If you are a PC player running a system with DirectX 10, starting tomorrow you won’t be able to log into Star Trek Online or Neverwinter if you do not have a PC with a video card that supports Direct X 11 and Windows 8 or 10.
The original announcement about the transition away from DirectX 10 was made last fall, and Arc games and Perfect World say that the decision was made in order to improve the game performance and optimize the experience as well as set things up for continued development. This follows other games also moving to end support or add more current options, including EVE Online, The Elder Scrolls Online, and Guild Wars 2.
If you don’t upgrade your system and it’s not compatible, then tomorrow you will find that you won’t be able to log in and you will get a message about incompatibility on your launcher. Star Trek Online and Neverwinter will also no longer support Windows 7, which is of course a very old system by now, but many games that launched while Windows 7 was in active development kept maintaining support for the OS for a while.
Now, however, even older releases have an eye on the future and streamlined development. Since new content, as well as patches and bug fixes need to be created and tested, it makes sense that some publishers and development teams are modernizing the systems they support. Reducing the number of iterations that need to be worked on, as well as tested and sometimes held back before release to account for a difference, the benefits are easy to understand.
When it comes to upgrading your OS, they will support Windows 8 and Windows 10, with a recommendation for the latter. Nothing yet on Windows 11, but support may have some answers if you have questions.
For complete details on the transition, you can see the update over at Arc Games.