Warner Bros. Montreal revealed the full recommended PC specs for Gotham Knights, and they are frightening. The graphics card alone costs as much as a PlayStation 5, and that’s only to play the game on “high” settings at 1080p. The news comes a week after the studio confirmed that the Batman game will only run at 30fps on consoles without a performance mode, despite the “new gen” $70 price tag.
Gotham Knights is out October 21 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. The minimum specs were revealed earlier this year and are nothing to sniff at. You’ll need at least an Intel Core i5-9600K or AMD Ryzen 5 3600 and either a GTX 1660 Ti or Radeon RX 590 to hit the lowest settings. But it’s the recommended specs added to the Steam page yesterday that have people talking.
To run the game at 1080p and 60fps, players will need an Intel Core i7-10700K or AMD Ryzen 5 5600X and either an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 or AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT. While the AMD equivalents are slightly cheaper, the RTX 2070 still runs over $400, despite the recent drop off in card prices due to the crypto crash and inventory backlog. Want to push the framerate higher or, god forbid, try to output the game in 4K? You’ll probably need a gaming rig that spares little expense.
The recommended PC specs are especially notable this time around because Gotham Knights will only run at 30fps on consoles. Executive producer Fleur Marty confirmed there won’t be a performance mode in the game’s Discord, unlike other recent PS5 and Xbox Series X/S games. Horizon Forbidden West and Forza Horizon 5 both allowed players to choose between 60fps or a graphics mode featuring a higher resolution. Marty explained Gotham Knights’ exception as partly due to some of its unique gameplay features, like untethered coop that allows two players to explore Gotham separately.
But the tradeoff still caught many by surprise, not least of all because Gotham Knights recently ditched its PS4 and Xbox One versions and is part of the new wave of $70 console games (despite the demanding PC specs, it’s only $60 on Steam). The news kicked off a debate about what players should expect as a baseline for the next wave of holiday and early 2023 blockbusters. According to The Callisto Protocol, it’s 60fps.
Striking Distance Studios took the opportunity to announce yesterday that its spiritual successor to Dead Space will still arrive on time on December 2 and run at the higher framerate when it does. The horror third-person shooter hasn’t yet revealed its recommended PC specs, but it will be on PS4 and Xbox One as well as the new consoles. Of course, talk is cheap, and will see how each game actually performs once it’s released.
One question players might want to ask is what’s required for studios to hit certain performance benchmarks in the run up to shipping a game. Callisto Protocol director and former Sledgehammer Games co-studio head, Glen Schofield, praised crunch culture as recently as last month. Despite later apologizing for comments valorizing overworking developers, Bloomberg reported that at least some staff at Striking Distance Studios had indeed crunched to ship the game on time.