Alan Wake 2 is one of the most anticipated titles of this year. However, it turns out that the real horror of Alan Wake 2 won’t be the Lovecraftian creatures and nightmarish landscapes—it’s what your PC lacks when attempting to launch the title.
Developers Remedy have released the official system requirements for the game, giving fans a proper scare—especially when one dares to look upon the minimum requirements tab.
Remedy’s Oct. 20 Twitter post contained a table of system requirements from minimum to recommended, with a separate table for ray-tracing enjoyers. The post has gained some traction and has spawned a plethora of memes among the gaming community.
Remedy expects Alan Wake 2 users to crack on with an RTX 2060, at the very least, with 16GB of RAM and nearly 100GB of storage space for the game. However, the devs recommend an RTX 3070 and a mid-tier AMD or Intel chip from the last four years.
These requirements have sparked somewhat of an outrage for a justified reason. If we go by Steam’s hardware surveys, most players own an RTX 3060 or lower, meaning that they will be locked to a sub-60FPS 1080p experience at medium settings. This is more than a beefy game— it’s an outright behemoth.
To add insult to injury, the game seems to have been developed with DLSS and FSR in mind. Seeing as almost no one will be able to play the game at high settings with respectable framerates, it’s understandable that the developers went down that path. After all, frame generation and AI upscaling are the future, though shoving it in our faces is far from the optimal approach.
The community chimed in on requirements, drowning their sorrows in tears. One Twitter user noted that system requirements like these may indicate poor optimization, which seems understandable.
A Reddit post showcasing Remedy’s announcement also summed up the community’s thoughts, most of it inconclusive in tone. A mixture of sadness and disappointment radiate from the replies, with many pointing out that a game’s minimum requirements shouldn’t be so high.
“The day finally comes [when] I see my GPU in the minimum requirements,” one player said, adding the requirements are a lot for an Alan Wake title even in 2023.
Alan Wake 2 is headed for release on Oct. 27, when we’ll get to grasp how truly tasking this game is.
