Pretty good first-person Soulsliker Valor Mortis seems to have sliced its PC system requirements down, dropping its minimum CPU and graphics cards demands as an October 13th launch – for those who never trusted calendars, that’s tomorrow – looms.

Previously, the game’s Steam page listed some luxurious hardware indeed. Around the time of the final demo release in June, Valor Mortis was asking for either an AMD Ryzen 7 3700X or Intel Core i7-11700 as a min-spec processor, plus an AMD Radeon RX 6700 or Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super as a minimum GPU. Currently, the same page now lists the choice of an Ryzen 5 3600 or Core i5-10600K, as well as an RX 5600 XT or GTX 1660 Ti, making for far more budget-friendly entry into the plague-sodden battlefields of Napoleonic Europe.

That’s good, even if the SSD size requirement has risen slightly, from 50GB to 60GB. However, there are some – to use an appropriately French-sounding word, despite it being Latin – caveats. Firstly, if it sounds like I’m hedging in that headline, it’s because developers One More Level haven’t formally announced the reductions anywhere, and my request for confirmation thus far goes unanswered. That suggests they might not be the absolutely final requirements, though it would be weird to whack up placeholders this close to release.

I also don’t have either of the listed minimum GPUs, so for testing, substituted in a GTX 1070 instead. At 1080p/Low, this still needs upscaling help to get Valor Mortis running semi-smoothly: with TSR at 67%, Nvidia’s decade-old card mostly hummed around the 40-50fps range, averaging 41fps in a particularly tricky open-air section. That’s not awful, but I saw some of the same stuttering and sudden framerate drops as I did when testing the newer RTX 4060 for my review. If, then, you really want performance smoother than Big Napo’s finest felt bicorne, you’ll likely need a steadier supply of VRAM.