Indiana Jones and the Great Circle seems to have split some critics, which only makes me want to play it more. Our own Eric Switzer gave it 3.5 stars in his review, which makes it a decent, albeit flawed, game. Elsewhere, I’ve seen critics give it a full five stars, lauding it as a late contender for Game of the Year. I’ve also seen it described as torturous and miserable. This is a very wide spread of opinions. I can’t wait to play it and decide for myself if I hate, love, or feel ambivalent about it.
But I won’t be playing it on my PC. Despite the fact that my rig cost me about $3,000 only two years ago and I have an RTX 3080, my PC doesn’t meet The Great Circle’s recommended requirements. I’d technically need a 3080 Ti. What the hell.
Ray Tracing All Around
The standards are pretty high across the board because this is the first mainstream video game to require hardware ray tracing. If you have an older card without a ray tracing core, you’re out of luck.
In fact, the recommended requirements I’m looking at aren’t even for full ray tracing, just the standard features. For full ray tracing, I’d need an RTX 4080. I could technically still play it on my current machine, but why would I? I own an Xbox Series X, and I won’t have to worry about fiddling with the settings to enjoy myself. I definitely don’t care enough about the precise way light falls to buy a new graphics card.
What Happened To Accessibility?
This isn’t a huge deal – since playing games is part of my job, I have every console in the current generation on top of having a PC. If my build isn’t beefy enough to play a game, I can always just use a console.
But most people aren’t like me, who can consider spending thousands of dollars on every piece of tech a business expense that comes out of their taxable income. Some people just have a PC, and not even a top of the line one, because they play video games casually.
What happens to those people? They shell out for upgrades, or they skip the game, I suppose. Missing out on one thing isn’t the end of the world. Nobody will suffer in any major, substantial way because they couldn’t play the new Indiana Jones game. The hobby is a luxury.
What Could Higher Specs Mean For The Industry?
But I wonder if The Great Circle’s high specs are indicative of what the future will bring. We already know that studios are chasing higher graphical fidelity like their existences depend on it, which is making games more expensive and take longer to develop. This is a pretty widespread issue in triple-A gaming that won’t go away unless something significant changes..
And if every game starts making ray tracing mandatory for peak graphical fidelity, then everybody needs to upgrade their rigs. This would make the cost of entry for PC gaming higher than ever before. Gaming is already an inordinately expensive hobby – consoles are expensive. PCs are expensive. Games are expensive, and only getting more so. At what point do players start getting priced out of the hobby entirely?
Right now, it’s just one major release with high specs all around. I don’t really want to see this become a pattern, but I fear it might anyway.
Uncover one of history’s greatest mysteries in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle™, a first-person, single-player adventure set between the events of Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. The year is 1937, sinister forces are scouring the globe for the secret to an ancient power known as the Great Circle, and only one person can stop them – Indiana Jones. You’ll become the legendary archaeologist in this cinematic action-adventure game from MachineGames, the award winning studio behind the recent Wolfenstein series, and executive produced by Hall of Fame game designer Todd Howard.