Crysis 2 on console is better than Crysis on PC
The Crysis and The Sims franchises were for years a PC staples as both the games were made for the mouse and keyboard of a computer and did not count spin-offs. For most of the time the two games remained on PCs.
Today, in the era of high-definition consoles, there are features that can handle whatever the PC games can throw at them and as a result there came games such as Crysis 2 and The Sims 3. These two games are now making way for the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.
Graphically, Crysis 2 looked beautiful than the original Crysis. It is set in New York and has done a great job in rendering the major landmarks of the city. There are several places captured with details such as the MetLife Building and the Grand Central Terminal.
The directional pad is superb and the controls are interesting. The left and the right direction pad allows the players to cycle through weapons. Killing enemies is not a big problem and avoiding their gunfire. In fact the the controls are almost transparent.
An In-depth Analysis of Crysis Warhead Graphics
We know that Crysis Warhead has some oddities for the graphic settings, but how well do these graphics actually performed. After all the complaints about the original game’s outrageous system requirements, developer Crytek promised that this story would be tweaked a bit to run well on a much more affordable computer, but did they deliver? The guys at TechSpot have gone in-depth to analyze the game’s performance, providing benchmarks for 14 different video cards at each of the game’s three quality levels, and the results aren’t too spectacular. Below is the quote from the TechSpot:
Roughly this time last year Crytek released the highly anticipated first-person shooter Crysis exclusively for the PC. Since then the game has been used as the prime benchmark for high-end graphics cards, with only a handful of them being able to conquer the title, delivering great frame rates using high quality settings.
Amazingly, even the latest generation AMD and Nvidia graphics cards still struggle in Crysis, and require a great deal of tweaking to get the perfect balance of quality and performance. Result of these insane hardware requirements to play Crysis in all its glory, many gamers have stayed away from this amazing title, which truly is a shame.
That said, we understand just how disheartening it can be to spend big dollars on a new gaming system and have it struggle with a game.
In the meantime, Crytek has been working hard on a successor of the title called “Crysis Warhead”. This new version of the game updates and refines the gameplay through a parallel story that follows Sergeant Michael “Psycho” Sykes. Psycho is presented with his own challenges on the other side of the island during the same time period of the first game. Crysis Warhead features new fully customizable weapons, vehicles, and enemies, along with new multiplayer content.
Our take on this article will be all about hardware performance considering it is based on an enhanced version of the CryEngine 2. While many gamers were outraged by the lack of optimizations in the original Crysis, we simply felt it was too far ahead of its time.
Crytek claims this optimized version allows for enhanced performance. A headline that caught our attention earlier this year read “Crysis Warhead to run smoothly on a $600 PC?”. Crytek’s CEO stated at the time that a PC valued at just over $600 could run the title with high settings enabled at 30 to 35 frames per second.
This got us wondering just how well Crysis Warhead had been optimized and why these “optimizations” had not been applied to the original. Then again, the developer cleverly missed from mentioning at what resolution gamers could expect this kind of performance (when making the 30 fps claim).
And so today we plan to find out exactly how Crysis Warhead performs using a range of previous and current generation graphics cards. Crysis has renamed their quality presets from Very High, High, and Medium, to Enthusiast, Gamer, and Mainstream, while there is also a Minimum setting.
Our testing covers the Enthusiast, Gamer, and Mainstream quality settings at 1440×900, 1680×1050, and 1920×1200 resolutions.
Source: Click Here
Crysis Cost $22 million to make
CEO and President of game developer Crytek said Crysis cost 15 million Euros (22 million USD) to develop during a panel about the future of gaming graphics at the Games Convention Developers
Conference in Leipzig, Germany. Yet despite the cost, Yerli maintained the game was profitable, adding, “if it wasn’t profitable I wouldn’t be able to stand here.”
In the past, Crytek was responsible for the first-person shooters Far Cry (2004) which ran on its CryEngine 1, and Crysis (2007), which rand on its CryEngine 2. Crysis Warhead, another first-person shooter with ties to Crysis and also built with CryEngine 2, is being readied for release this September.
Yerli gave no word on what other titles the company might produce between now and 2012, when he believes the studio’s next engine will be ready and a new generation of consoles will be available.
Brand new gameplay trailers for Crysis Warhead!
So Crysis has put out a new trailer, and it’s actually of gameplay this time instead of just some stupid mini-movie. The driving gameplay redefined looks improved in my opinion, I remember driving in the first Crysis was really hard and awkward.
Another thing I noticed when watching this trailer is that at about the :40 second mark, the machine running the game starts to lag and get choppy when the battle intensifies. Crytek already said Warhead will be able to run on mid-level PC’s, so it would be interesting to know what kind of machine was running this. In all fairness, the lag could have very well been caused by FRAPS or whatever game cam they were using. I usually don’t have that problem when using FRAPS, but who knows.
To watch the HD trailers, click on the Crysis Warhead Videos tab.
Some more Crysis Warhead screens…
VE3D posted some new Crysis Warhead screens today. The images look very similar to the original Crysis game. To take a look, click here .
Why does Crysis Warhead look just like Crysis1?
Crytek was quick to point out that Crysis Warhead was absolutely not Crysis2. I wonder why Crysis Warhead looks exactly like Crysis1 then? Is it because the Warhead trailers are really just Crysis1 trailers to throw us off? Take a look at this "Crysis Warhead" trailer and tell me it doesn’t look like Crysis1. Oh, also tell me your don’t see one of those damn aliens in the trailer too, have we not made ourselves perfectly clear? Would Crytek be dumb enough to have us fighting aliens AGAIN?
Yeah…let’s hope they are just doing this to confuse us and throw us off then on release day it will be a bigger supprise…let’s hope. Here is the link to the story I pulled this video from too.
CVG takes a test run on Crysis Warhead
CVG tested out Crysis Warhead recently and during their test run Crytek devs pointed out that even though they were playing with the settings on high, the PC that they were playing was purchased for the equivalent of £380 pounds. So apparently Crytek has really got their engine under control and playable for non-super computer users/owners.
Here’s the full article:
I’d spent half-an-hour back in the frosted glades of Korean-patrolled paradise when the Wizard of Oz’s curtain was pulled back on the PC I was using.
Despite the fact that I was playing Crysis Warhead on high settings with a smooth frame rate and barely an ounce of pop up, the guys from Crytek dropped the information that I was playing on a machine they’d bought for the Euro equivalent of £380 pounds.
You see, over the past year they’ve tamed the beast that is the CryEngine 2 and now I was apparently getting high settings from 2GB of RAM, an Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 processor and an NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT video card.
Sure, it’s a fairly decent rig, but aspiration-wise it’s a hell of a lot more realistic for the average gamer.
Crytek are dead set on taking their game away from the PC elite and turning it into the people’s plaything. Viva la Revolution!
"When we started doing Crysis, being the tech-happy company we are, we started working with the latest and greatest in technology that we could get our hands on," explains senior game designer Bernd Diemer.
"I mean we had the first DirectX 10-capable card on the planet in the office, it was fantastic, but it also caused us a lot of pain.
"We were trying to get our minds around this new technology and we focussed on the ultra high-end part of the spectrum, the enthusiast part, the guys who really want the latest and greatest.
"This was our focus, and this is where the system specs came from, which were pretty steep at the time of release.
"Now the technology has matured a bit and we know how to use it better and how to optimise it - we’ve taken the high setting, which is still one of the best-looking games on the market and given it to our Budapest team with a games PC that cost about €480: we just said that was the machine it had to run on.
"What’s more, we asked for whatever could be optimised down from the ultra high setting to be put into it as well. Warhead really isn’t running on some super-secret ultra-high prototype thing."
Crysis was undeniably something special, but seeing as countless PC gamers dithered on playing it beyond the demo because they didn’t yet own a super-powerful rig many will have missed its supreme action bubble, washing machine lobbing and maximum armour combat.
In the process they will also have missed its somewhat duff final missions, occasionally confused AI and an irritating cockney geezer who went by the name of Psycho.
But these are three things that Crytek are dead-set on striking from the balance. Well, almost. Two out of three isn’t bad is it?
Alright Treacle?
For a character who cruised straight into the PC ZONE roll call of the most irritating game characters at a respectable number 10 (issue 191), suffice to say when this issue’s cover art, featuring Psycho’s mug, appeared in the office there was a stir.
Still, Crytek are promising a far less apple-’n'-pear eye-rolling this time round.
"I know he’s perceived as a bit of a stereotype, but we do use stereotypes as they’re fun - especially for people who aren’t familiar with Europe.
The American market basically," admits Diemer. "But we’ve now, honestly, put a British guy in charge of making the character. So I hope he’s not too much for your… er…"
Our more delicate tastes Mr Crytek? "Yes, just that. Your more delicate sensibilities. And we also have Susan O’Connor of BioShock fame working on the dialogue."
Problem, hopefully, fixed then. While we’re at it, those who wondered if Psycho’s accent was a product of the Dick Van Dyke school of pavement art jabbering can rest easy that his voice actor actually is British too - so British in fact that IMDb informs he’s been in Emmerdale, Peak Practice and Grange Hill.
With Psycho comes a whole new fixation with all-out action: more enemies, more explosions, bigger guns and far more casually discarded rocket launchers.
The cloaked stealth build-up to any assault remains sacrosanct, should you want it to be, but when everything goes wrong (as it always does) the pace of the game and the amount of flames on-screen far outstrips Nomad’s more reserved outing.
The parts of the island Psycho is exploring are clearly the parts marked out by the North Koreans for explosive barrel storage and parking facilities for vehicles with extra-big guns.
‘ello Love
The game itself will cover eight hours, ending with the bit where Psycho greeted you back on the US carrier, accompanied by a captured half-dead alien craft, close to the game’s ending with the line "Oi Nomad! Get a load of this ugly bastard!".
Meanwhile, it begins with the moment that he was called away from the harbour assault after sniping from a crane gantry.
In fact, that harbour assault - with its relentless military bombardment, encroaching dawn and complete open sandbox mentality - is very much the template for Warhead.
"We basically said to the design team - look at this, then make a game out of it." explains Diemer.
"We wanted to improve on the pacing and in the assault mission there’s a very high level of intensity at the beginning, then it
gets really, really quiet, then all action again - it goes up and down."
The plan for Warhead, then, is to make levels tighter, more varied in the number of approaches you can take and to never ever lock you tight in the generic ‘gun emplacement’ or ‘vehicle section’ dynamics that Crysis reverted to during its Medal of Honor: Alien Assault closing chapters.
You’ll never be securely strapped into a VTOL or Humvee without the option to hop out and blow stuff up on foot instead.
The game opens with a level called Ambush - and what follows is a balls-out study of licking flame and the heady aroma of petroleum gas. The amount of military chatter in your ear has been upped considerably, there’s more friendlies and enemies on screen than ever before and there’s a VTOL pilot raining death from the skies, while you re-accustom yourself to which way you have to point the mouse for your various suit powers.
Even better is another new arrival: flittering in the tall grass between frozen Koreans teetering on the edges of frosty craters, there are butterflies that you can shoot out of
the air. Hoorah!
Soon enough though, the pilot is shot down and you’re sent off to grab his black box recorder and kill everyone who lies between.
Around this point an experienced Crysis player starts to see slight differences - notably in the AI.
"Some of the changes we’ve made are honestly really subtle," explains Diemer as I attempt to tag some distant Koreans while failing to realise that there are five approaching from the bank of trees behind me.
"One of which allows the AI to react a lot more fluidly, so they hesitate less and thereby look less stupid.
"In Crysis they were thinking ‘Maybe I should run over there? No… over there? Or maybe I should reload?’ They were bogged down by a decision tree.
You know, drill sergeants tell every soldier that doing something constructive immediately is better than working out the perfect plan too late."
Korean AI isn’t the only digital brain to get a screwdriver set jabbed into it though, a major thing that Crytek know they have to get right in Warhead are the smarts of the aliens.
Essentially they’re now more like humans both in combat and in the way you approach them - being moved away from the relentless tactic-eschewing horde they once were.
"We started by making a bastard hybrid child of human and alien AI, with the group tactics that humans use - flanking, calling for reinforcements, cover fire," explains Diemer, before moving on to explain that you’ll now be able to tag them from afar and plan your assault just as you do with the Koreans.
But alien Hunters can’t exactly smoke cigarettes, lug boxes around and casually piss against trees can they? How do they act when they think they’re alone?
"They’re curious about their new environment. They’ve come out of their ship after, how many years? It’s a different world they’re encountering, there are these humans running around with this strange technology.
"When they’re not fighting they’re curious about what’s going on, wondering what the big yellow machine over there is, or curious about buildings."
At which point, presumably, just as their questioning tendrils are poking into the inner workings of a JCB you decloak, fire off a volley, incur their wrath and get killed by a spinning metal blade to the back of your neck.
Ricky! Biyankaa!
Now let’s get back to the levels at hand: the downed pilot is a chap called Sean O’Neill, who knows Psycho from way back for expositional background characterisation plot purposes.
There’s a lot of (decent) back and forth about "Fucking hell, I knew it… Sean O’Neill!" and tales about drinking beer back in various army placements ("Lovely!") before you have to escort him through the assembled enemy throngs and their conveniently placed petrol stations.
As is the mantra in this second age of Crysis, the vehicle you’re initially presented with as you protect O’Neill’s jeep has a bloody big minigun on it - but should you choose to pick your way through the bullet hailstorm on foot you very much can.
Even if the chances of death are somewhat higher. As ever, the anything-goes mentality of the game conjures up all manner of unscripted celebration - none bettered by myself reducing a hovering helicopter to constituent parts with my rooftop armament before holding its flaming hulk in the air solely with bullet strikes and somehow knocking it straight on top of an open-backed truck containing four terrified passengers.
Believe it or not said truck was even sitting next to a large cylindrical gas tank - and I went as far as punching the air when it went up in a ball of beautiful CryEngine flame.
Sooner rather than later, I find myself at a hastily constructed US landing pad on a valley ridge where I drop off my Irish-named comrade - and choose to hang around fending off an enemy encroaching from all angles, taking them down one by one before picking any enemy survivors up and power-throwing them into cliff faces - as is so often my wont.
Presumably this behaviour not only earned my character the name of Psycho, but clearing the landing area would allow for airborne support in the final stages of the level - a seaside assault on a cargo-strewn base where the Korean’s warhead had been stashed for my examination and retrieval. Even though, as was conveyed to me in a series of winks, nods and how’s-ya-fathers from the Crytek team, it’s highly unlikely for said warhead to be of the military nuclear persuasion that Psycho is anticipating.
You Pilchard
Every which way you look in Warhead, there’s an exploding barrel and, system requirement downsizing aside, that’s probably the primary thing you’ll notice when you play it.
Believe me, there’s no feeling like winging a Korean with a power-thrown barrel and watching him struggling to stand back up while a casket of flammable liquid merrily smoulders a few feet away from him.
Destruction and physics objects being tossed all over a sunny seaside are the order of the day - it’s a simple mandate, but one that doesn’t fail to entertain when placed in Crytek’s more than competent hands.
Other vital changes include the menu system being coloured orange rather than green and a new suit voice that’s a more sultry, feminine version that the previous two on offer.
Another neat detail that’ll only thrill Crysis obsessives, is that you’ll now be able to set spring-loaded mines in the single-player campaign, should you want to surprise those tracking you with an explosion around their midriff.
Ultimately, what Crytek want you to know (are desperate for you to know, some might say) is that Crysis is no longer a beast to be feared.
They’re not saying that it’ll run on a series of diodes attached to a Casio LCD watch, but it’s now certainly far further within the remit (and budget) of the average PC gamer.
Thing is though, that’s not the most important thing. The most vital piece of information, and the one that Crytek are most tight-lipped on, are what new animals are due to inhabit the new swathe of island that Psycho will merrily dance through.
As already stated, butterflies that can be shot from the air are a definite. The ‘bigger, better, more’ ethos means that where there was one bird casually flying far above your head there are now 10 and where there were two crabs scuttling away from the wheels of your jeep on the seashore there are now 20.
As for anything else, a glorious return of the Far Cry pig perhaps, Crytek are defiantly silent.
"I’m not telling yet. It’s for you to discover," sternly tuts Diemer, "and it breaks my heart when people like shooting them."
The petition starts now people, if we start clamouring for goats and monkeys as soon as possible then they might make it in by the time of release. Go to it!
Crysis Warhead Details Emerge; Success May Lead to Crysis 2, DX10 Not Required for High-end Effects
New details about Crytek’s PC shooter follow-up Crysis Warhead have surfaced in monthly gaming magazine PC Gamer, reported by Czech gaming site Tiscali Games.
According to the preview, the possibility of a Crysis 2 relies heavily on Crysis Warhead’s performance at the market. While the title isn’t necessarily a true sequel, the developers stressed that Warhead is a completely stand-alone, full title.
Echoing Crytek’s claims that Warhead would be optimized to run on cheaper PCs, the preview notes that the Windows Vista-exclusive DirectX 10 API won’t be required to engage the game’s highest levels of detail and visual effects.
As previously reported, the game focuses on new lead Psycho, one of Nomad’s teammates from the original Crysis. Not unlike Valve’s Half-Life expansion Opposing Force (PC), the events of Crysis Warhead run parallel to those of the first game, following Psycho on the other side of the island.
Warhead’s campaign is said to employ more free-roaming sandbox gameplay than its predecessor, clocking in at around eight to ten hours, and features dialogue written by BioShock scriptwriter Susanna O’Connor.
The preview goes on to suggest that the enemy AI has been improved in Warhead, better equipping foes in terms of organization and combat tactics. In terms of new additions to the game’s arsenal, at least two new weapons—including a grenade launcher and double submachine guns—have been added, as well as the new armored scout recon and hovercraft vehicles.
Likely to be Crytek’s final PC-exclusive effort, Crysis Warhead is slated to hit PCs this fall.
IGN Previews Crysis Warhead
June 25, 2008 - Consider the warhead, an object that is both explosive and incendiary. A warhead is about destruction, pure and simple. Recognizing that is one of the key things to understanding Crysis Warhead, a stand-alone follow-up to last year’s acclaimed first-person shooter Crysis. Keep in mind that this isn’t a direct continuation of Crysis; it’s not one of the trilogy hinted at by Crytek’s CEO Cevat Yerli. Instead, Warhead is an offshoot story that focuses on one of Crysis’ supporting characters. And since that character’s nickname happens to be Psycho, you could rightfully expect some crazy things to happen.
In many ways Warhead is a different game than Crysis. The easiest way to think of Warhead is that it is Crysis with the action ramped up to 11. This promises to be a much more muscular shooter, with no shortage of huge firefights and explosions. In fact, the original Crysis may come off as being a much more cerebral experience in comparison. That game was about cat-and-mouse in the jungle, whereas Warhead is going to be about blowing that jungle up.
Warhead is set during the timeline of its predecessor. You play as Sergeant Michael Psyches, aka Psycho, the British-accented commando who goes off on a mission midway through Crysis only to reappear at the end, standing atop the flight deck of the aircraft carrier with a captured alien war machine. What happened to Psycho and how he comes home with such an oversized trophy is going to be the story of Warhead in a campaign that the developers say will be about the length of Crysis’. And before you can ask, since this is a one-off from the core franchise, the designers say that Warhead will pack a fitting finale.
While Crysis has sold more than a million copies and garnered many awards and accolades, Yerli said that there’s was also plenty of room for improvement, and that Warhead will address quite a number of issues. “Some people had some concerns about the ending of the game and the linearity of some sections, or could it be a bit more scripted with the environment? We tried to make with Warhead something that is a bit more accessible and mainstream in that regards.”
The fact that Warhead is built around Psyches also helps with telling a better story. In Crysis you played the faceless protagonist, and everything that happened in the game occurred from a first-person perspective. In Warhead, the designers can shift to more standard third-person cutscenes that have Psyches in them. Plus, it also helps that Psyches is a very colorful character. “He’s kind of a rough diamond, an unpolished diamond,” noted senior game designer Bernd Diemer. “He’s the guy who likes to blow up stuff, he’s the guy who likes to the cut to the point very, very fast. He doesn’t have time for chit-chat or doubts.”
“You tell him to go over there and take out that pillbox, he goes at it with a butter knife or C4 or whatever he has. That’s kind of his characteristic, and that’s where the name Warhead comes from. That’s him, basically. He’s explosive, he’s aggressive, and we wanted the game to portray that in interesting ways.”
The designers gave us a view of one of early levels in the game, Ambush. Right off the bat it’s intense. VTOL transports are coming in to drop off Marines, the radio is full of chatter, and jet fighters are dropping bombs left and right. Think of the opening of the Crysis level Assault, but with that amount of energy sustained throughout. It’s all very loud and frantic, but this isn’t an attempt to make a linear-game like Call of Duty. Warhead still embraces the series’ philosophy of the nanosuit, the high-tech power suit that lets you alter your strategy and tactics on the fly. The battlefields are still large and open, and this gives you an incredible number of options when in a fight. You can stealth and hide to restore your health or ambush an opponent. Use strength to leap atop buildings and hit your enemy from above. Or you can use speed to zip from one location to another. “The core gameplay is still Veni, Vidi, Vici,” Yerli said, referring to the Latin term “I came, I saw, I conquered.”
Since Warhead takes place concurrent to Crysis, it’s not too surprising that you’ll see many of the same assets that you may have seen before, like tanks and helicopters. Still, Warhead will introduce some new vehicles and weapons. We noticed a new type of armored personnel carrier, as well as an advanced scout vehicle, which comes in several variants armed with different weapons. Then there’s a new submachine gun that can be dual wielded, doubling your firepower. There’s more, of course, but that’s all we caught a glimpse of in this early level.
Yerli and the others see Warhead as sort of a relaunch for the Crysis franchise. For one, Crytek’s programmers have spent the last year optimizing and tuning the engine to improve both performance and visuals. For example, Warhead will introduce a new particle system as well as a new global ambient lighting system that boosts the image quality “at almost no performance cost” according to Yerli. Some before-and-after shots show off the new level of detail now achievable, right down to being able to see the grain in a wood plank or pores in human skin. “This is being done in DirectX 9,” Yerli noted, which is good news for those who haven’t or are unwilling to upgrade to Windows Vista and DirectX 10. And that brings up Crytek’s second point, which is that the rest of the PC ecosystem has matured quite a bit since Crysis shipped last year. Since then, Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Vista, which improved performance for 3D applications, and graphics hardware companies such as Nvidia have improved their driver support, which is critical for a game like Crysis.
There’s also the fact that many gamers have upgraded their systems over the past year. The Crytek team wants to dispel the myth that Crysis or Warhead requires a high-end, expensive system to play. So they ran the Warhead demonstration on a $652 PC built with parts purchased online. Performance was astonishingly smooth and fluid even with a high level of graphical detail.
Then there’s the other issue that Crytek wants to deal with: piracy. Yerli noted that for every copy of Crysis sold there were as many as 20 copies that were pirated. It’s obviously a touchy issue with them, especially since quite a number of those pirating the game are willing to spend money to upgrade their machines. “I’m disappointed by the behavior of the gamers,” Yerli said. “I’m not disappointed by the people who support us. I know there are a lot of people who support us, and I’m grateful and I thank [them] for that. But there are 15 to 20 times more people who don’t care right now.”
To combat this, Crytek plans to strengthen copy protection in Warhead, but how it will do so remains murky for now. Yerli admitted that it’s a very difficult task. “If you want to have an anti-piracy mechanic, you have to spend a lot of time at the risk of incapability here and there. So you will annoy some people, but you will delay the amount of piracy. You will make 10 people angry for 1,000 more people who cannot copy… It’s a dangerous walk to walk because the 10 people who are upset, they will get loud about it. And this is where we have to be good about it, and it’s difficult.”
While Yerli and other Crytek representatives have been quoted over the past few months that the company is flirting with no longer making games exclusive to the PC, Warhead will remain a PC exclusive. Warhead may be the litmus test that determines Crytek’s future to developing PC-exclusive titles. “We’ll look at how Crysis Warhead does,” Yerli said.
Warhead is being developed by Crytek’s new Budapest studio, and the developers there are bringing a fresh perspective to the series. Studio head Kristoffer Waardahl told us that many on the team are veterans of Hungary’s real-time strategy development studios, which sounds like an odd skill to bring to making a first-person shooter, but it actually helps when developing the complex and scripted moments of the game. It also helps with improving the AI, and the developers promise better human AI and, more importantly, better alien AI.
Crytek has also learned a valuable lesson when it comes to developing games, as well. Yerli said that, due to delays, too much information came out for Crysis before it shipped. The long wait also built up huge expectations. Crytek is going to play Warhead closer to its chest, revealing a lot less than before. And there shouldn’t be any long wait this time, as Crysis Warhead is on track for shipping this fall.
Crysis Warhead runs smooth on lower-end PC’s with settings on high?
Optimizations made to Crytek’s CryENGINE 2 will allow the upcoming sci-fi shooter follow up Crysis Warhead to run smoothly with high detail settings on cheap PCs, studio CEO Cevat Yerli has claimed.
Specifically, Yerli told German outlet PC Games that a 400 euro (roughly $620) PC could run the title, with high settings enabled, at 30 to 35 frames per second. Curiously, he did not detail the resolution at which this is possible.
Despite having stopped patch support for the original Crysis (PC), Yerli said these optimizations could eventually make their to the first game. “That will take a long time, because the fixes are fairly profound,” he noted. “We are still in the process of the steps, but first we want to conclude Warhead.”
Though even the latest video cards can’t provide a smooth framerate for Crysis at high resolutions with very high detail settings, Crytek is confident that the game’s system requirements did not affect sales.
“Other’s lower perceived hardware requirements did not actually translate to bigger overall sales numbers than Crysis,”business manager Harald Seeley explained earlier this month. “You only have to look at the comparative PC sales volumes of other prominent FPS games which shipped around the same time.”
Due out this fall, Crysis Warhead marks the last of Crytek’s PC-exclusive titles because of piracy woes and the likelihood of higher sales on consoles. In addition to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, the company is apparently investigating PSP development.
