Is Crysis a good game? YOU decide!

[Sarevok]

I am worried about Crysis 2. Game looks like a dumbed down version of Crysis and Crysis:Warhead. Only 2 suite modes instead of 4 is going to take a lot of freedom away.

[adam_grif]

I'd be more concerned about the smaller, more linear levels necessitated by running on consoles. You at least retain most of the functionality of the suit without the modes, you hold jump to super jump and so on.

[weemadando]

The streamlining of the suit makes great sense and just removes the"I'm sure some military programmer would have written a macro for this" shit like having to swap modes to jump or sprint or smash shit etc.

Also, the Crysis levels were still linear. You're mad if you think they weren't.

[General Zod]

I am worried about Crysis 2. Game looks like a dumbed down version of Crysis and Crysis:Warhead. Only 2 suite modes instead of 4 is going to take a lot of freedom away.

Frankly I'm not sure what you're babbling about. Have you seen the latest trailer?

[adam_grif]

Also, the Crysis levels were still linear. You're mad if you think they weren't.

Linearity is not a binary switch. Many levels in Crysis and Warhead (a few notable exceptions being the alien ship and the horrible on rails train thing in Warhead) let you tackle objectives as you pleased, with numerous approaches available to you. The levels being smaller in scope means that there will inevitably be fewer levels in which I can, say, swim around the long way to get to my objective, or hijack transports to blow through checkpoints.

The relative openness of Crysis/Warhead (Warhead less so) was a breath of fresh air, and along with the nanosuit powers are the reason why the game is one of the best shooters of all time. The nanosuit gives you options to dispatch foes and approach situations, and the level design gave you options in how to get from A to B, and they synergized with each other nicely.

[Bounty]

I'd be more concerned about the smaller, more linear levels necessitated by running on consoles. You at least retain most of the functionality of the suit without the modes, you hold jump to super jump and so on.

First of all, size != linearity. Crysis 1 let you look for miles and miles... while you walked down a narrow path and had the quote freedom endquote to attack the next building from slightly to the left or sightly to the right.

Second, console != linearity. Crysis 1 wasn't noticeably more "linear" than, say, GoldenEye on the N64 (Go ahead, play it. Turns out the idea of having three slightly different routes to an objective existed before 2005 -and on a console, no less. I hear they have cooties).

Third, you're the sort of idiot who keeps the delusion alive that a good game has anything at all to do with the hardware, rather than proper design.

[adam_grif]

First of all, size != linearity. Crysis 1 let you look for miles and miles... while you walked down a narrow path and had the quote freedom endquote to attack the next building from slightly to the left or sightly to the right.

That's only true of some levels. You'll notice that in the post above yours I specify that the game was indeed linear in some respects, but that being able to run around a large open level to find many ways to your objective was great design. Consolizing the sequel doesn't eliminate everything good about the level design, but it eliminates the large sandbox levels, and it's no coincidence that Assault and Onslaught are the best levels of the game.

Second, console != linearity. Crysis 1 wasn't noticeably more "linear" than, say, GoldenEye on the N64 (Go ahead, play it. Turns out the idea of having three slightly different routes to an objective existed before 2005 -and on a console, no less. I hear they have cooties).

No, console = shit hardware = forcing them to choose between large open levels that look like turds, small levels that look nice, or designing separate levels for each platform. If you're happy with your tiny levels then I'm thrilled for you, but I'm going to be disappointed when the sequel to Crysis ends up suffering from the same cramped corridors where you can't go three meters left or right without running into a wall, invisible or otherwise, that has infested modern game design. If it turns out that the console versions look like turds but they kept the big levels, I'm going to be ecstatic

Third, you're the sort of idiot who keeps the delusion alive that a good game has anything at all to do with the hardware, rather than proper design.

You're the sort of person who keeps the delusion alive that important aspects of game design are not influenced by hardware and hardware limitations, and that developers don't have to make sacrifices in other aspects of the game in order to do all of the things they want to do.

You should hop on over to the Battlefield 3 thread and fight the good fight, it looks like the console defenders are about ready to throw in the towel.

[Bounty]

You're the sort of person who keeps the delusion alive that important aspects of game design are not influenced by hardware and hardware limitations, and that developers don't have to make sacrifices in other aspects of the game in order to do all of the things they want to do.

You're the sort of person - like most game developers, unfortunately - that can't tell the difference between a tech demo and a game. Here's a free hint: one of them may lack perfectly rendered 3D grass, but people do keep coming back to play it.

PS: I do my gaming on PC.

[weemadando]

First of all, size != linearity. Crysis 1 let you look for miles and miles... while you walked down a narrow path and had the quote freedom endquote to attack the next building from slightly to the left or sightly to the right.

That's only true of some levels. You'll notice that in the post above yours I specify that the game was indeed linear in some respects, but that being able to run around a large open level to find many ways to your objective was great design. Consolizing the sequel doesn't eliminate everything good about the level design, but it eliminates the large sandbox levels, and it's no coincidence that Assault and Onslaught are the best levels of the game.

Hopping over to Metacritic's XBox 360 All Time best list...

GTA 4
Red Dead Redemption
Elder Scrolls: Oblivion
Fallout 3
Assassin's Creed II
Assassin's Creed Brotherhood
Burnout Paradise
Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit
Skate

That's just off page one.

I can add in some other stuff off the top of my head:

Far Cry 2
Mercenaries 2
The Saboteur
Fuel
Red Faction Guerrilla
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising

Hell, I'm sure others can pile on more.

But yeah, I mean, there's NO games with large sandbox levels on console, not at all.

[Bounty]

Body Harvest had 10-square-mile open sandbox levels in 1998. On a console with 4MB of RAM. Sure, it didn't look great, but that didn't stop it from being an excellent game.

In Griffo's world, where a good game is just a mediocre game that renders individual blades of grass, such a thing must look as alien as the monolith from 2001 did to the apes.

[adam_grif]

You're the sort of person - like most game developers, unfortunately - that can't tell the difference between a tech demo and a game. Here's a free hint: one of them may lack perfectly rendered 3D grass, but people do keep coming back to play it.

Are you implying that Crysis was not a game, but that Crysis 2 will be?

Hell, I'm sure others can pile on more.

But yeah, I mean, there's NO games with large sandbox levels on console, not at all.

I'm not even trying to be snarky here, but seriously dude. You can't just isolate statements from an argument, throw out a counter to that statement and ignore the context of the discussion. What you just did is exactly the same as what a certain poster was doing over in the Battlefield thread. My position was not and never will be "you can't have large levels / high player counts / sandboxes on a console" (even though you can make it look like I've said that by quote mining, which is what you just did), but that in order to maintain the plumbing on the consoles, they have to make cuts somewhere else in order to polish aspects of their game. This is something that PC developers are not forced to do because they always have more horsepower to work with, and can actually design games to take advantage of future systems on the highest settings (something Crysis did) since it will be forwards compatible.

Here is a part of my post that you didn't include in your dishonest quote mine:

No, console = shit hardware = forcing them to choose between large open levels that look like turds, small levels that look nice, or designing separate levels for each platform.

This is beyond dispute - two games running on the same hardware, one with large open levels and a long draw distance, and the other with tight corridors and far fewer things to render, will have a huge graphical divide between them. Crytek is a company known for producing graphically stunning games, and releasing Crysis 2 on consoles looking significantly worse than all the competition is a bad business move, but would be ultimately necessary in order to preserve the huge levels that were present in the first game. All of the games you just posted reinforce this point, but I shouldn't even need to say it since this should be something that is extremely obvious to all of you.

Body Harvest had 10-square-mile open sandbox levels in 1998. On a console with 4MB of RAM. Sure, it didn't look great, but that didn't stop it from being an excellent game.

I would take a graphically shitty but high quality game in the blink of an eye. In fact, I've even stated as much above - I would rather Crysis 2 looks shit but maintains the great level design of the first game then morph into something else in the sequel, but the thing holding this back is Cryteks insistence on producing a visually impressive game that is forced to run on the equivalent of a GeForce 7600. I'm not the one calling the shots. I'm just pointing out realities about the hardware, which everybody takes to mean that I've launched a personal vendetta against "lol consoles" because of PC fanboyism and graphics whoredom. What's fucking rich about this was that I was one of about two people who defended the Wii as a system worth owning late last year

[Bounty]

This is beyond dispute - two games running on the same hardware, one with large open levels and a long draw distance, and the other with tight corridors and far fewer things to render, will have a huge graphical divide between them.

But that's not a reason for the console to "hold back" the PC version. Look at what GT4 did: the same content - in terms of level design, features, what have you - but with the option of dropping in extra filters, higher resolutions and bigger draw distances for the people who have the PC horsepower to run them.

You didn't start out by saying what you've now back-pedalled to; you started out by saying flat-out that the console couldn't do proper sandbox levels, period, and that this would hold back the PC version - when it's in fact consoles that have pushed this technical limit and have been at the head of the curve in terms of openness and non-linearity, even if they dropped behind in polygon count or pixel resolution. Your entire base premise is just flat-out, demonstrably wrong.

Are you implying that Crysis was not a game, but that Crysis 2 will be?

Neither. Crysis was always meant to be a demo for the Crytek engine, it just happened to be presented as a good game (I won't touch the "best shooter of all time" bit, but there's no denying it's a good game in it's own right). But that wasn't what I was going for; it's the tendency for developers and fans alike to think of games in terms of how good they look or what stats they boast in term of quantity of content or quality of the graphics, rather than in terms of how good, innovative, or just plain fun the gameplay is.

I'm just pointing out realities about the hardware, which everybody takes to mean that I've launched a personal vendetta against "lol consoles" because of PC fanboyism and graphics whoredom.

console = shit hardware

I hope you can spot where people may have gotten that idea about you.

[Steel]

Far Cry 2
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising

How on earth do games like Far Cry 2, where going 20m from a military checkpoint causes it to respawn because the game cant hold more than a tiny fraction of the game world due to console ram limitations and Dragon Rising, which which could have 36 times less enemies (63 total as opposed to 63 groups of 12 men for 3 sides) compared to the 10 year old original game help your case?

There are a bunch of other games on there where stupid things happen, because despite having a large game world, only a tiny fraction of it actually exists at a given time due to technical limitations.

[adam_grif]

I hope you can spot where people may have gotten that idea about you.

The PS360 GPUs being pieces of shit is not open for debate, they have 1/4 the memory and processing power of average 2011 video cards. When you compare it to high range offerings the canyon between them simply gets wider. The PS3 is running the equivalent of a Geforce 7600 GT and the 360 is running the equivalent of a Radeon X1900. These have ~500 Mhz clocks and 256 mb of memory to play with, in addition to being vastly inferior in numerous other respects that aren't clearly apparent just from comparing clockspeeds and ram.

Calling these pieces of shit in 2011 is calling a spade a spade. You would have to be a huge fanboy to deny this, actually. There are plenty of reasons to own a PS3 or 360, graphical prowess is NOT one of them.

But that's not a reason for the console to "hold back" the PC version. Look at what GT4 did: the same content - in terms of level design, features, what have you - but with the option of dropping in extra filters, higher resolutions and bigger draw distances for the people who have the PC horsepower to run them.

I have no idea what "GT4" is (Gran Turismo is obviously not what you are talking about), but everything you just mentioned is something that PC games will have anyway, even if you do gimp the level design to fit on ancient hardware. I reiterate; Crytek will not (and did not, judging from everything we've seen of the 360 version of the game, if not for this leak we never would have even known what the PC version looked like until the game released) produce a graphically low quality game (on par with something like Elder Scrolls IV or AssCreed which absolutely do look shit compared to the shooters that Crysis 2 has to compete with) for the console market which will presumably be where most of their sales come from (unless it bombs with the console crowd or something).

If the choice is alter level design to be more like CoD or look like an open world game (i.e. crap), they are going with the latter, and we've seen every indication that this is true of Crysis 2. It's premature to conclusively say this given that the only leaked footage we have on youtube is of what is essentially a tutorial level, but that is definitely where my money is riding for this one given what we know about how it looks and the capabilities of the system. Crytek would have had to pull out some voodoo shit to make it look like that on 360 while still maintaining the huge levels.

You didn't start out by saying what you've now back-pedalled to; you started out by saying flat-out that the console couldn't do proper sandbox levels, period, and that this would hold back the PC version - when it's in fact consoles that have pushed this technical limit and have been at the head of the curve in terms of openness and non-linearity, even if they dropped behind in polygon count or pixel resolution. Your entire base premise is just flat-out, demonstrably wrong.

You say backpedalling, I say clarifying since nobody with more than a pea where their brain is supposed to be would not realize that open world games exist, especially since we just had this fucking argument in another thread that is on page 1 of this section. Included in that argument was the exact same accusations you are making now where the other side was acting as though I was saying that consoles "couldn't" do this or that.

Neither. Crysis was always meant to be a demo for the Crytek engine, it just happened to be presented as a good game (I won't touch the "best shooter of all time" bit, but there's no denying it's a good game in it's own right). But that wasn't what I was going for; it's the tendency for developers and fans alike to think of games in terms of how good they look or what stats they boast in term of quantity of content or quality of the graphics, rather than in terms of how good, innovative, or just plain fun the gameplay is.

I'm not sure what the relevance of this is even if that's true, since I obviously love Crysis the game, not CryEngine 2.0. Notice I was praising the gameplay and open levels as opposed to what a great looker it is (even though I do love that also, I finished the game multiple times on my shitty old GPU that could barely run it).

[Zac Naloen]

Far Cry 2
Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising

How on earth do games like Far Cry 2, where going 20m from a military checkpoint causes it to respawn because the game cant hold more than a tiny fraction of the game world due to console ram limitations

Got a source for this?

It's far more likely it's a broken respawn timer they can't be bothered to fix along with the rest of the games bugs.

[adam_grif]

Got a source for this?

It's far more likely it's a broken respawn timer they can't be bothered to fix along with the rest of the games bugs.

No it's just terrible design. I don't see how something like this is a RAM limitation since something like this is trivial to fit into a tiny save file (i.e. "Checkpoint #23 destroyed".

[Sarevok]

Where the heck does the idea Crysis was not a game but a tech demo for Cry Engine come from ?

In terms of gameplay Crysis blows away every CoD, Operation Flashpoint 2,Half Life 2, Halo sequels etc. The enemy AI is second only to FEAR 1. The Nanosuit delivers incredible freedom in exploring and destroying enemies. And even the story damn fantastic - it is a summer blockbuster movie packaged in videogame form. Crysis makes no pretension of being an intellectual tale like Bioshock. It is Independence Day in video game form and absolutely rocks in that role.

It just seems like a group of people who never finished the game are just repeating something they heard on the internet. I ask these people to actually play and finish the game and then repeat whether they still think Crysis was not a great game.

[General Zod]

Where the heck does the idea Crysis was not a game but a tech demo for Cry Engine come from ?

In terms of gameplay Crysis blows away every CoD, Operation Flashpoint 2,Half Life 2, Halo sequels etc. The enemy AI is second only to FEAR 1. The Nanosuit delivers incredible freedom in exploring and destroying enemies. And even the story damn fantastic - it is a summer blockbuster movie packaged in videogame form. Crysis makes no pretension of being an intellectual tale like Bioshock. It is Independence Day in video game form and absolutely rocks in that role.

It just seems like a group of people who never finished the game are just repeating something they heard on the internet. I ask these people to actually play and finish the game and then repeat whether they still think Crysis was not a great game.

Quite frankly you're delusional if you think FEAR has the best AI ever.

[Sarevok]

In terms of FPS games FEAR infantry AI is by far the best. If you know of another game with better soldier AI please do share it's name. I am sincerely interested.

[TheMuffinKing]

In terms of FPS games FEAR infantry AI is by far the best. If you know of another game with better soldier AI please do share it's name. I am sincerely interested.

In my opinion, the Helghast soldiers from Killzone 2 were at least on par.

[General Zod]

In terms of FPS games FEAR infantry AI is by far the best. If you know of another game with better soldier AI please do share it's name. I am sincerely interested.

And you're using exactly . . . what criteria to define the "best" AI with?

[Artemas]

Radio chatter, man.

[MKSheppard]

I am worried about Crysis 2. Game looks like a dumbed down version of Crysis and Crysis:Warhead. Only 2 suite modes instead of 4 is going to take a lot of freedom away.

Well, I wouldn't worry as long as they simply combined SPEED and STRENGTH; since in the cutscenes of Crysis Warhead, they showed Jester using SPEED to run to catch up with a train, and then switched right away over to STRENGTH to jump onto it.

That was near impossible to do with a mouse based interface for suit modes.

But two? That leaves "Cloak" and "Do everything else".

[Chardok]

In terms of FPS games FEAR infantry AI is by far the best. If you know of another game with better soldier AI please do share it's name. I am sincerely interested.

And you're using exactly . . . what criteria to define the "best" AI with?

Clearly someone here hasn't played Far Cry 2 or Halo: Reach.....

[adam_grif]

The A.I. of F.E.A.R.: Three States and a Plan

A presentation from GDC 06. For what it's worth F.E.A.R. A.I. was fantastic, I'm very shocked when people say that Halo reach had better A.I. (the elites weren't that good, bros).

ALSO, Crysis sold >3 million copies on PC. Crytek still supports the PC, even though they're crybabies about piracy. The game was hugely profitable, and they made even more money on top of that from engine licensing to third parties (mostly for simulators and the like). Crysis 1 bombed so hard they opened 2 additional studios