Features 10 Years On: Crysis

Aren't there a bunch of mods that improve the look and feel of Crysis, bringing it up to the modern era? At least high-res textures I'm almost sure I've seen before.

 

The part of the game where everything turns frozen will still bring my 970 to its knees at max settings with AA (15-20fps)

..although that's probably more to do with poorly optimised shader code than any weakness of the 970.

 

Yeah, in all the "but can it run Crysis", I never actually found out at what point in GPU history it was that Crysis became fairly playable. Like, I have an R9 290X... will that do the job? (I know it'll make my smart meter go mad)

 

Completely agree with the article.

Purely gameplay-wise (the first half of) Crysis definitely ranks in my top 3 FPSs.
The C1 nanosuit was a brilliant, super versatile game mechanic. It's a shame Crytek clearly didn't get that and dumbed it down in the sequel. (Haven't played C3 yet)

Feel an urge to reinstall (+ Pydon's Natural Mod for pitch black nights)... but I'd have to track down the box... and a DVD drive.

 

Yeah, the first half was fine. The floaty bit inside alien ship was sh!te and things didn't really improve after that.

Much like the initial Far Cry - awesome to begin with, then progressively silly and pants.

 

I heard someone mention crysis

 

Crysis can still push systems hard if you scale things up appropriately. Try playing it at 4K with all the bells and whistles...

And it's still the most gorgeous game in existence:

Getting slow Gunny - back in the day you would've been on this in minutes.

 

not my fault im in the middle of prepping/painting a room.

 

Tomshardware did a bunch of benches recently with cards that came out since Crysis.
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/crysis-10-year-anniversary-benchmarks,review-34091.html

 

I am very glad you took a ten-year look at Crysis. It deserves every gamer's attention.

I absolutely loved - and still do love - playing the original game AND its successors. With isolated exceptions (!) the game engine is superb, the AI excellent, the level design outstanding, and the production top-notch. Crysis 2 and 3 made some concessions as console games - primarily in less-fluid combat - but still provide jaw-dropping graphics, meticulous design, good scripts, perfect voice acting, great music, and terrific gameplay. The boss battles in 3, especially, are just magnificent.

Crysis 1 / Warhead also had "quicksave" so you could try and retry endless variations on tactics over the wide range of levels and combat situations. This extended the replay value to nearly infinite and was, idiotically, dropped in the Crysis 2 & 3 as some kind of bow to console praxis.

In Crysis 1 I disliked only the post-mine sequence, travelling through the cave; and I found the ice levels less intuitive and more linear than the first half. But, so much else was wonderful.

Crysis was so hyped before release that massive numbers of gamers were poised to hate it. They found an excuse in the graphics settings, where Crytek had unwisely attempted some future-proofing. Despite it obviously being beyond the capabilities of 2007-08 GPUs, users insisted on turning the graphics "up to 11" - and then bitching about performance! Go figure.

In fact the game was incredibly scalable. I first played it on a GeForce 4 card with 256MB, on a circa 2000 Pentium. This was at minimum resolution, but it ran and was a blast. Today it runs on my Dell tablet. To ever question its playability was either specious trolling or truly ignorant.

I constantly look for another FPS with anything like the gameplay and polish of the Crysis quad. But we get almost nothing beyond endless stupid melee concoctions. Instead of enemies intelligently taking cover, standing off, or flanking, they just mindlessly run at you. That's because melee requires only a fraction of the programming smarts as do Crysis-level ranged tactics. When we do get something with a few brains, the combat mechanics (movement, weapon aiming etc) are wretchedly clunky compared to all the Crysis games.

When I heard the low sales figures for Crysis, which was PC-only, I feared we might 'never' see another game as good. Crytek somehow managed to do nearly as well in their console/PC efforts. Few others, in all this time, have even come close.

 

Game still looks great, almost as good as current games - compare it to other games from that era - e.g. Oblivion, which was meant to have pretty good graphics. They look dire in comparison where as crysis still looks modern.

That said at the time is was a dumb move - I personally didn't buy it when it came out because my PC wouldn't play it well enough - so effectively they stopped much of their potential market getting the game until it was several years old and cheap.

 

It absolutely needs a more modern engine. It was a first DX10 engine with a TON of post processing thrown on top. Not efficient at all.

 

I played it on my 3ghz P4 with 512mb RAM and a 128mb passively cooled ATI card. It was just playable.

 

It's what got me into computers (as I had to upgrade my PC to be able to play it at all) and then got me into overclocking (as I tried overclocking my gpu to try and play at better fps/settings).

Realised I don't have it digitally, tempted to try and pick it up at Christmas if it's on sale somewhere, never completed it but the first part of the game was great and I'd happily replay that.