World Of Warcraft Now Requires an SSD To Run Shadowlands Expansion

Community General Discussion
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So screenrant has released an article saying wow will now require an ssd to play even within the minimum settings.

Looks like we’re moving forward tech wise

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That’s mean i can’t play it without one?

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Here’s the official requirements, for anyone curious.

Outside of niche situations, not really. Loading will likely be painful though.

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If you have any understanding of computers at all, you’d understand that this game can’t require an SSD.

It just loads faster with an SSD. A lot faster.

But it’s still going to launch and run just fine on an old HDD. This isn’t like a CPU where if you’re way under spec the game becomes a 5 FPS slideshow.

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Expected. I know some people will be upset, but time goes on and technology evolves. Can’t stand in the same place forever.

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I feel like it’s been something people should have switched to last expansion. Loading into Dalaran was miserable without one. Glad they upped the graphics card minimum, too, because up until last expansion I was still using a 770 and it was horrible. Sometimes the game was unplayable.

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Of all the criteria, monetary restraints aside, that’s the easiest component to upgrade or utilize in your PC.

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Agreed. Gaming has always been a hobby that requires financial input.

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Every xpac brings a wave of posters who are angry that their 133Mhz Pentium box can’t run WoW any longer and I’m sure Shadowlands will be no different.

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But I love my Compaq 386.

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Oof, suddenly i remember how old I am.

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I don’t think it’s possible to force the game to run solely on SSD. HDD will work, just take a while longer to load.

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there is already another thread on this. i have a 5 year old acer predator w/o a SSD, and it works fine on beta. i wouldn’t run out and spend major bucks for shadowlands.

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The sound of excitement!

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In the beta and as of now, loading is not taking any longer than any part of BFA on my HDD. That being said, no idea what changes will take place in the future.

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they left
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 760
as minimum which is super suprising

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I really doubt Blizzard is ever going to be dumb enough to force people to use an SSD to play their game.

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I’ve been meaning to get an SSD for my computer for a long time now. This news has finally pushed me to pull the trigger.

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Ideally they should have minimum specs as low as possible because its an MMO, even if people are playing on a potato, you still see them run by you, so they add to the game. I find this trend of upping minimum requirements on all games harmful to online games in general.

I doubt SSD is going to be mandatory, since it has the same interface as HDD and they’d need to be extremely rude to arbitrarily restrict access to people whose computers CAN in fact launch the game, but the game deems them unworthy of launching it purely due to launcher logic.

I’m more concerned about this happening to old graphics drivers, these people CAN launch the game(it might be a slideshow, but it’d work), but launcher can say “your potato is not worthy of launching this game, begone!”.

I had to get a new laptop because the prepatch launcher refused to launch due to integrated graphics being downright refused(it still launched retail, except it had text saying my graphics is not supported, which was fine). Not everyone is fortunate enough to just get a new computer at their whim.

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Good times. The internet was so simple back then.

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