Two weeks ago I wrote an article about the announcement of the system requirements of two of this years most anticipated games – Call Of Duty: Future Warfare, and Assassin’s Creed: Unity, noting that the requirements seemed suspiciously high for what the games were, you can check that article out here if you want to know more. In the two weeks since then, COD: Future Warfare has been released and I’m very pleased to say that the recommended hardware was actually required, that being in the sense that the game certainly didn’t look bad, had an excellent selection of graphical settings, and was well optimised, all of which are signs of an excellent PC port that looks like it may well be the first COD game worth buying on the PC in the last few years.
Obviously Assassin’s Creed: Unity hasn’t been released yet and thus we can’t say for certain whether that game is a good PC port or not, but I can tell you that you won’t be paying £40 for it on Steam upon it’s release, because it’s not going to be on Steam upon release. In another move which seems to only attempt to alienate PC gamers, Ubisoft has pulled Assassin’s Creed: Unity, Far Cry 4, and The Crew from Steam for the Christmas period, saying they have “been in discussions with Valve” and that for now you can buy it from Uplay instead, which just so conveniently has the ‘reduced’ price of £40 if you preorder it, instead of the £50 it’ll cost you after its release. Considering Steam is generally considered by gamers to be the place to go for games on the PC, I can find no explanation as to why Ubisoft wouldn’t have their titles on it, as it will most probably harm their sales, and has already been seen, anger a community that is already not a huge fan of Ubisoft.
In a day that is already not going well for Ubisoft, things aren’t getting much better with the announcement of Far Cry 4’s system requirements. And here they are:
Minimum:
- Supported OS: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8/8.1 (64bit versions only)
- Processor: Intel Core i5-750 @ 2.6 GHz or AMD Phenom II X4 955 @ 3.2 GHz
- Memory: 4GB
- Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 460 or AMD Radeon HD5850 (1GB VRAM)
- Direct X: Version 11
- Hard Drive: 30 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card with latest drivers
Recommended:
- Supported OS: MS Windows 7 SP1, MS Windows 8/8.1 (64bit versions only)
- Processor: Intel Core i5-2400S @ 2.5 GHz or AMD FX-8350 @ 4.0 GHz or better
- Memory: 8GB
- Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680 or AMD Radeon R9 290X or better (2GB VRAM)
- Direct X: Version 11
- Hard Drive: 30 GB available space
- Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card with latest drivers
Once again we’re seeing pretty high end requirements with a 290X being the recommended card of choice for AMD users, whilst the GTX680 will be fine for Nvidia users, which is a pretty huge difference in performance. The 290X is roughly 35% faster than the 680, depending on the game of course, and it’s the same story with the CPU’s – a 2.5GHz quad core for Intel users, whilst for AMD users you’ll need the top of the line FX8350 to meet the recommended settings. Could we perhaps see very poorly optimised code for AMD hardware? That wouldn’t make much sense considering the next gen consoles run on AMD hardware, but until the game is released we just won’t know. Looking at the other requirements it’s nice to see the storage down to 30GB which sounds a little more reasonable, and the 4GB minimum instead of the 6GB we’ve been seeing on other titles recently is nice to see too.
I think it’s very odd for Ubisoft to be making the decisions they are, pulling three of their biggest releases from Steam doesn’t make any sense to me, and with Ubisofts recent track record on the PC I’m very sceptical of how well their new titles are going to play, but what do you think? let us know.
