Cinder City quietly halves its RAM requirements after 64 GB recommendation caused an uproar

Cinder City, an open-world cinematic third-person shooter set in a near-future Seoul from Big Fire Games and NC (formerly NCsoft), launched its Steam page with system requirements that immediately drew widespread criticism. The minimum spec called for 32 GB of RAM — double what most modern AAA games ask for — and the recommended spec demanded a staggering 64 GB.

The spec sheet was a strange mix of contradictions: minimum CPU was a Ryzen 5 3600 paired with an RTX 2060, reasonable enough, but the recommended tier jumped to a Ryzen 7 7800X3D alongside only an RTX 4060 — a pairing that makes little sense. The 64 GB RAM recommendation alone would cost upwards of $800 in today's DDR5 market, a particularly rough ask given current memory prices. Rock Paper Shotgun reached out to NC for clarification and received no response, but within a day the recommended specs were quietly updated: RAM dropped from 64 GB to 32 GB, and the recommended GPU was bumped up from an RTX 4060 to an RTX 4070. No official statement accompanied the change.

Big Fire Games is a studio under NC Corporation, a South Korean company best known for MMORPGs like Lineage and Blade & Soul. Cinder City represents a different direction — a third-person shooter with open-world ambitions set in a post-apocalyptic Seoul. The game has no confirmed release date yet, which at least gives the team time to continue tuning the specs before launch.

The silent update hasn't fully put the conversation to rest. Whether the original numbers were a data-entry error or a reflection of genuine optimisation problems remains unclear, and the community is still watching closely. With 32 GB now sitting as the recommended figure rather than the minimum, the game is still asking more of players' hardware than most of its competition.