I tried looking for them at the Bioware forums, but my search turned up cold. Is there any word on what range they'll be? I'm contemplating buying a new system before I start school and I'm wondering how high I need to aim for.

Thanks in advance.

I'm quite sure I have seen it somewhere. Perhaps it's in Forum News or in the reviews.

I haven't seen it anywhere, but I'd guess that whatever is top-of-the-line now should be pretty mainstream by the time this game gets released. I don't expect to see the game before the holiday season of 2005 at best. We're more likely to see it 2006 sometime.

If you're willing to spend the kind of money it takes to get a PC good enough to run a game that won't be released for that amount of time, you probably won't be happy with what you get now when the game comes out. ;)

You do not really need to care for the specs, if you just check for the price-hop. You know: a long line of all kinds of nifty cards and things with steadily rising prices, until in some point they hop with a ridicilous amount -get the system just before the hop, and you should be fine.

This, of course, if you build your own comp. I bet DA is aimed for a bit older comps, something like 1 GHz, so no worry.

DA will probably require quite high system specs by today's standards, considering the release is still 2-3 years away. There have been no official specs given out yet, and probably won't be for a couple more years. So, it's way too early to plan for this one.

Yeah. I'm going to guess a AMD64 and a Radeon9800pro will be "minimum". Figure a "Pixel Shader 2.0 compliant" device. Most likely, the game will be multi-threaded. With AI's getting as sophisticated as they are, people are going to start needed a couple of cpu's to handle things.

Save up your money now, and blow the entire was of cash six months before the game is released, if this is the end-all-be-all for your gaming desires.

Bah... if any game requires 2 cpu's, they can count me out.

if any game requires 2 cpu's That's highly unlikely, unless they want to commit economic suicide, since very few people would have that kind of capability, even two years from now. They will want to sell a lot of copies of this game. Very few games are designed exclusively for high-end users anyway.

Chandos: cough *FarCry* cough

And besides, some games, like HL2 are so big that they can make the specs as high as they want as many people will be prepared to get a new system just to play this game.
Furthermore, a general comment: please keep in mind that there are probably a lot of PC dummies out there, who don't have a clue what the line-up of current cards is, nor what a Pixel Shader 2.0 is, and yes, that includes me.
Please, if these technical terms occur, put down some explanation too.

On the Half-Life 2 comment, I bought an ATI Radeon 9600xt 128mb gfx card. It came with the ability to get Half-Life 2 fo' free and has some stamp on the box like the 'preferred graphics' for HL2, so the specs for the game won't be all that high. I'm thinking P4, 512mb ram, 64mb+ gfx card (minimum) type-specs.

From the way Dragon Age looks, it will probably have the same minimum specs as NWN.

If i were you, Beren, i would shoot for 2.5ghz+ P4, 512-1024mb ram, and buy an ATI Radeon 128mb g-card. I've had the 9600xt for a couple months now and it has been performing extremely well. If you're sitting financially pretty go all out and get 256mb g-card, 3.0+ ghz P4 and go 1024-2048 ram. That should handle just about anything until the next big Intel processor comes out.

My computer (P4, 2.4ghz, 512mb, 9600xt) i have had about a year and a half and it has handled just about anything i can throw at it. The only game i have (and i have quite a few) that i can't max out the settings (without suffering below 60fps framerate) is 'Combat Flight Simulator 3'. I swear that game needs at least a gig of ram to perform at it's maximum "beauty". I would have to swipe out both my 256mb ram's and put in two 512's. I'm not gonna take that step until necessary.

I'm not a computer genius by any means though, and this is just my opinion. ;)

Here are the system requirements for Far Cry: PIII? hardly state-of-the-art.



Windows 98/Me/2000/XP (only); AMD Athlon 1 GHz or Pentium III 1 GHz; RAM: 256 MB; DirectX 9.0b-compatible graphics card from NVIDIA or ATI ; GeForce 3, 4, 4MX; NVIDIA-based cards must have ForceWare drivers 53.03; ATI Radeon 8500; ATI-based cards must have Catalyst drivers 3.9 Sound Card: DirectX 9.0b-compatible sound card DirectX Version: DirectX 9.0b CD-ROM / DVD-ROM: 24X CD-ROM This is from Firing Squad's review:

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/far_cry_nvidia/
In laymen’s terms, this means that NVIDIA’s three-year old GeForce3 GPU is capable of reproducing most of Far Cry’s brilliant eye candy, although at a significantly reduced frame rate.

Considering that the game is 2-3 years away from release, I think a processor of 2GHz+ is hardly unreasonable. It might sound a lot by today's standards as a minimum requirement but by 2006/2007 it'll be below average. The majority of computers these days ship will a processor of 2GHz or more (budget machines aside) so by the time DA is released, finding a comp with a processor faster than that will be no problem.

Amazing, here we are 2 1/2 years later and the game specs are still a big mystery, at least as far as I know. At this point a dual core machine does not seem to be that unreasonable, since it has been over 2 years since we were speculating, and the game still may be at least a year away from completion. The game may be running on outdated technology by the time it's released. Ironic, I'd say.

As long as its something new and well done, I don't really care at this point. When was the last time a new RPG worth ANYTHING was released? ToEE? If there was one after that, I must have missed it. I swear I'm in RPG withdrawl. FF V and DragonWarrior 3 are looking awefully good at the moment.

There are three RPGs that I have played in the last year that I thought were pretty good: Oblivion, Dungeon Lords and Vampire: Bloodlines. I understand that Gothic 2 was good also (although I have not played it).

There will be three more interesting games out in the next few months: NWN2, M&M Messiah and Gothic 3. But of all these games I would say that Dragon Age appears the most promising, at least at this point.

And I agree that the technology is not that important. Yet sometimes RPG games sit so long in production that what appears to be state-of-the-art in terms of technology and graphics in the beginning, turns out to be only average once it is finally released 3-4 yeras later, such as what happened to the orginal NWN.

I'm sorry, but I can't take many of those games seriously. Non-linearity may be the new by-word, but I feel like it was a failed experiment. The Elder Scroll games I played (Morrowind and Oblivion) just seemed to sink that in for me. Too much focus on making a powerful uber-character and not enough on the plot line turns the game into any ordinary cuizinart bloodbath.

NWN suffered from some of that, too. I had no problem with the technology. I admit it wasn't state-of-the-art, but it was nice nontheless. The thing I had a problem with was that the plot, characters, and planning all seemed to have been sacrificed in the name of technology.

Guess what my 2 favorite RPGs of all time are? Fallout 2 and Final Fantasy VI! One high-technology (for the time) and the other was 16-bit (I think, maybe 8). But they were both great because they were well made. Awe-inspiring plot lines with great game mechanics, characters that actually made you feel for them, and ways to develop your game uniquely.

I'm sorry, but I just wanted to burn most of the NPCs in NWN alive, and that would be true regardless of how they were animated.

Dungeon Lords and Vampire: Bloodlines didn't attract my attention at all, but that may be my general dislike for gothic and dungeon-crawl games, nothing personal.

M&M Messiah may actually hold some promise, but I'm not holding my breath. They fell into the 'technology and quirky game mechanics' pit a while ago and I haven't seen any signs of them pulling out.

...

I think I may have gone a little off topic on that last part, but here's my mane focus: DA could be 8-bit and bi-chromatic for all I care, I would still hold it in the CRPG Hall of Fame if it was well written and well executed.

I'm sorry, but I can't take many of those games seriously. Well, it's a matter of personal opinion then, since you lost the serious approach on your tirade regarding the current state of RPGs once you mentioned ToEE. Sorry, and nothing personal intended here. Nevertheless, DA may be close to the perfect combination of all the aspects you mention. It may even turn out to be a good old-fashioned dungeon crawl.

I am a pessimist. Dragon age is taking to long, which means that something went wrong. I do not know what but signs are there. The gap in pc games released is to big. They say: we made the expansions, we bring you jade Empire... So do the others.

system specs? They do not know themselves. It can be a number of things like an outdated engine, I am not a game developer but I think Bioware had to make a few big decissions and choose wisely to postpone the game. if it were anyone other than bioware, the game would have been rushed. As soon as they can predict the specs, then they have a version of the game running on a pc.

Or did they decide to release the game in a less rpg games filled year? All with all, we will know after the release. Until then, forget this game for 2006 and think more christmass 2007

I think ToEE was SOMETHING. Far from great, but once you got the 'unofficial' patch to put all the item descriptions back in and finish the un-finished quests, it was worth playing, and definitely worth the $8.98? I paid for it. There were also a number of good mechanics features I liked, like showing the area of effect for a spell you were about to cast.

Anyway, I'm thinking DA is being held back so long because they're trying to implement the best technology they can while still developing a great story line with good mechanics. Also, concidering some of the things that have been said along the lines of, 'You can be a Prince out to save his kingdom or a pauper out to make a name for himself', I'm wondering if they aren't developing entirely seperate plot lines for different starting character positions. Maybe that's just my own wishful thinking, but it certainly would take a while.