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The world of simulation games is rich with a mind-bending number of unexpected niches. Be a goat, drive a train, manage theme parks of every permutation imaginable, or step into the humble shoes of a janitor charged with cleaning up the gruesome viscera of alien gunfights. Whatever your predilection, it’s catered for. In 2018, PC Building Simulator took things further, breaking the simulation games equivalent of the fourth wall. Players were invited to simulate building the machines on which they would play the very game they were playing, if they were playing it in the game. It gets meta. 
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Following a demo that was downloaded over 500,000 times, PC Building Simulator sold 100,000 copies in its first four weeks in Steam Early Access. Fast forward to October 2021, and the game was claimed over 2.5 million times in its first 24 hours as free game of the week on Epic Games Store. Building on the success of the first game, the tricked-out, overclocked sequel, PC Building Simulator 2, is set to release soon. To find out what fans can look forward to, Intel Gaming Access raised an IT helpdesk ticket to Phil Clandillon, Product Development Director at Epic Games, and part of the team working on the game in collaboration with UK-based developer, Spiral House. 
Careerist or Hobbyist
“PC Building Simulator 2 develops the original’s recipe for success with an expanded and improved feature set, making those dream PC builds look and function more realistically than ever,” said Phil. “It’s a game of two halves—Career mode and Free Build.” In the new 30+ hour Career mode, players run their own PC workshop, learning to repair, upgrade and build PCs while earning money for their business. Free Build gives players the opportunity to build and share their dream rigs using over 1200 real-world parts, including of course a range of the latest CPUs from Intel.
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“For casual players, the game’s Career mode offers escapism and relaxation via the zen-like experience of running a PC workshop at their own pace,” explained Phil. “Free Build offers real-world PC hardware enthusiasts the chance to deepen their knowledge of advanced PC-building concepts like overclocking, water cooling, and RAM timings.” Free-Builders can also use the game’s case customisation features to spray paint, sticker, and wrap their rigs. “Players can also use the new Lighting app to create fully addressable RGB lighting sequences which animate across the machine,” Phil continued. “Once a build is ready, players can export and share it with the community via our all-new .pcbs file format.”
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Really Real Rigs
The team has worked hard to bring the rig-building experience even closer to the real thing, including going deeper on vital details like cooling. “We now model the heat in the case and allow players to inspect the temperature of components via a new Thermal Camera app,” Phil explained. “The game provides granular control over air cooling via the Fan Control app, and water cooling has also gone up a notch, with a custom bench allowing players to add GPU, CPU, motherboard, and RAM water-cooling blocks to existing components.” 
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The game’s deeper PC building experience is underpinned with greatly improved graphical fidelity, and a step up in the realism of both hardware and software simulation. It’s not simply about jamming parts into a box, however. There’s a learning curve, lots of data to absorb, and an emphasis on understanding how components interact and work (or don’t work) together.
“The original PC Building Simulator was full of hard-to-crack technical challenges, and that theme has continued with the sequel as we’ve cranked up the realism and added more complex features,” said Phil. “One of the biggest challenges the team faced is creating parts which fit together in exactly the same way as they do in real life. There are so many different possible component configurations that it’s impossible to test them all manually. To that end, we’ve built automated testing tools to find collisions and incompatibilities between parts.” 
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The interoperability between components is a cornerstone of the game’s realism, so naturally the team has put a lot of effort into getting it right. “The way parts fit together has been completely overhauled for PC Building Simulator 2,” said Phil. “Players should see a big difference in the compatibility and user-friendliness of our next-gen components compared to the legacy parts we created for the original title.”
Only the Best Parts
Of course, the game wouldn’t work without making all the essential real-world hardware components available virtually to players. “There’s a huge amount of heavy lifting that goes on behind the scenes to make sure we get the latest and greatest PC parts into the game,” said Phil. “Our partnerships with brands like Intel are invaluable in bringing realism to the simulation, and we work non-stop to ensure we’re sourcing, modelling, and integrating components from all across today’s vibrant PC hardware scene.” The painstaking process of getting each piece into the game involves modelling, texturing, integrating and testing each one, which explains why there will sometimes be a delay between a hot new component hitting the physical market and its appearance in PC Building Simulator 2.
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“One of the most difficult challenges when simulating PCs is trying to ensure that the components benchmark in a way that’s comparable to real-life parts,” explained Phil. It’s an area of the game where the relationship between Epic and Intel has become particularly useful. “Intel has been super helpful, with the team making themselves available to sense-check our implementations and data.”
“We’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with Intel since the early days of the original PC Building Simulator”, continued Phil. “Through our many updates on that title, we’ve always added the latest Intel CPUs, and the team at Intel have regular calls with us to keep us up to date with what’s going on in their world around innovation and development. We couldn’t ask for a better partner!”
PC Building is for Everyone
It would be somewhat perverse to expect players to have the kind of next-level spec rig they will be able to build in PC Building Simulator 2 in order to play the game, but that’s not to say there aren’t advantages to running it on a hefty system. “There are two sides to consider when looking at performance and PC Building Simulator 2,” said Phil. “One, the title shouldn’t require a massively powerful rig to run on. Part of the game’s appeal is living out the fantasy of building the world’s best PCs, so requiring one of those PCs to run it on by default would be a little unfair! Two, for players who do have high-end hardware, we want the PCs they create to look as realistic as possible. On a modern rig running at 4K resolution, 8xMSAA, and maximum graphical settings, players’ builds will really shine.”
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The team is currently tight-lipped about future plans for the game and the franchise generally, but there’s every indication PC Building Simulator 2 will enjoy similarly numerous and feature-packed content updates as its predecessor. “At the moment the entire team is focused on polishing the game for release,” said Phil. “Once we get to that point, we’ll be processing the feedback from our community and deciding on our roadmap for post-release. We can’t reveal our plans just yet, but rest assured we have some exciting plans for the future.”
<a href="https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/pc-building-simulator-2">Wishlist PC Building Simulator 2 on Epic Games Store</a>

Preview: Build Your Dream Rig in PC Building Simulator 2