Normally, PC system requirements are really only of interest to prospective PC gamers wondering how well they can run upcoming titles, but Godfall‘s system requirements are causing a stir amongst even console gamers.
Just take a look at the minimum and recommended requirements for the PC version of Godfall:
If you’re looking for some practical context, we highly recommend you check out the PC requirements for Cyberpunk 2077 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla. The long and short of it, though, is that Godfall‘s PC system requirements are unusually high.
Before we dive into what, exactly, makes these requirements stand out, we should point out that Godfall developer Counterpoint’s community manager suggested on Reddit that the game’s recommended PC requirements correlate to an in-game setting of “High” and should be what you’re aiming for if you want to run the game at 1080p and 60 FPS. That would seem to mean that if you’re shooting for 1440p or 4K gameplay, the requirements will be even higher than that.
Frankly, that’s shocking. I don’t remember the last time that I’ve seen a game that requires 12 GB of RAM at a minimum or a game that demanded a GTX 1060 (which is still a pretty powerful modern GPU) just to run. While it’s true that neither the minimum nor recommended requirements will require you to purchase the latest and greatest GPUs and CPUs, you’re seemingly going to need a gaming PC that’s only a few years “old” to run the game at all.
So are Godfall‘s specs a preview of what kind of PC you’re going to need to get through at least the next few years of gaming? Maybe, but some are already speculating that these requirements have more to do with Godfall‘s PC port than the future of gaming.
Again, these are incredibly high requirements that were revealed relatively late in relation to Godfall‘s November 12 release date for PC and PS5. It’s already a somewhat bad sign when developers wait so long to reveal their system requirements, but when the requirements themselves turn out to be this high, then it feels right to suggest that the real problem is with optimization.
Further support of that theory can be found in the specs of the PS5 itself. Godfall‘s developers have said that the game will support 4K 60 FPS gameplay on PS5, which is odd considering that the PS5 “only” has 16 GB of RAM. While the PS5’s custom GPU, CPU, and architecture which doesn’t demand the resources of a PC OS make it more powerful than the “recommended” Godfall build, the difference doesn’t entirely explain the game’s minimum requirements and target performance.
Having said that, elements of Godfall‘s requirements do feel like a harbinger of things to come. 12 GB of RAM and an SSD will likely become minimum standards for larger PC games in the near future. Cyberpunk‘s PC requirements suggest you may not have to scramble for a new GPU quite yet, but as we talked about elsewhere, the enhanced capabilities of next-gen consoles will impact the minimum requirements of PC games sometime in the near future. It just may be a couple of years before your PC needs to essentially be as powerful as a next-gen console before you’ll feel safe.
As for Godfall, I hope my worries about its PC performance are unfounded, but considering how poorly the PC port of Horizon Zero Dawn ran (at least at first) it feels like developers may still be figuring out the seemingly unique relationship between PlayStation architecture and PC builds.