CRYSIS was so awesome! (Got some screenies. Big 56K warning)

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zagood

Diamond Member
Mar 28, 2005
4,102
0
71
Originally posted by: Pugnate
The last 20-30 minutes really affected how things flowed, it was noticeably chunky during that stage.

It is like that went through the least optimizing. There were bugs in that sequence, like aliens not exploding when hitting the ground, that prevented the game from continuing.

That's a bug I saw midway through the game, where you're protecting an infantry unit, right before the tanks. I restarted the level and it didn't happen again.

-z
 

imported_Imp

Diamond Member
Dec 20, 2005
9,148
0
0
Originally posted by: ZappDogg
Originally posted by: skace
Does the ice effect on objects kill anyone elses FPS? I mean from like, perfectly smooth to 1fps instantly the second you see anything frozen?

Yup, sure did. I did some tests on the demo, and it was mostly the 1680x1050 resolution behind it...would still do it with everything set to medium.

That's interesting... my system chugged with ice and I was using 1680x1050.
 

stureandre

Member
Aug 15, 2007
36
0
0
The game was freakin AWESOME, but short..
They should have created more.. Can't really put words to it, but there was just not enough.. Pretty much all the new games just have the feeling of being "just not enough".

The gameplay was awesome in every way, even though my 8800GTx took a crap and i stole my girlfriends 1950 PRo instead.. not really the same experience, but what the hell!

When the sequell comes around, i hope they add more than the 8-10 levels or whatever they had in Crysis..

Oh and with the 1950 Pro 1024X768 with half and half on medium and low i got about 40 fps average.. with a magnificent drop in action!! god i miss my GTX!!

have fun playing!
 

Pugnate

Senior member
Jun 25, 2006
690
0
0
Come on, for a shooter it was fairly longish, no? It was longer than HL2, F.E.A.R., COD4. Then again, even a Barbie game is longer than CoD4 -- I don't know this first hand.
 

skace

Lifer
Jan 23, 2001
14,488
7
81
Originally posted by: Imp
That's interesting... my system chugged with ice and I was using 1680x1050.

I'm running 1280x720 with SLI 8800GTs, 8GB of memory and a Q6600. The second I see ice my game completely dies. I think there is a bad driver or a bad configuration that causes this to happen but I haven't had a chance to research it yet. I originally turned my settings down from Very High to High, but it still does it. I'm not lowering my settings anymore when VH runs perfectly smooth everywhere else, this has to be a misconfiguration or a bug issue.
 

badnewcastle

Golden Member
Jun 30, 2004
1,016
0
0
The game was cool, I give it a 5.8 out of 10 though.

Pros:
Graphics: 9/10 (would have been 10 except it's so hardware dependent)
Bio Suit: 10/10
AI: 8/10
Gameplay: 8/10
Sound: 8/10

Cons:
Aliens: 2/10 (once you got into the alien sphere I think it went way down hill, I think this was rushed)
Dificulty: 3/10
Game Length: 3/10 (to many games are too short including this and COD4)
Ending: 4/10
Videos: 3/10 (they were cool but there was way too many)
 

soydios

Platinum Member
Mar 12, 2006
2,708
0
0
the game can still be played with a previous generation card, just not at the high settings, obviously. an X1900XT or 7900GTX on medium-high will get between twenty and thirty fps, and with a fast enough CPU and enough RAM, that's a consistent framerate. the carrier deck at the end slows it down to between ten and fifteen fps, so you need to drop the graphics to medium-low. ice effects on the carrier deck didn't affect my frame rate, either.

still, even on medium graphics, it's the most gorgeous game I've seen my X1900 XT render real-time. but to really play this game with all settings on very high and 4xAA, you need a 3.2GHz quad-core, 4GB of RAM, and a 9800 SLi or 4800 CrossFire setup.
 

seanp789

Senior member
Oct 17, 2001
374
0
0
I really like this game though I think the stealth suit makes most of the game a little too easy even on very hard.
 

RS8

Senior member
Oct 14, 2007
202
0
71
Was not too impressed with the game, it's Farcry with a boob job. Aside from blowing everything up (which gets old after 10 mins) there's nothing left to really do. The AI is very questionable and the glitches are unbearable.

Yeah, it looks wonderful but that doesn't make up for everything else the game is lacking.
 

Spoooon

Lifer
Mar 3, 2000
11,565
202
106
I think it's a cool game, but so far I am not enjoying zero-g. Some cool moments like switching on stealth as you're running away, then jump off a cliff, then switching to shield so that you survive the fall.
 
Aug 9, 2007
150
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I just finished it. It is the best FPS since Half-Life for me.
I have been a professional games reviewer for a couple of years and am an avid FPS gamer, name me one fps that got over 75% average rating and I played through it.
I recently played through R6: Vegas, MoH: Airborne and COD4.
While all of these were entertaining, Crysis got me excited again like the 16 year old boy playing Duke3d.

You have to look at Crysis like a very hot date.
You prepare yourself mentally, defrag your computer like you gel your hair.
You upgrade, install the latest drivers, oil everything up, tweak the config for Very High DX9 , buy Coke and some pizzas, lock the door and then get ready to rock for 2-3 days.


AI:
The AI reacted awesome 95% of the time.
(I just went straight ahead to difficulty mode 4 and played on Delta.)
The 5% when the AI makes something stupid it's still better than the standard "Radiant" bollocks of Oblivion or other shooters.
The AI for the Korean supersoldiers was so cool. How they jumped on tomb stones and evaded incoming fire. WOW! Sometimes it felt like fighting a real good bot or average human.

AI example:
I'm in an office building destroying some chairs and boxes on my search for new ammo and the noise attracts a team of soldiers. Two enter through the front, one through the rear. I cloak and let the two man team look around until they get nervous and reverse back out of the building. Then I finish the lonely third soldier. This unfortunately attracts the soldiers again. I make a mistake and one soldier manages to fire his gun. Now the whole village is alerted and more and more soldiers run around alarmed. One ignites a flare and I can hear a distant helicopter approaching together with another jeep.
The AI sometimes seems almost too realistic: If there is a heavy firefight it can attract almost all the soldiers in the vicinity making it an epic firefight and afterwards an easy ghosttown trip (I had this at the harbor with a ten minute firefight at the cruiser with constant improvising)

Animations:
If you squint your eyes a little the cinematics almost look like Final Fantasy (cg movie) quality. The characters are so awesomely detailed and have very good dynamic fluid animations and very good motion capture clips. The whole animation system including facial is at least one or two generations ahead of HL2 and COD4.

Levels, Gameplay & Story
The levels got better and more epic as they should be. The one where you have to push forward with a tank was so awesome. A huge valley with the giant rock formation in the background and so many possibilites!
And just when you think you've seen enough of the beauty the weather and sun changes and you get some haze and fog that again looks at least two generations better than anything out there at the moment.
I often paused the battle and climbed outside of my tank just to gaze around in astonishment.
The ice levels: WOW!
The core: Looked like a freaking CG movie
The carrier: WOW!

The only time it got a little slower was when WW3 broke out on the flight deck. I couldn't be more happy with the game. Perfect length and a great multiplayer mode.
Now of to power struggling!
 

skace

Lifer
Jan 23, 2001
14,488
7
81
So I was running the 169.02 drivers from nVidia. Updated to 169.12 new beta drivers and now 64bit Crysis.exe runs and I've the game plays a bit better. I think the only real compatability fix is that my AA must have been on ingame because when I went back into the game with 169.12 the jaggies were noticeable when they used to be non-existant. But this was a good thing I suppose since it was properly utilizing correct AA settings now and certain after affects weren't freaking out as much.
 

Fenixgoon

Lifer
Jun 30, 2003
31,491
9,817
136
how large is the multiplayer base? i was in the beta and really enjoyed power struggle, so i hope there are a decent # of online players :)
 
Aug 9, 2007
150
0
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Just some more thoughts and impressions:

Regarding AI:
I hope all the COD4 lovers realize that there are worlds between COD4 and Crysis AI?!
In COD4 everything is strictly scripted. Enemies come in endless waves if you cross certain thresholds. Sometimes they seemingly pop up behind you in an area they can't have reached realistically. The enemies have zero search routines, or casual behavior they always walk the same paths (sniper mission where you have to hold still and the convoy searches for you).
In Crysis there is a limited number of soldiers deployed on a battlefield and those guys call for backup, use the dynamic environment for cover and advance, they search in teams, they get frightened and they have to travel the normal way to reach you.
If a level has e.g. 30 soldiers they all follow the rules of the game. You can attract them with loud noise and try to fight them off or pick them out one by one.
It's a completely different kind of game and AI.
COD4 is way more arcadey and the enemy waves with hundreds of soldiers sometimes are ridiculously over the top.
Of course there can be some glitches with a complicated AI system like Crysis has. e.g. soldiers running to man a MG and you pick them off and they don't realize that not manning the MG would be a better idea. But I take those glitches before any of the scripted boring arcade stuff of other shooters any day.

Graphics:
Even as someone who normally just runs through games and knows a lot about 3d modeling, animation, texturing I was amazed so often, that the game probably took me 5 hours longer to complete.

Skybox and draw distance:
COD4 has ugly low res skybox image planes as backdrops. e.g. mountains based on some photo source. The problem with this is that you can clearly tell when the normal level ends and the skybox begins. Worse:
Sometimes the foreground 3d objects have LESS detail than the skybox plane. This looks bad, bad, bad.
Crysis is the first FPS that I know of that has realistic scale and draw distance (Far Cry's scale was a little tiny) and manages to draw actual 3d geometry until the horizon.
Even Oblivion with all the high res packs and LOD patches and whatnot doesn't look nearly as good and the sense of scale in Oblivion is more like a toy railroad universe than something realistic.
Crysis even manages this draw distance without having too much annoying textures popping up or other LOD tricks. It all felt very smooth.
Coupled with the perfect depth buffer usage for distant haze and fog and the volumetric clouds, the sun shafts and all the other atmospheric features it is the first videogame to date where you really feel the world and not get distracted by engine limitations.

Just some more graphic/gameplay features that stand out and above the competition:

+REAL snow and rain: The snow is in the actual level and not just blowing in a box around you all the time following you whereever you go (Oblivion)
+Snow & rain shaders are amazing. I took 30 minutes on the carrier alone to check out all the wet planes and the rain falling in the ocean.
+REAL 3d water tesselation not just flat shaded ocean planes and the boats and floating stuff react to it.
+REAL dynamic shadows that are perfectly filtered (hello FEAR)
+Sharks, butterflys, frogs, goats, chickens, birds, fish, crabs, turtles, pastridges, moskitos and other animals which all can be killed, picked up or messed with
+Breakable vegetation with on-the-fly boolean operations where you break stuff
+Driving tanks through a field of banana shrubs and everything breaks and the leaves react to you and the tank (compare that to BF2 where picket fences are an impossible barrier for a battletank)
+Breakable stuff everywhere (not like COD4 where every sequence when something breaks is scripted and small bricks are glued to the ground)
+Oil barrels that have actual oil in them and leak accordingly. When you throw it in the ocean a cloud of spilled oil forms
+Awesome physics system with no cheating. Just one example: I managed to jump onto a hovering VTOL and got a free lift. In other games this would probably have been a scripted ghost object where I'd had fallen through. I then took a barrel and jumped on the VTOL and placed it on top of it and the barrel swayed realistically on the back of the VTOl with every movement WOW!
+Awesome little details like player hands grabbing stuff (hello Gordon Freeman!)
+You can see your body and feet leave footprints in sand and move realistically (hello Gordon "Ghost" Freeman!)
+Weapons customization and possibility to dual wield melee weapons. (during the last level I ran around with Gauss rifle in one hand and Golf club in the other, those buggers never knew what hit'em)
 

Pugnate

Senior member
Jun 25, 2006
690
0
0
Originally posted by: Fenixgoon
how large is the multiplayer base? i was in the beta and really enjoyed power struggle, so i hope there are a decent # of online players :)

Loads of people online.

The only time it got a little slower was when WW3 broke out on the flight deck.

haha.
 

Jules

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
15,213
0
0
Man i wish i can finish this game but i lost interest. Playing TF2, Uncharted and Ratchet and Clank doesn't help either.
 

Regs

Lifer
Aug 9, 2002
16,665
21
81
It just amazes me how photo-realistic the out doors are.

Then you go inside stuff and it's a single color wall and floor with no textures or shading. Not like you're in a lot of enclosures, as this game is based almost all out doors.

The air craft carrier and some of the in-door tents/bunkers all look crap. Don't understand it. I'm starting to think the makers of Far Cry can only do jungles.
 

Dainas

Senior member
Aug 5, 2005
299
0
0
Great game, nice and playable (ultra/8ax anis/1600x1200) until it lulls you into a false sense of security. The game's difficulty tends to skyrocker right at the same time as the fps bomb, not being one of those games where somehow you can still aim at 20-25fps. As such obviously a lot of online lying to boost epeen going on, because your just not going to beat the game in hard on any current system without setting visuals to fugly.

I beat the original Far Cry loosing few lives mostly due to tripping over my own grenades. Crysis is easy on normal, then past halfway it becomes more attune to trying to survive at the bottom of a blender. Sporadic choppiness and enemies just rushing at you from every angle; Die reload die reload die reload over and over.
 

SuPrEIVIE

Platinum Member
Aug 21, 2003
2,538
0
0
Originally posted by: videogames101
dude, you NEED to enable AA, those screenshots like wicked jagged, lol...

lol i dont see why people put up a fit about this, when ur concentrating on playing you spend hardly any attention about scenery.. but i guess i have low graphics standards which is good otherwise u will have to spend big money to get the best looks
 

skace

Lifer
Jan 23, 2001
14,488
7
81
When I first started reading Crysis reviews, one of the things I read was that the game mimicked Farcry and would have the same downfall because of it, which was that the 2nd half of the game got rid of human battles and thus took a step down. I'd just like to comment on the fact that while the 2 games do follow the same trend, I found the aliens in Crysis 10x more enjoyable to fight than in Farcry. The only problem is that you need to have smooth frame rates for the alien parts more so than the human parts because the aliens move very quickly. They will fly and change direction at the drop of a dime. Now, I can understand why this would create a negative experience for some people, because maybe they were getting by with 15 FPS throughout the game, chugging along and making due. Those same 15 FPS will make it nearly impossible for them to kill any of the aliens. This becomes even more true on the VTOL level and later. With smooth frame rates, these fights are incredibly fun and I love the way the aliens have unique attack patterns.

Crysis is also the only game I'd ever use the term next gen to describe.
 

skace

Lifer
Jan 23, 2001
14,488
7
81
Originally posted by: Dainas
Great game, nice and playable (ultra/8ax anis/1600x1200) until it lulls you into a false sense of security. The game's difficulty tends to skyrocker right at the same time as the fps bomb, not being one of those games where somehow you can still aim at 20-25fps. As such obviously a lot of online lying to boost epeen going on, because your just not going to beat the game in hard on any current system without setting visuals to fugly.

I beat the original Far Cry loosing few lives mostly due to tripping over my own grenades. Crysis is easy on normal, then past halfway it becomes more attune to trying to survive at the bottom of a blender. Sporadic choppiness and enemies just rushing at you from every angle; Die reload die reload die reload over and over.

VTOL level is the exact point I set my graphics to medium.

And I've already stated my system specs. I hated setting them to medium. The day I get constant FPS at VH in this game will be awesome.