Surprise! It is the beginning of the end. Okay that's a little bit dramatic, but when I tell you that I stopped breathing the moment I saw those monstrous Alan Wake 2 PC specs, I am not lying. This is the first time that I have had to sit with an uncomfortable fact: my three-year-old gaming laptop doesn't meet the minimum system requirements needed to run a game. Given that I paid almost £2,000 for this thing back in 2020, I'm more than a little bit upset.
While this Alan Wake 2 revelation – that came one week out from release, no less – was not the first worrying sign I've seen from my ageing laptop, it's by far the most significant. Being reminded of its mortality made me panic enough to seriously consider a PS5 Slim, but after giving it some more thought about what it means for PC optimization, I've reason to hope there's life in the old guy yet.
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Check out our Alan Wake 2 review to see why it's an editor's pick in our books.
Graphics cards are finicky things to upgrade in a gaming laptop. Soldered to the motherboard and essentially impossible to budge, I've known since day one that my beloved HP Pavilion would fade into technical obsolescence eventually because of it. I thought I'd made peace with my ageing GPU and its eventual need for replacement, but was apparently wrong about that.
The thought of having to play Alan Wake 2 on my Xbox Series S fills me with white hot dread. Not only am I frankly awful at third-person shooters without a mouse and keyboard setup, I'm resentful of the fact that I'm getting no say in the matter. There's no issue at all with Alan Wake 2's demanding PC specs on the higher end – naturally, cranking up the quality with full ray-tracing is going to need a lot more juice than my GTX 1650 Ti can squeeze out. But even the usually more realistic "recommended" settings are mind-boggling. Essentially, if you're running a GPU that's more than a couple years old, many of us PC players will be left out in the cold.
Alan Wake 2's system requirements will come as an especially sobering sting if you're one of many who pre-ordered it. Developer Remedy Entertainment waited a mere week before launch to announce its PC specs, causing many let-down fans (including myself) to share their frustrations on Twitter. It all begs the question of whether Alan Wake 2 is properly optimized for a non-console experience at all, unless you're running the highest end GPUs on the market.
Fidelity, or lack thereof
This year has been filled with fantastic new games for 2023, many of which have seen successful consoles and PC launches without pricing players out in terms of GPU specs. That's what made the Alan Wake 2 specs feel so left field: to my mind, no other PC game released this year has been as demanding on the low end of the graphics spectrum.
It might not support ray-tracing, but Baldur's Gate 3's minimum system requirements for PC indicate that a 2014 graphics card would be able to run the game at its lowest settings, while the PS5 version still translates to a stunning 60fps display in dynamic resolution. A more fair comparison might be the PC version of Resident Evil 4 Remake. In my mind one of the best horror games of the year, it can make do with a GTX 1050 Ti graphics card, circa 2016, with ray-tracing turned off. Meanwhile, the oldest GPU expected to get Alan Wake 2 up and running is an RTX 3060 that launched in 2021.
It all begs the question of whether Alan Wake 2 is properly optimized for a non-console experience at all.
This is not a contest of which games can perform with the oldest tech, and I'm not saying that you'd have a brilliant time playing either of the above titles on their lowest possible settings. Rather, Alan Wake 2's PC optimization – or supposed lack thereof – points to the wider issue of financial accessibility in video games. I'm fortunate enough to have my Xbox Series S handy as a backup. I can only imagine the let down experienced by hundreds of excited fans when their 13-year long wait for an Alan Wake sequel ended in disappointment and refund requests last weekend.
Alan Wake 2's minimum PC specs seem to be something of a rogue entity. It's bizarre that my three-year old GPU is already too dated this time around, but given the track record established this year alone, it seems most modern games are shipped with optimized settings to suit less high-tech setups. All suggestions indicate that my 2020 HP Pavilion 15 should hold out just long enough for me to save up for a proper rig in the next three years or so – and if not, I guess I'd better work on that controller aim.
For more things that go bump in the night, check out these upcoming horror games.
