Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond requires more than 173 GB of storage

Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, the first fully virtual reality experience in franchise history, requires an incredibly powerful gaming PC. Recommended systems specs, which were released on Monday, are higher even than Valve’s Half-Life: Alyx and include an Nvidia GTX 2080 graphics card and at least 173 GB of storage.

According to the reviewer’s guide that accompanied last week’s press preview event, developers of Above and Beyond say their game also requires even more space for the initial installation. At least 180 GB of storage is required to download, unpack, and install the game files. The developer tells Polygon that owners won’t need to maintain that much free space once the game is initially installed, since future updates won’t be nearly that large.

The recommended system requirements are as follows:

• Intel i7 9700K (or comparable AMD)
• 16 GB DDR4 RAM
• Nvidia GTX 2080 or higher
• 180 GB of space to unpack/install; 173 GB once installed; SSD or NVMe recommended

Monday’s announcement continues a trend of ever increasing game sizes. It began in 2018 with the announcement that Red Dead Redemption 2 would require 99 GB of space to install on PC and consoles. Developers and publishers have gone to great lengths to reduce these install sizes, including Epic Games, which recently shrunk the size of the wildly popular Fortnite.

Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond launches Dec. 11 for Oculus VR and on Steam, where it will be compatible with other headsets. The final product includes a full single-player campaign, multiplayer modes, and a gallery of historical documentaries.

Update (Dec. 9): Following the publication of our story, a representative reached out about the system requirements for Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond. While the reviewer’s guide mentioned above did list “minimum specs” for running the game, they said that was noted in error. Instead, they should have been listed as the “recommended specs.”

“The game can absolutely be played on lower spec machines and players will experience a dip in performance,” the representative said. “The game is CPU bound more than GPU bound, and single player and multiplayer have different performance footprints.”

We’ve updated our story accordingly.

Update (Dec. 10): Prior to launch, Respawn reached out to Polygon to note that it had significantly lowered the required disk space for download and installation. Where previously the game required more than 340 GB of storage for the initial download and 177 GB once installed, it now only requires 180 GB for the initial download and 173 GB for the final installation. We’ve updated the article accordingly.