Crysis

I've got mine! Amazon shipped it yesterday, it arrived at my work today :)

Unfortunately I won't be able to play it until tomorrow :(

A guy at work brought it in playing it on his macbook and it looked like yet another generic fps to me.

I have nothing against the genre but just not found anything that's made me go wow since Duke Nukem 3D!

OK, not strictly true, Half Life and Deus Ex were impressive.

I like generic FPS, especially FarCry generic =)

Amazingly it runs on my rig, GeForce6800GT all settings on low so it probably looks slightly worse than FarCry lol

I've played it last night and it was as I expected. Yet another boring FPS. Water effects were actually very disappointing. I was expecting something better.

Barney

I think its the best FPS ever. Pushes the limit of what has been done before in many areas. Of course it looks like a FPS, only so much you can do when dangling a gun in front of a camera.

What farcry does is allow for a broader range of freedom with how you go about doing things, you cant use run and gun doom techniques. It has fairly realistic feeling weapons, and is one of the few games that allows for realistic ranged shooting and lets you use the spectactular environment and factor it in your strategy.

If you want, and you have enough ammo you can mow down a section of forest to clear your FOV kind of like predator, and trees and limbs can kill the enemy when they fall as well as you.

Enemy use covering tactics with firing suppression and the whole game seems very realistic in delta mode. In the difficult settings bullets can also pass through some cover materials, physics is great. Best FPS since farcry and Riddick came out.

If you don't like FPS you probably won't like it, if you like boring generic FPS like doom and unreal you will probably like it even less. In my opinion it pushes FPS to the next limit of fun realism.

You forgot to mention...

Weapons of MASS DESTRUCTION

I just got to the ice level bit.

It isn't a place as such - more an incident. I'm so excited I simply cannot stop twitching and touching.

I'm going to wander outside to see the scenery.

EDIT:
Mmm, no ice or snow stuff outside - it just happened inside the complex.

Mmm.

Touching resumed.

Crysis does live up to the hype, it looks awesome but more importantly it plays awesome too. Tonnes of attention to detail, it draws you in it's flexible, there are lots of ways of doing things, this really does update the genre and raise the bar, I'd equate this to a similar step change that Half-Life brought to FPS.

Anyone complaining about this game either hasn't played it or just hates FPS game.

Crysis is awesome!

Darkheart

Well, play Crysis - then go back and play Oblivion.

Crysis' lush (and realistic) vedgetation makes Oblivion's landscape look somewhat barren and cartoony.

Downloaded the demo last night 1.7GB ridiculous! Now I can play it on my new Radeon X1950 Pro :)

here's Crysis Low setting v's very high. Anyone else think the low setting looks a lot like oblivion :)



Some people might actually prefer the low settings depending on how much they like realistic atmospherics and shadows and lighting etc.

Er.. which is which? The top one seems to have much better lighting on the gun but all the foliage is ridiculously overbright and cartoony.

Other than the gun and the overbright, there doesn't seem to be much difference at all.

The bottom image is sexual when moving.

I'm inside the alien ship - just killed my first Alien.

It's sort of like the Abyss.

Other than the improved shadows, the volumetric clouds and the much greater detail even at a distance (and the higher res textures).

What shadows? Nothing's close enough to see a shadow. There are a couple of diagonal lines of shadow on the tin roof in the bottom image maybe? But the top image is Noddy-in-Toytown bright that I'm not sure if I can even see the shadow in that image so I can't really judge improvement. What greater detail? The lighting is so much darker that there's not enough contrast to see detail. There are definitely a few branches on trees in the lower image that are not present in the top image, but it's still too fuzzy to make out more than that. And seriously, volumetric clouds. Talk about seeing what you expect to see. At that distance and at that resolution, it wouldn't look one iota different if it was a skybox.

All of which still leaves me with the same question, because there are clouds in the top image which aren't in the bottom image, but there are branches in trees and bits of shrubbery in the bottom image which aren't in the top image. So I still have no idea which is which.

The bottom one is darker, but it looks more photorealistic to me so I assume that's the "improved" one.

Gabriel

You're just being difficult aren't you?

there are plenty of better images that will show off the games graphics out there, that one conveniently showed two very different renderings of the same scene so I stuck it up.

No, he's not. I honestly have the same problem.

I'd say the bottom is with higher settings, but that's 90% an uneducated guess.

Well looking at the mountain in the distance the top one seems to have the much higher degree of detail, while the bottom one looks washed out.

If I were to hazard a guess I'd also say the bottom one is the higher quality one, because PC games seem to think that darker=higher quality, and because of the shadow on the roof of the shack. But a lot of the things (like the gun and the water) looks much better on the top image.

When have you ever been outside at any time, not during an eclipse, when the sun was clearly high in the sky, and had to strain to see what looks like about 200m ahead?


Here is our photorealism reality check. Well what do you know? Reality isn't at all dark and murky. Go figure.

your pic doesn't work, and maybe you should look at some of the decent crysis screengrabs. The one I posted originaly isn't the best example of crysis graphics.

No, I'm just being honest. I thought the people complaining about my inability to tell which was which while refusing to answer the question themselves were just being difficult.

I still think it's the bottom image, but Perturbatios comments about clouds and detail haven't helped me, because the mountain in the top picture is far more detailed and the bottom one is all washed out. That plus there are virtually no clouds in the bottom picture and he mentioned volumetric clouds.

So no, I'm terribly sorry but I can't tell whether Noddy or muddy is the high detail shot.

This video lessons all:
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/19966.html

There are lots more there:
http://www.gametrailers.com/search.php?s=crysis&str_type=movies&ac=1

Except it is, because it's probably going to be roughly what people are going to get.

Indeed.

Wow. Awesome. Besides the absurd idea that a 5.56mm round has enough kinetic energy to topple a palm tree, that foliage looks more artificial than LEGO. Have you ever been outside?

That's probably depth of field causing the blur. And a lot of the lighting depends on the time of day and where your facing, if the sun is causing glare its going to cause your surroundings to darken.

Flameducks image looks like it has a polarising filter and UV filter on the lense, and has very bright lighting which might be caused by any number of things. Crysis renders more like you don't have a UV filter on the camemera so things get more hazy and blurred in the distance.

Could be, I didn't take the picture, just picked it at random from the 1000's of similar pictures of Fraser Island froom Google Image Search.

So kind of like if you were drunk, or had poor depth perception?

Nice picture. Still looks more like an ink than a photo to me.

Here is a fly-through trailer
http://www.gametrailers.com/player/15440.html

Looks amazing. Too bad FPS games give me a major case of motion sickness.

Agreed, it's way too dark mr Pedant. What I guess I meant by, quote, "MORE photorealistic" is that it had some kind of misty blurring on the backround which looks sorta realistic (dpending on the weather!) and better lighting on the palm trees in min left.

The fact is - if you have a high-spec PC and run Crysis wacked up high - you'll see stunning, gorgeous, natural environments.

Period.

I saw. I came. I've changed my underpants.

So that deformed blurry-looking tree stump in the foreground, with the rendering artifact was added after the screenshot was taken?

And I don't think those mountains in the back are moving fast enough (or provide enough gravitational pull) to cause a blue shift.

The fact is, if you go outside you will see stunning, gorgeous, natural environments.

no one said it was real, and those stumps probably started off life as full grown trees that got the tops ripped off.

Most of the foilage in the game can be shot to pieces kind of like how soldier of fortune let you shoot limbs off of people. The stumps in the puki's shot are already broken ones I guess.

Anyway, Crysis is a winner on many different levels, its not just the graphics. In the graphics department if just takes every neat rendering trick that has been used in isolation before and crams them all together simultaniously in one engine. It's really quite something. It's the most immersive FPS to date, and just also happens to have great gameplay to match the graphics.

Any chance the full version is a little more optimized compared to the demo?

My 256mb 6800GT (and 256mb {which is reading as 512mb in WinXP for some reason} GF8600m GT on my laptop) could barely hold (re:consistent 25+ fps) the demo at 1024x768 with medium graphics, and god forbid I go anything lower than that in this day and age.
(why they even suggest a GF6600 as the minimum requirement is blasphemy, the game looks worse than FarCry on low detail)

If not, I'll just keep plugging away with the editor until I get bored of creating little parks that are ready to be destroyed with my TAC gun.

it doesn't seem much different to the demo on a single core CPU like mine, but crysis is supposed to split itself into saperate threads for AI, physics etc if you have more.

there's a good gamespot crysis guide which says that after the GPU the CPU can make a HUGE difference. Dual core 2ghz boosts the FPS by about 1/3 over a single core 2.4ghz


http://www.gamespot.com/features/6182806/p-6.html

top-bottom:

bottom one has shadows on everything, improved clouds, water, way more foliage (look at distance lines along mountains) better lighting on everything including lightin on self, as well as ambient colouring on stuff instead off fullbright ugliness.

Noticed depth of field on bottom pic too, it looks simply superb. I played the demo and got the same results.

The top pic basically is unlit completely and looks like a poor dx6 game compared to the bottom one.

I've made it to the aircraft carrier. I stayed on deck for a while watching the figher planes landing and taking off in the night-time rain. Then I proceeded below deck to large myself in the corridors.

The admiral of the carrier has just announced that the US president has just authorised the use of nuclear missles on the island.

Oooh.

The major stole (not sure why) a VTOL and has legged it back to the island. The admiral was not too happy but decided to let it pass.

Oooh, the nuke just hit the island - I watched it from the bridge of the aircraft carrier.

Mmm, seems the nuke made the aliens stronger. Now they are attacking the aircraft carrier.

The carrier is on fire - I have to go now to fight the intruding aliens.

If I don't see you all again - then just remember that I was the greatest Blitzer who ever lived.

Puki.... noooooooooooooooooooooo!

lol

:)
IPete2.

For a moment I misread that sentence!

'US president has just authorised the use of nuclear missles on the Iran.'

That's the end of the game.

The carrier is the last level.

Sniffage.

Basically, from the point the aliens were encountered I thought the game was not as good. To me the aliens were totally bent. Basically they were just flying jellyfish things - ie totally bent. I'd rather they were humanoid like the mutagens in FarCry.

I'm going back to play in the jungle bits - I like those.

So, that's it? No alien base to get in to? No alien labs? Have you ever flown an aircraft during the game? I mean, is this game really worth it?

Far Cry was pretty interesting because it's a big game that has a lot of varied gameplay both indoors and outdoors, and challenges that are quite varied depending on the trigens or the soldiers and the configuration of the islands. Riding boats was neat, and so on (blowing satellite dish or planting nuke on an underground base accompanied by a petulent woman).

You get to fly the VTOL troop carrier thing towards the end of the game.

The only inside bit (as per FarCry) is the final carrier level.

Still, don't forget FarCry 2 is on its way - it uses this new engine.

I just found something new:

In the game there is wildlife - ie the baby seagull things and hens you find running around in the undergrowth near the first camp (as pictured above by "Evak").

Anyway - you can can pick them up like any other object. They twitch about in your hand as you carry them around.

I found you can then throw them.

Activate 'Strength' and you can throw them further.

I got a hen thing and took it to the top of a mountain thing and then larged it off into the water.

If you tilt your head right back - ie looking straight up - then large one into the air - you can see how many times you can shoot it before it hits the ground.

So they can't fly once you throw them then?

Nope - however, they can't fly anyway though.

You can throw live ones further than dead ones for some reason.

I found another new game which was to see how many times you could make them bounce on the ground. A bit like skipping stones over water - but using the land instead. They don't skip over the water in Crysis.

That is because they are the wrong shape.

Flatten one with a vehicle first then see how they skim over the water...managed to get one to bounce 9 times in a row!

lol puki...

Nice wind-up Shambler. You had me wondering.

Is the gfx setup the same as on the demo, where you can only get the best effects on XP by hacking the 'very high' settings into 'high' in the config files?

Yeh, I had to hack the sucker up for the retail version.

Here's a video of it running with the hacked 'Very High' settings: http://media.putfile.com/Crysis-for--FlameDuck-

EDIT:
It looks better if you change the video size to half-size. Putfile have compressed the footage to a flv file - thus destroying the quality.