Well…damn.

Over the past year we’ve seen minimum and recommended system requirements for PC titles climb steadily upward, but Dying Light has probably just taken the award for most brutal yet.

The game’s Steam page has today been updated with the minimum and recommended system specs for running the game, and it’s going to make all but the most die-hard PC gamers cry out in horror.

Here’s what you’ll need to run the game:

MINIMUM:
OS: Windows® 7 64-bit / Windows® 8 64-bit / Windows® 8.1 64-bit
Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-2500 @3.3 GHz / AMD FX-8320 @3.5 GHz
Memory: 8 GB RAM DDR3
Hard Drive: 40 GB free space
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 670 / AMD Radeon™ HD 7870
Sound: DirectX® 10

That’s some pretty high minimum requirements, right? A GTX 670 or HD 7870, plus at least 8GB of ram and a pretty good processor. The recommended specs, though, call for something a little bit more powerful:

RECOMMENDED:
OS: Windows® 7 64-bit / Windows® 8 64-bit / Windows® 8.1 64-bit
Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-4670K @3.4 GHz / AMD FX-8350 @4.0 GHz
Memory: 16 GB RAM DDR3
Hard Drive: 40 GB free space
Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 780 / AMD Radeon™ R9 290
Sound: DirectX® 10

To the best of my knowledge this would make Dying Light the first game to ask for 16GB of ram. The thing is nothing shown of the game so far sees to indicate that it needs anywhere near this level of hardware to run, and I can’t help wonder if this isn’t going to be another case of bad optimisation and bloated “requirements”.