It's no wonder Dragon Age: The Veilguard was Steam Deck Verified so quickly: it'll run on a 10-year-old graphics card that was new when Inquisition came out
BioWare has revealed Dragon Age: The Veilguard's system requirements on Steam and its official website. They're surprisingly light for what looks like a pretty gorgeous RPG, though that 100 GB of hard drive space is definitely a whopper.
The thing that really boggles my mind is that The Veilguard's minimum spec GTX 970 GPU will be a full decade old by the time the game releases on October 31, and the AMD equivalent R9 290X is even older. These were the shiny new graphics cards you would have wanted to run Dragon Age: Inquisition on when it released in November 2014. While the latest generation of graphics cards has been a bit of an expensive dud, I've always appreciated how the longevity of the previous decade's hardware is a world away from the rapid obsolescence of GPUs back in the 2000s.
The i5-8400 and Ryzen 3300X CPUs in the base spec are more recent, but still pretty long in the tooth. The Veilguard hasn't escaped the ballooning storage cost of games in the past few years though: 100 gigabytes, nearly four times as much space as Inquisition took up.
«Steam Deck Verified» can be a frustratingly loose categorization, but The Veilguard's low bar for system specs lends a lot of credence to it earning the status pre-launch. The Veilguard's system requirements are pretty comparable to Baldur's Gate 3's actually, though the new Dragon Age recommends a stronger CPU. BG3 was a pretty great Deck experience, but at launch it had some issues with processor-intensive city areas. The fact that The Veilguard is going to be more of a full action game than any Dragon Age yet may also mean that 30fps with some dips will be harder to stomach than in the turn-based Baldur's Gate 3.
This is definitely one I'm going to be playing on desktop, though my Steam Deck-favoring partner might have a better time with The Veilguard than I'd initially anticipated. The fact that it will be EA App-free on Steam no matter what you're playing on is good news for everybody.
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