Today, we updated the system requirements for Trails of Cold Steel II to specify explicitly that it requires a 64 bit operating system. (I.e. specifically Windows 7 64 bit, Windows 8 64 bit or Windows 10 64 bit)
For most of you this should not make a difference, but if you are affected please read below for how to obtain a full refund. If you are interested, you can also read a more detailed technical explanation for this change. The short description is that, especially in later parts of the game, playing on a 32 bit OS can lead to crashes, graphical issues, and seemingly inexplicable performance problems.
I apologize for this oversight in the initially published requirements and our internal testing.
Refunds for 32 bit OS users
If you are on a 32 bit OS, then regardless of your playtime or purchase date, you can of course obtain a full refund for the game. Please point out this announcement when you request the refund, and it should go through with no problems. Should your refund still be erroneously denied, then contact
[email protected] and we will make sure to sort it out.
Technical Explanation
Trails of Cold Steel 2 is a 32 bit executable - otherwise it wouldn't run at all on 32 bit systems. This generally means that its address space is restricted to 2 GB of memory. Note that this doesn't mean that the game can actually
use a full 2 GB of memory - the address space becomes fragmented to some extent, which might prevent some memory allocations from succeeding even if it seems like ample space should be available.
During the port development, we decided very early on to favor performance, new features and improvements (i.e. unlimited draw distance) and graphical quality over memory frugality, since basically everyone in our target audience has at least 4 GB of main memory - likely more - and we can make a better game for this vast majority by actually using this memory. To do so, without making the game a 64 bit executable (as that would introduce a lot of issues with library dependencies), we enabled the
LAA bit for the game. This tells the OS that the application is capable of dealing with a full 4 GB of address space. As a consequence, we also set the minimum RAM requirement to 4 GB, and the suggested amount to at least 6 GB to also allow for some background processes.
What we failed to consider was that this simply does not work on 32 bit versions of Windows - even with LAA, in the default case each program only gets a 2 GB user address space allocation - and although it's only about 2% according to the latest Steam survey, some players are still using a 32 bit OS version.
We discovered this issue by investigating a number of unusual crash and issue reports, and could narrow it down thanks to the feedback from various people who were directly affected. Thanks for your patience and help while we determined the root cause of this problem.
Given that it was a basic assumption during port development, there is no feasible way to make the game run in a completely stable fashion with just 2 GB of available address space, especially not without removing some of the new features that are appreciated by most players. Therefore we have decided to take this step to update the system requirements, and to offer full refunds for everyone who is affected by this oversight.
Future Patches and Other Issues
While several issues and bugs experienced by a small subset of players can be traced back to this issue, there are also some unrelated problems which we have been able to reproduce and are in the process of resolving.
Version 1.2 of the game should be released next week and will include loading time reductions, fixes for several crash issues, and also some gameplay and graphical improvements.
