Arise now, ye Cerim: No Rest for the Wicked’s performance updates are underway

No Rest for the Wicked launched into early access as a bit of a fixer-upper, even by the standards of its 'buy now, play finished game later' model. The good news is that the grim action-RPG’s wonky performance is already being straightened out, with two of its three hotfixes thus far delivering a noticeable improvements, even on older graphics cards.

Following Hotfix 1’s focus on the game's debatably enjoyable weapon durability system, Hotfixes 2 and 3 have made a raft of tweaks aimed at getting those framerates up. Along with the general fixes and enhancements, they both also specifically address the prologue’s dramatic ship battle, in which a maelstrom of sea, rain, and fire effects conspire to batter performance harder than any other part of the game I’ve seen yet. Well, except the cutscenes, for some reason.

I checked in with No Rest for the Wicked, post-Hotfix 3, to see whether these are doing the trick, and I did indeed see a marked uptick on the humble GTX 1060. This GPU is still best deployed at 1080p and on the lowest quality preset, Performance, but it proved far more capable of staying above 30fps than it did at launch. The prologue, while still testy to be sure, no longer spent extended periods in the lowly 20-25fps range, instead staying largely above 40fps. With the sole exception of the final fight in the rain, though that still stuck to a playable 30-35fps. Ashore, it was smoother still, averaging 56fps.

I’ve also tried these hotfixes on the Steam Deck, though the differences are harder to spot when you’re using the default settings (which include a dynamic resolution target of 30fps). It’s still pulling around 30fps during the tough bits and around 40fps in the easygoing areas, though I do get the feeling it’s not dynamically lowering the resolution as often as it used to when trying to maintain that 30fps floor.

Progress is being made, then, though I’m still going to wait for a few more early access spit 'n' polishes before I give No Rest for the Wicked the full performance analysis treatment. For one, there’s still semi-regular stuttering, especially on the Deck, and two, your only graphics options remain the simple presets and a couple of motion blur settings. The massive framerate drops during cutscenes also continue to vex, even if the updates so far have at least eased them up a little.