Crysis definitely had its moments, but the newer games (especially in motion rather than a screenshot) could often end up looking a lot better. But consoles not changing is probably most of the blame (no current ones even really do 1080p in a detailed FPS....). But games are shooting for a much wider audience now, and the publishers wised up to trying to sell more games to the players vs. dumping money into video cards all the time.

Crysis is not still ahead of everything else, but it still hits that point of diminishing impact vs improved visuals. Something like Witcher 2, modded Bethesda games, Battlefield 3, modded GTA IV, or Rage (glitches, but there were some amazing textures too) all offered substantial improvements over Crysis. Or LA Noir and the like in terms of depictions of humans.

People in this thread seem to be forgetting that Crysis isn't just relatively difficult to max out because it's soo far ahead of everything else...it was also just poorly optimized. PC games that are technically more advanced have come out since Crysis (including Crysis 2) that can be run on a wider variety of machines.

@Tennmuerti said:

@Bourbon_Warrior: I will disagree on the overall visual quality of Farcry 3. (running it at 1920*1080, on ultra, minus MSAA). But yes the grass is amazing.

@Bell_End: @Sooty: Playing it for a day now I think overall Farcry 3 is nowhere near as good looking as near maxed Witcher 2, BF3, Metro 2033. But this is kind of expected because of the scope of the game, Farcry 3 being open world. The character faces and grass are really good however. A better comparison would be Just Cause 2. And imo Just Cause 2 (for disclosure i did not like that game much) looks better when taking in the panoramic vistas and looking at far away shit; but there is more copying of assets in JC2 as well as less upclose detail. Have to say i kind of expected a tiny bit more from Farcry 3 visually.

What GPU you running for Ultra, I'm running a 5850 that could max on Skyrim but I can really only get somewhere between Medium and High with all the post processing stuff to low.

@MonetaryDread said:

@Fredchuckdave said:

@Mamba219 said:

@Seppli: Can I ask you a question out of pure ignorance: what does a game's AI have to do with the technical limitations of a console? Graphical fidelity or whatever I might understand, but why is it impossible for a PS3, say, to emulate the original Crysis's AI?

Killzone 2's AI is generally superior to the original Crysis AI, which wasn't bad granted. You also don't get a "make the AI retarded" switch in that game. Cloak Engaged.

You sir never fought the Korean soldiers in NanoSuits on the Delta difficulty level then. That fight took me 45 minutes because the A.I. was actually hunting me while I ran through a forest.. Killzone 2 does not have that quality of A.I sir.

Too bad it assent that great in the sequel, Crysis 2 has to have by far the worst AI in any AAA game.

@Zekhariah said:

Crysis definitely had its moments, but the newer games (especially in motion rather than a screenshot) could often end up looking a lot better. But consoles not changing is probably most of the blame (no current ones even really do 1080p in a detailed FPS....). But games are shooting for a much wider audience now, and the publishers wised up to trying to sell more games to the players vs. dumping money into video cards all the time.

Crysis is not still ahead of everything else, but it still hits that point of diminishing impact vs improved visuals. Something like Witcher 2, modded Bethesda games, Battlefield 3, modded GTA IV, or Rage (glitches, but there were some amazing textures too) all offered substantial improvements over Crysis. Or LA Noir and the like in terms of depictions of humans.

Not really fair to say modded games look better than Crysis, there's loads of Crysis mods (as I remember) that made it look even better. So getting into modded versions of games is kind of moot, and graphical mods can be subjective.

@eskimo said:

@Sooty: I had an 8800 Ultra and a top of the line CPU, and it still wouldnt run on max settings. I'm pretty sure that noone could run it back in the day.

Dx10 max settings was broken though, if you ran it under Dx9 with a config tweak it looked identical on "High" with way better performance, so when I say max I'm actually referring to that. It was definitely possible but don't get me wrong, it could dip to the mid 20s. Fortunately Crysis still felt somewhat smooth at such framerates. (which is weird, guess it was the motion blur)

@The_Nubster said:

That's an action shot in Crysis, which is close up to an explosion, several trees, and the ground, walls, etc. The Far Cry 3 screenshot is from the top of a ridge, and everything is far away. From what I can see, the shadows are comparable, the guns and hands are comparable, and the draw distance in Far Cry 3 is really good. It seems on equal footing to me, but again, the screenshots are of two different situations.

http://www.abload.de/img/crysis2011-03-2118-18-tbex.png

http://www2.picturepush.com/photo/a/2116460/img/Crysis/Crysis-2009-08-13-17-17-39-49.bmp

Bit more comparable!

@Brad: Me too. Pretty fucking awesome. Playing it on 1024X768 with details at medium wasn't very fun tho...

@warxsnake said:

Hi, I worked on FarCry3 as the Weapons artist. Since we get these Crysis/Farcry comparisons a lot, I thought I would chime in. Typically as developers we are not supposed to but anyway. English is not my first language so excuse the bad explanation: Crysis is map based. No matter how big the maps are or how big you think it "looks", it's still sectioned just as much as Bioshock, Medal of Honor or Call of Duty or <insert other FPS>. This means that the backdrops in Crysis 1 are very low poly but very beautiful fake backdrops, fake hills, and sometimes, matte paintings. The distant areas that the player cannot reach also do not have any additional gameplay centric assets or setups, such as navmesh for AI and so on, meaning there's drastically less that needs to be loaded in memory, meaning they can spend way more of their memory on beautifications. Far Cry is an open world game with 14km draw distance; the difference in memory requirements and budget compared to a typical FPS is enormous. It's not even in the same ballpark.FC3 is a Multiplatform, open world, first person game. That is literally the worst combination game development wise, it's hell really, and why you don't see that many of that type of game. (Fallout3, skyrim).We also do not have the luxury of linear path with scripted events; not to the extent of a call of duty or MOH anyway. Everything in our game besides some story mission stuff is systematic, requiring a lot of things to be loaded in memory at all times. Everything that happens around you needs to be loaded in memory of course, but also things that happen in other sectors or parts of the massive map that the player is not necessarily in. Speaking of memory; on the PS3 for vram anyway, we need to fit everything from NPCs, Hero characters, Weapons, weapon attachments, vehicles, animals, exotic/cinematic, , FX, Menus (Flash), environments, and all textures (all visuals) into 128MB of memory. The rest is for the engine and the buffers, totalling ~250MB of memory. 128MB of memory is... not a lot. Not a lot for a first person open world game anyway. Comparing my budget specifically: I won't go into too much detail: Plenty of FPS games dedicate ~20MB+ for weapons alone. I can only afford 6MB. The same goes for all other fields. Since more things have to be loaded in memory, everybody from Animations to Sound to graphics, has to deal with less. Way less. And we are just scratching the surface, just talking about memory requirements. There is also draw calls, overdraw for particles, rendering times, disk drives and texture lookup and streaming on consoles, etc. In short, our game's technical specs somewhat match those of Fallout3, Skyrim, Dead Island or other similar truly open world FPS games. If you want to compare FC3's visual fidelity to anything, it would be to those types of games. Comparing FC3's console graphics to Crysis is like comparing Skyrim's/Fallout to Halo4.

This is awesome and scary at the same time.

If you and your buddies developed Far Cry 3 without any hardware limitations (PC), would the development be less "hellish" you think?

@Bourbon_Warrior: It's in my later reply just below, 6990m.

@Tennmuerti said:

@Bourbon_Warrior: It's in my later reply just below, 6990m.

Yeah I just got a big performance boost by turning off AA, managed to turn alot of stuff up like max FOV.

@warxsnake said:

Hi, I worked on FarCry3 as the Weapons artist. Since we get these Crysis/Farcry comparisons a lot, I thought I would chime in. Typically as developers we are not supposed to but anyway. English is not my first language so excuse the bad explanation: Crysis is map based. No matter how big the maps are or how big you think it "looks", it's still sectioned just as much as Bioshock, Medal of Honor or Call of Duty or <insert other FPS>. This means that the backdrops in Crysis 1 are very low poly but very beautiful fake backdrops, fake hills, and sometimes, matte paintings. The distant areas that the player cannot reach also do not have any additional gameplay centric assets or setups, such as navmesh for AI and so on, meaning there's drastically less that needs to be loaded in memory, meaning they can spend way more of their memory on beautifications. Far Cry is an open world game with 14km draw distance; the difference in memory requirements and budget compared to a typical FPS is enormous. It's not even in the same ballpark.FC3 is a Multiplatform, open world, first person game. That is literally the worst combination game development wise, it's hell really, and why you don't see that many of that type of game. (Fallout3, skyrim).We also do not have the luxury of linear path with scripted events; not to the extent of a call of duty or MOH anyway. Everything in our game besides some story mission stuff is systematic, requiring a lot of things to be loaded in memory at all times. Everything that happens around you needs to be loaded in memory of course, but also things that happen in other sectors or parts of the massive map that the player is not necessarily in. Speaking of memory; on the PS3 for vram anyway, we need to fit everything from NPCs, Hero characters, Weapons, weapon attachments, vehicles, animals, exotic/cinematic, , FX, Menus (Flash), environments, and all textures (all visuals) into 128MB of memory. The rest is for the engine and the buffers, totalling ~250MB of memory. 128MB of memory is... not a lot. Not a lot for a first person open world game anyway. Comparing my budget specifically: I won't go into too much detail: Plenty of FPS games dedicate ~20MB+ for weapons alone. I can only afford 6MB. The same goes for all other fields. Since more things have to be loaded in memory, everybody from Animations to Sound to graphics, has to deal with less. Way less. And we are just scratching the surface, just talking about memory requirements. There is also draw calls, overdraw for particles, rendering times, disk drives and texture lookup and streaming on consoles, etc. In short, our game's technical specs somewhat match those of Fallout3, Skyrim, Dead Island or other similar truly open world FPS games. If you want to compare FC3's visual fidelity to anything, it would be to those types of games. Comparing FC3's console graphics to Crysis is like comparing Skyrim's/Fallout to Halo4.

Thanks for the info, never realized that about Crysis. Far Cry looks fantastic on my 5850 GPU, really enjoying how hilly the map design is, having alot of fun getting my sniping on up in the mountains to the pirate camps below. Best game I have played all year.

The real question is. Could the Wii U run Crysis?

@isomeri said:

The real question is. Could the Wii U run Crysis?

Considering the 360 can... yes.

@Seppli: Well I didn't say it was bad, not fun or that i hated it, simply that the gameplay is lacking, especially compared to far cry. I played it again fairly recently, but the gameplay always ends up the same. Cloak, win the game.

edit: Although, Warhead is way more fun...somehow.

You lock a guy named Vladimir Kajalin in a room and don't let him out until he invents something the world isn't ready for yet, but looks damn nice. Thus, SSAO.

Naw, I don't know. I'm not really sure it still looks that great. A lot of heavy duty fuck-all-technology. Maybe a case of "many developers can do it, but probably shouldn't".

I don't think it is.

There are games that looks just as good if not better than Crysis today. Far Cry 3 also has way better facial animation than Crysis.

@Tru3_Blu3 said:

@warxsnake said:

Hi, I worked on FarCry3 as the Weapons artist. Since we get these Crysis/Farcry comparisons a lot, I thought I would chime in. Typically as developers we are not supposed to but anyway. English is not my first language so excuse the bad explanation: Crysis is map based. No matter how big the maps are or how big you think it "looks", it's still sectioned just as much as Bioshock, Medal of Honor or Call of Duty or <insert other FPS>. This means that the backdrops in Crysis 1 are very low poly but very beautiful fake backdrops, fake hills, and sometimes, matte paintings. The distant areas that the player cannot reach also do not have any additional gameplay centric assets or setups, such as navmesh for AI and so on, meaning there's drastically less that needs to be loaded in memory, meaning they can spend way more of their memory on beautifications. Far Cry is an open world game with 14km draw distance; the difference in memory requirements and budget compared to a typical FPS is enormous. It's not even in the same ballpark.FC3 is a Multiplatform, open world, first person game. That is literally the worst combination game development wise, it's hell really, and why you don't see that many of that type of game. (Fallout3, skyrim).We also do not have the luxury of linear path with scripted events; not to the extent of a call of duty or MOH anyway. Everything in our game besides some story mission stuff is systematic, requiring a lot of things to be loaded in memory at all times. Everything that happens around you needs to be loaded in memory of course, but also things that happen in other sectors or parts of the massive map that the player is not necessarily in. Speaking of memory; on the PS3 for vram anyway, we need to fit everything from NPCs, Hero characters, Weapons, weapon attachments, vehicles, animals, exotic/cinematic, , FX, Menus (Flash), environments, and all textures (all visuals) into 128MB of memory. The rest is for the engine and the buffers, totalling ~250MB of memory. 128MB of memory is... not a lot. Not a lot for a first person open world game anyway. Comparing my budget specifically: I won't go into too much detail: Plenty of FPS games dedicate ~20MB+ for weapons alone. I can only afford 6MB. The same goes for all other fields. Since more things have to be loaded in memory, everybody from Animations to Sound to graphics, has to deal with less. Way less. And we are just scratching the surface, just talking about memory requirements. There is also draw calls, overdraw for particles, rendering times, disk drives and texture lookup and streaming on consoles, etc. In short, our game's technical specs somewhat match those of Fallout3, Skyrim, Dead Island or other similar truly open world FPS games. If you want to compare FC3's visual fidelity to anything, it would be to those types of games. Comparing FC3's console graphics to Crysis is like comparing Skyrim's/Fallout to Halo4.

This is awesome and scary at the same time.

If you and your buddies developed Far Cry 3 without any hardware limitations (PC), would the development be less "hellish" you think?

Hi

Not really, if we developed a totally "unlocked" PC version, more money would have been dumped into the PC version but we necessarily would not see that money back from sales.

Also things like number of enemies on screen, what weapons they carry, number of vehicles on screen, and all this, are not only balanced for gameplay, but are balanced to not bust in memory at any given time. If we change any of that for PC we are then making a different game and throwing off the balancing that was set, in this case, based on PS3 performance.

It would make things worse because then you have to deal with major inconsistencies between versions.

@MonetaryDread said:

You sir never fought the Korean soldiers in NanoSuits on the Delta difficulty level then. That fight took me 45 minutes because the A.I. was actually hunting me while I ran through a forest.. Killzone 2 does not have that quality of A.I sir.

I beat Crysis on the 3 highest difficulty settings, probably died something like 20-25 times on Delta; died 400 times in Killzone 2. Granted with magical superpowers Killzone 2 would likely be easier and I can't speak to doing some bizarre challenge run to make it more difficult, but that's kind of a dumb way to rate difficulty objectively.

http://www.giantbomb.com/achievements/delta-act-iii/153237/

11%

http://www.giantbomb.com/achievements/heroic-survivor/132781/

2.5%

http://www.giantbomb.com/achievements/tactical-challenger/151248/

1%

@warxsnake said:

@Tru3_Blu3 said:

@warxsnake said:

Hi, I worked on FarCry3 as the Weapons artist. Since we get these Crysis/Farcry comparisons a lot, I thought I would chime in. Typically as developers we are not supposed to but anyway. English is not my first language so excuse the bad explanation: Crysis is map based. No matter how big the maps are or how big you think it "looks", it's still sectioned just as much as Bioshock, Medal of Honor or Call of Duty or <insert other FPS>. This means that the backdrops in Crysis 1 are very low poly but very beautiful fake backdrops, fake hills, and sometimes, matte paintings. The distant areas that the player cannot reach also do not have any additional gameplay centric assets or setups, such as navmesh for AI and so on, meaning there's drastically less that needs to be loaded in memory, meaning they can spend way more of their memory on beautifications. Far Cry is an open world game with 14km draw distance; the difference in memory requirements and budget compared to a typical FPS is enormous. It's not even in the same ballpark.FC3 is a Multiplatform, open world, first person game. That is literally the worst combination game development wise, it's hell really, and why you don't see that many of that type of game. (Fallout3, skyrim).We also do not have the luxury of linear path with scripted events; not to the extent of a call of duty or MOH anyway. Everything in our game besides some story mission stuff is systematic, requiring a lot of things to be loaded in memory at all times. Everything that happens around you needs to be loaded in memory of course, but also things that happen in other sectors or parts of the massive map that the player is not necessarily in. Speaking of memory; on the PS3 for vram anyway, we need to fit everything from NPCs, Hero characters, Weapons, weapon attachments, vehicles, animals, exotic/cinematic, , FX, Menus (Flash), environments, and all textures (all visuals) into 128MB of memory. The rest is for the engine and the buffers, totalling ~250MB of memory. 128MB of memory is... not a lot. Not a lot for a first person open world game anyway. Comparing my budget specifically: I won't go into too much detail: Plenty of FPS games dedicate ~20MB+ for weapons alone. I can only afford 6MB. The same goes for all other fields. Since more things have to be loaded in memory, everybody from Animations to Sound to graphics, has to deal with less. Way less. And we are just scratching the surface, just talking about memory requirements. There is also draw calls, overdraw for particles, rendering times, disk drives and texture lookup and streaming on consoles, etc. In short, our game's technical specs somewhat match those of Fallout3, Skyrim, Dead Island or other similar truly open world FPS games. If you want to compare FC3's visual fidelity to anything, it would be to those types of games. Comparing FC3's console graphics to Crysis is like comparing Skyrim's/Fallout to Halo4.

This is awesome and scary at the same time.

If you and your buddies developed Far Cry 3 without any hardware limitations (PC), would the development be less "hellish" you think?

Hi

That was the most simplest greeting I've ever seen in my entire life.

@Brad said:

@The_Laughing_Man said:

Crysis also kinda skimped on gameplay stuff to make way for its visuals.

I wish this silly fallacy would go away. Crysis is a great combat sandbox that I had a ton of fun with.

Well said. It's a shame to see so many comments condemning Crysis to be nothing more than technical show piece. It's perfectly fine to not like the game, but I can't help but feel like many of the people with an opinion, never actually played it.

The encounters in that game can be as generic as you want, but the subtleties and quick switching of the Nanosuits abilities make for some of my favourite moments in any shooter, completely encouraged and unscripted (such as destroying a vehicle patrol by throwing a washing machine at it).