Sad tidings for fans of heavily normal-mapped pretend-man-shoots. Seems both Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 haven’t exactly stormed up the charts, which is a tragic and strange state of affairs for what were seemingly two of the most eagerly-anticipated PC games of the year.
Crysis managed just 86,633 copies in its first month on sale in the US, and UT3 a truly depressing 33,995 – which is less than the number of people who read RPS every pico-second. Yes.
The reasons? Well, there’s a lot of possible reasons. Someone will doubtless shout at me about how piracy isn’t hurting game sales in the slightest and even bringing it up means I’m allowing myself to be pupeteered by the entertainment industry, but I’ll risk quietly waggling my eyebrows at the version of Crysis leaked to Bitorrent well before the game was on sale, and let you lot draw up your own theories on that front. Personally, I suspect it contributed a little, but I really can’t believe it was anything like this significant an effect. The huge glut of other high-profile action games over the last couple of months is a far more likely smoking gun. But not the only one.
Next Generation theorises that fear of crazy hardware requirements kept people from buying Crysis. Could very well be there’s something in that – certainly, a fair few RPS readers have mentioned they haven’t picked it up because they’re convinced their PCs can’t handle it, while hearing that it takes three graphics cards and $1800 to run it at Very High settings hardly gives it a sense of being aimed at the layman. While UT3 runs smoothly and prettily on a much less beefy PC, it’s tempting to speculate that it too was perceived as having unrealistic requirements – an inaccuracy that even some of the media believed.
If sinister focus groups and demographic testing decides that fear of hardware hunger was the root cause of low sales, it’s unlikely we’ll see another game to raise the technological bar as Crysis did for quite some time. Worst case scenario: we revert back to consoles defining PC games’ graphical clout. That would be sad. But hey, at least we’ve still got Death Worm.
Or perhaps it’s just that Crysis and UT3 are on everyone’s Christmas list, and come January they’ll each have sold ten times as many copies as poxy Halo 3.
Related Stories:
The combat is Deus Ex was god awful.
Didn’t detract from the awesomeness of the game that much, though.
I think it’s increasingly daft to make comparisons between HL, HL² and Deus Ex vs the Crysis & UT3 brigade, they might all share the same First Person game space, but they are very much different gaming experiences. One of the refreshing things for me was to see CoD4 actually step more towards the former style of game (one where Story is a big factor) and away from the latter.
Deus Ex had the first, and as far as I know, last, body-area related damage for the player with varying effects such as having to crawl (when legs were too badly damaged) the aim being off when aims were shot, the scope wavering when the player had head damage and the chest was simply the largest possible kill area. The AI was terrible, I’ll give you that, but it was made in 2000, so it’s not that bad for the time. Beyond that it had lots of options for combat, including mods for weapons, and augs of course.
Name a shooter with better narrative
I’d buy UT again reskinned and with a useful Biorifle and Ripper – hint, hint, Epic. I really shouldn’t have used the words ‘more of the same’ when I meant ‘more of the same 2K series feel’; in many cases ‘more of the same’ is the highest compliment I could give, and I fully recognise that. It’s just that ‘the same’ in this case is something I haven’t liked for the past three iterations.
I forgot to mention this earlier but:
It might be worth mentioning that, on the postive side, Epic/Atari did offer a rebate on some of the cost of UT2003 when you purchased 04, as long as you still had the disks. So it’s not as if they’ve never considered it. Although granted, it’s now on Midway so it’s down to them this time.
“Deus Ex had the first, and as far as I know, last, body-area related damage for the player”
SWAT 4 and, to a lesser extent Call of Cthulhu have that as well. Sadly I can’t think of any others off the top of my head, which is a shame as it’s an interesting system.
Chemix: The Marathon trilogy. Which debuted in 1994.
Oh, and Half-Life².
Funny how you’ll bash the A.I. for one, where it ultimately is of minimum (and again, serviceable) importance, yet forgive the other where a sense of character is supposed to rub off from every encounter. Seriously, Deus Ex would be a much, much better game if combat wasn’t its focus. It could have been an expansive first person adventure game with rare, and genuinely challenging, firefights, and it wouldn’t suffer either in those circumstances from being a conspiracy story which somehow turns massively public and ridiculous. It’s like a bad Sci-Fi channel serial.
And to answer to the matter of area-damage: Robinson’s Requiem, which again came out in 1994. To add to the list: Operation Flashpoint.
If that’s all you saw in Deus Ex, then you didn’t get look into it any more than you had to.
I’ve played it well over half a dozen times, thank you. I’ve explored and done all that other nonsense. I even gave it another go this Summer because people kept insisting about its qualities. Which decidedly weren’t there. The combat is garbage, the voice acting hideous, the graphics already dated at the time of its release, and dropping references here and there do not automatically make for a great story.
i feel the same way about marathon, really. never got into it, and maybe i missed something, but sometimes i think the attraction of a game is always partly a function of when one meets it.
Well, I’m gonna pick both of them up, as soon as I have enough money.
Marathon. Bioshock. Hell, System Shock and sequel, though they’re less pure shooters. All have better stories than Deus Ex. I mean, I liked Deus Ex a lot, but its story was pretty silly and overly convoluted. I think it made as much of an impact as it did because it’s unusual for a shooter to have much of one, much less one that could alter (if not really all that much) based on your actions.
And no, not HL2, which barely has a plot at all. Yes, occasionally people talk at you but it’s 75+% pleasantries and mission objectives. What HL2 is very good at is creating memorable scripted sequences, but for the most part those sequences are self-contained, not really requiring or doing much with the surrounding context. (it does still have more plot than Half-Life, though. I’ll give it that.)
it is impossible not to love any game that obliquely makes a bob wilson joke about adam weishaput via the numbers 23 and 17.
well, for me, anyway.
Maybe it’s not piracy or hardware. Maybe people are sick of the same old FPS over and over?
For shooty goodness at the nmoment, I’ve got COD4, which I insta;lled a week or so ago and haven’t even played at all. One more vote for bored of shooters, here.
I’d buy Crysis if it would run on my system. I played the demo on low settings, it ran with 15-25 fps and it did not look good. Rocks popping up an stuff like that. I also tried the UT3 demo, it ran better on my system than Crysis, but i wont buy it either. UT2004 looks better on my system and i really don’t know why i should buy a game which is basically the same except for the system requirements.
I’ll buy Crysis after i purchased a system that can handle it… Which may take some time since all my favourite games are still running fine (WiC, TF2).
Both games are pushing too hard at the PC. You’d need to spend the same as a console to play crysis – so why not just buy a console? I know i can’t afford the £200+ to get a decent graphics card that would make either of those games look good. On top of that, both games have an art style that inspires nothing (especially UT3, looks like someone sneezed rust+metal over every surface?)
My biggest issue with Deus Ex were that many of the choices the player is presented with in the narrative are false choices – ultimately they have minimal short term effects, sometimes only amounting to a slight change in dialogue and that is it. Still remains a great game though; completing the game using only my mighty stun-gun and police baton was a (sad) highlight in my gaming career.
Let me add my “me too”, as in “Me too also installed the demo on a quad-core/2GB/8800GTS machine, and it ran like toffee, and I’ve no intention of buying it”. However, being forced to run a game at low settings is not in itself enough to put me off a game – indeed, I upgraded to this machine from my previous (2600+XP/1GB/6800GS) which I’d played Oblivion quite happily on low settings for about a year, with a view distance so slow it seemed Cyrodil was permanently foggy, because, even when you took the pretty graphics out of the equation, there was a still a great game there.
To me, Crysis looks like Crytek took Far Cry, added some generic Asians and unlikable teammates in (it’s astonishing – nay, depressing – how 3 years after we first met Alyx, no other game has managed to include such a fully-rounded NPC teammate), included a super-suit that seems to run out of energy in 10 seconds, making any kind of tactical use of it impossible, and then – despite everyone saying “Far Cry was rubbish when you introduced the mutants” – plonks in a bunch of aliens just at the end of the demo. All in an engine which, even with the above high-end PC, has rubbish-looking jaggy-edged foliage. Just completely unspiring.
In the local computer store, Crysis is at number 3 – hardly an unrespectable position, unless the gaps between 1, 2 and 3 are huge. PC owners will buy good games; Oblivion has sold huge amounts, and that’s a game which also had very demanding graphics; even now, over 18 months after its release with a quad-core, I still have to run it in 1024×768 to get good framerates outdoors with maximum view distance.
There seems to be sub-text here that PC owners should buy PC-exclusive games merely to support the industry, else we’re going to end up with console-only ports. But if we just end up buying games such as Crysis out of a sense of obligation, it seems to me we’re only giving a message that we’re happy with unoriginal tech-heavy games that can only be bought by a small fraction of the PC-owning population. This obsession with the top 1% upgraders is kiling the industry. It’s often pointed out that most games sell the most copies in the first few weeks after release – what, then, is the point of making a game that in this period is unplayable for most PC owners? Another example: Neverwinter Nights 2. My wife bought my this a present last October for my birthday – I can now only play the game, as a combination of new hardware and several patches mean it’s now playable. And as I mentioned above, my previous machine wasn’t _that_ bad.
Frankly, if it’s a choice between that and console “ports” like Oblivion, I’ll go with the latter.
P.
In the local computer store, Crysis is at number 3 – hardly an unrespectable position, unless the gaps between 1, 2 and 3 are huge.
In practice, yes, they probably will be. The game at number one is probably outselling number 3 by 10:1.
This is an industry in which a game will do 80% of its sales in the first month. With the costs associated with a game like Crysis, it will have needed to sill 1m copies in the first month just to break even.
So, it looks like it’s going to be a sizable loss for Crytek. Still, if their intention was for it to be an advertisement for CryEngine, well, they’ve kinda screwed that up too, now everybody knows that the engine scales in an laughably poor fashion, a manner completely unsuited to the heterogeneous PC gaming space.
I’m assuming you’re probably right on this.
Oh, and the games at 1 and 2? Football Manager 2008 and a The Sims 2 add-on. Neither I imagine the type of game you need to go quad-core for.
I would have thought that a good rule of thumb was to make sure that the game is playable by that many number of PC owners. The Steam hardware survey should be mandatory reading for developers; looking at the latest, I’m guessing only 1 in 10 of those who submitted a result could play Crysis anywhere above the lowest settings; that 1 out of 10 out of an already small fraction of PC owners.
It’s like Lotus complaining why their cars aren’t the best-selling, when they’re so fast compared to Fords.
P.
You know, what surprises me about all of this is how much disinclination there seems to be here towards the two games. Maybe Crytek and Epic should have seen this coming.
I suspect Crysis was an expensive proposition too, so unless they get some good engine licensees, its flopping is going to hurt their bottom line substantially.
Since UT3 was just a texture pack pretending to be a new game, Epic should be able to shrug off its dismal failure with nothing more than a bruised ego.
I bought both UT3 and Crysis – admittedly, I bought UT3 solely for modding purposes, but I’ve played (some) of the single player.
I enjoyed Crysis (and at a reasonable frame rate) – there’s something immensely satisfying about uncloaking in front of a confused Korean soldier only to pick him up and throw him over a cliff. The story is nothing particularly new, but it wasn’t terrible and (most importantly) the game play was entertaining for the duration of the SP campaign.
The UT3 campaign has kept me slightly amused, but it’s nothing too amazing – the “choices” it gives don’t appear to have any noticeable impact on later missions and giving the AI team extra players is a horribly obvious and artificial method of increasing difficulty, but there we go. I just want to sit down and get my head around modding the damned thing.
don’t forget about the upcoming far cry 2, which seems to address the ups (jungle shooting is fun!) and the downs (mutant monkeys suck!) by adding variety to the former and cutting the latter entirely. (or so they say)
If you want jungle shooting (and a damned catchy tune) I suggest you try Boiling Point (do try to look past the bugs)…
It’s immensely good fun and doesn’t have a single trigen / flying ice alien in it (though the jaguars have been known to levitate).
I never really got into Boiling Point. I dunno, it just seemed a little too open and broken for me to really sit down and get to grips with it, and I’ve installed it twice. But both times I’ve never got further than the first hour. Ironically both times the primary reason I haven’t gone back to it is due to a hardware failure preventing me from getting the save game back.
I think it’s trying to tell me something…
Some people are doing the same mistake with Crysis they’re doing with every game that has high hardware requirements on its highest settings – frankly, who cares, as long as it scales well? Which Crysis does., within limits.
Don’t understand all the negative comments, either – doesn’t need to be everyone’s cup of tea, of course, but to say it’s just an engine is a bit silly. I loved the first two thirds of the game – even more than Far Cry, though, it’s a game that invites you to make your own fun. It’s not as immediately spectacular as something like Call of Duty 4, but it’s more rewarding in the end, for me.
As for the piracy: make of that what you will, but I heard that EA halved(!) their internal sales expectations after Crysis was out on torrent sites before it was released.
I’ll give you a hint as to why these two games have failed sales wise- NO ONE CAN PLAY THEM! Having looked into the matter, if you want a computer that can play crysis really well, you’re looking at spending 3000 dollars on the tower alone.
No one is going to buy a game that they can’t play on their machine. Crysis is the future. The present isn’t ready for it.
To repeat myself yet again; with a quad-core/2GB/8800GTS machine, I couldn’t play at the highest setting (by which I presume you mean “Very High”), I couldn’t play at High, I couldn’t even play at medium. To get a decent frame-rate, I had to set it to Low, which means the game ends up looking like rubbish, with horrible jaggy foliage (and since foliage is 4/5s of the scenery you’re looking at, that’s a lot of jaggies).
Since I’ve no desire to spend €50 on a game that looks rubbish on my PC, I’ll wait ’til it’s out at bargain price in a year or 2 by which time it’ll be cheaper and I may have upgraded. The problem is, this plan works for me, but not for Crytek.
P.
That does sound quite weird – with some basic tweaking tips from tweakguides.com, I was happily playing on a high/very high mixture on 1280*1024 on a similar system (C2D 6750/8800GTS/2 GB) at consistently over 25 FPS (apart from a few scenes in the last few levels). Most people over on Eurogamer had no problems running the game.
Are you quite sure you were on the latest drivers and have Microsoft’s Vista hotfixes for gaming installed?
Admittedly I can’t stand playing FPS at less than 40FPS. The problem with Crysis is that it varied wildly for me, from 10FPS to 50. When you say that’s an “average” of 30FPS, it doesn’t sound so bad, but try that when half the time, you’re looking at a slideshow. Still OK if it’s an MMORPG, RPG or even a slower paced action RPG, but not for a shooter.
P.
I have 2 GB RAM, E6600 at stock and a 8800GTS 640mb. One of the RAM sticks burned, and I had to tweak my games a bit on vista to play. I turned everything from very high in Team Fortress 2 to medium-low and the game still looks awesome.
My point? You don’t buy crysis to run it at high. You buy it because you want to run it at max settings and enjoy EVERYTHING this highly former-anticipated game has graphically to offer. It was advertised with hundreds of videos about it’s awesome graphics and physics. Who buys crysis after previewing it knowing he/she can’t run it at max? This was the target message and everyone looked at it as a tech demo. A very good looking tech demo but that was the most you saw in it.
After pre-ordering orange box and played the TF 2 beta, I logged back to play-dot-com and canceled my crysis pre-order. Why? I knew I wouldn’t be able to run the game with full graphics, and after TF 2 I knew there wouldn’t be anything past the first benchmark impressions in the game.
Crysis was advertised as the best looking game. Most people want to run it at full glory, not cut down settings. Gameplay was never advertised apart from the nanosuit. Lacking both story and graphic expectations, made me not buy the game in the end.
UT3? I have TF 2 as mentioned before. No need for another MP game, and there is COD 4 too. Not fun as TF 2 but very good on the classic shooter league.
We’ve been rather spoilt for choice recently, haven’t we? UT3, The Orange Box (which, according to the latest PC Gamer UK contains 3 of the top 7 games of the year), Crysis,
Kane & Lynch, COD4, not to mention non-FPS games like Tabula Rasa and the latests instalments of PES and Football Manager. I’ve been rather taken by the idea of Viva Pinata too. Plus I’m still horribly addicted to Peggle…One problem for Crysis and UT3 is they came out after The Orange Box. I’m personally not looking at either, as I haven’t even completed Portal yet. If I did buy one game, it would be UT3, having been sucked in by UT’s madness over many years.
However, Crysis is a complete no-no for me. I have a nearly two-year-old PC, Athlon 64 3700+, 2 GIG RAM and a 7800 GT. It’ll play the OB games without a problem, and I’m assuming would give a fair go to UT3. Crysis has always been billed as a Direct X10 game though (not in the way Halo 2 was…), and although I’m fully aware I can buy it for XP and get the full Direct X9-and-a-half experience, but I don’t want to. I’d rather wait a couple of years until I’ve saved enough money for the Quad-core Quad-GPU Quad-coffee maker monster of my dreams.
Then I’ll buy Crysis. Sorry Crytek, but you’ve pitched your game a touch high for me, and the maximum you’ll get is a tenner from the bargain box. On the other hand, well done Valve – by forgoing Direct X10 for the time being you’ve given your games as wide an appeal as possible.
And how many copies of the Orange Box have sold? I only have to look at my MSN contacts list to give a wrough approximation – most of the current screen names involve cake, or cubes, or being “Still Alive”…
All I know about crysis is that it has a high-spec engine. Thats not enough reason for me to buy a game, despite having a fairly good rig. COD 4 had its on-line perks and new game modes, and that, plus the fact that its a sequel to a truly awesome game, meant I bought that instead. If I was bored with COD 4, I’d try the demo, but as it is, I haven’t even bothered.
Dear Mr Jesus,
For your Christmas, I would like to have the last comment on this post, even if it must be burglary.
That seems unlikely.
Mnngh and indeed arrgh. UT3 really isn’t as demanding as it appears. And as for Crysis. Well, I built my computer for less than £600 (about $1200) and it plays the Crysis demo perfectly well.
On another similar note, I was watching an episode of Around the Net in 20 Games on the Frag channel on Joost today (Featuring Jon Hicks, Journo-Spotters!). And the guy from biz-tech said what I thought were the most ill informed comments about UT3’s technical specs ever. Granted it was before it came out, but given he used these words “It will require Vista and a DX10 graphics card and a top end rig” – that was require, not optional. I don’t remember at any point being under the impression UT3 would be Vista only – with comments like that broadcast, it’s no wonder gamers get worried about whether a game will play on their systems…
[quote]However, Crysis is a complete no-no for me. I have a nearly two-year-old PC, Athlon 64 3700+, 2 GIG RAM and a 7800 GT. It’ll play the OB games without a problem, and I’m assuming would give a fair go to UT3. Crysis has always been billed as a Direct X10 game though (not in the way Halo 2 was…), and although I’m fully aware I can buy it for XP and get the full Direct X9-and-a-half experience, but I don’t want to.[/quote]
I just wanted to let you know I have an almost identical rig to you (only 1 gig, and a Radeon card) and I ran the Crysis demo fine.
I still wasn’t impressed at all, but be assured you can play it (I had most of the settings on High or Medium).
“What HL2 is very good at is creating memorable scripted sequences, but for the most part those sequences are self-contained, not really requiring or doing much with the surrounding context. (it does still have more plot than Half-Life, though. I’ll give it that.)”
Didn’t see this, sorry (lot of posts to go through, heh.)
I actually had a theory that I posited to a friend: if you took Half-Life 2’s ’sequences’, and rearranged all of them, I’m not sure new players would really notice. The game felt entirely disjointed, and I was never in a position of “Ok, I did x, so now these bunch of things happen, then I get to do y, and…” it was: Drive car to place. Place leads to cave. Cave leads to place. Place leads to car again. Car leads to place.
QFT. It never gets old. Ever.
I think it might be hard to rearrange HL2’s sequences and have the game play nearly as well. It’s not that they narratively need to be in that order, but rather that the order they’re in represents an optimal scaling of difficulty and learning curve. For example, I really wouldn’t want to try to fight a gunship or strider 3 minutes into the game.