Windows 10 won't let people with bad PCs review games

The Joker said:
Yip, as far as I'm concerned steam reviews are as broken as the ANC.
I rate the should even block you from buying a game if you don't meet the minimum requirements.
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Sadly with the broad spectrum of hardware out there and requirements being vague on some games, you might find yourself having a BEAST of a machine to run game X, but its requirements on RAM or DISK space aren't being met according to IT, and now you're not allowed to buy it?

So yea, I agree with reviews under par being blocked, but i dont think blocking people buying the product will work, not that they'd EVER do that...


EDIT: Crappy examples above, but heres a real-world one.

Requirement for older game says 3ghz AMD/intel cpu.

Now lets say joe has an i7 but its clocked at 2.9. We all know cpu is well above minimum requirements, but according to the stats its under. now he cant buy the game.
 
This I agree with:

On the other hand, some games are perfectly playable below system requirements (especially if they are disproportionately high) and this could lock out genuine reviews.
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A lot of system requirements are way overblown. Games like Watch-Dogs are prime suspects, where the system reqs were probably overblown to compensate for poor optimization and technical problems.

If you implement this system on Steam then I give it a month and publishers like Ubisoft are going to increase their minimum specs dramatically to lock people out so they can't complain about poor optimization. So the only people left will be those who are 10x above recommended spec, telling everyone that the game runs great because they just power through the poor optimization.
 
mottamort said:
Sadly with the broad spectrum of hardware out there and requirements being vague on some games, you might find yourself having a BEAST of a machine to run game X, but its requirements on RAM or DISK space aren't being met according to IT, and now you're not allowed to buy it?

So yea, I agree with reviews under par being blocked, but i dont think blocking people buying the product will work, not that they'd EVER do that...


EDIT: Crappy examples above, but heres a real-world one.

Requirement for older game says 3ghz AMD/intel cpu.

Now lets say joe has an i7 but its clocked at 2.9. We all know cpu is well above minimum requirements, but according to the stats its under. now he cant buy the game.
Click to expand...

Graal said:
This I agree with:



A lot of system requirements are way overblown. Games like Watch-Dogs are prime suspects, where the system reqs were probably overblown to compensate for poor optimization and technical problems.

If you implement this system on Steam then I give it a month and publishers like Ubisoft are going to increase their minimum specs dramatically to lock people out so they can't complain about poor optimization. So the only people left will be those who are 10x above recommended spec, telling everyone that the game runs great because they just power through the poor optimization.
Click to expand...

Yeah I didn't think it through. That said I just wish that steam would pay more attention to the user review system. I know it's changed recently but I still feel it gets abused constantly. I've even come across threads asking for groups of people to review bomb certain games for whatever the reason.
 
Graal said:
This I agree with:



A lot of system requirements are way overblown. Games like Watch-Dogs are prime suspects, where the system reqs were probably overblown to compensate for poor optimization and technical problems.

If you implement this system on Steam then I give it a month and publishers like Ubisoft are going to increase their minimum specs dramatically to lock people out so they can't complain about poor optimization. So the only people left will be those who are 10x above recommended spec, telling everyone that the game runs great because they just power through the poor optimization.
Click to expand...

Yup, I see a lot of room for some unsavory devs to push up minimum requirements well above what would be the true minimum just to prevent the lower end of the spectrum to post a crappy review.

To be brutally honest (and I might get crucified for this) I deem the minimum spec to be the hardware required to run the game at its lowest supported resolution with all graphics options set to the lowest possible setting and then achieving an average of 30 FPS.

Applying this logic will actually LOWER the minimum spec of some titles out there. However it is extremely difficult to say for sure. And the only way to put things in a "for sure" fashion would be to specify processor generations, but that will alienate the general population.

Take DX:Mankind Divided's minimum spec:

MINIMUM:
OS: Windows 7.1SP1 or above (64-bit Operating System Required)
Processor: Intel Core i3-2100 or AMD equivalent
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 7870 (2GB) or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 (2GB)
Storage: 45 GB available space

So is the AMD Phenom II ok? What about the Athlon X4? What if I have a Core 2 Quad? And i5-3220?

Same with the graphics requirement? Is the R7 260X fine?
 
PsychoFish said:
Take DX:Mankind Divided's minimum spec:

MINIMUM:
OS: Windows 7.1SP1 or above (64-bit Operating System Required)
Processor: Intel Core i3-2100 or AMD equivalent
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: AMD Radeon HD 7870 (2GB) or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 (2GB)
Storage: 45 GB available space

So is the AMD Phenom II ok? What about the Athlon X4? What if I have a Core 2 Quad? And i5-3220?

Same with the graphics requirement? Is the R7 260X fine?
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As someone running an older rig (Phenom II 935, with a Radeon 5850), this really grinds my gears.

I'm reasonably clued up about pc's, but I have no idea off the top of my head what the i3 (or i5) equivalent of my CPU is.. Because my CPU has a name of its own. Often the graphics card requirements are the same, i.e. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 or AMD equivalent. I mean, really, now I've got to go and do research on hardware testing sites to determine what my hardware is equivalent to? And hope that the site applied decent logic to determine their answers? Developers really should be able to guide minimum requirements a bit better than the current norm, because God forbid I should try the game before buying to see if it actually runs on my machine, then they get all upset.

Ffs.

/rant
 
Avatar said:
As someone running an older rig (Phenom II 935, with a Radeon 5850), this really grinds my gears.

I'm reasonably clued up about pc's, but I have no idea off the top of my head what the i3 (or i5) equivalent of my CPU is.. Because my CPU has a name of its own. Often the graphics card requirements are the same, i.e. NVIDIA GeForce GTX 660 or AMD equivalent. I mean, really, now I've got to go and do research on hardware testing sites to determine what my hardware is equivalent to? And hope that the site applied decent logic to determine their answers? Developers really should be able to guide minimum requirements a bit better than the current norm, because God forbid I should try the game before buying to see if it actually runs on my machine, then they get all upset.

Ffs.

/rant
Click to expand...

The reality is that it's extremely difficult, but there could be a potential middle ground. However it's still not quite right. Microsoft tried something with WinSAT to give your CPU, Memory, etc a "score" out of 9.9 (5.9 on Vista and 7.9 on Win7) this has however been canned completely in Win10. But I would much rather prefer to see minimum requirements that state something like:

CPU : Score of xxxx on SomeGenericBenchmaking tool v1.0
GPU : 2GB RAM and xxxx score on GPUBenchMarkTool v1.0

The issue however is to get publishers and devs to agree on a tool. Also when the tool gets updated or needs to get updated due to architectural changes in hardware some old scores will get skewed.
 
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