A cozier Lord of the Rings experience is on the way with Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game. Weta Workshop's hobbit life-sim goes live later this month, and the studio has shared the surprisingly reasonable minimum system requirements ahead of Tales of the Shire's launch.
Posted on the Steam page, the minimum system requirements are surprisingly low on the graphics card side. For the minimum bar, whihc is 1080p and 30 FPS on Very Low settings, you can get by with an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770, AMD Radeon R9 270X, or Intel Arc A580. The former two are both 4 GB graphics cards from 2013.
While the processor will need to be a little more recent (an Intel Core i5-7600K or AMD Ryzen 3 1200), that's a fairly reasonable setup, albeit for the absolute lowest settings. What about the recommended?
For 1080p and 60 FPS on High settings, you'll need a little more oomph. The graphics card requirement bar jumps up to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti (8 GB) or AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT (12 GB). CPU will need a bit more power too, moving up to an Intel Core i5-10600 or AMD Ryzen 5 8400F. Here are the full system requirements:
Tales of the Shire – Minimum System Requirements:
OS: Windows 10
Processor: Intel Core i5-7600K or AMD Ryzen 3 1200
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770, 4 GB or AMD Radeon R9 270X, 4 GB or Intel Arc A580, 8 GB
Storage: 3 GB available space
Additional Notes / Details: 1080p Very Low @ 30 FPS
Tales of the Shire – Recommended System Requirements
OS: Windows 11
Processor: Intel Core i5-10600 or AMD Ryzen 5 8400F
Memory: 16 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, 8 GB or AMD Radeon RX 6750 XT, 12 GB
Storage: 3 GB available space
Additional Notes / Details: 1080p High @ 60 FPS
This leaves some questions unanswered when it comes to higher resolutions, though. Running at 1080p60 on High settings is one thing, but for players who might want to push up towards 1440p or 4K, we'll have to wait and hear more about the state of the game.
At the very least, Tales of the Shire seems to be shaping up to be a cozy time in this well-loved fantasy universe. Despite being caught up in some delays and a drawn-out struggle to find its footing, after publisher Private Division was sold off.
Tales of the Shire: A The Lord of the Rings Game is out on July 29 for PC, as well as PS5, Xbox Series X|S, and Switch.
Eric is a freelance writer for IGN.
