Mass Effect Legendary Edition system requirements are surprisingly steep

Mass Effect Legendary Edition, the remaster of the original trilogy, is now available for pre-order on Steam and Origin. Along with the pre-orders, the store pages have finally revealed the PC system requirements:

Minimum requirements:

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: 64-bit Windows 10 Processor: Intel Core i5 3570 or AMD FX-8350 Memory: 8 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 760, AMD Radeon 7970 / R9 280X (2 GB VRAM) DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 120 GB available space

Recommended requirements:

Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system OS: 64-bit Windows 10 Processor: Intel Core i7-7700 or AMD Ryzen 7 3700X Memory: 16 GB RAM Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 1070 / RTX 200, Radeon Vega 56 (4 GB VRAM) DirectX: Version 11 Storage: 120 GB available space

At first, most gamers and tech journalists (myself included) assumed the remaster was built on the relatively modern Unreal Engine 4. Under UE4, these system requirements wouldn't seem so steep. As it turns out, though, Mass Effect Legendary Edition runs on Unreal Engine 3, the exact same engine used for the original trilogy.

Given that the game didn't get the expected upgrade to Unreal Engine 4, these hardware requirements feel a bit bloated, especially the recommended CPU and graphics card.

We can only hope the developers are just playing it safe, and that we'll get a well-optimized game at launch rather than a broken remaster on an aging engine.

Source: Steam