cretin
Arcane
- Joined
- Apr 20, 2019
- Messages
- 1,369
Crysis is one of the those games that seems to live in peoples imagination a lot differently to how it was in reality. Its also one of those games people never stop saying stupid shit about, like that it was so graphically awesome that it still melts GPUs today, or that it still looks better than everything since. The former statement being just fucking plain stupid (I ran this bitch maxxed out on a laptop, so just shut the fuck up with this nonsense) and the latter being a half-truth we will get into later.
So I acquired a GOG copy and set about putting the GPU melter theory to the test by maxxing out everything, because of course. And indeed, during the opening sequence and introductory gameplay I noticed it was quite.... slow. But my system wasn't chugging. And then it occurred to me that the problem was the refresh rate. Cue 15 minutes on google, to find out that for some dumb teutonic autism reason or another, crysis has a problem where the refresh rate in true fullscreen is locked and the only way to get around this is to run it in some form of windowed mode, and further that the only actual way to do this is to do it manually once you're loaded in. I dont know why, and I dont care. Pressing alt + enter 4 times gets you to a fullscreen window. Voila, buttery smooth ~100fps, and no GPU melting going on in any, way shape or form, even during intensive scenes. Actually the only slowdowns that occurred seemed to be from problems with the game itself loading things in during heavily scripted sequences.
Anyway, the first thing that I noticed is, this game has definitely aged in a way people pretend it hasn't. There are some really, really ugly fucking low res textures. Crytek was obviously judicious in marshalling their resources, as the assets that are important like people, weapons, vehicles etc are all high detail, but things players aren't going to spend a lot of time looking at like rocks and wooden fences are disgusting. Ditto with the poly count on models. It is however, yes a very nice looking game, largely due to crytek's very clean asset work and good lighting. Surprisingly, on the visual front, crysis doesn't blow its wad early; the best imagespaces in the game come later on and are incredibly atmospheric, actually arrestingly so and I'm a guy who is completely jaded with videogame graphics. It occurred to me that one thing crysis does well is in not doing things that are industry standard these days, e.g not going overboard with post processing or having obnoxious saturation.
Gameplay wise, crysis surprised me. Its a fucking good FPS. It was unabashed fun in a way I haven't had with a FPS since HL1. The game can be played as a conventional run, jump, shoot FPS or as a milfag LARParino with stealth and carpal tunnel syndrome abuse of the lean keys. In other words, it doesn't particularly punish any given approach, despite ostensibly having the trappings of a tactical shooter. The suit gimmick is a bit lackluster, the only two modes of interest are invisibility and speed. Strength falls by the wayside simply for not having many (any) interesting implementation. You really only ever end up using strength mode just to make tall jumps. It would've been fun for example, if you could do stuff like pick up vehicles and throw them at chinks or burst through walls like the koolaid man. But overall, the game chucks fun set pieces at you that can be approached in different ways, although I will say, just like crytek's previous games (far cry) the illusion of freedom is larger than the reality, another thing that people's imaginations like to remember quite differently.
If i had to criticize something, it would be that this is a very easy game. I played on the highest difficulty from the get go, and aside from the absolutely retarded final boss fight, in which you will be killed by stupid shit over and over, there was not ever a situation in this game that was particularly challenging. I can't imagine playing it on normal would be anything but a power fantasy. My gut feeling is the AI is gated in a way so as to not have to suffer endless amount of bitching from players (which still exists anyway) because the AI at time has some impressive routines that other games just simply do not care to develop, such as pincer maneuvers and cover seeking behavior. However, they also have the standard AI neutering where they do very little of the meaningful things that would actually frustrate players, such as throwing grenades (i think i counted them doing this maybe 5 times throughout the entire game) or rushing the player aggressively. The addition of vehicular and static weapon enemies (there are boats, cars, helicopters and tanks) couldve posed an interesting challenge but they are given the standard FPS neutering to make them have poor visual/engagement ranges, slow reaction times and generally just letting the player off easy.
Overall, a good game, if a little short on the chink smashing.
So I acquired a GOG copy and set about putting the GPU melter theory to the test by maxxing out everything, because of course. And indeed, during the opening sequence and introductory gameplay I noticed it was quite.... slow. But my system wasn't chugging. And then it occurred to me that the problem was the refresh rate. Cue 15 minutes on google, to find out that for some dumb teutonic autism reason or another, crysis has a problem where the refresh rate in true fullscreen is locked and the only way to get around this is to run it in some form of windowed mode, and further that the only actual way to do this is to do it manually once you're loaded in. I dont know why, and I dont care. Pressing alt + enter 4 times gets you to a fullscreen window. Voila, buttery smooth ~100fps, and no GPU melting going on in any, way shape or form, even during intensive scenes. Actually the only slowdowns that occurred seemed to be from problems with the game itself loading things in during heavily scripted sequences.
Anyway, the first thing that I noticed is, this game has definitely aged in a way people pretend it hasn't. There are some really, really ugly fucking low res textures. Crytek was obviously judicious in marshalling their resources, as the assets that are important like people, weapons, vehicles etc are all high detail, but things players aren't going to spend a lot of time looking at like rocks and wooden fences are disgusting. Ditto with the poly count on models. It is however, yes a very nice looking game, largely due to crytek's very clean asset work and good lighting. Surprisingly, on the visual front, crysis doesn't blow its wad early; the best imagespaces in the game come later on and are incredibly atmospheric, actually arrestingly so and I'm a guy who is completely jaded with videogame graphics. It occurred to me that one thing crysis does well is in not doing things that are industry standard these days, e.g not going overboard with post processing or having obnoxious saturation.
Gameplay wise, crysis surprised me. Its a fucking good FPS. It was unabashed fun in a way I haven't had with a FPS since HL1. The game can be played as a conventional run, jump, shoot FPS or as a milfag LARParino with stealth and carpal tunnel syndrome abuse of the lean keys. In other words, it doesn't particularly punish any given approach, despite ostensibly having the trappings of a tactical shooter. The suit gimmick is a bit lackluster, the only two modes of interest are invisibility and speed. Strength falls by the wayside simply for not having many (any) interesting implementation. You really only ever end up using strength mode just to make tall jumps. It would've been fun for example, if you could do stuff like pick up vehicles and throw them at chinks or burst through walls like the koolaid man. But overall, the game chucks fun set pieces at you that can be approached in different ways, although I will say, just like crytek's previous games (far cry) the illusion of freedom is larger than the reality, another thing that people's imaginations like to remember quite differently.
If i had to criticize something, it would be that this is a very easy game. I played on the highest difficulty from the get go, and aside from the absolutely retarded final boss fight, in which you will be killed by stupid shit over and over, there was not ever a situation in this game that was particularly challenging. I can't imagine playing it on normal would be anything but a power fantasy. My gut feeling is the AI is gated in a way so as to not have to suffer endless amount of bitching from players (which still exists anyway) because the AI at time has some impressive routines that other games just simply do not care to develop, such as pincer maneuvers and cover seeking behavior. However, they also have the standard AI neutering where they do very little of the meaningful things that would actually frustrate players, such as throwing grenades (i think i counted them doing this maybe 5 times throughout the entire game) or rushing the player aggressively. The addition of vehicular and static weapon enemies (there are boats, cars, helicopters and tanks) couldve posed an interesting challenge but they are given the standard FPS neutering to make them have poor visual/engagement ranges, slow reaction times and generally just letting the player off easy.
Overall, a good game, if a little short on the chink smashing.
