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Crytek: Crysis 2 will be graphically superior on the PC
Ihmotepp
Member Posts: 14,495
Suck on that you console bitches!
http://www.techspot.com/news/38605-crytek-crysis-2-will-be-graphically-superior-on-the-pc.html
So when news broke that Crytek was planning a cross-platform sequel many were worried the PC version's graphics would be dragged down as a result. However, according to Crytek CEO Cervat Yerli, Crysis 2 will be graphically superior on the PC compared to both PS3 and Xbox 360 editions.
Comments
Well thank god for that. Now hopefully it will have controls made for the PC and not "Riged" X-Box ones like Just Cause 2.
If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude; greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.
Samuel Adams
No shit
I hope they hired some skilled and terrific programmers, last game was a mess.
Maximum graphics potential has always been the one area PC excelled at when it comes to cross-platform games. Naturally considering new hardware is available for PCs several times a year while consoles are static for half-decades at a time.
There's other areas worth worrying about though when it comes to which version will be more worth buying. Such as CryTek's plans for multiplayer and DLC for Crysis 2. As usual though I'd expect the subpar PC experience of fractionally less purchases and fractionally less poeple to play online with, and 360-first on any expansions or DLC. I can't wait until the day, if it ever comes, Microsoft merges Xbox Live with Games for Windows Live so that I can indiscriminately use my gamertag and the service no matter which platform I bought the game for.
Ultimately though...I'm probably going to get the game for both. 360 for any multiplayer and DLC, should they be there. PC because I'm planning on getting two DX11 cards soon and the inevitable mods for Crysis 3.
No? The Engine was amazingly well optimized. Bully for the PC is an example of a Mess.
It's not just the graphics I worry about but also the controls and the AI.
They have clearly nerfed the graphics by going for low poly cityscapes instead of glorious pacific islands. The mapsizes will all be smaller because consoles have so small an amount of GFX RAM.
Less RAM and smaller CPU's also means cut down AI's, less of them with less intelligence.
I think that the CRYengine is perfectly capable fo delivering the same performance on PC this time as it did last time, I fully expect the PC version to look nicer than the console, but I don't think the game design will be testing my hardware limits to the max and given that Crytek have always made technology titles, thats a big part of the attraction for me gone.
FAr Cry 2 looked good on PC too. So did FEAR 2, but both of them were a let down. The both lacked what made the PC originals excellent. And this is what I expect of Crysis 2. So it's not on my list.
Which is why games like Just Cause 2 and GTA 4 are not released on consoles.
Oh, wait...
They both suffer all the same limitations you would expect of any other console port for a PC gamer. Interface, scale, modability and complexity.
The critical difference between those franchises and Crysis, is that those two did not make a name for themselves selling ever more powerful software to the technology market and then produce a lower tech version.
The player has different expectations for those titles.
GTA 4 has not abandoned it's Unique Selling Point. Crysis 2 has.
That you are comparing Crysis 2 with Just Cause 2 rather neatly reflects the drop in standards we are expecting of the franchise.
Actually, Just Cause 2 exceeds the original Crysis in terms of complexity of its open world. The world is larger and also includes full flight both by use of vehicles and the parachute.
Thats not to say that it looks quite as pretty as Crysis, but to say that it can't handle an open world is simply not true.
Crysis's unique selling point was its amazing visuals. According to Crytek, the PC version of Crysis 2 has better visuals than the original Crysis.
I think you really need to learn to understand that when a salesman tells you the product he is selling is better than ever before, he may be a little bias.
We are expecting Crysis 2 to play better on PC than Crysis one due to the (necessarily) unambitious nature of the levels. Instead of the Jungle, we are going for easy to render cityscapes. Expect much better framerates than Crysis and a bog standard game arena that no longer stands out from all the others and astounds you with it's authentic beauty.
Am I going to get blown away and stare gawping at my screen as the waterfall cascades down over my head in the middle of a tropical clearing. The suns corona playing on the ripples....the mist and the spray... the refractions as water drips over my eyes...
Answer? No I'm not. Since the consoles can't display that, they haven't wasted anytime designing them into this game.
Just Cause 2 doesn't even approach Crysis in the complexity of it's level design. Count the number of objects on each map. Count the complexities of each model. The numbers of concurent AI's you fight, the numbers of concurrent decisions those AI's are making. Have a look at the physics of those objects and the number of ways in which they are interactable.
Just Cause 2. ROFLMAO.
Did the guy who made that tell you how fabulous it was too? You have to be just about the most gullable person I know GM. You console wasn't a super computer sold to you at a loss, it was a cut price computer sold to you at a very large profit.
I can't think of anyone less critically minded than yourself.
I'm not saying to you that there aren't any good open world games on consoles, nor would I ever attempt to. I'm just pointing out that the scale and complexity of those open worlds are paltry compared to open world titles designed for the PC. When you follow a PC franchise to console you will find these nerfs very obivious. they will disappoint and even annoy you.
That doesn't mean GTA 4 is a bad or unenjoyable game in any way, but it hardly compares to say Armed Assault 2 if open worlds are the experience you are looking for. Not on scale, not on detail, not on interactivity.
My local town can provide a really entertaining football match. Well worth going to see. But they aren't Manchester United. They aren't in that league.
My point remains that Crysis's USPs were it's pacific island themes and it's state of the art computer science. Two elements that it has dropped in order to court the console market. They've had to drop the bits that made it stand out. The bits that all the other games couldn't compare with.
In some aspects Crysis was more impressive than Just Cause 2, You claim you like open worlds and tropical settings. Just Cause 2 offers just that. Some aspects such as visuals and physics are less impressive, sure, but thats why Crysis 2 could have been scaled down if it were to continue to use a tropical settings
You probably won't find waterfalls in Crysis 2, but the terrain offers all kinds of other possibilities. I think the change in setting has more to do with variaty than anything else. Crytek's games have been taken place on a tropical island since the original Far Cry. Its time for something new.
My place as a console bitch has been showed; I've been told, owned and taken away from!
Let the PC gamers of the world unite, you've truly showed us that not spending the 2 to 3k on a gaming rig capable of showing the level of difference capable between that of a true gamer and our mad console ways to be a truly pathetic loss that we will continue to regret until we break down, sell our macs and recite those epic words: "Hi I'm blah and I'm a PC.".
Meh, I'm kdding. All the power to them, while they are at it they should make sure that the graphics for Crysis 2 will rape and pillage the poor little rigs of the world with the indeference which a hawk shows to a field mouse while they sit back and watch their stocks in Toshiba GPU unit sky rocket!
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Polygon count, fill rate, shader processing rate, data transfer rate.....the recommended specs for Crysis on PC offer over 10 times the graphical capability of an XBOX 360.
They have to use no more than 1/10th of the graphical detail on 360 that they used in Crysis in order for it to work at all.
They have to fit all this into 1/4 of the RAM, all managed by 1/3 of the procesor power.
There are serious compromises needed to be made old boy. Compromises that will define the games limits.
This is going to be done with smaller maps, smaller view distances, and less complex objects. For example single square buildings instead of multiple complexly geometric trees. (Each one of those trees is going to be using up the same sort of computational resources as one building). Lower polygon monsters etc. Lower monster counts and less complex AI, fewer multiplayers... all the usual tricks.
It's perhaps conceiveable (although never yet done before) that they will take the time to up the AI* for the PC market and change the interface and make new textures. Add a serious physics engine. But it is inconceivable that they will make a load of new levels just for PC players. That's just too much work.
Typically they just do some higher res textures.
(*)Although it should be noted that most ports just do the textures. Far Cry 2 had the same nerfy AI, FEAR 2, a game who's AI was originally the Franchises unique selling point on PC, didn't bother with either the interface or the AI.
PC isn't so standardized a gaming platform that consoles can be blamed exclusively for any concessions made by a company like CryTek. Last I checked, Intel still had over 50% market share in graphic cards for PCs. ATI and Nvidia of course occupying the rest; with their graphic cards divided between what's in netbooks, notebooks, laptops, on-board in Dells and HPs, and otherwise not the top of the line game-oriented offerings.
PC as a gaming platform is very varied. Probably top-heavy in terms of serious gamers; in that all of us here are the types to upgrade our systems every year or more if given the chance. But not so top-heavy when it comes to everyone CryTek would like to target on PC and make concessions for in their game design so that their systems will run these games.
I do believe that increasingly though its going to become painfully obvious that consoles are hindering PC growth. Particularly the 360 when it comes to things like it being limited to DirectX 9. Metro 2033 for example, it has DX9, DX10 and DX11 support. For as long as the 360 has a lifespan, all crossplatform titles will have to target two or three different DX versions or forsake the later versions all together.
Ultimately though there's other reasons (piracy) why consoles are the leading platform anyway. Any disprepancy between consoles and PC was never a problem in the past. No one really cared what the SNES version of Doom turned out to be like. 'less the bigger issues of gaming on PC are solved, look forward Crysis 3 with iPad as a leading platform ahead of PC.
Nobody is saying Crysis 2 on consoles will look just as impressive on consoles as it does on PC.
However its design of an open world could easily be done on consoles. Ofcourse not with the same polygon count and textures resolutions whatnot, but it can definitely be done when Just Cause 2 offers a tropical open world that is significantly larger than that of Crysis. The view distance also won't be a problem, since Just Cause 2 offers an enormous view distance when you fly up in a plane and you can simply scale this.
I think you miss my point GL.
Crysis 2 on the PC will be less impressive than Crysis 1 on the PC.
Just as Far Cry 2 was, just as FEAR 2 was.
The reason for this is because those games have been designed to use a much reduced system of hardware than the originals were. This will directly effect the enjoyment of fans of the series as their advanced computer science was one of it's unique selling points.
Just Cause 2 doesn't advance human knowledge and capability or science in any way whatsoever. Sorry, but for me it's just a choddy run of the mill console game. Same for GTA 4. I recognise they are fun games with open worlds and view distances and whatever else. But ultimately they are un-noteworthy. Gaming remains fundamentally unchanged by their creation. The boundaries of human entertainment remains the same.
Remember that in a video game "size" is not meausured in virtual miles and kilometres. It is measured in image complexity.
View distance is always a problem. If you fly up in a plane and all you can see is some blurry landscape and the odd other plane, then obviously it isn't a gamebreaker.
But if on the otherhand you wish to interact with hundreds of units on the ground... whereas viewed the from the ground you will only be able to see a few of these at any one time, limiting the amount of processing and rendering required, from the air the you will be able to see them all. This means a lot more rendering and if in multiplayer, a lot more bandwitdh usuage and computational power and RAM usuage for the server.
So typically, games limit view distance to optimise both their rendering performance and their network code.
In a Star Trek game I have a view distance of hundreds of light years. Remeber It's not the distance you can see that is important, it is the amount of objects and polygons you can display to make up that picture. It's complexity. Reducing view distance is just an artists trick used to limit that in a densely populated enviroment
For some games clearly this is not an issue, we can have a 5 mile view distance in Tom Clancy's HAWX because we only display a very limited ground map and not many sky units.
So yes you can scale this, but there are limitations in game design placed on you by that scaling.
But if we were to again compare with Armed Assault, we can see the use of "fogging" to limit the view distance. With default settings of 900 metres and maxmium settings of 10,000 metres self assignable depending on your hardware capabilities and personal preference.
And here is the difference that change in scale can offer you in game terms.
In Tom Clancy's Hawx, you can fly about over a city and shoot down planes and glowing tank Icons.
In Armed Assault you can also land that plane in the city, get out, look at the flowers in someone garden (and then shoot their dog), listen to the birds and the bees buzz and sing. Get in a car drive down the street window shopping, park next to said tank, get into it, drive it through the autumnal forest to the next city and shoot up those aeroplanes you missed in their own airbase after they have landed, get out of the tank walk into thier pilots mess hall and watch TV. Or maybe just drive to the seaside and go swimming.
In Crysis, map sizes were often limited rather than view distances. So instead of the streaming maps you had in Oblivion Elder Scrolls or World of Warcraft and Armed Assault (all of which use limited view distances), you had a far smaller map and loading screens. (They used fogging in a couple of the larger vehicle levels).
Game designers don't "have to" use fogging, they choose to.
The problem with your arguments is that all of them can be scaled.
View distance can be scaled, Polygon count can be scaled, Player counts in multiplayer can be scaled.
I'm not sure why you used the example of Arma. You can do all of that in Just Cause 2 no problem.
You're already claiming Crysis 2 will not be as impressive as Crysis 1 without having even played or seen it yet.
My only concern here is if they will make the PC version so you had 2 options, one for playing online against consoles if you choose to and another for PC players against PC players because this way the PC version of the game can utilize everything and have bigger maps etc.
Of course that's not going to happen; for the greater concern of PC players cheating.
And there's more to map sizes than technical limitations. Huge multiplayer games like MAG only make sense if designed towards. What's personable to team based play is more valuable than pushing hardware limits for the top 1% of PC enthusiasts.
Exactly why they give you settings to change your graphics according to your system. Having both options creates cheating how by PC users? They always have punkbuster or such for anti cheating on servers anyway for PC releases. What bothers me as a moder and map maker of Farcry-Crysis is that if they go this route without the option to allow PC players to play vs console servers and also PC to PC then it limits how creative the PC moders/mapers can make for the console version. Also it gives a slight edge for PC players using mouse vs console players having a game controller.
Console multiplayer is pretty protected. There's always either dedicated servers hosted by the publishers or peer-to-peer hosting between consoles that no cheating software can be installed upon and used.
PC is a different story. Server side things are getting better, as with MW2 and Infinity Ward opting for publisher hosting instead of anyone-can-host, but there's still been client side cheats due to the open culture of PC software.
'til something big rolls along; like a coalition of top publishers declaring Steam as THE medium of PC Gaming, or Microsoft makes Games for Windows - Live a real PC counterpart to 360's Live, then console and PC crossplay is a terrible idea.
I actually thought the first Crisis was pretty boring. Nice graphics but not very exciting, I remember the AI being absolutely terrible, didn't bother to finish it.
Personally I think if a game's biggest selling point is graphics, it usually means the rest is an afterthought.
But then again I think this game is not really designed so much to be a game but rather to showcase a benchmark in graphics using the Crytek engine. I think a lot of people will be excited because they can put their PCs to the test, max out settings and enjoy the show, but for me it will probably be another crappy game.
O_o o_O
Pretty much. There's a balance to be had between creating a benchmark and creating an actual fun game. Epic, CryTek, id Software always usually end up making essentially tech demos anytime they have a new engine that's debuting; only for third parties to make actual fun games.
I'm optimistic though this around. Despite all the marketing geared towards tech, revealing not even the protagonists name as far as I've seen, there's still some good things going for it; primarily the fact that Richard K. Morgan (Takeshi Kovacs trilogy) is penning the story.
We'll see, but it should be a lil deeper gameplay wise than Crysis.
You've hit the nail on the head.
Crysis 2 will be a scaled version of Crysis.
The scale will be 1/10th.
This is a massive reduction in scale. Hence it is perfectly obvious that Crysis 2 will not be as impressive as Crysis.
That's not to say that it still can't be an impressive game or even a very impressive game, just that it will lack in comparision to the previous iterations.
And this difference will be too large for me to ignore.
Given a large part of the attraction of the previous iterations has always been it's depth of scale, this is a big step in the wrong direction for this gamer. I'm not eagelry awaiting this title at all.
Just Cause 2 has the same problem, compared to ArmA 2, the scale reduction will be something like 1/20. Which means for every single thing you cans see in Just Cause, you can see 19 more in ArmA2. For every single object you can interact with in Just Cause 2, you can interact with another 19 in ArmA 2.
This limits the scale of the story that is possible to tell. That same level of rich detail, the same complexity, simply won't be there. 95% of the content of the game....not possible to include.
I'm using the example of ArmA 2 because it is an open world game. The type of game that's scale differentiates it from the other titles and whose gameplay mechanics are specificially tailored to capitalise on this.
So sorry, Just cause 2? It's a scale model game on a tiny scale. Wow.
Woot, is it going to have small scale multiplayer? Double woot! Just what no one wants.
Similarly if I was to convert a PS3 game to the Iphone, the same sort of reductions in scale would be there. Are you looking forward Just Cause 3 on the Iphone? I have to say, I'm not.
It really sounds like you have an issue with design decisions more than anything else. You're attempting to blame platforms other than the top 1% of PCs being targeted as a reason whatever game of whatever scale you want to be made isn't being made; but that really isn't it.
If Just Cause 2 isn't impressive to you; then more than likely its because it wasn't designed to be impressive. Not because it maximized the potential of consoles or any other technical reason. Just as with the multiplayer examples; some experiences are very small like Splinter Cell and Gears of war, some are huge like MAG with 256 players. It's all a matter of design decision, and big or small can be right or wrong depending on what gameplay designs call for.