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I suddenly feel a sense of camaraderie with the Battlefield 6 community, as EA says "a substantial number" of beta testers were rocking PCs that didn't meet the game's minimum requirement, and as someone who refuses to retire his old RX 580 rig, I can relate.
In fairness, the Battlefield 6 beta's system requirements are fairly modest. It's recommended that you have at least an i7-10700 CPU and 3060 Ti GPU, but the minimum specs settle for an i5-8400 processor and RTX 2060 card (AMD equivalents are, well, equivalent).
Still, we're living in one of the times of all times. With tariffs popping off as well as general economic uncertainty, my old faithful RX 580 desktop, with its only two upgrades since 2018 being a faster SSD and extra RAM, has yet to fail me. And it sounds like I'm not alone.
Talking to Eurogamer, Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl said a "meaningful percentage" of beta players were on rigs that sat at or around the game's minimum specs. And in a follow-up clarification from EA, it was revealed that "a substantial number" of players were using hardware below those minimum specs.
Without any hard data reported from that demographic, it's hard to extrapolate much from this beyond the general sentiment that, yeah, things are expensive right now, and it's clear there's still a large segment of the gaming population that either can't afford to upgrade to the new standard or simply doesn't care to (I fall somewhere in the middle).
Thankfully, Battlefield Studios says it's worked hard to ensure us plebs have a good experience too.
"We built maps, and had to go to our artists and tech artists to adjust these maps so they were more performant," said Buhl. "We've put in a lot of effort across the board to make sure these performance targets were set, and whether you're on min spec or ultra spec you're going to get the experience we're targeting.
"Min spec is certainly one of our most important specs [...] it's super important from both a commercial and business perspective - we want as many people as possible playing the game."
Only time will tell if Battlefield 6 joins the ranks of the best FPS games ever.
