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. 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. 

"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:

Minimum:

• Processor: Intel i5-4690 / AMD FX 4350 -> Intel I5 4690 / AMD FX 8350
• Memory: 8 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GTX 780 / AMD Radeon R9 280X -> Nvidia GTX 970 / RX 480 (4GB+ of VRAM)
• Storage: 70 GB available space -> 150 GB available space

Recommended:

• Processor: Intel i7 4770k / AMD Ryzen 5 1500X -> Intel i7 8700K / AMD r5 3600
• Memory: 16 GB RAM
• Graphics: Nvidia GTX 1060 6GB / AMD RX580 -> Nvidia 2060 Super / RX 5700 XT (8GB+ of VRAM)
• Storage: 70 GB available space -> 150 GB available space

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 standard.

Baldur's Gate 3 is now set to come out on August 31, and—in case you missed it yesterday—will feature JK Simmons as General Ketheric Thorn, "a seemingly invincible necromancer leading an army of the dead toward the city of Baldur's Gate." Simmons is known for his previous work as the voice of Aperture Science founder and CEO Cave Johnson in Portal 2 and a Dota 2 announcer pack, and has also appeared in a few movies and television shows.