The name's still Bond but at least everything is right this time, as 007 First Light's devs have corrected their system requirements after 'an internal miscommunication' error

It's been a good while since we've had a James Bond game, so the expectations of IO Interactive's 007 First Light have been high from the start. However, when the developers announced the PC system requirements for the game, all kinds of cocktails were shaken, and that's because they didn't make a whole lot of sense. Well, stir me a nice cup of tea as they've only gone and fixed them.

IO Interactive announced the new specs on X, along with some profuse apologies for the earlier mess. Where previously the developers were once recommending you needed 32 GB of system RAM just for 1080p 60 fps, it's now a far more realistic, and affordable 16 GB (the same as minimum).

The CPU specs haven't really changed, though the minimum is now a Core i5 9500, rather than a 9500K. Which doesn't exist. Oh my. Anyway, both sets of requirements are demanding a six-core processor to kick things off with, but even the recommended specs aren't asking for that much more, as the Core i5 13500 and Ryzen 5 7600 are both fundamentally still six-core chips.

However, they both support multithreading, which the min spec CPUs don't, and the i5 13500 also has eight E-cores, which is why it supports 20 threads (versus 12 for the Ryzen 5 7600). Not that I think those extra threads will make much difference in this game, as it's probably going to be quite heavy on the GPU.

At least, the specs in that respect now make sense. Previously, IO Interactive was suggesting that you'll need 12 GB of VRAM to cope with 1080p 60 fps, at the same time as stating that an RTX 3060 Ti is a recommended GPU. The only problem is that the graphics card in question only has 8 GB of VRAM. Oops.

Hence why the new specs now state 8 GB for the recommended setup, and the devs have also lowered the VRAM specs to 6 GB as a minimum, down from 8 GB. Why would they do that? Well, that's how much VRAM is on a GeForce GTX 1660, the suggested card at minimum. Top job IO, top job.

While it's great that IO Interactive has addressed all of this so quickly, these kinds of silly errors shouldn't have appeared in the first place. Even if the developers haven't actually tested the game on this hardware, it's really not hard to look up the correct specifications or hardware models.

I'm also a bit concerned that there's no indication as to what quality settings are supposed to be used with the minimum and recommended setups, and whether or not upscaling needs to be used.

Perhaps after all this kerfuffle, IO Interactive will spend a bit more time checking details more carefully and do the right thing by telling PC gamers exactly what they need to know before handing over their hard-earned cash.