toblix

Crysis

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So, I've played this for quite a bit, and I guess it's fun... but there's something missing. It's almost weird. Everything about this game is so advanced. The graphics and physics are unbelievable. And it's obvious the people behind Crysis are both extremely rich and highly competent. So, why is it that I'd rather play five minutes of any Half-Life game than one hour of Crysis? Why do I find myself exploring every corner and looking under every desk, finding myself totally immersed in Half-Life 2's arguably less realistic world, and still just pass by entire buildings in Crysis?

I know every last bit of information about the Half-Life games, and could probably correctly recite the names of all the characters and the level structure of all of them, but there's only a handful of memorable events, all of them seemingly disconnected from each other, and I guess my character is called Nomad? I don't even care.

The combat in Crysis is pretty advanced, with all the weapon modifications and suit powers, but I'd still rather walk down a zombie-filled corridor with my SPAS-12 than run through the lush jungles of whatever the island I'm on in Crysis is called with whatever the gun that's only useful if you hit the koreans right in the head is called.

Does anyone else feel like there's something missing from Crysis? Or that there's just too much stuff, and not enough focus or something? I dunno. When I think about it, I see Crytek as this team of highly skilled programmers and mathematicians, maybe more interested in showing off what their engine can do, whereas Valve has a greater focus on the player experience, tuning every detail of their game to a different kind of perfection, maybe.

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Just based on the demo, I had the same impression as you. My computer couldn't run the game at higher details, so I was forced to play with the lowest settings. What I realized as soon as I had stripped away the unbelievable shiney-ness of Crisis was that the core gameplay was miserable. It's funny, because I think Crisis is a very shallow experience. I've been replaying Deus Ex recently and I'm finding exactly the same thing as you did with Half-Life in that the world is more believable in a way in the sense that there is a distinct style that makes it memorable and an artistic direction which helps to drive the action of the game. With Crysis, and I know I've said this before, I think there was an interview where someone involved with the game said that their goal with Crisis was to try to remove all artistic style from the game, the implication being that when the graphics kick in, realistic detail would create the mood of the game, effectively replacing creative level design. Maybe the best comparison to make is to a game like Bioshock, effectively a contemporary of Crysis, and another game praised for it's graphics. As pretty as Bioshock was, the technology behind the graphics in the game couldn't match Crysis' photorealism. However, the often stylistic and exaggerated visuals (for example, the (spoiler) Fitzpatrick piano scene from Fort Frolic) made the game immersive not only at the highest detail settings but even at the bare graphical minimum. I think until it can be assumed that your average gamer had a rig capable of playing Crysis on even the medium settings, the designers should remember that immersion is not always dependent on graphics.

I'd also like to say that I think that unless a game is accessible and enjoyable on all levels of detail, it's misleading to label a game as having lower minimum requirements than are necessary to play the game the way the creators wanted it to be played for the sake of reaching a wider audience.

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Crysis is the movie equivelent of a jerry bruckheimer movie.

I enjoyed it, visuals were stunning. But strip it all away and it would be mediocre.

I feel like that's about all I can say about it.

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Youch. I think I might have to give this one a miss. I don't care how good the graphics are (and I've probably got a rig that could handle them, too) if the gameplay is average. I LOVED BioShock. I LOVED Deux Ex. I don't think I'd be interested in playing something that paled so badly in comparison.

I feel that I'm having a similar sort of experience with Mass Effect now, although thankfully it's not that bad and IS quite immersing.

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Plenty of people love the game to bits and it has good reviews pouring out its arse ThunderPeel2001, so I wouldn't let opinions steer you too much. I recommend you give it a go rather than just deciding to skip it. :tup:

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Watching the trailer, I thought for the first time about the irony behind the realism in Crysis and how different the criteria for realism are in games and movies. Crysis is considered the most "realistic" game on the market right now because of how realistically the graphics and physics are handled. However, seeing the game play, especially after the "twist", the actual content of the game is so stylized and spectacular itself that if it were a movie, where visual realism is to some extent taken for granted, we'd call Crysis ridiculously unrealistic.

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Hmph.

I tried the demo on my kickass PC and it could only run the game in MEDIUM graphics settings with no AA :tdown:

Considering that the graphics is all that people seem to be talking about, it confuses me that hardly anyone will be able to see them?!

The graphics didn't even look that spectacular to me. Nice. Detailed. But amazing? Hmmm.

Seems to me that it's just "throw it all in, don't worry about trying to steamline it, it's too complicated. We'll just tell everyone that the slow running of the game is a 'feature' of the 'amazing' graphics". Just lazy?

I know it sounds weird, but playing BioShock at max everything was a truly beautiful experience. Even Mass Effect on my 360 looks superb and is mostly beautiful. But I'm not sure what Crysis is adding by making everything so insanely detailed that 90% of computers can't even play it with High (nevermind Very High) graphic detail... It reminds me of the pointlessness of Alien Breed 3D II on the Amiga.

What's going on? Did I miss something? Can ANYONE play this game with its "intended" graphical settings without needing a Quad SLI based computer?!

* My specs are:

Intel E6600 Core2Duo 2.40GHz

4GB (4x1GB) CorsairTwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC2-6400 (800), 240 Pins, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 4-4-4-12, EPP

Gigabyte 965P-DS3

XFX 8800GTS PCI-E 320MB

Surely this is good enough? ;(

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The thing that I've heard at some places was that the biggest difference between Bioshock and Crysis is that Bioshock has a strong visual design, whereas Crysis just wants to be as realistic as possible, in effect shunning any notion of design. Hence, no matter the polygon count, Bioshock will always be the more impressive, beautiful, evocative one, graphically.

Now I've not played Crysis, so this isn't aimed at it in particular, but when will designers understand that realism is extremely boring in a game?

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With Crysis, and I know I've said this before, I think there was an interview where someone involved with the game said that their goal with Crisis was to try to remove all artistic style from the game, the implication being that when the graphics kick in, realistic detail would create the mood of the game, effectively replacing creative level design.
Maybe the best comparison to make is to a game like Bioshock, effectively a contemporary of Crysis, and another game praised for it's graphics. As pretty as Bioshock was, the technology behind the graphics in the game couldn't match Crysis' photorealism. However, the often stylistic and exaggerated visuals (for example, the (spoiler) Fitzpatrick piano scene from Fort Frolic) made the game immersive not only at the highest detail settings but even at the bare graphical minimum.
:grin:

So yeah, I agree.

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There's all this talk about how the Crysis devs wanted "no design" just photorealism. I'm sorry but that's bull. Things like weapons, the suit that you wear, the HUD, the enemy soldiers, the vehicles, the buildings.... all this needs to be designed, nevermind the alien bollocks. In a live action movie, an immense amount of preproduction goes into designing things (just look at WETA workshop). If you want photorealism, fine, but you'll still have to design stuff.

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There's all this talk about how the Crysis devs wanted "no design" just photorealism. I'm sorry but that's bull. Things like weapons, the suit that you wear, the HUD, the enemy soldiers, the vehicles, the buildings.... all this needs to be designed, nevermind the alien bollocks. In a live action movie, an immense amount of preproduction goes into designing things (just look at WETA workshop). If you want photorealism, fine, but you'll still have to design stuff.

It's not that they remove design from the game completely. Everything is designed. But they tried to remove, and I can't remember the exact words they used, but I think it was "artistic design" (meh, it might not have been "design"). But the idea wasn't that things weren't going to be designed, but that the artistic flare was going to be replaced with realism. Clearly with the alien levels, they still had some of that going on, and they may have abandoned the philosophy early on in development, but going into the game they contrasted Crysis to Far Cry in that Far Cry was very stylized because they didn't have the technology to create immersion any other way, and that Crysis would instead have its artistic influences stripped down from it.

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The suit that you wear and the HUD, fine they require design. But the weapons, vehicles, enemy soldiers and buildings are all attempts at recreating something that already exists. There is no design work there, just complex tracing :)

I mean take a look at their comparison shots of real life vs crysis and tell me they didn't just copy what's in the world as closely as they could.

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What's going on? Did I miss something? Can ANYONE play this game with its "intended" graphical settings without needing a Quad SLI based computer?!

* My specs are:

Intel E6600 Core2Duo 2.40GHz

4GB (4x1GB) CorsairTwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC2-6400 (800), 240 Pins, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 4-4-4-12, EPP

Gigabyte 965P-DS3

XFX 8800GTS PCI-E 320MB

Surely this is good enough? ;(

My specs are pretty close to yours. Except I only have 2 gigs of ram and the 640mb version of the 8800.

I was able to get a steady 20fps on high at 1280x1024. This is on windows XP.

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Something worth understanding about Crysis is that the majority of the stress is on the graphics card, so every single pixel counts towards performance loss. Just to put this into perspective, I have:

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 @ 3.0GHz

4GB of 800Hz DDR2 RAM (dual channel)

GeForce 8800 GTX 768mb

And running Crysis on 'Very High' with my native 1920x1200 will very neatly bring me down to 14 fps, yet if I play it on a more typical resolution such as 1280x1024 I can push well over 30 fps. Therefore, what resolution someone uses is a critical factor when comparing stats.

The game is clearly ahead of its time technologically, so pretty much nobody can realistically run it maxed out. Even on my machine which definitely sits in the higher end of hardware, I have to lower 'Shadows' and 'Post-Processing' (these make the biggest difference) to 'Medium'. Possibly the model detail to 'High'.

This is how PC gaming is in general, unfortunately. Even BioShock falls in frame rate considerably at times on 1920x1200, while on a lower resolution it's as smooth as an eel. Playing PC games is basically a great big pain on the arse, and the sooner they nail precision aiming on all the consoles the better. :frusty:

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I think that, in a way, the graphical realism of Crysis can't really be seen until you do something like fire a turret into the woods and see all the trees shudder and fall. That's really physics, not graphics, but the graphics might not really strike you until you see that. I only played the demo, though, on a computer that's not nearly powerful enough to run the game on decent settings.

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Yeah, the realism of the world does genuinely make the gameplay more interesting in my opinion. Or rather, it makes it more varied. I mean with most FPS games there's really not much in the way of choice with regards to how you take out some guys, but in Crysis you really can do all sorts ranging from just breaking their neck to shooting out structures/trees/etc to crush them. I really have enjoyed my Solid Snake antics in Crysis.

It seems like they have great gameplay mechanics and a great engine. The only areas I've seen a lot of criticism about is the hardware requirements and the storyline. But then, could all the exciting gameplay have been created on lesser hardware? People say they shouldn't have released this game with such intensive requirements, but would there really have been less complaints if they'd just released it with the 'Medium' settings as the maximum?

The fact is that Crysis is quite unique in its scale and gameplay freedom, so pointing to any other game and saying it runs better is a bit unfair. BioShock is an example that was brought up for some reason, despite the majority of its environments being in tight indoor spaces and having nowhere near the view distance, physics, and detail seen in Crysis.

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Hmmm. I was running it at 1280x1024, so I thought it'd be ok. The game "rates" my system at a Medium graphical setting across the board. If I add 4xAA I can feel it, though, which is annoying.

With BioShock I ran it at 1680x1050 with everything maxxed out, including V-Sync, and I didn't notice a single bit of slowdown.

Not sure if your Quad processor or more onboard GFX ram makes a lot of difference, but your proc will certainly help with the physics.

I'll mess around with the settings and see if I can make a difference.

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I don't think anyone can really enable anti-aliasing in Crysis. There're so many edges to be anti-aliased that it's absolutely crippling, and needs a serious amount of graphics card RAM (which is already being gobbled up by the huge textures and whatnot).

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Ok, well I just left it at Medium setting and kept playing. I quite enjoyed it. I appreciate the huge landscape and it did look beautiful at times. It's quite freeing.

I saw a boat on the horizon so I decided to swim towards and see if I was met with a dreaded invisible barrier... but instead I was able to keep swimming and swimming until eventually I was shot by the boat.. Lots of fun! :tup:

I really got the feeling I could have wandered around the whole beautifully rendered island.

I have rarely encountered worse enemy AI, however. The physics allows you to do some interesting things. There was a jeep with a gun turret mounted on it that kept patrolling the road I was following. So I took a random car, blockaded the road with it and hid in the bushes waiting to take the enemy jeep out... Brilliantly, they couldn't pass.

But they didn't slow when they saw the vehicle either... they just kept "driving", neither of the bad guys noticing that they were going nowhere. Hmmm.

Later, I also killed three bad guys and, being unable to move their corpses, I panicked when I saw an enemy jeep coming down the road where they lay. I braced myself for a reaction when they saw their comrades laying in the road... No need to worry though, they just drove RIGHT past them.

Hard to believe that, despite beautiful graphics and physics, older games like Deus Ex had better enemy AI... Big disappointment in this department and a hugely wasted opportunity for more tactical gameplay :tdown:

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Yeah I agree, the AI really is quite disappointing considering how technically accomplished it is everywhere else.

Although it's quite enjoyable cranking the difficulty up onto maximum and attempting to be all Solid Snake with them, the real thing (Metal Gear Solid) has infinitely better AI -- or at least the illusion of it -- which makes for more generally fun stealth play. Not responding to fallen comrades is a particularly lame thing; if that happens in MGS, they immediately raise an alert and have reinforcements all over the area.

Seems like Crytek ought to pay more attention to basic advances in AI in other games before progressing their visual technology any further. :tmeh:

Weirdly, comparing Crysis to MGS3 seems very appropriate as both put you in the middle of huge stretches of jungle/forest, with use of the land for stealth and whatnot being vital. I really do like this type of game and wish stealth play could be in more games without feeling tacked on. Not that Crysis has anywhere near the storytelling magic of MGS.

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Yeah I agree, the AI really is quite disappointing considering how technically accomplished it is everywhere else.[...] Seems like Crytek ought to pay more attention to basic advances in AI in other games before progressing their visual technology any further. :tmeh:

This is even weirder looking back at Far Cry awesome AI... How could they get worse from one game to another ?

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