Hey there, good question!

While we opted for a nostalgic-y style, there are quite a few modern effects enabled that bring the requirement up. Dynamic Shadow maps, volumetric fog, realtime global illumination (approximation - not ray-traced), distance field shadows, etc...

It is possible that the game will run on lower end video cards, though on hand I only have an old AMD HD 6870 and an AMD R9 270 to test with. It doesn't run very well on the 6870, but it does run well on the R9 270. From that, I looked up the nearest competitor on the NVIDIA side, and came up with the GTX 760.

With large open worlds and dynamic lighting/shadows, it's a complicated affair to optimise for our small team. We have spent a lot of time getting it to where it is, and there are further strategies for reducing runtime costs at this stage, but with the trade-off of FAR lower visual fidelity (super ugly, jagged, low-resolution shadows or none at all for example, or large trees appearing/disappearing), or copious amounts of time baking scene lighting and managing level streaming. I know it looks easy from the outside, but it's very expensive and time consuming to make these changes, sadly.

There is absolutely still room for optimisation and it is likely that we will be improving this over time, though I can't promise much other than that, and it will always require some form of gaming hardware. There is the potential for Dwarrows to land on streaming services in the near future, as a possible alternative for non-gaming computers.

All of that being said, many of the settings can be tweaked/disabled within our settings, so it could very well work fine with lower settings on older/low range hardware.