Yesterday, the God of War: Ragnarok PC port's system requirements were posted to Steam before its September 19 launch— and some of the listed requirements are already raising some eyebrows. One of the biggest points of contention is the 190 GB install size, which seems close to the combined file size of both the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 versions, respectively, which weighed in at 107 GB and 84 GB when the game launched.
However, the requirement of a PlayStation Network account for a single-player game has also drawn controversy—mainly because PSN is available in far fewer countries than Steam, effectively locking Ragnarok away from many PC players due to arbitrary account restrictions.
A silver lining revealed by a glance at the official system requirements is that these targets are all being met without using upscaling technology. While some games calculate the usage of DLSS or FSR in system requirements, the developers of the Ragnarok PC port at Jetpack Interactive, porting the AAA console-targeted Sony Santa Monica original, have fortunately sidestepped this misleading practice. Additionally, Nvidia DLSS 3.7, AMD FSR 3.1, Intel XeSS 1.3, and Frame Generation are all still supported despite not being used to "cheat" the system requirements, which is an excellent boon for performance and image quality across the board.
God of War: Ragnarok PC System Requirements
In any case, most of these system requirements seem quite reasonable, even the 190 GB install size, considering the much wider platform support expected of a PC release. It's not like we haven't seen games this big before. In June 2023, Starfield drew controversy for its 125 GB install size requirement, while Modern Warfare III has required 213 GB for a full install of the game with "HQ textures" since November of the same year.
PC installs for AAA games in the hundred(s) of gigabytes have been commonplace for some time, with the Red Dead Redemption 2 PC port weighing in at 150 GB when it was released in 2019.
However, God of War Ragnarok is a simple-player game, which makes its requirement for a PlayStation Network account to be playable quite egregious. It may also result in Steam Deck compatibility being completely off-the-table despite God of War (2014) running so well on the handheld and targeting a very similar level of fidelity, just at a relatively smaller scale.
