Do I need a new computer to play BG3?

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If you have no other pressing need for a new computer and have a solid internet connection you could buy the game on Google Stadia and Stream it. No hardware upgrade necessary. The service has received a lot of hate and some valid criticisms but for me it works great. No subscription fee for the free tier and you can buy games and play them straight away on pretty much any screen. Not a hardcore gamer anymore, want to play a game but not upgrade hardware and have solid internet connection then I strongly recommend Google Stadia.

 

Assuming that was to me, the thing was that I'd shut down Firefox (it was trying to eat all my ram) so my partial comment was deleted. Sorry about the much delayed response but I just realized that your post was probably directed at me.

Additionally I don't keep the site open all the time because I have a terrible habit of having 30 - 40 tabs open at once so I try to close the ones I'm not really using ATM.

 

Hm, I recently did a bank-account check and discovered that I had a rather large amount of savings stored up. Enough that I can actually afford a good upgrade without bankrupting myself. My main computer is used primarily to run DAZstudio as an art program so I can get my artistic expressiveness out. Gaming on the main computer only happens when I can't play the game on my older system at all for some reason. But I'm nervous about the whole idea of having to port stuff around if I do buy a new system. As a side-note my Win10 install was on top of a win7 install so it had retained a few Win7 functions like the older picture viewer. Computer techie friends are now letting me know that that Win10 on top of an earlier OS system tends to fail hard at some point; and exactly that happened to me about two months ago. So I'm just getting finished with reinstalling EVERYTHING and not really looking forward to doing it again with a new computer. On the other hand I'm still very much interested in having a system that can play some of the newer games and my old I5-3550 can't even meet the minimum specs for BG3 which aren't much better than that. I picked up Sword Coast Legends early hoping that they'd get around to implementing more of the 5E ruleset like more classes and races but it sounds like the company that made it folded after one somewhat minor update. So as far as I know BG3 is the only 5E game that might ever get a complete set of races and classes. Larian hopefully won't fold up, turn to dust, and blow away too soon.

 

I've been told that the problem usually comes if you installed Win10 on top of the older Windows instead of deleting the older version. Not even sure how you'd delete the OS and then manage to install a new one; but it's been some time since I had to do an install without having even a malfunctioning OS to start with. I know other people who haven't had issues, but I have several friends who work in IT who tell me it's a known and fairly common problem.

 

That's easy, when you do the upgrade, it asks you if you want to do a "clean install" which will wipe all your files, or do an upgrade in place.
If you do an upgrade in place instead of a clean install you might have issues.
If you do a clean install it will wipe the hard drive and the old OS before installing Win 10.
I've been doing some temp jobs doing corporate migrations from 7 (or 8) to 10 these last few years and they all use a system to back up all the files, do a clean install, and then use SCM to push all the applications back on and then restores the files through whatever method (Dell Migration Tool, roaming profiles, something called "Code42", etc).

 

Upgrading to windows 11 can be tricky. System requirements are high.

 

Frankly, they are almost as bad as the jump from XP->Vista, although honestly part of that was Microsoft initially understating the requirements and then manufacturers' putting out hardware that only met the minimum requirements rather than the recommended ones with stickers that said "Vista Ready".