For a long time now Infinity Ward has been making some pretty big claims about the kind of power necessary to plow through their latest title, Call of Duty: Ghosts. Considering it’s a game meant to go cross platform with next gen consoles, it had better be packing some serious power… right?
Not long ago many users reported that if you didn’t have at least 6 gigabytes of RAM, CoD: Ghosts would fail to launch offering up some sort of critical-looking error box.
We now know from people who have bypassed the game’s system check that it runs absolutely fine on systems with as little as 4 gigabytes of RAM. In fact, it has been verified and documented by YouTube user “Super Bunnyhop” in this video.
In it, he proves that Call of Duty: Ghosts uses only a measly 2 gigabytes of RAM at most (with the rest being Windows) and that the “error” message is a facade. You could probably even skate by with 3 gigs.
So why ever would you claim that your game needs 4 more gigabytes of RAM than it really does (at a minimum)?
This is speculation, but it does seem abundantly clear that with the onset of next gen consoles sporting 8 gigabytes of RAM themselves, console players are going to be expecting their most beloved franchises to actually utilize as much of that power as possible. If they found out that the game not only doesn’t, but probably can’t, it would certainly cause an uproar for mainstream and casual gamers. And so, they’ve made a conscious decision to hide the fact by implanting a bogus error message. Believing that a misleading error message would be sufficient in covering up the facts surrounding the actual requirements does strongly imply that they think their customers are all dolts.
This is looking to be a fib on the same scale as SimCity’s big one earlier this year where developers swore up and down that it had very important and complex cloud calculations that needed to be done, justifying the always online requirement. Users later discovered that the game only had to be connected to the internet to save; the game itself played just fine offline.
