Koki on 16/12/2007 at 11:08

---

Deep breaths, and count from 10 to 1 in german. Hoookay, moving on...



Well isn't this interesting? SLI sucks, most people should know that, and Crysis sucks on SLI, most people playing Crysis should know that. The article on Kotaku is so incredibly vague("Very High" with no info on resolution, AA, AF, RAM, CPU, etc.) it's not even funny. I don't know about the REAL article, since Kotaku redirected me to digg which redirected me to yet something else at which point I gave up and used my psychic powers to eradicate digg from the Internet(It's still there, but it's probably just my browser's cache). The cherry-on-top moment was the "a respectable (but far from mind-blowing) 37.9 FPS". Crysis doesn't need high FPS because of the way it renders - but they have already proven they don't know what the hell they are talking about so putting that aside, if 37 is not enough for someone, he really needs to be whipped with an extension cord.
As for the sales, you can build a box which runs Crysis on all high with no problems for under $700 not including the monitor, and I won't even mention there's also Medium which according to my reports runs on current budget cards. Of course no one will really care because they read on Kotaku that you can't run it, in, like, in a hundred years.

Speaking of Crysis sales, suprisingly it was momentarily (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=16415) second best selling PC game in Japan. Why would japanese who don't play PC games in general, and if they do they're dating sims/eroge(Which will run on a cheap notebook), and - to put it mildly - do not usually buy foreign games, get Crysis? My speculation that they just want to kill some koreans is indubitably baseless, unfair, xenophobic, homophobic and racist.

MSX on 16/12/2007 at 19:42

---

Um, the genre is crowded. Putting out crap all the same time is dumb as I believe I made a thread about not too terribly long ago. Unless you design something spectacular competition is a bad thing.



Koki... how does it make you homophobic to think that? I'm curious.

Banksie on 16/12/2007 at 23:52

---

It is just a shame that once you enter the alien ship that all that freedom goes away and it turns into a heavily linear experience. That said the fights up to entering the ship are all a lot of fun.



Indeed it also depends on what you expect as a comfortable experience. Most FPS purists recoil in horror at playing at less than 40 FPS and I must admit games like Half Life 2 become quite different once you can play it at those speeds - using the crowbar to take out headcrabs mid-air for instance becomes a viable response that a lower frame-rate simply doesn't permit.

That said with Crysis' open (well for the aforementioned first half of the game) approach then a lower frame-rate is very viable. You just tend to less of the in your face Rambo rushes and a bit more long range sniping and stealth. I've played Crysis through on the Dx9 version of very high (so hacked cfg files) and it worked well. I was amazed at how well the HD2900XT held up when playing at 1680x1050. Yes the frame-rate is mid twenties and you definitely don't enable AA. But it was just so pretty that otherwise I was happily spending my time sneaking, shooting and being devious to various North Korean troops...

If anything what I'd like to see is Crysis patched to make better use of multiple cores as I suspect a healthy chunk of performance is being choked by blocks in the engine. In particular background data loading causes drop spikes here and there which, if Bioshock is anything to go by, could be completely eliminated by proper multi-core threading.

Aristed on 18/12/2007 at 03:36

---

I didn’t mind the alien ship. At first it was interesting because it was new and different then just as I was getting pissed off that the game had gone linear it ended and went back outside again. I think without it I would criticized the game for lack of variety in location and samey gameplay. So it (and the frozen jungle) were imho good design decisions, but the first half of the game is defiantly better…

gunsmoke on 19/12/2007 at 02:22

---

I had a LOT more fun w/FarCry (hell I still play it frequently), and it was worth upgrading for. This is NOT.