Read the Q&A here
After the proposed system requirements for Heroes VII were published, fans reacted somewhat with disbelief, as they were setting the bar very high for players. Essentially, it seemed like you'd need a very powerful computer to be able to play this game. This upset some people and prompted Celestial Heavens to do a short Q&A with Limbic about it.
1. Are the current system requirements for MMH7 finals? Will the fans have to buy new PCs to have any of hope of playing H7?
"Until the very end of the development we will improve the optimization of the title and provide fixes enabling to cover a wider range of setup.
For instance, we did determined the system requirements based on the intermediate version that we are still optimizing a lot. For example: Since then we fixed issues, that were impacting the framerates by more than 50%.
Moreover, since the test were handled on an alpha version, we wanted to be 100% sure not to overpromised on product pages. To do so, the test we ran to fix those recommended requirements were based on the use of the equivalent of an "Ultra" settings mode and not "Medium" one.
We are making a 2015 game and aren’t aiming for high end hardware but if you have a too old setup you might have to upgrade to enjoy the full MMH7 experience."
2. Why post a list of system requirements if the list is not final?
"It is important to know that we have the obligation to share system requirements when we decide to propose a title on a shop. Indeed, those are parts of the minimum required information we need to provide even if the game is not final and unfortunately, we are not supposed to mention them as "provisional".
Current system requirements are the one we fixed for the Beta only (before solving previously mentioned issue) and improvements are to be expected for the final game.
It is too early to know how much we will be able to reduce those requirements but there are still several optimization that weren’t implemented in this beta version to be expected in the future.
3. Will the requirements be the same for using the map editor as for playing the actual game?
Since the map editor is directly based on Unreal 3 Engine software, it will offer thousands and thousands opportunities which also mean that we won’t be able to "optimize" it for all setup as much as the game itself.
At the current time, the editor is greedier in terms of resources and this should also be the case with final release. We will continue to work to improve both of them and allow different settings for both entities to help you better experiment the editor.
Follow-up: Limbic saw some of the fans' comments and gave this response:
Editor CPU usage:
"The editor is taking more memory and rendering time by itself due to some overhead that the game don't have to process (light emulation, multiple viewports, grid scanning, tools rendering, GUI...). One big exemple is that we support the "play in editor" option that allow the modder to quickly launch a version of the game with the currently edited map to increase efficiency. And at least for this the editor will require more as it emulates the game aside of the opened editor: Editor + Game > Game alone. This explains why we already stated that it's expected to release the editor with higher requirements than the game. It's also good to mention that like the game, the editor have a continuous effort about optimization."
Laptop GPU Topic:
"In terms of GPU you only need a DirectX 9 compatible card (like Heroes VI). Including Laptop GPUs. There is no system that will block the game from running on them, but you should consider that those cards are less powerful than their Desktop versions and they might be weaker at delivering a smooth framerate or good graphics."
We thank Limbic for their time. What do you think? 
