Blows my mind that a 7 year old game is still one of the best looking.

It's also still the best one in the series. So there is that.

Fired this up the other day and proceeded to mess with the console and break it, was hilarious running around at 300% run speed and unlimited energy/health.

I didn't think it looked that great back when it came out so...

I can only imagine how bad your eyesight must have gotten since then. Do you wear 2 inch thick glasses these days?

I have pretty good eye sight actually. Thanks for the attempt at condescending though. In all seriousness, I've always said that Crysis looked good technically, but is bland as hell artistically. Thus it looks pretty bad in my opinion. I'm also not a fan of how Crytek does little to no optimizing to have their stuff run smoothly. They throw in every technique and the kitchen sink in, but don't actually try to make it run well until you have a future computer that can brute force it's way through all the calculations.

The rocks in Crysis are very ugly.

YOU'RE nearly 7 years old! Buuuuuurn...

But really, that blows my mind to think about. It does NOT feel like it's been that long since I was drooling over pre-release screens and reading everything I could about it. (not to mention having to run the demo at such low settings that it actually looked worse than Far Cry on low)

Oh man, I still remember how everybody was all "Yeah, your computer is good, but it still can't run Crysis".

Now most computers made can run it at least somewhat.

You know what? It was pretty ambitious for its time. Not just graphically, but combining that with some of the open-ended, physics rich environments in the first half of the game.

There's nothing quite like that anymore, even the newer Crysis games. Man, I liked that first one...

Really it's only nearly 6 years old... but yeah that's pretty insane. Game still looks pretty good.

@giantstalker: Agreed, that first game was probably one of my favorites of all time. I played it just about a year ago too so I remember it quite vividly.

Cool!!!!!

they got rid of that achievement.

I agree with most of this. At the time of release Crysis was definitely a tour de force that brought even the most advanced PC's to their knees. Unfortunately as Liquid said, in large part this was because the game wasn't optimized properly. This could be seen as a positive if we assume Crytek are a bunch of visionaries that are making games for the future rather than for the now - but I don't have enough technical know-how to make a strong argument whether the technology they used was ahead of the curve or simply poorly put together. Apart from that, and this remains true to present day with Crytek 3, I thought these games looked and played in such an incredibly bland way that I could not bring myself to finish any of them. I hear people discuss with great glee the numerous approaches and open ended gameplay in Crysis 1, but to me those approaches really always boiled down to assaulting a given village in the middle of a jungle from each of the cardinal directions; go in quiet; go in loud. At the end of the day you just went and killed all the cookie cutter militia in a largely arbitrary location and moved on to do the same a dozen more times. I will say that, even though this was largely due to Crysis 1 being developed for the PC, the decision to have all your abilities such as speed or strength be separate toggles made a lot more sense than the way it was handled in the later iterations, having them simply just be ON all the time.

Well its quite simple, good looking assets require loads of money and people to produce, hence why most games credit sequences are 15 minutes long; for a game to look much better than Crysis or next gen Crysis (whatever that's going to be) it would cost hundreds of millions. The upper limit to graphics is a financial one, not a technical one; console people were content with worse looking games than Crysis right up until they announced the new consoles (though they still would have been fine if they didn't).

Seriously, there was an achievement?

@liquidprince:

Bland as hell? They were going for realism so of course it's bland. Then aliens happened which was kinda boring but it looked cool and shiny.

Still holds up, and still looks great. And now in 2013 I can finally say "my pc can run crysis."

Crysis still looks pretty damn amazing today on good hardware. People rattle on about the poor optimization but really the only performance hog was it's lighting engine. The engine supported full dynamic multi-source lighting long before anything else however it did so without using deferred rendering, as such all of the lighting passes are extremely expensive.

I played this for the first time in 2012 and the alien spaceship BLEW MY FUCKING MIND IN 2012.

@korwin said:

It definitely seems like the people talking about "poor optimization" are just throwing that word around, and have no actual idea what that really means technically.

Not saying I do, but you're the first one to actually bring technical terms to the table to justify your claims.

Also yeah, this game is great and still looks awesome. The first PC build I got that could run it on Maximum settings with only the occasional frame drop was built in... 2011? Yeah, late 2011. Fucking expensive too.

I played it for the first time this year. Max settings, smooth as butter. It still looks fantastic, and it's even got the gameplay to back it up. Felt like an open world Halo with how it treats combat as a puzzle.

It was slightly cartoon-y and very colorful, which for me lent its visuals a whole lot of appeal. However, I can see why it might look kinda blend once you get past the mind-bending level of detail.

I like the first Crysis a whole lot, and I think the second one is a perfect example of pacing out the action so that the current moment always feels more intense than the last. That said, Crysis 1, 2, and Warhead seems like enough Crysis for me. I'll eventually get a crack at Crysis 3 but I don't really care that much about it. I've had my fill.

Came out in 2007... if this math checks out then... my god, you seem to be correct!

And the whole "Still looks good today" thing.. I mean, I guess.
But the again some people also say that about Half-Life 2 and others (except me) don't fall over laughing when they hear that, so are they really worth listening to?

You've got that right, it looks damn nice. Hell, it's still a fantastic game and the best in the series.

Crysis is a hell of a game.

Technically is was made to be unplayable at the time, by tossing all the physics and all the graphics at it, so it's not much of a surprise that it holds up today. I don't know how the textures are doing, I'll assume decently.

Maybe they're referring to the FakeFactory mod? I think they updated it a couple times as well.

No no, I'm talking about the people who say it about Half-Life 2 with no mods.
Like "It still looks mind blowing" and "the animations are so great" and also the whole "characters look so real" thing is stille happening from time to time.
That last one might be people hopped up on meth or they're really drunk but the others are often said by people who for some reason really love that game. I guess bias may explain it when I think about it, but still.

Remember when Crysis was supposed to have magnetic boots to climb giant aliens, and some sort of moral system if you fight the koreans? Man....

It was still a great game, saddly 2 and 3 were only average.

Not enough anime chicks.

I'm remembering how proud I was that I could play it on medium when it was new.

Yep, it's a damn good game too. Despite the popular opinion that it was a shallow tech demo, from people who couldn't even play it.

2 and 3 however...

Man, reading this thread makes me wanna find a chicken and toss it 50 yards.

Not nearly enough.

So it looks great?

Sure, it was technologically impressive, but artistically and creatively void. Played it for an hour or two and got bored.

Boring game, even at the time. I never was able to finish it.

I haven't seen it recently, I'll check it out eventually, but ya it looks better than console games I guess. That's not really hard, though. Consoles are low end computers. The reason you don't see a lot of technically impressive games is because games aren't designed for PC anymore so in a lot of ways this significantly held the industry back. In a lot of ways, though, this is a good thing if their budgets are this bad for what they are making. Imagine how much worse it could be if they actually tried to make games that even the highest end PC would bog down on.

To be fair, also, I don't think that it's really necessary to push it that much more right now. Games look fine. I think they should focus more on making animations better, now.

I've never been big on graphics, though, so ... meh.

If you somehow got that from what I said, then you can go on believing it...