostic window that opens. The System tab shows your CPU, RAM, and DirectX version, while the Display one shows your GPU. You can use Windows Explorer to view your free SSD space.
The Outer Worlds 2 is set to come out on October 29 across Xbox Series X|S, Windows PC, PS5, and Game Pass, with the game playable now for anyone that purchases the Premium Edition. Note that the $69.99 Standard Edition for Xbox (and PC, thanks to Xbox Play Anywhere) is just $55.79 at Loaded (formerly CDKeys) at the moment thanks to a nice deal.
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