Sure, Star Citizen runs just fine on my laptop from HDD. Simply dial the sliders down a bit, no problem. Actually I won't even attempt to try Star Citizen, however Elite Dangerous with everything turned to minimum ran at a glorious 6 fps on planets on my previous laptop (With GT 230M) and only took 30 seconds to load / generate a system map after each jump.
Of course designing a game to run acceptable enough on old hardware is going to hold back the new hardware. On PC it's your own responsibility to figure out whether you can run a game.
Magic scaling is the new secret sauce.