Getting Ready for Pacific Drive on PC: A Shortlist of Things to Learn!

If you're a fan of New Weird, survival and/or horror games, or just want something entirely strange in general, the odds are great that you've already seen Pacific Drive. Taking obvious cues from STALKER, Roadside Picnic, and - indeed - Vandermeer's Area X, Pacific Drive is a game about exploring the aptly named Olympic Exclusion Zone. Except, this time around, your most potent tool isn't a gun: it's a jalopy.

Set against the backdrop of a violently mutated Pacific Northwest, the Olympic Exclusion Zone wouldn't be out of place in, say, Atomic Heart. Heck, even Control, now that we think of it! To call this region of the world anomalous would be an incredible understatement, and Pacific Drive tasks you with straight-up driving through it in an oddly customizable station wagon.

What unique and strange challenges await in Pacific Drive, we do not yet know. We do, however, know much about Pacific Drive system requirements, graphics settings, and other technical aspects of the game. Set and primed to roll out of the garage on February 22, we've got just a few days to go before Pacific Drive is out, so let's get to the good stuff!

READ MORE: Discussing the RPG Gameplay of Dragon's Dogma 2

Everything You Need to Know About Pacific Drive on PC

In Pacific Drive, it's just you and your sci-fi station wagon against the Olympic Exclusion Zone. Before you can face supernatural dangers in this exciting driving survival game, though, it may pay off to get a sense of what sort of PC you might need for it to run well! Further, is the Deluxe Edition worth the squeeze, and do we expect the game to come with advanced rendering features, such as ray tracing? Learn all of that (and more) in the next couple of sections!

Play Pacific Drive on PC on day one - with 2Game's early discount!

Pacific Drive System Requirements

If you got whiplash when checking out Capcom's system requirements for Dragon's Dogma 2, we've got both good news and bad news for Pacific Drive. Namely, this will decidedly not be a low-spec title, though it also shouldn't be quite as steep of a hill for the lower-end gamers among us.

Minimum Specs

OS: Windows 10, 64-bit

DirectX: Version 12

CPU: Intel Core i5 8600

GPU: Nvidia GTX 1060 (6 GB variant)

RAM: 16 GB

Recommended Specs

OS: Windows 10, 64-bit

DirectX: Version 12

CPU: Intel Core i5 10600K

GPU: Nvidia RTX 2080 or RTX 3070

RAM: 16 GB

So, as you can see, the minimum GTX 1060 is an extremely humble minimum spec. In theory, this should mean that Pacific Drive - at its lowest settings - should be very easy to run. Maybe even be playable on a Steam Deck, for all we know!

At the same time, though, with the RTX 3070 being the recommended high-end GPU, Pacific Drive will push some envelope somewhere. At its highest settings, the game certainly does look remarkably good with its stylized visuals, so we'll need to test things out ourselves once it comes out. Do stay tuned for that!

Graphics Settings & Customization Potential

As we pointed out above, and as should be plainly visible from the gameplay footage we featured earlier, Pacific Drive isn't careening towards a fully photorealistic visual style. Instead, we're getting a stylized approach reminiscent of, say, Dishonored in some ways.

There's no way to be absolutely sure of this just yet, then, but games with such aesthetics can usually get cranked down to their absolute lowest settings and still look pretty darn good.

The crux of Pacific Drive's visuals will be the atmospheric effects and the lighting, from what we've seen so far, and those effects can usually scale pretty darn well across a wide variety of different hardware. Again, we'll need to wait and see how that pans out, but we're optimistic, broadly speaking.

Pacific Drive's Optimization Expectations

As you may already know, some players ended up spending some time in Pacific Drive's Olympic Exclusion Zone early this month. This allowed them to get a sense of the game's hardware optimization, and we learned that the pre-release build did have some trouble in this respect.

Notably, it would appear that using DLSS led to some issues for some players. Further, keeping the jalopy's rear-view mirrors at 'High' or 'Ultra' basically renders the game twice, and we expect this setting, in particular, will drag the performance down heavily if you don't tweak it a bit.

Pacific Drive PC Editions

Pacific Drive is launching on PC in two different editions, keeping things delightfully simple compared to most other modern releases. Both versions of the game will be made available on February 22 - meaning there's no early access window of opportunity in place - and the only difference between the base game and the Deluxe Edition is in a selection of customization options you get with the latter.

Play Pacific Drive on PC on day one - with 2Game's early discount!

Pacific Drive Deluxe Edition

Notably, Pacific Drive: Deluxe Edition comes with the We Have Liftoff DLC, which is a fairly interesting set of customization options for your jalopy station wagon. You get all of the following:

Do note that, even though the We Have Liftoff DLC is included with the Deluxe Edition of Pacific Drive, it would seem that the DLC will be made available as a standalone upgrade for the base game later on. In other words, you're not necessarily missing out on anything if you opt for the cheaper version. However, the DLC will likely be more expensive later down the line, if you don't purchase the Deluxe Edition. Something to keep in mind!

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If you’re a fan of New Weird, survival and/or horror games, or just want something entirely strange in general, the odds are great that you’ve already seen Pacific Drive. Taking obvious cues from STALKER, Roadside Picnic, and – indeed – Vandermeer’s Area X, Pacific Drive is a game about exploring the aptly named Olympic Exclusion […]