Min-Spec vs AAA - The Secret Accessibility of the PC - Extra Credits 

An example of a single player game that recently embraces this accessibility (and I could not include in the script due to time) are most games on the RE Engine. Devil May Cry 5, the Resident Evil 2 and 3 Remakes, Resident Evil 7 and Village all can look spectacular at higher settings on capable PCs but can easily run on Integrated GPUs (and still look pretty acceptable). This level of optimization was likely not easy or cheap, but it shows what can be done when this is a consideration!

As one of The Poors, being able to run games on my decade-old laptop with decent results will absolutely increase my chances of purchasing said games.

Screw "artistic vision", if a game doesnt let me turn off motion blur, then its dead to me.

I wish steam had a feature that allows you to filter the games that are too demanding for your pc. If they can give us a filter about prices then they can give us a filter about ram and operating system.

Honestly the biggest issue my family are having is new games taking larger and larger memory. Like my sister likes playing sims, but a big update nearly rendered the game unplayable on the old family computer

As a person who uses a quote-on-quote "Gaming" Laptop that fails to meet the minimum requirements of many indie games, as well as tends to stutter and lag on 2D games, I find this topic highly important. Also, the stuff about cats and 2nd Dinner is too true.

Yes, this! Performance on PC is a huge hurdle non-gamer players have, since they don't have gaming oriented computers!

There's also the recent trend of games that used to be console-exclusive now also available on PC. Yakuza games, Horizon Zero Dawn, Final Fantasy games, SMT Nocturne remaster, etc. If this trend continues, I think I won't buy any consoles anymore going forward. Most console game developers whose games I care about have started to consider getting more of their works released on PC, because obviously they also realized that there's money to be made there.

Config files is also real handy when dealing with mods.

Absolutely this. As I get older, having an expensive machine just dedicated to my hobbies has becoming so much of a pipe dream. Getting a cheap computer has allowed me back into gaming but there's so much I can't do because my machine didn't cost £3000 and glow magenta

Um, i don't hear gamers asking for game-consuls that can push more hard-core graphics and processing power. I honestly hear more, as in a LOT more, asking for back-wards compatibility. The people who tend to demand MORE processing Power and higher-graphics, are the game execs (and I'm sure that has nothing to do with just charging more.)

It's also a Plus when Indies Tittle also took this accesibility and they also craft the game to low end players, and its play same as cool. Stardew Valley, or Blaphemous for a Example.

As someone that had a super potato pc for a while (even your “entry level” gpus would’ve been a huge upgrade) I am now going to work really hard to make my games run on old PCs.

"How often have you been short a squad member the would usually play with you but can't run the game" yeah never but then im the one who missed out

Age of empires is a great example of how to preserve a playerbase for a long time.

I'm a laptop gamer and I'm glad you covered this, though I wish you went more in depth

In India I have a second hand pc I got for studying and I love every game I played.

The mention of possible bugs reminded me of an issue I had in No Man's Sky where setting the graphics to low made the LOD cutoff so short that interacting with most anything would pull the camera out past a detail shift and kick me out of the interaction, or just never load the full detail model and collision mesh at all. I thought my save was corrupted or something.

Do you know why payday 2 is one of the most played games on pc? Low spec PC acess.

When Hello Fresh says they have a smaller carbon footprint, they are quoting an intentionally flawed and morally wrong experiment. They had students at Uni of Michigan buy full sized items (boxes of pasta, whole cabbage, etc) then cook a single serving meal, and throw the rest in the trash. Plus the fact that they only got 25% carbon savings over this incredibly wasteful process shows how bad for the environment Hello Fresh actually is.

I've always thought that one of the major reasons for the success of Minecraft in the first place is that it can run on potato computers.

Thank you for talking about how lowering graphic options and stuff makes a game accessibility to those of us who can't afford better CPUs, I can't afford to buy a fancy tech device just for gaming and I'm pretty sure that I ain't the only one

I am from Brazil and games here are way too expensive, specially with the increase of dollar. Using my computer is more viável with chapar prices of games (and use of emulators) than consoles. I still prefer to play on the Switch than my PC, but I need to save more money and get less games to do so.

"entry level" GTX1050s... Meanwhile, here's me with a GT730...

Man, fuck those games where you press "video settings" and you are greeted with a whole 2 settings: resolution and graphics quality, each with 4 whole options Also let me choose where the audio comes out of

I can't tell you how happy I was when I learned that my 5 yro laptop could play Dragon Quest 11. Never before have I seen a game that lets you adjust render resolution. This is also why I appreciate demo's. I would have never bought the game without being able to try it for free.

I love the fact when you said to set the graphics to low in the intro and the video quality went to 144p automatically.

Well, it's a good thing my game idea is already graphics-light, and I was _already_ thinking of a global audience. : )

I used to be a poor boy with a poor computer and now I'm a poor boy with a fantastic computer so I know the struggle of playing my favorite games with poor graphics to get it to work

Really enjoyed watching this episode. Brought back memories of editing CS config files and and I think it's a topic that should be talked about even more.

wait, you mean to tell me there is a higher setting than low?

3:58 I've legitimately played many games on 800X400 windowed mode, just so that I can run it at a stable 30FPS. This is very true and I wish more companies took notice of that.

Thank you for drawing attention to this!

Config files can also allow people with monstrous computers to push the limits the other way as well. For example, Minecraft shaders have many, many customisation options that you can tweak to make the game look exactly the way you want it to, from things like general quality all the way to the temperature that torches appear to burn at.

You forgot TF2, it's still being updated against hacks.

Meanwhile Doom: Yeah, you can run it on anything year 2000+

5:38 as that one friend that often has to look up system requirements first before joining friends on a new game they discovered, I can say it is one of the feelings.

"All the way from spain" I could make an entire video about everything cursed with that map...

love ya guys keep up the amazing work!

Config files and advanced settings can be great, but something to be careful of is what the defaults are. If 99% of players change a setting to something else, maybe consider making that the default. For example, starter guides for the first person shooter TF2 often have a huge section what to settings change to make the game far more playable. This can include raising the fov up from 70 to 90, hitsounds, damage numbers, better weapon switching, fixing overbearing view models, etc. All of these are big improvements to the experience but some of them are hidden in the advanced settings or even variables only accessible from the dev console. Config files are great, but please make the important stuff accessible in the settings and have a good default value.

This is a lovely episode, I started and still play on a PC. My first PC was actually a laptop and it was old and rather slow, after all I used if for school as well. I've always been into history (which I'm currently majoring in) so my parents got me a game that I could play as a 14-y.o. kid with terrible eyesight. The game they got me was Civilisations V which is a turn-based grand-strategy which is perfect for people with a visual disability. However wayy too heavy for my laptop and only by scaling down the graphics I would be able to play it. Now, a solid 6 years later I'm very thankful for that because it got me into gaming.

As a political lefty, I appreciate this video. In my opinion, the political left in recent years hasn't spent nearly enough time talking about the most oppressed group of all: *The poor.* Tackle poverty in general and watch as most other problems magically evaporate.

This was an excellent one to hear about. I wish you guys did more game-related videos but I understand that Extra History and Extra Mythology tend to get higher view counts. I just miss having more game videos.

Optimizing is super important to me. Especially since I enjoy city/village builders and their devs tend to dump so much pointless cpu hogging stuff into the game that it lags to death once you pass small size unless (or often despite) running a super high end pc.

Super cool seeing low spec gamer on here

Optimization really is something awesome to see in games. By coding the games to do more with less, you're simultaneously allowing lower end systems to pull off the same feats that would be expected from a higher end one, while simultaneously freeing up more of the resources of the higher end systems for even higher quality effects, or just simply letting the computer use those resources for other software like video chat or streaming. Just make sure that said optimization doesn't come at the expense of clear code and maintainability.

Watched this video at 144p

Sometimes lowering fidelity can lead to balance issues, such as environmental render distance in hardcore survival games. Being able to change to a lower setting can lead to an advantage in spotting enemy players trying to hide, which results in some players lowering their settings just to get an advantage. But in general I agree that trying to widen a game's options to include all sorts of hardware types should be an ethical choice for a developer as much as an economic one.

Being able to use a laptop to take my games with me on the go would be awesome even though they would have to be at lower visual quality.

low spec gamer is amazing, got me to try out some of the games my computer couldn't run normally

THANK YOU for covering this! As someone that grew up poor each family member (3 of us) could have at MOST a pre-made $600-$700 computer, preferably a laptop in my case as a teenager and later a university student, which would inevitably last only 3-4 years due to problems in the physical design of the laptop or computer as a whole (ask me about them in the comments). My family didn't know anyone who could magically custom build better computers for the price, and even then think of how few people that can make better custom build laptops for that price. It was only through a long series of coincidences that I recently had enough money to buy a $1,800 gaming laptop which WILL have to last me at least 10+ years. It's the first time anyone in my family has or likely ever will "have a computer with a graphics card that can make Minecraft look like the face of God." or "One of those computers with a fancy graphics card that has letters before it." Prior to this, my old laptop over the span of 3-4 years became unable to even play Overwatch (with a wired connection) without 3-4 seconds of lag every 8 seconds with graphics set to "cheese grater".

Man, I love XCOM 2. I would really love if the game finally loads on my laptop. Maybe someday soon.

as a kid i had only a old family PC to play on. right now i have gaming laptop... but my friends don't haha. so i'll still end up playing low spec friendly games!

Yes, a new extra credits!

I see that Pacific centered map you snuck in there! Nice!

A lot of fans have been speculating that Halo Infinite may be sticking to a simple art direction for these exact reasons. The past few games were SO graphically intense it's not even funny. Halo 2 Anniversary Edition takes crazy processing power, and Halo 5 didn't even get a proper PC version. A big part of Halo Infinite's marketing has been that "the game will launch fully optimized for PC". And while recent screenshots have improved since July's horrendous gameplay demo, it's still clear that the game is taking a "clean and simple" approach to it's graphics, instead of going full "next gen" high fidelity. And honestly? As a PC player who has experienced THE PAIN of running all my games at low settings to prevent my potato from catching fire? I'd say Halo Infinite could be taking a great step in the right direction here.

This summerizes my pc gaming philosophy since 1995. I didn’t get consoles until they were 10 years old, I learned to game on other people’s discarded PCs from age 8. I’m building my first gaming PC from scratch in 12 years, gaming on a toughbook cf-31 I picked up on ebay for $300 until I have enough parts

I always wanted someone to address this problem

Yes! LowSpecGamer, and an episode speaking about games and their minimum specs. As someone literally being addicted to a game I can barely play with my very underpowered computer, I can't tell you the joy of seeing someone tackling the issues of accessibility of gaming money-wise. I personally believe Mobile is a great equalizer when it comes to the issue but so many good mobile games do not care about optimization. A phone doesn't have to be a dedicated gaming thing, so it's easier to justify the price and bite the bullet. My phone currently is legitimately only very slightly worst than my computer specs-wise.

Graphics is only half the experience. The other half is the CPU(s). The AI in many games is limited not by how smart they can make it but by how much time it has to do the smarts. If the frame rate is 30 fps, then the CPU must go thru the decision tree of each unit 30 times a second. That's a lot of work. Smaller CPUs mean smaller decision trees. Which means the experience is not as rich for those on less powerful equipment.

2:18 Love that "no 3" T shirt

Very good view. BUT I also loved the Valve dig with the "no 3" shirt...

I've appreciated low settings just because bitcoin's priced me out of building a new PC for a while now.

And then there's me who plays from a goddam second-hand Asus using my mom's wifi.

The fact that you and Nick Pulos are friends is a crossover that I always find unexpected when he appears in your vids. I follow you for work out advice and I follow Nick for... ah...other kinds of inspiration 😉

This episode is pure love for gaming!

As someone who uses a non gaming pc I would love these settings

My last pc was 14 years old. For my own pc i’ve always use pcs from the trash or relatives giving theirs away as they upgraded. Low end is the whole reason I love indie titles. Games like Cave Story, 20XX, Offspring Fling, Recetear, Crystal Crisis, and Spelunkey Classic are what I think of as default when playing pc games. Its definitely shaped my taste in gaming on pc.

Whenever the exta credits, intro plays I don't know why super Mario 64 comes into my mind.

I play on a laptop that is, at this point, SEVERAL years old. I bought it off a more computer-savvy friend while it was still pretty new, and though I'm still impressed by all the things it can run (most notably for me, Overwatch, Civ 6, Guild Wars 2, and Crusader Kings 3), I do have to run most of those games on lower graphical settings and with an external fan so that my machine doesn't try to achieve vertical liftoff with how hard the fans go. Guild Wars 2 is particularly nice for this, since it puts all the visual settings under an easily accessible menu and even has 3 automatic settings to select from if you don't want to mess with things individually - Best Appearance (all graphics, including other player's models, are set to the highest setting), Best Performance (all graphics are set to the lowest setting), & Autodetect (which...is exactly what is says on the tin), and all of these can be further customized within these settings.

Victoria II, for all its challenges and learning curves, is very easy to edit and configure in the files thanks to the good work done by Paradox.

2:17 all hail the Lord Gaben and his bountyful blessing of discounts

While I am all for more accessible gaming. I feel like its worth noting that this doesn't always work for multi-player games. Sometimes it can cause some bad ripple effects in the game. For example, the game planetside 2 is an mmofps that had a configurable ini file. The most common use for this accessibility was to disable particle effects so that smoke grenades couldn't blind you, creating an enormous advantage.

Sooo true! You have no Idea ... the frustration!😂

im glad you made this video even with an upgrade i made to my pc i still cant run rdr2

Wow an Extra Credit actually about video games!!

I would like to add something to the conversation here: "Accessibility" settings, when referring to graphics, doesn't _only_ mean for low spec gamers. *TL;DR-* Some people need config files and graphics settings to make games playable for physical or mental reasons, not just hardware. There's obvious things like color blind settings, but also things like screen shake and particle density. I personally have severe difficulty processing what's going on in many games when there's too much going on onscreen, or when the screen is shaking or wobbling around too much, or when there're too many flashy particles or UI elements cluttering my view. Config files, and in some cases mods (In games where modding's acceptable, mind you!) allow for some games to be significantly more enjoyable, or in some cases even playable for me, by removing these effects. And i wouldn't be surprised if lots of other people have the same experience. I also have sensitive eyes, so being arbitrarily locked at a low framerate can hard on my eyes. Also, some games' implementations of anti-aliasing can be immediately painful to look at. Monster Hunter: World's for example. In some games i have to sacrifice performance to turn up the render scale or field of view for the sake of my health. Which of these options i go with generally depend on the game i'm playing and its art direction. Games with flatter colors and larger objects might not need as a high a framerate to be comfortable to look at, or i might be more comfortable turning _down_ my resolution to reduce eyestrain with things like grass, trees, and some games' fog effects. Overwatch is an example of a game that could really use some more graphics settings aimed at accessibility, or really even a full redesign in some areas. I find myself going effectively blind for what can sometimes be several seconds at a time due a combination of lots of factors. Screen shake disorients me, excessive UI elements can be hard to read, (White-on-white healthbar, anti aliasing on the crossshair making it less sharp, etc...) or HUD clutter that often provides no gameplay benefit and force my brain to tune out some portions of my screen entirely. (IE; The "on fire" mechanic, or random lines, pictures and patterns) Large bloom effects come off of everything causing important game elements to blend together or be completely obscured. The low field of view makes it harder to track where i am in 3D space. And the lighting in many maps can be either too dark, too bright, or in the worst cases- a mix of the two right next to each other. Meanwhile Hollow Knight became waaaay more fun once i installed a few mods to reduce a few visual effects and force my camera to stick to the knight, thus removing screen shake. I could actually process what i was looking at and had a blast.

Awesome!!

5:41 I FELT THAT.

"Of the five most popular GPUs, three could be considered entry-level." Me, where most of the machines we use are laptops with onboard graphics only: "A GTX1650 is entry-level? Hahaha, good joke..." 😕 Seriously though, if you own a laptop that doesn't have dedicated graphics (because, y'know, gaming laptops aren't cheap), finding games that are actually playable can be an... interesting experience. Also, this is one of the reasons why I find I spend more time and money on indie titles than ones from the big companies: you don't need to spend thousands of dollars on a computer able to experience the game as intended. Low hardware requirements FTW, IMHO.

Honestly having to mess with files in my game, especially if they come with a "not supported" warning scare me to the point that if mjnimum options within the game itself doesn't allow me to play the game on my potato, then I'm not playing it. I've had too many poor experiences playing games on my laptops that I don't even try anymore. Consoles give me the assurance that the game SHOULD run on my hardware, so there's more confidence in what I buy.

You know what is likely going to be really good for this? VR. Lightweight, comfortable, and affordable stand-alone VR headsets are the way VR will (and already kinda is) become mainstream. And that means designing games that output high resolutions and high frame rates on what are effectively moderately powerful smartphones.

Loved this episode. Here in Latin America consoles (and console games) are ridiculously expensive, so PC is often the only viable way one has to play. Steam having prices on my local currency is the main reason I stick with them: I can buy games from Steam at a reasonble price, which is just not true for games on consoles or even other virtual stores. Also, my main PC for gaming is my four year old laptop. It's really good as a work/study PC, but it's clearly not meant for gaming. So I love it when a game is either really well optimized or gives me the option to lower the graphical settings as much as I want to. Right now I'm playing Trails of Cold Steel 4, and they have a set of settings called "portable" for this kind of machines: It works really well, and the game looks pretty much the same as it does on PS4.

Sometimes, those ULQ settings give an unfair advantage over the default settings, meaning those who don't know or want to decrease the quality are at a disadvantage simply because they dont have the time, patience, know how, or interest to change it in that way War Thunder is one of the most egregious examples

Oh thank you thank you thank you. Someone understands me an my country. I went the console route because pc games are single-minded on higher visual quality, to the point of my modest pc not being able to run 5 year old games.

I admire games that put in the work to allow a game to run at low settings - it's seriously impressive to see a game so well designed that it actually looks pretty nice at low settings. The Resident Evil games in the RE engine in particular must have used some kind of witchcraft to be able to run on half a potato and still actually look decent.

In Brazil, minimum wage is LESS than 200USD. Depending on which platform you choose, games are only available if you import them (which costs $60 for the game + $15-20 shipping, and then add 60% over it all as taxes). Imagine playing minimum wage for a single AAA physical game. Even for consoles that are officially distributed here (like Playstation and Xbox) a new AAA release can cost almost $100.

Really wish the video went more into design for a lower spec as well. There are some titles that just due to some design choices and really good art direction look and play excellent on many different tiers of hardware. This titles play so well to the limitations they often hold up better into the future as well.

I definitely feel that some genres should majorly consider minimum requirements; like co-op shooters; so many great and promising games starve themselves of wider player base because only the most high end of rigs can run it. Looking at you GTFO.

a good example of an out of game config file is planetside 2. That game gives you all the options in its in file

Honourable mention: Some games don't force you to download the high-quality assets if you know you can't use them, but instead let you play a minimum viable version that also happens to be much lighter on disk space.

+1 I'm literary happy just being able to play the game @ a reasonable framerate XD (more so when i was younger and couldn't afford more beefy hardware, but it's still the same now.. just that I can financially afford to crank up the settings now )

Watching this video in 144p because it's apropos.

3:35 I have never heard of this. Honestly, I remember trying to run it when it launched and getting 5FPS even using LowSpecGamer's tips to make it work. Right now I'm playing another Battle Royale (Super Mecha Champions) which I'm enjoying greatly, but it is not designed for my computer (I barely top at 25 fps, with many many possibilities of lag, freezing, and often even crashing). Might look that up honestly.

As someone who’s too young to get a job and to buy top of the line PC stuff that I’ve wanted to get, I’m super bummed out that I can’t play or can hardly play games like Warzone or even modded Minecraft with a hand-me-down laptop that’s starting to show its age. Having settings like this would be a god send, especially if they’re easy to figure out how to change

The big reason I mostly play old games and indie games is because my dusty little laptop can't handle big games. And it's also why I absolutely adore Borderlands 2 for running on what is realistically a toaster if you reduce the visuals just a little bit

I feel represented ! I'm from Brazil and buying a current generation console with a minimum wage, if you live by yourself, is pretty much impossible since it would take 5 or 6 months of salary to buy

Good stuff

Finally I feel represented.

I've been struggling running games on a laptop for many years because of space and mobility constraints. I can't wait to have these alleviated, but until then I'll have to be very careful what games I buy. Even disk space has been a struggle at times!