As the memory crisis continues and players begin to complain, Cinder City drops 64GB RAM requirement and ups GPU requirement instead
Cinder City is a new online co-op shooter from South Korean publisher NC. Announced earlier this week, the game looks like a cross between The First Descendant and many other zombie shooters you may have seen before.
But it wasn't the impressive visuals in its reveal trailer (below) that generated most of the conversation around it. That honour instead fell to its system requirements, which were published on Steam shortly after its reveal.
Both the Minimum and Recommended specs are fairly demanding in their own right, but it's the RAM section that created a bit of a controversy. When the specs initially went live, the game asked for 32GB of RAM as a minimum, with 64GB recommended.
Setting aside the skyrocketing costs and severe shortages of RAM today, which have caused all manner of consumer electronic devices to shoot up in price, this is the first instance I've seen of a game asking for 64GB of RAM. For reference, it costs around £674 ($900) today to buy a 32x32GB kit of DRR5 RAM.
It turns out, someone made a mistake. In a statement posted to the game's Steam page, the developer admitted it was an error and said it's now been adjusted to list 32GB for both Minimum and Recommended.
"We apologise for any confusion this may have caused. The information has now been updated to the correct specification (Recommended: 32GB RAM)," the developer wrote.
"Please note that the current system requirements are based on our current development build," the statement goes on. "As optimisation continues, the final system requirements at launch may be lower than those currently listed. We will provide updated and more accurate system requirements closer to release."
The story doesn't end there, however. Shortly after the Steam page was updated with the new specs, players noticed that the recommend GPU was sneakily changed, too, going from an RTX 4060 to the more powerful - and expensive - RTX 4070.
This is not actually the first time a game has lowered its PC specs following player complaints. LEGO Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight developer TT Games dropped the recommended RAM from 32GB to 16GB prior to launch. As the current memory and storage crisis continues, we're likely to see more developers spend extra time optimising their games to take better advantage of more common RAM configurations, such as 16GB.
