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PC requirements hit a new high as the popular PS5 game hits Steam

The protagonist of Returnal stares at the camera.

Screenshot: Sony/Kotaku

Pop quiz for you PC nerds: A friend wants to build a gaming PC and wants to know how much RAM they should get. What would you say? 16GB for games is a safe bet, right? Maybe you could even get away with 8, if you just want to play mostly indie games and perform everyday computing tasks? Well, you better hope this hypothetical friend of yours (not that you don’t have real friends, I’m sure) isn’t planning to play the next PC version of Return Why according to Steam’s new listing of the gamethe recommended specs call for a mouth-watering 32 gigabytes of RAM.

Originally released as a PS5 exclusive, Return is one of many Sony games coming to PC lately. Return is a roguelite third-person shooter where you play as a space explorer trapped in an endless time loop. As one of the first PS5 titles that showed much of the promise of the system’s graphical horsepower, it’s certainly fitting that a PC version ups the ante. Word of Returnis coming to PC arrived during the very long Game Awards last week, where it was followed up by a list from Steam that included the recommended specs of a six-core processor (eight if you’re rocking AMD), a 2000-series GPU, 60GB of storage (which is modest, really) and 32 gigabytes of damn ram in the year 2022. The future is here, alright.

To be fair, the minimum specifications of Return they seem a lot more tolerable, but are still pretty high in the ram department. A four-core CPU on Intel or AMD will do, and true GTX 1060 graphics will do, but you’ll still need 16GB of RAM. For minimum specifications! I only got into PC gaming around 2016 or so, but even I know that the minimum specs are usually tailored to what’s left of previous generations. And that means you, yes you, with the GTX 980 still in the tank, need to move forward.

ReturnThe requirements of seem like a pretty sharp spike for anyone paying attention to this sort of thing, which is what I thought of the upcoming Dead spaceThe minimum and recommended specifications of the 16GB remake. Let’s put that in some context though.

In 2015, popular titles such as Relapse 4 And The sorcerer 3 required for eight gigabytes minimum and recommended (minimum specs on The sorcerer it was only six gigabytes). Flash forward to 2019 and Resident Evil 2The remake of required eight gigabytes either side minimum or recommended. Cyberpunkskicking my PC’s 32GB of RAM, eight-core CPU and 3000-series GPU, it wanted 12 gigabytes max in 2020. Just a year later, the gorgeous Force Horizon 5 had a recommended requirement of 16GB of RAM, as well as Resident Evil Village. Now Return (which doesn’t yet have a release date on PC) arrives with double the requirements in a fraction of the time.

Of course, a recommended 32GB spec is inevitable because we can’t get enough of the pretty pixels. But if you consider it Return was, at best, a sleeper hit on PS5 and it’s not, I don’t know, next crisis or the sequel to Cyberpunks, that number seems awfully high. If nothing else, Back specs are a sore spot as are PC gaming in general have more it’s more expensiveeven with the cryptocurrency empire burning in the distance.

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