RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Cinder City, the upcoming "open-world cinematic third-person shooter set in a fallen near-future Seoul," popped some eyes earlier this year when it came to Steam recommending 64GB of RAM. That turned out to be a mistake , but the minimum requirement is still 32GB, which is a lot—more than the majority of respondents to the most recent Steam Hardware and Software Survey have, anyway—and as PC Gamer's Nick Evanson noted at the time, either the remaining specs contain other, still-uncorrected mistakes, "or the game is an unholy mess of non-optimization."
That complicates the usefulness of those system requirements somewhat, so here's a more practical way of determining whether your rig is up to snuff: A pre-alpha playtest set to run August 14-16, and you can sign up for a shot at access right now.
A few things to note: The playtest is open only to people in the US, you have to be at least 16 to take part, and it's all under NDA: "Recording gameplay, taking screenshots, streaming, publishing posts, or uploading any content related to the playtest is strictly prohibited."
But if you fit within that demographic and don't mind keeping your secrets, the playtest presents an opportunity to see Cinder City in a live environment and get a sense of how it's going to handle on your PC. Naturally it won't be the final word on the topic: It's a "pre-alpha" version, and publisher NC said when it corrected that wild RAM recommendation that "as optimization work continues, the final system requirements at launch may be lower than those currently listed."
Still, if the playtest runs reasonably well on your PC, you can pretty safely expect the final release version will too—and if it's a train wreck, hey, at least it was free, right? There's also the possibility that Cinder City will be a good game, which is always a nice bonus when it comes to this sort of thing.
And yes, there will be further opportunities to see how that optimization work is going, if you don't get into this round or find it kind of iffy: More playtests, which will seemingly be open to more regions, will follow this one.
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