If you’re a stalwartPCgamer, it will come as no surprise that triple-A games have been steadily ratcheting up their system requirements over the years. As big-budget titlesincreasingly aim for photorealistic graphicsand fancy technical features, the minimum specifications needed to run these games get higher and higher.
This puts the onus on PC users to upgrade their rigs in order to keep up if they want to enjoy games at the highest possible settings and with the best performance. And in order to keep up, companies regularly put increasingly powerful PC components on the market, promising more graphical fidelity and more processing power for even more money.
You can’t begrudge studios for taking advantage of improving technology, butBioWareseems to be forgoing that withDragon Age: The Veilguard. The system requirements for the newest installment in theDragon Age serieshave been revealed, and they’re surprisingly light. In fact, the game’s minimum specs will allow the game to run on a decade-old graphics card, and even the minimum processor requirements are fairly old.
The recommended requirements rely on more recent tech, but are still far from cutting-edge – the recommendedNVIDIAgraphics card was released in 2018, and the equivalent AMD card was released in 2019. The recommended processors were also released in 2018 and 2019. That said, you’ll still need quite a lot of storage (100GB) and 16GB of memory to run it, but these are also common components of a five-year-old machine
These light demands are likely why DA:TV wasSteam Deckverified so long before launch.
How Are Dragon Age: The Veilguard’s Requirements Possible?
It’s not often we see a modern triple-A game launch with such modest requirements, especially one that still has pretty great visuals. So how has The Veilguard managed to dodge requiring high specs?
When the first trailers for the game were shared, a lot of players expressed concern and even anger that the style was more cartoony than in previous games. While the older Dragon Age games have always been a bit stylised, that was mostly because of the graphical capabilities at the time. Many fans hoped that with technological improvements, the newest game would go for a more photorealistic style, the way many triple-As have.
But The Veilguard is more explicitly stylised than previous games, and with it BioWare has made a conscious choice to lean into this art style, despite now having the technology to do otherwise. This could be partly attributed to the game’s long development cycle: the game has been in the works since 2015, and it would have been a pain to repeatedly target newer hardware.
I also can’t help but remember what former Dragon Age executive producer (andcurrent consultant on The Veilguard) Mark Darrah saidin a video about the swelling development cycles for triple-A games: we’re in a period he calls the “fidelity death cult”, where studios are pushing towards hyper-realism and more intricacy. He also called for developers to stop trying to cross the uncanny valley and instead “go back to exciting game design”. It seems that this is precisely what Dragon Age: The Veilguard is trying to do.
Lower Technical Demands Means More Players
In the end, this turned out to be a good thing for everyone. While many still aren’t happy about the art style the game has gone for, the environments are stupefyingly beautiful, the facial animations are way better than anything we’ve seen in the series so far, and the art direction is cohesive and compelling. We’ll have to wait till the game is released to see how well the new visual style gels with the storytelling and gameplay, but from what we’ve seen, it looks undeniably beautiful.
More importantly, the fact that the technical requirements are so low means that a lot more people can actually play the game. Players have worried on social media that because the game looks so good, they won’t be able to run it on their older hardware, and for the vast majority of people, these lower system requirements nullify those worries. You won’t have to shell out hundreds or thousands of dollars upgrading your rig to play The Veilguard, which makes the game far more accessible to a wider range of players.
This is in keeping with the rest of DA:TV’s philosophy, which has aimed to make the game as accessible as possible, to as many players as possible. The game’shighly customisable difficulty optionscater to players who want high difficulties and players who,for whatever reason, may want an easy playthrough, even one where they can’t die at all. Everything we’ve seen of The Veilguard shows us that BioWare wanted this game to be played by as many people as possible, and these humble specs are just another aspect of that. Good on BioWare.
Dragon Age: The Veilguard
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Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the long-awaited fourth game in the fantasy RPG series from BioWare formerly known as Dragon Age: Dreadwolf. A direct sequel to Inquisition, it focuses on red lyrium and Solas, the aforementioned Dread Wolf.
