Baldur's Gate 3 increases system requirements 'to better reflect the realities of the launch version'
It's been nearly four years since Larian Studios announced Baldur's Gate 3(opens in new tab). That's an awfully long time in PC gaming terms, and it's come an awfully long way since then. So it shouldn't be entirely surprising that your rig is going to be a little beefier than developers originally thought in order to run the game comfortably.
«Baldur's Gate 3's graphical fidelity and complexity has improved quite a bit as it's grown throughout Early Access,» Larian said at the tail-end of yesterday's launch date announcement(opens in new tab).
«We've been keeping an eye on its minimum system requirements, and as the game nears release we've raised the minimum system requirements listed on Steam to better reflect the realities of the launch version.»
The change to the minimum requirement is relatively slight, but the recommended specification has gone up too, and more comprehensively. Here's how both have changed:
Regardless of your hardware, you'll also need Windows 10 64-bit and DirectX 11 to play.
Larian said Baldur's Gate 3 «may be playable» on PCs below the new minimum requirement (but, I would guess, not below the old minimum), «but we believe this may hinder the player experience.» I suspect it might, too.
The change might be frustrating for anyone who was on the bubble with the original specs, but I think shifting hardware requirements are kind of inherent to the whole early access process: Developers release a game in a half-finished state and then spend the next year or two (or four, as the case may be) working on it, and by the time it's ready for full release, things have changed, and what was good enough then isn't going to cut it now—or at least, isn't going to perform to the originally anticipated
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