Are you looking to pick up one of the biggest VR releases of the month, Insomniac’s AAA open world sci-fi shooter? Make sure your PC is up to scratch.
Stormland is an open world co-op shooter developed by Insomniac Games and funded by Facebook. The game features a vast open world that blends traditional level design with procedural generation. It features crafting and an innovative climbing system.
We gave Stormland 4 stars in our review, calling it “a real achievement“- despite some bugs and issues.
Stormland is impressive, both in its visuals and its scale. It may be the best looking made-for-VR open world title yet. But that accomplishment, and its partial procedural generation, come at a cost.
GPU
Like Asgard’s Wrath, the other big Oculus release of the season, a strong GPU is recommended for Stormland. While it will run on the regular Oculus recommended specs, you’ll have to keep the graphics settings fairly low.
Insomniac’s Recommendation: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080/AMD Radeon RX Vega 64 equivalent or greater
While playing on an RTX 2070, we found we needed to use High settings rather than Ultra.
CPU
CPU is where Stormland’s requirements go noticeably beyond Asgard’s Wrath. Stormland’s large open worlds filled with enemies and interactables will tax even the strongest CPU.
Insomniac’s Recommendation: Intel Core i7-8700 / AMD Ryzen 7 2700X equivalent or greater
These processing requirements may contribute to some of the AI issues we noticed in our review. Often you’ll see only some enemies notice and fire at you. It is just speculation, but we wonder if the game may be deciding to only process some enemies in order to maintain framerate.
With Oculus Link slated to release this month, we’ll be curious to see how Stormland performs on Quest. The lower refresh rate and resolution should make it easier, but the overhead of video encoding may prove problematic.
