By Alec Meer on December 15th, 2007 at 2:25 pm.
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.
I think it is actually a case of release shedules. I mean, I know marketing wise people assume the most games are sold at Christmas, but for the PC market – where hardware costs need to be taken into account as they are arguably more of an issue than the consoles – then releasing lots of games with high – or percieved high – system requirements is actually going to be a bad thing, as people will assume they can’t affoard to get all the good games. Without trying to imply I am the PC market, it is the reason why I myself haven’t yet got Crysis or GH3 – I simply can’t affoard it till after Christmas, after having bought Gears of War, Orange Box, UT3 and ET:QW all within the same month…
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I think hardware is the problem for crysis, I know I’m waiting for the new Nvidia cards next year before I buy it. Perhaps the sales for games that push computers this hard will be less front loaded, and offer us a way out of the week one sales spike? Maybe I’m being too optimistic.
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In other news, the Witcher sold over a million copies, apparently. So it’s not all doom and gloom in the PC games retail space.
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How many copies has the Orange Box sold, for comparison?
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I doubt true figures for OB will ever be known until Valve release Steam purchase statistics.
And it is interesting to note the sales of The Witcher, especially after it’s reviews. And my point of about UT3 – it doesn’t actually have high specs, which has been reported – but do people think it does, and in fact are more ignorant to certain things than perhaps they should be?
-And I say this without wanting to get into another argument about whether Witcher is any good, there’s three other posts for that, and besides I’m downloading the demo as we speak, so I’m not qualified yet. :P
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We can’t really tell with the OB because so many copies are going to have been sold via Steam.
I’m with The_B on the release schedules being so closely packed, especially this year.
I think that the majority of people will just buy a few of the big games at launch, then after Christmas when money starts rolling in again, people will starting shopping madly!
Fear not then my friends, fear not :)
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I’m wrong but i’d prefer to think that PC gamers and reviewers are looking past “OMG ORSUM GRAFFIX” and looking for an actual game.
Quake Wars goes on my list of games to avoid because it’s put down as an online game…I want something to play when i take my PC into work on a Saturday every games needs a steady offline element at it’s core and a multiplayer as a second “thing” (there is probably a word for what I mean) Online FPS games are (for me anyway) a quick fix they aren’t there for hours and hours of game play to somehow justify buying the game (Oh hey there Halo 3)
This is what MMO’s are for, Questing gets boring? Twat a rock for metal to sell, that gets crap? There is a Basin in Arathi when you get to dance on players when they die. You can’t do that on TF2 or UT3 when things get a little repetitive.
I know there is a single player element to UT but it’s pushed and pushed as a GLIMMERING AWESOME LIFELIKE MULTIPLAYER AWESOME GAME ONLINE WITH OTHER PEOPLE ONLY EVER” They’d have been better releasing on the 360 and PS3 only.
I leave the “i’ll buy that because it looks better than that” mentality to ps3 and 360 owners.
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I doubt piracy is the biggest factor here. Take a look at the file sizes for each, around 6 and 7 gigs respectively, then take into account they were both released in a packed schedule with several other prominent titles of varying large sizes.
File sizes won’t bother serious pirates of course but for the average user that concentration of gigs will put off anyone but the most determined – and even then they will likely be selective in what titles they waste their bandwidth on.
Hardware requirements are an issue (although I can’t say I’ve heard any fears levelled at UT3 to support that argument) but I personally believe the biggest complimentary factor was quite likely the respective demo’s.
They weren’t flattering when taken in context (hardware requirements, many other titles such as the Orange box, etc, etc).
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I think it’s mostly the hardware problem for Crysis. However, it seems to me that Crysis will keep a steady flow of sales as time goes by and people gradually upgrade their PCs.
Yay for The Witcher! It’s a great breath of fresh air for the genre, and it, along with MotB, makes 2007 the best year for PCRPGs since the heyday of the infinity engine. It feels like end of a long walk through RPG mediocrity.
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Meh… Why didn’t I run out and immediately buy Crysis/UT3? It looks spectacular, but is that going to satisfy my gaming needs?
I think its a clear sign that indie/casual games are rising to prominance. No-one wants to get bloated 7gig games with a huge price tag.
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I dont think it is quite that bad for Crysis, you can expect it is be included with every other graphics card that is sold at retail for the next year or so.
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I bought UT3, well, because I like UT. All the talk saying it was leaning back toward `99 style grabbed my eye, too.
The talk about Crysis being a system killer didn’t phase me. It runs fine on high for me, and I’m running all on last gen gear. Not like Oblivion which I had sitting on my shelf for two months until i built a new computer.
The Witcher, from what I’ve played so far, is quite enjoyable. Though not quite so enjoyable as my surprise when the collectors edition box was handed to me and I almost dropped it from the weight of it. Yes, it actually came with lots of interesting extras inside, like CE boxes used to.
I truly do hope these numbers are from people holding off until Xmas. Theres some excellent games on the market these last couple of months, games I really want to succeed.
Not to mention the piracy really bugs me. Especially when I show up to a lan and end up playing deathworm by myself all night, because I’m the only one with legit copies of the games people wanna play, which reasonably enough don’t agree with their marauding, sea faring brethren.
Anyway, `nuff said. I’m off to play some Mask of the Betrayer, and punch some dragons and whatnot.
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I didn’t buy them because they just seemed a bit dull compared to the greatness of titles earlier in the year. After playing S.T.A.L.K.E.R., the Orange Box and Bioshock I just don’t want to go back to Far Cry with better graphics but worse AI (that’s how it seemed in the demo) or sugar coated deathmatch which just makes me long for some TF2 (or real deathmatch like Death Match Classic on Steam).
Nothing about piracy, system requirements or the death of PC gaming. They just didn’t look like very good games. Glad to see that us PC gamers don’t buy titles simply based on hype.
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I played the demos of CoD4, UT3 and Crysis, but only bought CoD4. I at least, felt the other two seemed a bit… nothingy. I know at least a dozen other people who’ve only got CoD4 – these are genuine FPS fans – and they’re not in the least bit interested in the other two games.
I truly believe there’s something about them that lacks appeal to a fairly large area of FPS fans.
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I think it can all be attributed to one feature alone.
Both Crysis and UT3 lack porn cards!
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Epic can only blame itself for the failure of UT3.
The decicated server was utterly shitty :
no linux server
dedicated servers requiring CD key AND the DVD in the player(!!!).
problems with players unable to connect to servers
lots of other bugs
crappy server browser(no even an option to filter for dedicated servers!)
crappy scoreboard (no ping indication!)
crappy demo with all the problems above which made you want to run away
delayed in europe
In short the game wasn’t ready.
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I brought CoD4 and the Orange Box – that fills my singleplayer needs (good singleplayer too, not what I got out of the Crysis demo!) in CoD4, and a bit in Episode 2, while I’ve been playing hours of Team Fortress 2 for multiplayer.
No doubt UT3 is good multiplayer but it’d be a while before I had enough time to try it, and I haven’t talked to anyone who has said it was good.
Oh, and The Witcher is good, and I’ve not even had time to finish that :D
Timing/saturation might be the thing. Perceived specs another. Crysis might be just not that good – I never liked Far Cry really, for instance. Not sure about UT3 though.
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personally, I think its the fact that both of them went up against the likes of a tough release schedule competing with CoD 4 and other mentionables. *sigh* whats gonna happen to PC gaming now that consoles are the only platforms being marketed?
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UT3 was the only demo of any of these games I played, and I’d have to agree it wasn’t that great at all. Everything else I bought in good faith and high recommendation (thanks Fairtra- I mean, thanks, RPS!(and others))
But yeah, release schedules is a good point to raise. September-November, the big name games were popping out every three days. Now, as far as I know, theres nothing big coming out until Starcraft II, and our release of Assassins Creed.
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I read on another site that ET:Quake Wars only did something like 18k on the PC which is pretty bad if true…
Personally I do think the consoles are having a bigger effect this round. All the things that made the PC great have slowly been adopted by the consoles the tech, developers, franchises, features, digital distribution and now even modding with the PS3 and Keyboard/mouse support. All done in a slicker and easier to use package which is hard to compete against.
The one thing left is it’s independence with no over sight or censorship from the platform owner which will ensure PC gaming stays around in one shape or another (though that future I believe is going to be indy, casual & mmorpg games).
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Crysis is on my santa list so that’s why i don’t have my copy yet :)
I’m pretty sure I heard an interview somewhere (possibly 1ups GFW podcast?) where the developer said their plans for Crysis were fairly long-term anyway (in that they expect uptake to be slow initially but for it to sell consistently for quite some time as people slowly get around to upgrading their rigs and want something shiny to play on it…but maybe I’m imagining things).
UT3..well, it OK but i don’t think there’s much in the vanilla game that’ll hold my interest very long (i’m one of those people that rarely takes it online and botmatches can only hold my interest for so long). It will be interesting to see what the modders will make of it though (is epic running another “make something unreal” competition this year)?
In any event, if games like the Witcher are selling MUCH better than yet another generic FPS then I think I can live with that…
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Those sales figures do look a little depressing, but I think they only take copies sold in brick-and-mortar shops into account.
Both games are available as direct downloads, though; Crysis through EA’s (horrid) Store and UT3 via services such as Direct2Drive. It would be interesting to know how many additional sales were made through these services.
Having said that, there’s only around 760 servers in total running for UT3 at this very moment, which does seem to indicate that the game hasn’t really caught on just yet. Of course, the lack of servers isn’t helped thanks to the absence of a Linux dedicated server.
Lastly, it could be said that the demos for both games actually put people off. UT3′s beta demo was underwhelming, to say the least, and not indicative of the quality of the full game, and Crysis’ demo just made mainstream PCs weep. A lot of people have put the purchase of Crysis off until they’ve got the hardware to do it the justice it deserves.
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I’m so damn happy that The Witcher sold well. I’m not syaing piracy is a non-factor, but The Witcher was out on torrent sites around the time of its release too, and apparently it’s done fine. It’s a great game, and very much non-cookie-cutter, so I’m really happy.
I know I was tired of shooters, maybe more people felt like me and didn’t buy either Crysis or UT3, since they already had plenty of shooters. Besides, TF2 has completely taken over as my multiplayer game of choice.
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I haven’t bought UT3 because the men are so macho they make me feel sexually inadequate.
Also, the hardware thing.
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Beyond the pretty what is there in Crysis? The AI isn’t adaptive or sandbox capable in the way Operation Flashpoint/Armed Assault* succeeds, so the single-player portion needs to be of COD4/OrangeBox quality to suck people in and that just wasn’t the case. It’s an airhead wearing a suit, masquerading as something greater than the sum of its parts. UT3 meanwhile is just poop.
*Operation Flashpoint back in the day brought most computers grinding to a halt.
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Note; that I’m not suggesting either game doesn’t have a lifespan beyond the initial package. The technology is certainly impressive and in the hands of modders I’d expect it to shine but that’s not going to influence early sales is it.
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Do you know what, I really don’t agree so much on this point. The singleplayer was pushed so much, I remember reading it in nearly every preview, I almost got sick of the “interesting fact that more people played UT2004 offline than on” – we were reminded all too frequently.
I also wonder if marketing-that-didn’t-have-marketing-money-spent-on-it playing a large factor. In essence, I know a lot of people would say that they’re actually turned off by marketing made for purpose, and there were several ads for UT3 and Crysis about, but not so much for The Witcher. However, the marmite-ness of the game provoked a lot of discussion, and certainly got itself into the conciousness of gamers a lot more, especially those who were just curious as to what it was like. So perhaps in a rather perverted fashion, it’s not games that are “good” that are going to sell well, it’s those that people are curious about.
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UT3 was barely marketed at all down here. I actually heard so little of it for the last 6-8 months, I had to go looking around the net to find out if it was still coming out or not. Whereas every magazine had dirty great ad’s for the witcher everywhere. This month its just all ad’s for timeshift and game related uni courses.
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Tragic? It’s more than Crytek deserve. Nobody has ever fully explained to me how releasing a game than virtually none of your potential customers can play is sound business sense?
Basically, everyone decided to give Crysis a miss, since the chances of being able to run it at anything like decent quality was practically zero. And Crytek have paid for their idiocy with a grade-A flop.
Good, frankly.
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I’m not really surprised about UT3′s poor sales. It’s not really been marketed well, and of the major shooters released this year, it’s probably the one that looks the most generic. Plus, I think many hardcore FPS-players are a bit tired of the series. It’s just “old”.
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I enjoyed Crysis myself, the floating bit and the bits leading up to the ship weren’t that enjoyable but I thought many of the npcs came to life on the ship towards the end of the game.
I also liked that the game tried to be topical. You played as a technically superior enemy to the Koreans, hunting them, which obviously had a relation to ideas about the major Western powers and their foreign policies in mind. This was a battle to win a major resource, possibly a power source. (Much like oil or nuclear power)
The arrival of the aliens can be read in several ways too. The destructive power unleashed by war and violence perhaps? Or more likely given the nature of the aliens, it was representative of the earth rebelling against mankind’s destruction, or even more simply, destruction from ecological change. The earth essentially erupts like a volcano of ice, smothering the tropical jungles. (Referring to current fears about global warming and the melting of the ice-caps.) So it was nice to see some thought went into it.
I found it far more enjoyable than farcry, which was a game I never really liked. However, the Crysis forums were full of tech issues, bugs and problems. This along with talk of high spec only definitely will have dented sales.
Add to this that fps games have swamped the market of late and sales are bound to be lower. In comparison The Witcher entered a market, desperate for a new game of that type.
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UT3 is awesome and I love it deeply. Too bad Epic might only make a small mountain of cash, rather than a gigantic huge ridiculous mountain of cash like they made on ALL THEIR OTHER GAMES. I however, am neither developer nor publisher so I don’t really care. There will be enough players and enough user content that I’ll be quite satisfied for a long time.
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eagerly anticipated by who? By the droves of more causal gamers that don’t read gamer blogs/gamespot/whatever?
The gameplay on those was old last time round. Its a damn shame they didn’t die on their arses because at least then the shareholders would want to know why they aren’t making games that push the market forward instead of thinking they are important enough to define their own market.
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It would be more interesting to know what the total shooter sales were. You’d expect some to undersell if the shooter dollar was all going to, say, COD & The Orange Box. Bad timing. And if Crysis & UT3 didn’t sell, what about the Timeshifts and the Jerichos…
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And re UT3 or Crysis being the same old same old, wasn’t his true for COD and say, Ep 2?
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“Glad to see that us PC gamers don’t buy titles simply based on hype.”
Euh, STALKER, The Orange Box and Bioshock had their overhyping and clear faults as well you know. The first wasn’t the completely open-ended game without any bugs as you would expect from a game in the making for more than 4 years, the second was far from the “best gaming deal ever” with an “episode” which was as derivative and as short as episode 1 and as both FEAR addons (but without as much new goodies), a puzzle game that was completed in three hours and a multiplayer shooter with barely enough maps to play on. The third never came close to System Shock 2, period.
Just like the three aforementioned titles, UT3 and Crysis aren’t bad games, they just arrived too late (especially UT3) I think. Who can legally spend all that cash on so many good titles? On the other hand, the whole DX10 fiasco might be to blame as well. It never became a must to upgrade and even then there are so many misinformed folks that still believe that Games for Windows games (most horrible label ever) are Vista-only.
And btw, these are only US-based retail numbers, I would love to see how these titles did in Europe, especially in Germany (The Witcher numbers ARE based on the whole world, they sold 100.000 copies in Poland alone…).
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.. and that Witcher link seems to say they’ve produced a million, not sold a million…
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I’ll probably hear for this bu here goes. I think it’s pretty damned insulting that Crysis is so heavy on the resources. Not even 3 cards in SLI makes it run perfectly (the bechmarks I saw was ranging from 15 – 35 fps, hardly ideal!).
I bought the game and I love it, but I can’t stop thinking that it was released with too heavy specs in mind as a conscious choice to make us buy new hardware. I’m not going to add anything political about that, but I think the society in general is too focused on consumerism.
It’s too demanding today, that’s just the simple truth. Nothing runs it, it’s not far from releasing a Pixar movie in realtime and asking people to buy the necessary hardware to render it in an acceptable framerate. I think NVidia had a lot to do with it, they sell hardware for christmas, Crytek sells their game and everyone except the consumer is happy!
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Another vote for hardware problems.
I haven’t bought either because they won’t run on my PC. Nor my mates PC.
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Who can legally spend all that cash on so many good titles?
Uhhh…. I did. and more. does that make me a bad person? :(
or just another consumer whore? double :(
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By the way, Matt you have a few interesting ideas. And I definitely think the current climate issues are a reason for the whole ice thing. It’s like the old coldwar inspired monster movies, bur now the fear is about climate change (and terrorism) so the climate itself becomes a villain.
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“Uhhh…. I did. and more. does that make me a bad person?
or just another consumer whore? double ”
No, a lucky guy I guess. ;)
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“I did. and more. does that make me a bad person? ”
Heh nope. I bought a pretty massive computer recently and hidef games was definitely one of the things on the checklist of what I wanted it to do. But I will not play along with NVidia now after Crysis and buy a new gfx card right away just to play ONE game in the highest settings. I’ll wait a few years until most games are that demanding and hope that more consumers do the same thing.
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One more thing, these figures are for the US only. I am fairly sure that Europe is a much bigger market for PC games than the US.
I remember reading, when The Witcher came out, that it had sold 11,000 copies in the UK and Atari were very happy with the sales of the game as it would translate into a couple of hundred thousand copies worldwide.
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I’m a huge fan of UT2K4, and I’m in no rush to buy UT3. Making UT realistic is like gluing a rack-mounted storage server to an iPod nano. Sure, the specs are impressive, but you’re kind of missing the point. 2K4 has everything I love about UT – whacko weapons, absurdist scenery and cartoonish violence.
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I maintain that Crysis is a spectacular technological achievement that remains a fairly unappealing game. I don’t know why I find mass murder unpleasant in Crysis when it doesn’t bother me in countless other games, but ugh.
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It’s clearly a case of release schedules, the Christmas rush is frankly ridiculous and not everyone has 200 quid to throw at the latest release particularly when they all seem to be shooters. I bought the Orange Box and Bioshock and have yet to exhaust either due to limited play time and I want to get Mario at some point thats around 90 quid’s worth of games each with around 9 hours play time each and that will last me for a good couple of months.
UT3 from the demo is just UT2k4 but even shinier and Crysis while alot of fun is just another sodding shooter I’m far more interested in getting some more games for the wii than more PC shooters.
Note this has probably been said 100 times before but its I’m pretty convinced alot of other people are feeling the same way and blaming it on Piracy is abit of a cheap shot.
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The Reason for UT3 not being as high in the charts as anticipated is, in my opinion, because there was a 1 year (at least) delay from when it was supposed to be released.
I imagine that this put many people off.
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Oh and I also bought CoD4 but I have a thing for CoD’s melodrama even though it is yet another shooter. So again UT3 and Crysis are just not looking like attractive purchases.
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I bought Crysis for my brother, but didn’t buy it for myself after it hit the atmosphere and disintegrated a third of the way through. Haven’t even considered UT3 because people say it’s still like the 2KXes which I loathe. In a packed shooter schedule where even a thing like ET:QW can’t get on my scope, ‘desperately hobbled’ and ‘more of the same’ don’t even get a look in. That simple.
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I can only speak for myself, but…
Crysis: well really, every game and video card review pressed how even top end systems were brought to their knees by this game. So I bought a new gen, low end Dell and a great card, but I have no urge to get 15 fps on a new game.
UT3: as a longtime UT player I think I may have jsut hit the wall with it. I mean, it appeared to be more of the same, and I’ve eaten quite a bit of “the same” for the past 7 years or so. So maybe UT just ran its course.
Marketing and schedules probably play a serious role, but for me they just weren’t worth it.
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Pretty sad state of affairs for the PC platform. The Orange Box is basically the most exciting offering we’ve had all year – and that’s out on PS3 and 360 -.-
Crysis and UT3 are pretty dull unless you like your macho sci-fi shooters.
And during all this, the whole world is playing WoW.
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You can’t take the pirated version of UT online on regular servers, so it’s definitely not piracy that killed that game. It may have hurt Crysis, since it’s more of a single player game. I love watching the Crysis videos of giant physics experiments created with all the in game stuff, but I know from the demo that the game can’t do that stuff on my system.
I hope Crytech can sell their engine though, the editor is amazing.
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Geez. I thought I didn’t have time to read the comments, but I did. I guess I’m doomed to say this wherever I go: We had Crysis running on a couple of Radeon 9800s in a system built a year ago for just over USD1000. You turn off a couple of postprocessors and a shader that the human eye can barely notice, and away you go. You don’t touch the lovely water, the lovely textures, the lovely lighting…it only looks DRIBBLING GORGEOUS, but I guess that doesn’t matter because not quite all the checkboxes are maxed. I personally think Crytek should have gone the route of That Game Whose Identity I Don’t Remember and hidden the ultramax settings until a patch down the road. All these nerds ruining or waiting for what fun there is in the game because they have to turn off ONE SHINEY. Sigh.
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I’ve avoided buying Crisis because the way I figure it, I might as well wait until it hit’s budget in 6 months time and I’ve probably got a new graphics card, as for UT it just looks like graphical update of the ‘same old same old’ that epic have shipped for the last umpteen years. Time to bury that IP or completely reimagine it like Valve did with TFC (maybe loose the macho gay ‘tom of finland’ look while they are at it). Have been playing the Witcher and thoroughly enjoying it, it’s got risible dialog at times but it’s far more compelling than Oblivion was (plus there’s Porn cards ;)).
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I’m not playing WoW. I’m playing Armageddon Empires, thanks to RPS.
Anyway, dunno about UT3, but Crysis is rubbish. Unoriginal, boring, souless, regurgitated, uninspired crap. Maybe that’s why it hasn’t sold very well. I’m not sure which is funnier, EG’s 10/10 for Halo 3, or their 9/10 for Crysis.
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My theory:
I think multiplayer only FPS deathmatch games are very slight in terms of depth. I’ve read in interviews that id realized the same thing with the somewhat lackluster sales of Quake 3 Arena when it debuted oh so many years ago. That to me would explain UT’s low sales. It’s monstrously boring demo probably didn’t help either.
In the case of Crysis, I think its a combination of high system specs, and gameplay that doesn’t come off as clearly defined. While a game featuring combat that is crafted by the player is very fun to the hardcore gamer, the more mainstream player simply finds the game frustrating and dull.
I think gaming is heading in a new direction. If we are to use WoW as a template, gamers want a challenging, clearly defined game that will run on even modest systems. Perhaps this means more investment in art direction than the latest and greatest in shader tech.
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Tciu – seriously, don’t worry. If you’ve loved the previous UT games you will love UT3. A lot of people were put off by the seemingly dull demo, which in my opinion showcased two of the weakest maps.
To me, this -FEELS- more like UT than 2k3 or 2k4 ever did. And don’t mistake it looks nice with it being realistic – there are still plenty of silly maps and silly scenary and the biorifle is more silly than ever – i love it.
The only thing UT3 needs is a nicer interface and more maps – but neither of these criticisms detract from the basic fact that it rocks. Shame it isn’t selling more, i guess! But hey, i’m having fun. Yay!
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@Hypocee
That’s garbage mate. :)
It doesn’t run well on a Core 2 Duo / 8800 GTS, even at medium settings.
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Out of interest, what do people who are saying that Crysis is “unoriginal” think it is ripping off? The only thing that remotely comes close to its style of play is, well, Far Cry – a game made by the same people. Can people rip themselves off? If so, Doom 2 sucked!
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These two games sales aren’t representative of PC gaming.
-Crysis has the most highest hardware requeriments ever. 90% of the people with computers can’t run it.
-UT3 has bombed, just itself, without any help. It’s the same game as ever, but now with shiny (and messy, all the detail and bloom and shit makes hard to see things) graphics. Warfare? That’s not a new mode, It’s Onslaught with a ball. A modder could make the same thing with a mutator for UT2k4.
Also, it’s not set in modern times, the prefered setting for multiplayer action right now. There are more people interested in fight with AK and MP5s than with lasers. CS, CoD4, etc etc.
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It’s unoriginal in as much as it doesn’t have a unique or compelling storyline or atmosphere.
In contrast to, say, Stalker, the Looking Glass Studio games or BioShock, all of which are freaky and brimming with originality and character.
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Hang about. Crysis has been released?
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(I’m not a huge fan of Crysis myself, for the record).
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“Unoriginal” is not the same as “ripping something off”.
The game IS unoriginal. The suit and its abilities are interesting and well integrated in the game, although the high energy cost of each ability made the experience rather boring for me. Alot of stalking about and hiding while my suit recharged and all.
Outside of the suit, it’s FarCry with better graphics.
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Why on earth would anyone be less interested in a delayed game? Things like Stalker’s monstrous, creaking Franken-engine aside, it’s a matter of marketing. No consumer is going to remember let alone care that something was “supposed” to be out a while ago.
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RPG beating two FPSs in sales? Bwahahahahaha, take that world!
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UT3 has been patched and no longer requires the DVD in the drive to play online.
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Hmm, so you mean the story is unoriginal, not the gameplay? I’d definately agree there – and its probably why Stalker is my game of the year, and perhaps why i’d rather Bioshock above Crysis. I would say the gameplay in the first 2/3rds of the game is utterly brilliant though, and unoriginal it most certainly isn’t, unless we are applying the Far Cry argument. But as i’ve said, that’s like dismissing Thief 2 and Deadly Shadows cuz they also involve sneaking around nabbing stuff and a lot of weirdness to do with pagans and hammers.
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Also – i’m not trying to provoke you or anything – this is a genuine question – what do you think the difference is between being unoriginal and “ripping something off”? I’m not saying there isn’t one and I haven’t given this any thought, i’d just like to know what exactly you mean.
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It’s weird to see the almost uniform negative reaction to Crysis
I’m trying to quantify out how I enjoyed the hell out of it.
Screw it. It’s a fantastic gaming experience. Hopefully it sells better.
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> Anyway, dunno about UT3, but Crysis is rubbish. Unoriginal, boring, souless, regurgitated, uninspired crap.
Good god man, come back when you can think of something constructive to say about it. Because all that is just bullshit.
For the record, I’m running Crysis with a 2.7GHz C2D, a Geforce 8800 GTS, all graphics options on high… and it plays just fine. At a resolution of 1024×768. Really, the res makes a hell of a difference: FPS averaging around 25-35.
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I will buy UT3 eventually, but I have quite a backlog of gaming to do, I haven’t even finished Bioshock yet.
Makes more sense for me to finish the games I have and by that time those other games have usually been discounted. Btw last time I checked UT3 was 55€, exactly 5€ more than I’m willing to pay.
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The chance of The Witcher having solds a million copies is about equal to me banging Jessica Simpson and Lidsney Lohan in a 3-way tonight. ie ZERO.
I doubt there are 100,000 people on the planet that have even heard of it, much less bought it.
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It comes down to the games themselves.
Crysis was all engine … nothing else, the game was pretty piss poor imho, when you compare them against the two other great fps single player games sold around the same time (orange box and Cod4). The same with Unreal3, really I played the demo of Ut3 and even bought Crysis (yer I regret it) they are just tech demo’s with interactivity.
Unreal 3, just lacked anything coherant. I think the character art director in the house of epic games needs to be fired and hire someone with a clue. Even the levels in UNR3 were very uninspired really, although looking very nice visually the whole thing was all over the show.
Crysis, was just pretty much ‘meh’, the weapons felt like pee shooters. After coming straight off Call of duty 4 (was and still am on a FPS binge) where the guns had clout and felt like something real compared to the Crysis weapons I unloaded a clip and this small asian dood was just running around trying to take my head off. Later on the game is like we have rewound 10 years to where boss fights in FPS were ‘in’. Felt like the story could have been written on the back of a cereal box… tell me is the WGA strike affecting computers games as well? That’s the only thing I can think of that would excuse the bad, bad, bad dialog and annoying as hell cut scenes.
I don’t know why they take and engine that requires so much beef of a machine to play that doesn’t look too much better than something that takes half the power (cod4) and looks a damn sight more playable. As you can see I prefer CoD4, not only does the single player beat the shit out of most FPS games this year (bioshock excluded :P) but it runs smooth on a ‘average’ gaming rig, but the Multiplayer is far better than both the others put together, I mean have you actually played Crysis online? … all I can say is -yawn-.
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It’s a bit odd that so many here are concentrating on Crysis being the failure here, when it’s sold three times as many copies as UT3.
As for Crysis and its apparently insane system requirements, I’m running with every option on very high (using the XP “hack”), and it’s running great on my decent-but-not-amazing computer. Because, like Chis, I play in 1024×768.
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Having just played the demo of Crysis, I can see myself not being as excited as Orange Box about it, yet I can still see why it’s getting as much praise as it has. So I think I will still be getting it, because I like to get all the way through before making a final descion.
But in trying to quantify exactly why I think I won’t like it as much as Orange Box, I’m not really sure. At first I thought it was because “it takes itself a little too seriously” – but then I really liked CoD4… I mean, it’s similar to when I talk about Far Cry, I feel a lot more comfortable with saying “the Trigens were crap” than I do saying the rest of the game is good, but only about the same level of uncomfort in saying it’s “bad” or even exactly in the middle. It’s a weird one.
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I’m playing Crysis on my old PC which is barely scraping the minimum spec. The computer is about 4 years old and hasn’t been upgraded once. I had thought that my computer wouldn’t run it but i was planning to play it on my new computer. When the parts for it took a long time to arrive (i’m still waiting for the 8800gt) i installed crysis on my old computer.
Theres 1gb of ram, an ati 9800 pro, a singlecore (though admittedly 3.4ghz) cpu. Every setting is on low with no options to turn it up. The point is, i’m still enjoying it a lot. Sure, the physics aren’t there and the game isn’t as pretty as it should be. But it still looks very decent and the suit is still great to play around in.
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I’ll wait for december to be over until I can make my own analysis of how well the game did online but right now I’d agree with the NPD numbers and say UT3 on the PC was a failure. It seems a bad demo (the thing wouldn’t even run on my computer most of the times), an asstastic user interface and competition from games such as TF2 didn’t allow it to be anything other than mediocre.
It probably doesn’t help that Unreal is going the Doom/Quake path of (commercial) redundancy either.
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I’m bummed about Crysis because it does deserve some attention but UT3, a series that I counted as my all time favorite was little more than a tweaked/prettied up version of UT2k4. The difference being that UT3 had less than half the content at launch. They also implied early on that they would be incorporating some aspects of U2′s XMP which never happened. Still, I enjoyed playing it for a couple of weeks but as of now I’m already somewhat burned out on its gameplay.
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I do kinda distrust the figures on The Witcher, because as someone said, it’s a slightly weird, not very well translated Eastern European game based on books that have zero availability in the US. Plus it’s got a goofy game. It also kinda snuck up on me – I remember seeing one or two previews over the years, but most of those were of the “gosh that’s a goofy name” sort, and they’d all but died off a while back. And the reviews have been very mixed. On the other hand, I personally think it’s an awesome game, well worthy of those kind of sales, and I hope those figures are correct so that we can see more games like this, be they sequels, other obscure Eastern European games, or merely games of this genre. And it would hopefully wake people up that, yes, single-player RPGs do still have an audience.
I haven’t bought either Crysis or UT3 for most of the above reasons: there are tons of other games on my to-buy list, most of which I’ve been more excited about. The games I’ve bought have way more play value for me (The Orange Box, for example). I don’t think I can run Crysis acceptably (even the people talking about how, oh, it runs just fine at high settings and 1024×768, my preferred resolution….have 300+ dollar 8800-series cards I can’t afford and can’t match with my measly 7600GTx2.) I don’t want UT3 all that badly – I don’t play any of the UT games much and so it’s been my policy to wait and pick ‘em up when I can find them for 10-20 dollars. They can be a lot of fun in short doses, but not 50 worth. Also, I’d tended to grab them more for the mods than the games themselves – and UT3 hasn’t had time to get modded to any extent. Oh, and one other reason I don’t want Crysis yet – I still haven’t done much with Far Cry. Why bother with its descendant when there’s still plenty of fun to be extracted from the predecessor, which runs beautifully, maxed out, and cost me under $10 (this was before the ad-supported download or Gametap, which make it essentially free.)?
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they hardware reqs were a little steep for Crysis and there were many good games that came out around the same time. Come Christmas some people may be asking that fatso St.Nick, he’s so jolly, to hook up some gamage.
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I don’t think The Witcher has done very well in the US or the UK. But then, counting PC-sales only, those two markets are both pretty small these days. The real money, as far as “hardcore” PC-gaming is concerned, is in continental Europe.
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“the second was far from the “best gaming deal ever” with an “episode” which was as derivative and as short as episode 1 and as both FEAR addons (but without as much new goodies), a puzzle game that was completed in three hours and a multiplayer shooter with barely enough maps to play on. ”
You’re a sad sad man.
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Mediocre graphics-focussed FPS’s doing badly?
I’m shocked!
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I believe a little something called ‘fun’ is the missing element. There is only one company that really seems to understand the concept at the moment, and they are called Valve. Crysis interests me only slightly (and it would never run on my machine), and UT3 not at all. In fact, I hadn’t even noticed that UT3 had come out, so uninterested am I.
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Wow. Look at these comments! And here I was thinking it was RPS and not Gamespy…
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TF2 didn’t require an upgrade and allowed me to play with everyone I know. That stopped any thoughts of money-spending dead in its tracks, and if newly released games can look that good and be that playable, I’m not interested in upgrading just to see three thousand barrels cascade on me in real-time.
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For me, it’s hardware issues on both of them, but I’m running on a Mobile Intel chipset, so that’s to be expected.
But if I had to guess, I’d say that for Crysis it’s hardware, which is their own fault, and UT in general has been out of the public spotlight for a while. Of course, to the ignorant masses, both of these games doubtlessly just look like “those games that aren’t Halo 3″, which might’ve had something to do with it.
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UT3 doesn’t even need that high specs, shame really as it is quite good.
I’d be tempted to fast track it to steam if I epic, no doubt it’ll do better on there
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Heh that would be funny because Mark Rein (Epic CEO) hates Steam with a passion….
Also I think the Witchers definitely gaining attention, it’s actually pretty competitively priced here in the UK (about £25 in Tesco’s for example, where as Crysis is £30) and there aren’t any other PC RPGs out there presently competing for attention.
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I bought crysis as soon as it came out, and my machine can’t run it. I’m happy enough to hang on to it till i have a machine that can, but if I wasnt, most shops won’t do returns on PC titles because of piracy concerns. Thats a big prob for a lot of people tho, so I can really see people avoiding it because they don’t want to get stung.
As for UT, I already own UT, UT2003 and UT2004, and from what I can see, UT2007 doesn’t really offer anything new enough to warrant buying it. It may be difficult to improve on a game which is already so awesome, but that doesn’t mean people are going to buy it twice. Especially not when they can get TF2 for the same price and also get HL2, HL2 Ep1 & 2, and Portal into the bargain.
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fear of crazy hardware requirements kept people from buying Crysis.
Hit the nail on the head. I’m certain it won’t run on my machine, so I didn’t bother. Shame.
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@ kadayi:
Would you happen to have a link to the article where that is described?
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Neither one of these things were /games/ per se– they were glorified tech demos, advertising for engine licenses.
I never saw anything attempt to sell me on Crysis beyond “check out the shiny graphics– shame you don’t have DX-10 to enjoy them!”
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I actually think The Witcher may be a bit of a sleeper hit. I’ve had a slight interest since ohhh…. at least mid 2005. But pretty much since Penny Arcade rattled on about it a few years back.
Hell, maybe people got on to some e3 coverage, or just heard snippets about it, and its stuck in peoples minds and such.
Also, completely agreed with Mr Damiani here, Both Crysis and UT3 are merely tech demo’s for their respective engines, only Epic were just a wee too late with releasing theirs. ‘from the creators of gears of war!’
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UT3 wont pick up; it offers too little.
Crysis on the other hand is now THE test for people when they buy big on new hardware.
It needs to go onto a digital delivery system as soon as possible but it definitely has legs if not good gameplay.
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“Would you happen to have a link to the article where that is described?”
My bad, I was thinking of that other guy from 3D Realms. Mark Reins been quite vocal against episodic content, wire confused (too much late night witcher ;0)
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Radiant: I dunno, I think once the new Make Something Unreal contest comes around, it’s going to offer a lot.
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Crysis isn’t all THAT demanding on PCs, it just needs it’s options changed a bit. The story is alright, but the gameplay is great and very fun. It doesn’t try to be a mind bender, because it isn’t, and it doesn’t compete with the likes of Bioshock for story. That doesn’t make it a bad, GAME, to play.
UT3 was underhyped from the start with slim to none press releases to maintain a focus on Gears, while both sold Unreal Engine 3 to various developers and UT3 will act as a springboard to make it seem quick and easy through the mod community.
CoD4 has a massive fan base, spanning PCs and consoles and everyone expected the game to be good, hell even I did, hence why I bought it and played it, but it’s not some groundbreaking wonder of technology and storytelling, it’s a shooter with a few semi gripping moments.
The characters you play as, with the exception of the sniper I can’t recall the name of, don’t have any given personality or traits, they’re just tools to get things done, and no one responds to you except to move you to the next objective, there is no emotion that you’d get from HL2: Episode 2 or anything remotely close to it. I couldn’t care too much when “jackson” died in the nuke blast, despite my normally high levels of empathy.
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Doesn’t shock me in the least. UT3 and Crysis are 2 of the least appealing games to me all year( and I LOVE shooters..)
I personally just don’t get Crytek.. the fact that part of their company name is slapped onto their titles shits me incredibly for some reason, for starters xD. But the real problem is their worlds are just totally unconvincing to me. Their hyper-gloss plastic jungles and phospheresent water makes me cringe frankly.
I mean hell look at HL2: the damn thing is years old and it STILL pulls off some of the most believable environments in a shooter yet.
As for UT3, well let’s just say I hated the way they took the series in 2003/4 and it seems to be a further deviation along those lines, so they can forget it.
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Didn’t like the Crysis demo.
Don’t want another MP shooter.
Prefer games with thinking.
‘s it.
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I agree with mostly everything I’ve read so far.
- Crysis is an engine with some game attached. The first problem being that the majority of people can not possibly play it at an enjoyable speed. The second that it isn’t the most engaging story. Then they add Aliens. Bad move, usually. At least they could/should have avoided spoiling this part of things with some creative PR. Thirdly, they signed with EA, so we all knew it was at least 9 months from being consumer ready upon its actual release. I think about 100K sales alone will be gamers waiting for patches before committing their hard earned. ***The last game EA actually finished in an acceptable state was Fifa 95 on the Mega Drive (Genesis for the yanks).***
- UT2KWHATEVER is just more of the same, except prettier. It runs very well on most machines, but it doesn’t change the core game dynamics. If you don’t have UT yet, buy it, you’ll probably have a blast. If you one of the more recent ones, don’t bother. Epic will just stooge you and release another one in 18 months time. I think its seriously about time Epic consider an MMORPG expansion pack style upgrade system for the Unreal Tournament games so that new adopters can still play with older copies of the game. People will (and are) voting with their wallets and refusing to pay full price for a texture pack.
-Like most, my money has gone to the Orange Box, and BioShock. OB because its the game of the year by a country mile due to fun and value (amazingly important, and some developers/publishers Just Dont Get That), and BioShock because it COULD have been great (was let down BADLY by a poor last hour and dubious console related interferance, but still almost great). And hey, the collectors Big Daddy was NICE.
Call of Duty 4 will be getting my money when its a more reasonable price. By all reports its not very long at all (7-9 hours), and the multiplayer doesn’t interest me one bit, so thats not much game for $80 (AUD).
PC gaming can and will survive, but the companies that provide our entertainment need to get smarter. Start making games, not tech demos. People wont stand for it anymore. Stop playing the piracy card, people who don’t buy your game never were going to anyway. Get behind innovations like Steam, not just through downloadable content, but bricks and mortar copies with Steam integration or integration patches later on. People LIKE software that updates itself easily and provides more content readily. DIY patching should be a thing of the past.
Adapt. Think. Survive.
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I’m just saying what you already heart. Unreal 3 would probably run on my machine, but I’m not even interested enough to download the demo if there is one. I got discounted Unreal 2004 a year or two ago, had my fun with it, and am not interested in having the same experience with better graphics. Been there, done that.
I have the Orange Box. Portal was awesome, but it’s over, and I have considered uninstalling Episode 2 to reclaim the drive space. BUT I’ve been having a blast with Team Fortress 2 since the beta release.
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I honestly think its a simple mix of people tiring of the industry grade para-military, futuristic, fat guys in bloated 40K armor, designs we’re seeing more and more. If you blur your eyes, most of these FPS titles all end up looking and feeling the same. You either have your choice between the jingoistic “army” games, or the futuristic, Stargate stuff. There honestly isn’t much variety.
UT still feels like the same ole’ Mortal Kombat series of the FPS genre. While I think Crysis just fell off a bit because its requiring most people to have these MONSTER pc’s to run it at a decent rate. The mp was pretty cool, but EA also did nothing in terms of advertising the game almost at all. Most people don’t even know about game. And hardcore gamers are on the fence about having to upgrade for a game they don’t know much about.
While I don’t have numbers for the Orange Box. Everyone I know around me is still enthusiacally playing TF2 and Portal. Even if Portal is just an SP game. Valve seems to have done well to stray away from the norm designs in most FPS games and have struck a chord with their market.
PC gaming isn’t dying, but it needs to be marketed a certain way to reach more people. It’s not like the console market. And dev’s need to learn to also try and do “new” things within the FPS genre…badly.
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There’s a bunch of other issues here too. Like how many PC gamers have stopped buying games regularly because they just play WoW, or any other long-term MMO? Or how many more copies Crysis will sell over the coming year as people get around to upgrading and then look for something that will show off their new 3D card. The game may have a long tail.
UT3 I really enjoyed, but I feel like the time of the classic arena shooter is in the past.
Also, what would perhaps be more interesting would be to see how many copies STALKER and Bioshock sold on PC.
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For me (and everyone else packing my regular server) the big thing is the AIX coop add-on for BF2. I’ve got BF2142, Crysis and CoD4, but AIX is the game that gets played, simply because the gameplay blows away everything else. BF2 came out in 2005, but a free add-on (that comes to nearly 2GB), is packing the server, and despite the server running TF2, CoD4 and BF2142 as well, no-one plays those. Everyone’s in AIX.
It must say something about the difference between a game made to make money, and one made for the fun of playing, that it’s the more popular.
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The Crysis spec cry babies are getting old. If you spent money on your PC in the last 12 months it will run and actually the gameplay isn’t crap either.
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@Nallen:
4GB RAM, 2x 8800GTS SLI, 2.6GHz Core 2 Quad, 24” monitor @ 1900×1200, 12fps on high, 4fps on very high.
Thanks but no. I’m very glad that Amazon have a no-quibble return policy on games. I wonder how many people have returned Crysis when faced with the choice of unplayable vs turning settings down to “DirectX 7 Game” level.
Crytek need so poach some Source engineers from Valve to see how such things should be done.
Gameplay is alright, actually, but spoiled by the idiotic balance issues caused by the suit’s battery lasting about three seconds and Koreans apparently being able to take an entire clip of machine gun ammo in the chest without flinching.
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Well, I might get kickbanned for saying this on RPS but I prefer console gaming over PC gaming. It’s a lot less hassle playing on my 360.
I got The OB on PC as the majority of my friends own PCs but everything else is on the 360.
To get a bit on topic; I wasn’t interested in any of these as I prefer story and atmosphere (HL2 and Bioshock) over run and gun.
That being said though; Gears of War was awesome in co-op (and crap in single-player) but in the end I’d chalk that success up to atmosphere as well, although in a different form when compared to HL2 and Bioshock.
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The game may have a long tail.
Do you believe that, or is it wishful thinking? By the time the average PC can run this game, Crysis will long be forgotten as the uberleet move on to the next big thing.
Crysis will be a free pack-in with new NVIDA graphics cards within a year. A bundled tech demo to allow you to benchmark your new shiny, nothing more.
If not that, it’ll be sitting unloved and remembered only as a cautionary tale of developer hubris in the bargain bins of Steam and Gametap.
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@Martin:
BURN THE WITCH!
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Yeah, I dunno about you lot but multiplayer games seem like they require a bit of commitment. Even just DM-ctf sorts of things and there’s a lot of them about the last year or so. Who needs more than one teamplay DM sort of game?
In the old days (*cough*) when every game had some sort of DM and specific arena games were a bit new people I knew used to talk about that sort of game like it was a new platform and there was a bit of a “Wait and see what cool mods there are”. So, yeah, as far as UT3 goes I don’t wonder if everyone’s found their online battle game already the past 12 months and aren’t ready to move on just yet.
Crysis; my money’s on system requirements and the fact that everyone I know thought Far Cry was initially impressive but ultimately crap (they’re harsh, what can I say), so Crysis gets a bit of Third-Matrix-Movie Syndrome.
This industry obsession with initial release sales figures is dense and obviously because a lot of ex-movie marketroids have found work in the games industry and haven’t bothered to change their spots. Half Life’s massive success came over years; they sold the first person, then fixed the net code and bought a good editor like a year later, then repackaged and nurtured mods yadda yadda. Sure not many games could repeat this sort of thing, but more could try. UT3 looks great; sit back relax and nurture it as a platform, Epic, and it’ll do fine.
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@Pokeylope: 1900×1200 is a pretty ridiculous resolution. I really can’t understand why anyone would want a 24″ LCD for gaming. It’s not just Crysis, having such a screen practically forces the player to keep upgrading their rigs every time new, leet hardware is released to be able to keep playing new games at that resolution. Unless you poop money, having such a screen, just means your PC is carrying a huge weight around that brings down performance.
Also, do you have AA on or something? Because I’d reckon that you should be able to get better fps than that, at least on high.
Finally, medium settings in Crysis still look damn good.
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When we finally see UT2k7 on the Mac I’ll buy it.
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Well, the Crytek guys did warn us it wouldn’t run the way we, or they, wanted it to on current tech. So we cant really get all whiny at them too much.
Onto the people saying UT3 brings nothing new except shiny graphics….. well, its pretty much the neverwinter nights of FPS.
It’s an open platform. In both cases, the sequels bought pretty much nothing to the table except a shiny new engine.
And honestly, all the fans of previous installments, how many of you play with the vanilla content? hmm?
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Am am surprised by the backlash against the Crysis gameplay, it’s far more of a sandbox than Orange Box but personally I’m enjoying the change. I quite often find myself reloading encounters wondering if there is a more clever or more interesting way of doing it..
‘..hmm, I wonder what would happen if I jumped over that car and punched it in the fuel tank..’
Yes the Crysis engine is very demanding, but it’s also technically quite a bit beyond anything else. If the PC had fans like consoles do, internet forums would be full of PC gamers pointing and laughing and how inadequate console games now look.
Is it really right that we are moaning about the best example of ‘look what modern PCs can do’? A piece of software that is technically quite likely to be better than anything the current crop of consoles will ever be able to do and probably THE benchmark on PC for a long while yet.
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There is a fight like this going on Eurogamer atm too: The people who hate it vs the people who say “you’d love it if you explored it’s potential” then the original people say “but why should I be forced to try to get the most out of a game!” etc.
Personally I thought Crysis was utterly compelling, I think the demo alone is evidence of the myriad ways it is possible to play it. I think the people who don’t like it are those who choose the “boring” way.
Also – i’m with Jim re: UT3 and the slow demise of arena based shooters, if this comments thread is anything to go by. Which is a CRYING SHAME because UT3 is steadily working its way up my favourite-game-of-the-year list, and i’ve already played it more than I’ve played ETQW or TF2
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“Crytek need so poach some Source engineers from Valve to see how such things should be done.”
Source is very scaleable but it has shown its age as well. Source levels are way too small, even those so-called outdoor pieces in HL² and Episode 2. Enemy AI overall is still miserable if you compare it to the original HL/Opposing Force. Those cinematic physics moments in Episode 2 were very cool but besides that it’s not pushing the technology nor gameplay possibilities of the PC platform at all, only the artistic side (and even then in a such a linear “interactive movie” fashion that it’s more a frustration than anything else, it’s much, much less of a real “game” than more open-ended gameplay shooters).
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I agree with SwiftRanger. I don’t think the theme park ride style of gameplay that Valve go for in the half life games can hold my interest for too much longer. Games where you have to read the designers mind, even when it’s as smooth as hl2, aren’t as interesting as ones where you can actually be inventive. Games like civ, dwarf fortress and to a lesser extent farcry and deus ex are better to me than games like hl2 and it’s episodes, great though hl2 is.
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@ Pokeylope
> 4GB RAM, 2x 8800GTS SLI, 2.6GHz Core 2 Quad, 24” monitor @ 1900×1200, 12fps on high, 4fps on very high.
Seriously, there’s something very messed up with your setup if that’s what you’re getting. Or you’re trying to use 16xAA. Try going easy on the AA (2x or 4x is enough), and TURN YOUR SCREEN RESOLUTION DOWN.
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Well, the Crytek guys did warn us it wouldn’t run the way we, or they, wanted it to on current tech. So we cant really get all whiny at them too much.
Then they* can’t get all whiny when people with current tech don’t buy it.
Personally, my l33t-3-years-ago computer runs Crysis at reasonably pretty levels with no problems. But the demo just didn’t click with me. I’m fully prepared to accept that’s my fault and not the game’s, but I had a much easier time getting into The Orange Box, so’s to speak.
* – Not that “they” are. But you take the point.
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Market saturation, and Vista. Guys, Crysis was billed as the first DX10 game, among other things. A lot of the hardware and gamer sites ran ad^H^H stories for up to a year before release about building a “Crysis-Capable” or “Crysis-Proof” machine, or getting a Vista/DX10 path ready to be able “to play Crysis”. Crysis got linked in our psyches with DX10, Vista, and bloated hardware.
So the first question anyone — reviewers or players — would ask about Crysis was “How slow is it on my rig?”
For PC gaming, that’s really the kiss of death. I don’t care if it runs really well with most of the settings turned down to “this generation” level on two-year-old hardware, if the expectation that it is slow or requires super-hardware is there, the sales are only going to be to those who want to show off their toys.
Oh yeah, and the OB musta cleaned their clocks, and UT’s too. In a saturated market, there’s room for one blockbuster and one break-even proposition. The rest are losers. The OB kicked ass on the Arena stuff, and did plenty well for the SP FPshooter/puzzle games.
The technological marvels of Crysis remind me of a line from Brave New World:
If you go to the same CP-Well too often, people get bored.
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It’s all about hardware issues with gamers an there rigs. Not everyone can go out and afford a high end system these days. While games are trying to approach movie quality the graphics are nice, but that’s not the whole game. I for one can say for me it’s about a quality game that runs well with great game play and not just based on eye candy. While both of these games on this subject are very nicely done, Valve gets my two thumbs up for great games that look very nice even played on low end rigs.
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It’s just simply the cost for me. I couldn’t afford all the games I wanted to over the last few months so some had to be left for another time and Crysis and UT3 were the two that missed out.
Release schedules for this time of year are always stupid. I’m spending money on Christmas already so I really can’t afford to get more than one or two of the high profile releases anyway.
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Oh god, it seems like half the people criticizing Crysis in here haven’t actually played it. As far as I am concerned, the focus of the game is being able to play it however you’d like, you know, kinda like Deus Ex but without character growth. Being able to go through a level cloaking all the time, headshotting enemy soldiers with a silenced rifle, you know, playing Predator, moving through hidden routes and the next time just going in guns blazing, shotgunning everyone, collapsing shacks with well placed throws and blowing up jeeps right as they lunge at you with an underslung grenade launcher-it makes the game awesome, say what you will about the design and the story.
Crysis is 50% gameplay, 50% engine with not much left for the former two elements, but what can you do? It doesn’t try to be Bioshock or Portal, just a mix of an old fashioned shooter with lots of open ended elements and a rather spectacular though not that imaginative finish.
As far as UT3 goes? Well, it’s UT, you know, if it really plays somewhat “stale” for you, I can only wonder why you bought an Unreal Tournament title and thought it would really differ from its predecessors.
In the end, it doesn’t really pain me to see UT3′s sales, but as far as Crysis goes? I’m kinda sad since it’s one of those games that tried doing something new on both the gameplay front, as opposed to the on-rail shooters we get all the time now, and the technological front.
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“SwiftRanger: Enemy AI overall is still miserable if you compare it to the original HL/Opposing Force…”
The enemies of Half-Life didn’t even have anything resembling AI, as I recall. The only reason that had the illusion of being superior foes than that of HL2 is the stupid amount of hitpoints they had. I’m not an expert on warfare, but I do know two shotgun barrels to the face is pretty fatal. In HL1 it’d just give them a limp. HL2′s problem is the opposite – the enemies generally don’t take that much punishment before expiring.
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I totally agree with what Qjuad said.
I hated the way in HL that marines would some times require a whole clip unloading into their faces to make them go down. Its what puts me off replaying it. HL2 fixed that in my opinion, but still kept it challenging.
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If you read this The_B, be warned – the demo is from the Good Part of the game, where you’re running around whittling down smart squads of enemies, punching HMMWVs into the air and giggling.
It’s great for the first few hours! Then they throw out everything their engine and AI can do and make a corridor shooter instead. ‘Go down this five-foot-wide ship’s passage, enter this honest-to-goodness room full of crates, and shoot some hamstrung flying enemies to reach the next switch you need to flip. Ta ta!’
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Some points I’d like to push further:
This is what happened to Far Cry. But it still wasn’t seen as a ‘failure’, was it? I mean, yes you do hear everyone complaning about the Trigents, but at least that proves most people have played it in order to know how bad the Trigens were?
Now I feel this is a rather harsh way of putting it, especially as for one thing, the changes are a lot more pronounced than they were between 2K3 and 2K4 – other than the vehicular additions, it feels more like original UT than the 200X iterations did. They got rid of the adrenaline and replaced the machine gun for the enforcers again for a start. Agreed, it’s still not a level of change that would revolutionize things, but is that really what people expect from a UT game? Heck, if you really think about it – does Half Life 2 really change the core formula for number one, other than the phsyics?
And I’m with Jim, only I apply the theory for UT – I can see that still having legs, moreso when we see the mods and the MSU contest appear.
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The sales are very disappointing, although unless you’re Blizzard or Maxis, PC game sales in America always tend to be disappointing. It does sadden me though, to see the first AAA PC-exclusive title in ages to be a failure. If Far Cry 2 also fails, I will feel incredibly depressed about the future of PC gaming outside of generic MMOs and poorly done console ports.
I can’t believe so many people are crapping on Crysis for it’s gameplay. It’s so open-ended, I got more enjoyment out of the demo than full-fledged games this year. Meanwhile, COD4 was the most boring FPS I’ve played all year, and I played Jericho. Just completely soulless, uncreative gameplay that they already did with COD1 and 2 and haven’t even tried advancing. Go to one area, shoot the enemies coming out of the same place who continue to hide in the same two areas until finally you follow your compass to the next area and do it again. And it’s so heavily scripted, I’ve never been so constantly reminded that I’m playing a game as immersive as Pong over and over again. If you’re going to be on rails as a shooter, at least try hiding the rails.
Finally, I really can’t comprehend anyone who still uses the “people who pirate wouldn’t buy it anyways” excuse, which is frankly beyond delusional. I’m sure there’s some people where that’s true, but the vast majority of pirates I met are the same people who illegally download music, in other words everyday people of all ages who had no problem paying full price for games in the past when getting it illegally was too risky and/or inconvenient.
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I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the exact post in YCS just a day ago or so. Is that you, kuddles?
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That depends on what you class as the “formula”. It’s never been the gunplay for me.
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Also, I refuse to be impressed that Crysis allows me to play a super-soldier. I’ve been playing as a super-soldier in games for years, and it’s only the recent (and utterly bizarre) trend towards having less-super-soldiers in games that makes Crysis’ characters feel anything like unusual.
I mean, in Half-Life you can be super-strong and super-fast and super-bullet-proof, all at the same time, without some god-awful “LOOK, YOU HAVE TO USE THE MOUSE TO POINT IN A DIRECTION RATHER THAN CLICKING PRECISELY ON AN ICON! THIS IS NOT AN INTERFACE INTENDED FOR AN ANALOGUE JOYPAD, NO SIREE!” power selector thing. Same with any other game in the history of computer gaming until bloody Operation Flashpoint came along and ruined everything.
Not that I disliked OF itself, mind you. It was a great game and really emphasised the vulnerability of a soldier on a modern battlefield. Sadly, the effect it had on the larger world of gaming was not to cause developers to make games full of tension and real-world fear, but to make them all decide “Hey, let’s make it so that in every game from now on, you can’t see where you’re firing. OH! And let’s make it so that moving at anything faster than zombie-pace for three seconds makes your character tire out and fall over. OOOOOH! And let’s have it so that they can’t move and shoot at the same time so that player keep having to stop constantly and have their faces sniped off! THAT WILL BE AWESOME!”
Eeeh, I’m too incoherent for real ranting. Must sleep.
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The super suit is just another way of getting things done and making things more plausible. It could be magic, it could be augmentations, but in this version, it’s a suit. So what?
The implementation of real world concepts like headshots mean both the players and the developers have to think rather than just chucking loads of high health enemies at a player that they have to shoot forever to kill. Some developers fail at making the game fun while implementing realism, for example CoD4′s multiplayer, and the learning curve for it. Unless you’ve been a CoD fan since 2, you’re going to be lucky to get a single kill before you die for the 3rd time.
The first 2/3 of Crysis involve dealing with conventional enemies, and I admit that the 3rd section felt much less interesting than the first 2, at least after you left the alien ship. The freezing idea was cool, but the weapon given was terrible for actually fighting the aliens, whereas the gaus gun excelled at it, and rifles we’re half bad either, infact the rifles kicked ass when loaded with incendiary rounds. I wish there was a little more narrative though, but I didn’t expect narrative from Crysis, which isn’t an excuse, it’s still a flaw, but it doesn’t detract from the fun enough for me to say that they game is crap, the game is great, just not something I’d be retelling the story to others in great detail, versus Deus Ex which contains so many little tidbits, it’s insane.
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okay, sure. Now that Crysis has niched itself as being the performance hog of its generation, it can easily make it into those graphic-card retail bundles: “Dude, my card is so hot, it can play Crysis!”
How much money would it make?
I also find it difficult to imagine that Operation Flashpoint had that effect on developers. The OFP developers go the “wrong way” about making games, and it means they make engaging stuff with more depth, but also more chances for failure (ArmA, I’d be looking at you, but if I poked my head over the ridge, I’d receive a bullet between the eyes)
Check out the context for that “Feelies” quote above: human history and literature are being brushed away as lies, then there’s this interjection about the “Feelies”, touting their realism.
It’s quite simple: There is a body of lconventions for these games, a FPS “code”, if you will. It’s constantly evolving, but it’s largely influenced by technology. It’s a code, and it can be disrupted or perverted, but at one’s own risk (avant-garde just means the first to walk into a dead end).
Some of the conventions are: A. Short View Distances B. small-scale conflicts (preferably involving 4 bad guys, at most 10) C. super-human player powers and D. super-human enemy powers.
A. It costs a lot to render open spaces. Oblivion, Crysis and ArmA all show the processing hit that this involves, and this becomes all the more noticeable when the player moves into an area with a wide view. Building short view distances (tight, urban terrains, interiors, and so on) into the game ensures that the FPS stays constant and high. As a bonus, you can cram more detail into those tight spaces. Finally, close-range combat is more exciting: the player sees the adversary close up, blood flies, screams echo, all that touchy-feely stuff happens. Incidentally, Hollywood does the same thing with their battles: engagement ranges are greatly reduced for dramatic effect.
B. Hollywood also uses a handy rule of thumb for scaling engagements: one on-screen squad represents one real-life platoon (see Platoon); one on-screen platoon represents one RL company (see Black Hawk Down) and so on. Viewers can’t comprehend that many people doing things at once. So too with video games. Adding more than 4 bad guys to attack the player does not make the player any more stressed or confused. 4 bad guys is pretty much the saturation point. Any more than that, and you’re increasing the game’s complexity for no exceptional benefit to the player’s experience.
C. Few people want to play the PFC Schmuck, assistant mess-hall cook, unless it’s PFC Schmuck, assistant mess-hall cook who’s the only survivor of his unit and happens to gain access to a whole bunch of fancy toys really fast. People need a sense of accomplishment, and for single-player games, that sense comes from being better than other humans that happend to be computer-simulated.
D. At the same time, the game needs to get tougher. Because of (B), the only way to do this is to find some crutch by which the bad guys get better too.
All the examples given are of things that OF and ArmA do that are _not_ part of the code. What made Operation Flashpoint a great game was how it played at the edge of the code. It opened up the visibility distance just enough to simulate large spaces, and allow for vehicles to be used. It featured carefully designed scenarios, where many enemies attacked the player, but without overwhelming the end user. Throughout the game, the player was and remains just an ordinary human (although at times a Spec. Ops. dude), yet, as it advances, the player gets access to increasingly powerful toys (tanks and helicopters). The enemy remains human, but scales too in terms of super-human vehicles (tanks and helos).
The code is there; it’s just been played with. And I challenge you to name any game other than OFP/ArmA where you play anything but a supersoldier (spec. ops. – supersoldier).
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But again then, replace the run down areas of City 17 with Black Mesa research complex, then what do you have? I am a fan of Half Life 2 by the way, I’m just throwing in a counterpoint that is worth thinking about.
Also: the Football Manager series has barely changed since it began. Yet it still consistantly ranks amongst the biggest selling PC games. So is the argument of “more of the same not good” really a valid one?
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“I mean, in Half-Life you can be super-strong and super-fast and super-bullet-proof, all at the same time, without some god-awful “LOOK, YOU HAVE TO USE THE MOUSE TO POINT IN A DIRECTION RATHER THAN CLICKING PRECISELY ON AN ICON! THIS IS NOT AN INTERFACE INTENDED FOR AN ANALOGUE JOYPAD, NO SIREE!” power selector thing.”
You mean you actually have to choose between modes and approaches? God forbid those pesky devs make you actually consider the situation and make you choose what suit mode you need to be in for this particular approach!
Deus Ex probably sucked for you too since you had to toggle augs on and off constantly, what a horrible game, is it not?
Furthermore, if you would’ve actually played Crysis more you would’ve probably noticed the “Suit Shortcuts” option which should probably for fairness’ sake be set to on by default and which is the only real way to play Crysis. With it on, you want to strength jump? You just doubletap the jump key. Same with melee. Cloak? Doubletap crouch, it’s there. Armor? Doubletap move backwards key. Speed? Doubletap sprint while moving forward. Instant, fluid switching between the suit modes.
The entire point of Crysis is that thanks to those suit modes and your own imagination you could have limitless ways to deal with every situation in the game, again, with the exception of the final third which was supposed to be a cinematic on-rails conclusion.
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Yeah, Deus Ex was pretty horrible.
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Man! Games are rubbish, let’s all go skiing.
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oh dracko, your jihad against that which is good and pure in this world will never cease to warm my heart.
i’m getting crysis for xmas. i got a new video card in part so i could play it. i’m excited, but i have very specific – some might say low – expectations of shooters, and crysis hits most of them. the demo has been great fun.
how have timeshift and jericho sold? (timeshift has potential somewhere, no doubt, but jericho appeared – from the demo – to be a pile of bad things.)
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And I challenge you to name any game other than OFP/ArmA where you play anything but a supersoldier (spec. ops. – supersoldier).
stalker? you do have amnesia, but that’s not so much a superpower but one of the more horribly overused devices in games.
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Maybe one day, dhex, its Truth will burn through your corroded, bloated heart like the power of God’s own blowtorch!
Dinger: Do you want a list?
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I played the demo of Crysis on (mostly) medium and it still looked like one of the most attractive games this year and ran fine (7800GTX 512mb amd2 4600 2 gig ram).
I find it seriously amusing that people would return the game because they can’t play it on some obscene resolution or whatever, I buy/play games if they are fun, not because they look extra shiny. It’s sad.
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Deus Ex was and remains the pinnacle of shooters, and I only played it for the first time last year, so it’s not a matter of nostalgia.
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“The enemies of Half-Life didn’t even have anything resembling AI, as I recall. The only reason that had the illusion of being superior foes than that of HL2 is the stupid amount of hitpoints they had. I’m not an expert on warfare, but I do know two shotgun barrels to the face is pretty fatal. In HL1 it’d just give them a limp. HL2’s problem is the opposite – the enemies generally don’t take that much punishment before expiring.”
Something’s wrong with your memory then :) , HL1 was the first FPS that didn’t let its AI rely on unrealistic quick moves (ducking for rockets à la Quake 2, karate kid-sidejump à la Unreal) but on smart movement, cover and a teambased effort to kick your ass. I don’t know anymore if HL1 had hitboxes or not, if shooting in the face was equal to more damage or not, then again if it wasn’t like that, who could blame a 1997 debut fps game for that? Not only did the marines/black ops had more hitpoints (why shouldn’t they, you have a lot of hitpoints as well), they just moved so much more intelligently than the Combine do now. They’d even camp just to get on your nerves just like the FEAR AI does while a Combine almost never tries to conceal himself when he is on his own. I am not saying the HL1 AI didn’t have any bugs back then but HL²’s human AI just never manages to impress.
That’s the real problem with HL² (even on “Hard”), you are only afraid to die when you stumble on a street full with Striders (and since Episode 2, a forest full of Hunters:p). If you see a group of Combine, you pretty much know the only thing you should look out for are the grenades-with-awful-throwing-physics.
Don’t get me wrong, I like HL² (to a certain extent) but not for its AI.
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As Mr. Rossingol said, UT3′s gameplay seems to be past its heyday yet I don’t see Epic abandoning the IP because of one mediocre selling version.
I’m trying to imagine what an updated UT would look and play like? More realism in its weapons? A true single player game? (but that would be Unreal 3 though wouldn’t it….) . Maybe something similar to what Webzen is trying to do with Huxley….?
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Aye, it has been a magnet for words on all topics.
Next Saturday I’m just going to post a story reading simply “Videogames?” and let nature take its course.
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Man, enemies in Half-Life took unreasonable amounts of damage. In HL², you shot a soldier in the head with a shotgun, he went ragdoll on you.
I still don’t see why people dislike the A.I. It’s certainly not the most developed, but it gets the job done as I’d expect it to, servicing the immersion factor.
Chemix: If Deus Ex is the pinnacle of shooters, then I’m glad the industry has been making “alternative” shooters since. For all the fuss people make of it, it would be much better if it didn’t even attempt to play like a shooter at all.
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The combat is Deus Ex was god awful.
Didn’t detract from the awesomeness of the game that much, though.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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“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.
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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.
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If that’s all you saw in Deus Ex, then you didn’t get look into it any more than you had to.
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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.
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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.
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Well, I’m gonna pick both of them up, as soon as I have enough money.
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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.)
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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.
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Maybe it’s not piracy or hardware. Maybe people are sick of the same old FPS over and over?
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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.
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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).
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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?)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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).
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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”…
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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.
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Dear Mr Jesus,
For your Christmas, I would like to have the last comment on this post, even if it must be burglary.
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That seems unlikely.
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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…
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[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).
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“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.
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QFT. It never gets old. Ever.
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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.
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