No, not easy easy. The first hint of Sea of Thieves‘ minimum PC spec has been teased by the devs at Rare, alongside some other nifty goodies for PC and Xbox gamers alike, and it’s surprisingly relaxed — this is not going to be an especially taxing title for your maxed-out gaming rig. You’ll even be able to play it on a half-decent modern laptop.
In the latest update blog for SoT Insiders on the game’s forum, lead platform dev Ted Timmins has an early look at what kind of PC should run the game at its minimum graphics level — known as ‘Cursed’, alongside the ‘Common’ low, ‘Rare’ medium and ‘Mythical’ high and ‘Legendary’ ultra — at 1280×720 pixel resolution and a smooth-ish 30fps.
And it’s good news: any machine with a graphics card from the last couple of years, as well as a half-decent CPU, should handle the game just fine. And that’s true of notebooks and desktop PCs alike.
OS: “Windows 10 Anniversary” (1607)
CPU: Intel i3 @2.9GHz / AMD FX-6300 @3.5GHz
GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 / AMD Radeon 7750
RAM: 4GB
DirectX: 11
VRAM: 1GB
HDD: 60GB @5.4k RPM
Both the GTX 650 and HD 7750 can push about 0.8 teraflops of graphics computational performance, whereas even a modest standalone graphics card should easily triple that in 2017. Even a laptop like the skinny new Surface Book 2’s integrated GTX 1050 has almost 2.5 times the processing power. Interestingly, you’ll need 60GB of storage space for Sea of Thieves — we’re presuming for some uncompressed audio or for the same sweet 4K textures that should be downloaded for the game’s Xbox One X Enhanced version. The recommended spec, which should get you solid 1080p60 playback, hasn’t been announced yet.
The Xbox version of the game is also getting a field of view slider — exceedingly rare for console games, enough so that it was shouted from the rooftops when Battlefield 1 got one earlier this year. It might sound like a small thing, but for anyone gaming from a couch that doesn’t like the tightly cropped field of view that most console games opt for, it’s a godsend. Given that Sea of Thieves is one of Microsoft’s halo titles for its Xbox One X Enhanced Edition series of games, the extra love and care that’s going into the dev process for both platforms is obvious.
Finally, one big extra that Timmins mentioned in the comments — Play Anywhere is being enabled for insiders, so progress and player stats will be saved across both PC and Xbox — and the game’s beta testers should be able to pick the platform of their choice. There’ll be cross-platform play coming in the future, too, which is another bit of good news for anyone with a bunch of pirate-loving friends split across console and PC — like me. [Sea of Thieves]