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We just caught the minimum system specifications (MSS) for Mythic’s upcoming Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (WAR) title over at The Greenskin, and were a bit dismayed at the differences between WAR’s MSS and those suggested for World of Warcraft (WoW). While The Greenskin’s Snafzg claims that WAR’s requirements “don’t appear to be much higher” than WoW’s requirements, we beg to differ.

WAR’s MSS under Windows:

• 2.5 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
• 1 Gigabyte RAM (2 if under Vista)
• A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
• At least 15 GB of hard drive space

WoW’s MSS under Windows:

• Intel Pentium® III 800 MHz or AMD Athlon 800 MHz
• 512 MB or more of RAM
• 32 MB 3D graphics card with Hardware Transform and Lighting, such as NVIDIA® GeForce™ 2 class card or above
• 6.0 GB available HD space

Note that WoW’s Recommended Specifications require a processor roughly twice the MHz of the respective Minimum Specifications, which are closer in line to what WAR requires minimally. In other words, by “don’t appear to be much higher”, Snafzg means “are twice as high”.

The fact is, anyone who’s played WoW on machines at or even slightly above the MSS know that gameplay is horrible. Even with twice the processor speed, four times the RAM, and eight times the video RAM of the MSS, WoW can’t be played with all video features turned on, nor played at an ideal resolution. Point is, MSS are baloney if one wants a decent gaming experience.

That doesn’t mean that WAR’s MSS are as misleading as those Blizzard published for WoW. In fact, perhaps Mythic wanted to be more truthful in regards to the MSS, but Blizzard’s portrayal of the MSS is far from unique in the gaming industry, so we don’t expect WAR’s MSS to be that much more accurate than WoW’s.

As a sidenote, these requirements are putting further pressure on us to not bother with WAR at all. One of the appealing design considerations behind WAR is the focus on graphics that don’t push the edge of system graphics, unlike games like Age of Conan and Everquest 2. Blizzard has long developed games that scale well for older systems, and we were hoping WAR would be released with a fair amount of leniency for older systems as well. Sadly, WAR’s MSS don’t give us much hope, given that our primary gaming machine is now our only machine - a MacBook Pro. While WoW ran perfectly fine on this machine with some graphics tweaking, WAR’s requirements appear significantly higher, which means our expected gameplay would likely not be pretty.

Compounded with the fact that WAR is not being released for OS X, and the rather large content removal recently announced for WAR, we’re starting to think that we’re better off investing our gaming time in the slew of interestring console titles hitting the market this autumn instead of vesting ourselves in a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) with poor performance on a system barely a year old.

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