Or, shocking as it may be, not everyone is blinded by nostalgia.

True.
Many are easily blinded by pure eye candy.

Edit: typo

Alternatively, not everyone is blinded by the need for high-fidelity graphics. Some people prefer the older styles of graphics to what is standard these days.

The Graphics emulate 8 bit pretty well, it's nice for people that liked say the old Ultima series (or my beloved silver box <3).
That is not bad Graphics, just an artistic choice. Honestly one that I don't think I can get used to again but on the other Hand I really do like 16 bit Graphics, to each his own.

...

Probably you are right. The palette is very close to those graphics in Titles like Champions of Krynn/Death Knights of Krynn, or those from the old KOEI games, specially the portrait direction.

But one of the artistic choosings is the Commodore 64 kind of graphics as well, in fact when you press TAB to launch the console it is shownwith the classic blue C64 console design, some color choosings, backgrounds...etc. The C64 inspiration is there.

yaaaaaaayyy!

grateful this is finally released.

thank you to gog and the developers and publishers of this game. been very much looking forward to it.

Well, yeah, 16 colors is 4 bits :)
You can do more with EGA though.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Commodore64_palette_color_test_chart.png
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/24/Ega_palette_color_test_chart.png

It looks fantastic! I might grab it later this year.

I don't mean this in a rethorical or provocative way, it's a honest question: What part of the requirements you feel is too high?

The way I see it on minimum requirements, the CPU part is just a generic "any non ancient CPU will do" (we're likely talking about laptop hardware), the 4GB of RAM is the bare minimum one can operate Win10 and the Graphics are integrated. DX10 is self explanatory and 500MB of SSD space isn't too much, the game seems to only use 231MB.

Looking at the game graphics with all the lightning effects and such, it's clearly not what we ususally see on GameMaker level, although it looks older than myself :)

As I said, it fails on my small laptop with a Celeron CPU. So, that's the issue; there are Celeron and Atom CPUs being made today that are not ancient, bet can't run the game acceptably.

Also, one might want to play the game on a 2GB system running Linux with the help of WINE.

Can you expand your opinion on this?

Is it about the Unity as the company (rules of use, build-in telemetry, their quite recent and bad decisions on pricing) or about something else, connected to the quality of the engine (like the coding itself)?

In my case, the Win 10 part is the problem. But in terms of the hardware requirements, basically expected something like this to say something along the lines of "If the computer can boot up the OS, the game will run great."

"8 bit" refers to the CPU, not the graphics. 8-bit computers or consoles tended to have a somewhat similar look. In this case, "palette inspired by the legendary Commodore 64" is correct, as the colors are similar, but not identical (there are more shades of various colors than the real thing had). The resolution is quite a bit higher, at 480x270 compared to 160x200, and there's no attempt to simulate the strict limitations on which 4 colors you could use in a given 8x8 cell.

As a side note, I respect the apparently 100% faithful adherence to the pixel grid, which few modern pixel art games actually do. I assume everything is internally rendered at 480x270 and then stretched.

Getting pretty off-topic, but briefly: mostly bad management, directionless development, and increasingly strict online DRM.

In my opinion the ram requirements are way too much, as with many other Unity games.
You bring a point I personally never thought though; that is, the OS requirement added to the game requirement.

Indeed "vanilla" (without ISO edits to make it run faster without the bloat consuming ram...) Windows 10/11 is a ram consuming beast. It makes sense.