Set for release on December 6th, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle has faced criticism since its announcement, largely due to its overtly “modern audience” focus. The game has been framed as a sanitized, commercial product, championing inclusivity while playing it safe with its narrative, targeting “Nazis” as the primary villains and striving to appeal to the broadest customer base.
Adding to the controversy, MachineGames’ decision to implement mandatory ray tracing has raised eyebrows. The game’s PC hardware requirements demand a fairly modern graphics card, limiting accessibility and leaving many gamers frustrated with yet another title wrapped in DEI-centric marketing and exclusionary technical specs.
Modern games often launch in a broken, unfinished state, plagued by poor optimization, largely due to widespread adoption of Unreal Engine 5. However, MachineGames chose id Software’s proprietary id Tech engine for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. While id Tech, particularly since its transformative sixth iteration, has been praised for stability and optimization, the hardware demands for Indiana Jones however paints a different story.
Ray tracing is non-negotiable, requiring a modern GPU as a baseline. At minimum, you’ll need an NVIDIA RTX 2060 Super, AMD Radeon RX 6600, or Intel ARC A580 for 1080p low settings at 60 FPS, alongside a Skylake-based Intel Core CPU or AMD Ryzen 3000 series processor and 16GB of RAM.
The recommended specs climb significantly, targeting 1440p resolution at 60 FPS with high settings. Here, an Intel Core i7 12th Gen or AMD Ryzen 7 7000 series CPU is suggested, paired with an RTX 3080 Ti or Radeon RX 7700 XT.
For 4K gaming at ultra settings, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle demands top-tier hardware: an Intel 13th Gen processor or AMD Ryzen 9 7900X CPU, hilariously mislabeled as a Ryzen 7, plus an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 or AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT GPU.
While the game’s overall performance might benefit from the id Tech engine’s efficiency, mandatory ray tracing, or more specifically path tracing which is even more demanding to run without any sort of option to disable it substantially impacts performance and therefore necessitates high system requirements.
Notably, for maximum ray tracing fidelity, the game calls for at least an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070, mirroring trends seen in other NVIDIA-sponsored titles like Black Myth: Wukong. Even at this level, targeting 60 FPS at low settings involves leveraging DLSS upscaling and frame generation at quality presets, making these high requirements unavoidable for enthusiasts seeking the full graphical experience.
Just like Alan Wake 2, developers of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are leaning heavily on upscaling technologies such as AMD FSR, Intel XeSS, and NVIDIA DLSS, bolstered by interpolated frames, to present seemingly ambitious performance targets. However, the reality behind these numbers paints a less impressive picture.
For instance, even at the minimum ray tracing settings, the game targets a resolution of 1080p using DLSS set to “Quality.” On low graphical presets, an RTX 4070 a modern and costly GPU manages only 60 FPS, but the true internal resolution is a paltry 1280×720, a 55% reduction in pixel count.
The situation becomes more demanding with “full ray tracing” enabled. MachineGames recommends an NVIDIA RTX 4080, a GPU that originally launched at a staggering $1,200, for 60 FPS at “1440p” with DLSS set to “Balanced.” In reality, this translates to a native resolution of 1485×835, well below 1080p and represents a near 60% reduction in effective resolution compared to a true 2560×1440 resolution.
Meanwhile, the maximum RT setting requires an RTX 4090 for ultra graphical quality, where the game renders at a native 1080p resolution before upscaling to 4K using DLSS on the “Performance” preset.
Compounding these compromises is the reliance on DLSS 3, which introduces interpolated frames. While this creates the illusion of a higher frame rate, these “fake” frames come at the cost of increased input latency and generally unchanged frame times which could potentially undermine responsiveness at worst or offer no perceived difference.
For MachineGames to claim 60 FPS with DLSS 3, the game must upscale from significantly lower resolutions while relying on fake frames, suggesting native performance may linger closer to the 30 FPS range in actuality, hardly an inspiring benchmark for a modern, high-budget title.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is a first-person action-adventure game blending combat, stealth, puzzles, and gunplay. While the premise is intriguing, its performance is less so especially when compared to other titles built on the id Tech engine. Take DOOM Eternal, for example: even without ray tracing or path tracing, it can achieve frame rates in the hundreds on modest hardware like the NVIDIA RTX 2060 Super and AMD Radeon RX 6600, all at 1440p resolution no less.
Remember when MachineGames actually cared about making their games accessible? Titles like Wolfenstein: The New Order (2014), Wolfenstein II (2017), and even the woefully woke Wolfenstein: Youngblood (2019) ran just fine on entry-level hardware of the time.
Hell, even GPUs generations old could handle them without breaking a sweat, built on id Tech 5 and id Tech 6, these games delivered decent visuals and gameplay without demanding you sell your kidneys for a new GPU in order to push the gimmick of “realistic” lighting and reflections.
Fast forward to Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, where the “minimum” hardware includes an RTX 2060 Super or RX 6600, cards that are several times faster of the old entry-level options. And yet, for all that extra power, Indiana Jones can’t seem to outperform its predecessors in terms of optimization. It’s unacceptable.
By comparison, the performance expectations for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle are underwhelming. While it avoids being the worst-optimized title of 2024, it still falls short for a game built on a modern, efficient, and well-optimized engine. MachineGames has managed to squander the high hopes PC gamers might have had for this title, further hindered by its apparent prioritization of political messaging and inclusivity over core gameplay refinement.
Adding insult to injury, the game demands a modern solid-state drive, not for cutting-edge gameplay features but to compensate for inefficient texture streaming. While not inherently a deal breaker as SSDs are quite cheap and affordable these days, the real pain in the ass comes as its hefty 120 GB storage requirement, highlighting the trend of modern game design failing to compress and optimize file sizes.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle makes history as the first game to demand hardware ray tracing as a non-negotiable requirement.
While many titles that support real-time global illumination or reflective shadows offer software-based fallbacks, this game takes a different approach. Typically, enabling ray tracing significantly impacts performance, but there’s usually an option to disable it. Not here. Remedy’s Alan Wake 2, which also pushed the envelope with advanced features like mesh shading, eventually introduced patches post-launch that made the game playable on older NVIDIA GeForce GTX hardware.
No such accommodations are present for Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
The inability to disable ray tracing in any form has severely impacted the game’s performance, compounding challenges it faced since its announcement. As a modern Microsoft title, it will debut on Game Pass, giving players little incentive to purchase it outright. Adding to the controversy, speculation arose that Bethesda quietly added DENUVO anti-tamper DRM just days before release.
While the Steam store page did not list the DRM, updates to the depot repository revealed its inclusion, raising concerns about the invasive encryption software.
This wouldn’t be the first or likely the last time a developer has quietly slipped DENUVO into a game as a last-minute bait-and-switch to bolster day-one sales. For example, Lies of P was updated to include DENUVO just three days before its release, sparking backlash. Ubisoft pulled a similar move with Assassin’s Creed Mirage, where the controversial DRM was implemented as part of a day-one hotfix, much to the dismay of PC gaming enthusiasts. SEGA took things a step further with Sonic Superstars, not only including DENUVO but also mandating an Epic Games account, further frustrating players.
Thankfully, Bethesda has confirmed that the final version of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle does not include DENUVO DRM. The DRM was temporarily added to pre-release builds to prevent leaks from game reviewers and journalists preparing early coverage.
Bethesda, notably, has removed DENUVO from past titles like DOOM Eternal, though only after gamers discovered that the now-defunct Bethesda launcher provided a DRM-free executable, leading to the game being cracked regardless.
The absence of DENUVO, however, is a small consolation when considering the game’s steep hardware requirements and mandatory ray tracing, which adds minimal visual improvement at a significant performance cost. These barriers will likely deter many potential players, especially since there’s little incentive to purchase the game outright when it’s launching on Microsoft’s Game Pass subscription service.
Indiana Jones and the Great Circle seems destined for failure, and not just because of its technical issues. Gamers are tired of “modern audience” pandering, a euphemism for poorly optimized, half-baked products cloaked in a superficial veneer of inclusivity. MachineGames’ track record, especially with the Wolfenstein series, doesn’t inspire confidence.
The franchise’s portrayal of an anti-Nazi power fantasy devolved into absurd caricatures: Adolf Hitler depicted as a senile figure who soils himself, and a Nazi colonized, idealized America we’re supposed to criticize for having clean streets and no violence, where KKK members coexist with Nazi officers.
Things only worsened with its sequel Wolfenstein II and especially Wolfenstein: Youngblood, where the focus shifted to politically correct storytelling centered around two ugly “female” protagonists who failed to resonate with players.
MachineGames has doubled down on this approach, and it shows no signs of changing. With Indiana Jones and the Great Circle launching on Microsoft’s Game Pass, there’s little incentive for gamers to purchase it outright. Piracy isn’t an appealing alternative either; the game’s steep hardware requirements and hefty 120GB install size hardly seem worth the trouble for what looks to be another lackluster release.
If Bethesda believes they can continue pushing style over substance, they’re likely in for a harsh reality check.
