I have literally been watching the development of a game engine called CryEngine, for the better part of 7 years. Year after year watching them perfect their engine and implementing what seems like near impossible technology. The culmination of that technology has finally been dropped into a truly next gen game called Crysis.
The first thing people need to try and understand is that Crysis, (like the engine that it runs on, CryEngine) is truly a next-gen system. People like to throw around the words next-gen without really stopping to think about what they are saying. The PS3 the 360 are not next gen systems. They are current gen systems. Crysis is a next generation game. Crysis is what games are going to be in the future. That is why most of you won’t even be able to play it for another year. If you are trying to play the game on a system that is below their minimum spec then you are not really seeing the game for what it’s truly worth, so you should reserve judgment until you can see the game in earnest.
If you’re like me and you have a serious computer system at home, well…where do I begin? For all practical purposes the game is perfect on the technology side. They are doing everything that you can do in a game and they are doing it correctly. (prepare for some tech talk). They are not baking any shadows. Zero. They are lighting the entire world dynamically and with accurate shadows. Often times what you might get is a dynamic light being cast onto your main character and when his shadow hits another dynamic shadow they have an additive effect and the shadow appears darker where the 2 shadows overlap. Not in Crysis. The shadows are soft and they are being rendered correctly. We have anti-aliasing happening. We have water caustics being rendered under the water. We have the sun rising and setting during game play and we have parallax mapping. Which is basically normal maps on steroids. Normal maps fake detail by placing a fake shadow on an object where there really isn’t any detail to support it. If you were to look at a rough brick wall from the side that had normal maps on it, then you would only see a flat plane from the side. Front the front it would look correct however. With parallax mapping the profile of that wall would actually be affected and the bricks would appear to stick out past the wall from any angle. It’s incredibly powerful and something most gamers have seen very little of.
There doesn’t seem to be any part of the game that they did not meet or exceed what we would currently consider, incredible technology. What makes it more impressive is that it’s doing all of it. In most cases you get 1 big bang in your game. You get either amazing lighting or amazing dynamics. You get lots of characters on scene but you have shorter rendering distances. Not with Crysis. Every bell and whistle that you can think of is in the game and functioning properly.
Every plant in Crysis provides proper cover from AI and has collision. If you walk through a large leaf, the leaf moves properly. If you want to shoot down a tree with your shotgun, that’s not a problem either. It doesn’t matter where you shoot it. The tree will break and fall where you applied the most damage. Oh and look! You just provided more crouching cover by shooting that tree down. Amazing.
The textures alone are astonishing. When you first land on the beach and look down at your feet, you almost need to take a second to absorb it. The texture resolutions are incredible.
CryEngine has best been known for the environment work it produces, yet the character work is some of the best I have ever seen. The texture resolution is higher than anything I’ve seen. You can see the pores in your team mates faces for god sake. In almost any scenario I’d probably use Gears of War as the high bar for character work. I think the characters in Crysis are every bit as good and in a few cases much more difficult to create. For starters they went down the difficult road and created a suit that is covered, head to toe in a very detailed honeycomb shaped pattern. This honeycomb shape covers the entire suit. Basically you don’t have anywhere to hide flaws. If there is a single UV out of place then you would immediately see that flaw because of any texture stretching. With characters in Gears you have a very dirty texture that can have flaws and can hide anomalies like this. In Crysis they just let it all hang out. The texture quality is very obviously higher than in an game like Gears but that is because gears is not next gen. It had to fit onto a Xbox 360 and so their texture sizes can’t be as high.
The game play is excellent and is backed up by probably the best UI I’ve ever used. The UI is every bit as fast as it is beautiful and functional. Just the fact that you even notice how incredible a UI is says something. I mean if a UI is good it usually goes unnoticed. But this one is brilliant. You can access it while moving and it is easily readable. When you are not using your UI, you’re entire screen area is empty leaving you 100% room to enjoy the incredible view that Crysis provides.
The characters abilities are curbed by the fact that you can only use 1 of them at a time. You can’t for example run lighting quick and then throw a man 200 feet. You can however run lighting quick then change your abilities on the fly, take a moment and then throw some poor soul like a javelin. You have to think about your suit like you would if you were switching weapons. One of the neatest things I found was that you could run up to a man and grab him by the throat, choke him to death and then carry him in front of you so he could absorb bullets for a short time before dropping him to the ground, re-arming myself and continuing my rampage.
This game is what games will be in our not to distant future. You just need an Nvidia 8800 or greater to play it. You also should be running on Vista which supports Direct X 10.
