nabeel says:

That’s pretty hilarious, and irritating. I don’t really care that much since I always knew I could rely on the community to come out with some custom config files which I’ll be using like I did with the original Crysis (it didn’t let you use the maximum settings in Direct X 9 despite the engine and the hardware being fully capable of using some of them). Haven’t got a chance to get this yet, but I will do soon enough.

nabeel

September 22nd, 2008 at 11:54 am

YaRisse says:

Wait a second, Doesn’t an “Enthusiast” tend to go ahead and set all the settings individually anyway? Real men don’t use presets!

September 22nd, 2008 at 11:57 am

Heliocentric says:

In the old days games had 1 setting, and it didnt work, and we liked it!

September 22nd, 2008 at 12:03 pm

Twanni says:

I don’t see the problem.
I just miss the Gothic/Emo setting which reduces gamma to zero.

September 22nd, 2008 at 12:15 pm

Dinger says:

Eye Crack
Eye Candy
Eye Sore
Eye Can’t Play This Game

September 22nd, 2008 at 12:25 pm

AbyssUK says:

I’m too young to die
Hey, not too rough
Hurt me plenty
Ultra-violence
Nightmare

September 22nd, 2008 at 12:28 pm

Phil says:

If you sold your computer, would you get:
1k
700 pounds
350 pounds
A three-month suspended sentence

September 22nd, 2008 at 12:35 pm

Mogs says:

They were trying to fix something that wasn’t broken.

Still, I didn’t dwell on it, it’s not a big deal.

September 22nd, 2008 at 12:40 pm

FhnuZoag says:

Minimum
Slide show
Slide show
Slide show

September 22nd, 2008 at 12:41 pm

Ingenu says:

I see some people have had the same idea…

Ugly
Slow
Unplayable
Slideshow

At least that’s my experience with Crysis, dunno whether it can be applied to Crysis Warhead, though.

If there’s an auto detect, what’s the point of those profiles anyway ?
People who really want to tweak stuff will go into advanced options and tick/slide whatever fancies them…

September 22nd, 2008 at 12:51 pm

Nimic says:

My computer is far from a super computer (Faaaaar), and I can play Warhead on Gamer (High). A few places it lags a bit, but most of the time it runs very smoothly. If people haven’t tried Warhead they can’t complain about it, as it has lower demands than Crysis (or at least you can play with better graphics on poorer computers).

September 22nd, 2008 at 12:54 pm

Shadowmancer says:

Im a gamer so why dont it work for me!

September 22nd, 2008 at 1:22 pm

Heliocentric says:

Warhead? I never even finished crysis. The suits would have made an asymetrical multiplayer game great. Shame they suited everyone. How does it go? When everyone is special no one is? Give me a 5 vs 30 game. The 30 trying to get a convoy across a map the 5 super goofs trying to stop them. You could even have a non combatant camera class who if he manages to record any of the 5 guys using super powers gets his side increased resources. Where is my cheque?

September 22nd, 2008 at 1:41 pm

Okami says:

Maybe developers should take a hint from condom manufacturers. Nobody was buying “small” condoms, so they just repackeged them as “medium”. Et voila: Suddenly people were buying them..

September 22nd, 2008 at 1:52 pm

aldo says:

Maybe developers should take a hint from condom manufacturers. Nobody was buying “small” condoms, so they just repackeged them as “medium”. Et voila: Suddenly people were buying them..

Presumably leading to the Trojan, Colossus, Horse and You Can’t Fit That In There, Surely sizes?

September 22nd, 2008 at 2:02 pm

cqdemal says:

@ Heliocentric:
Whoa.

Whoa.

Now that you’ve said it, Crysis Wars feels quite useless.

September 22nd, 2008 at 2:34 pm

qrter says:

You can almost hear them grating their teeth..

“Jesus, guys.. what are we going to call the lowest setting!?”
“THERE IS NO LOWEST SETTING!!”
“But there is, it’s-”
“NO! THERE ISN’T!! WE DON’T DO THOSE!”
“…”
“call it… *dry heaves*.. minimum..!”

September 22nd, 2008 at 2:57 pm

Andthensobecause says:

This is all apple’s fault what with it’s let-me-warm-your-soup-and-spoon-feed-you interface design.

And then everyone buys it.

September 22nd, 2008 at 3:08 pm

Psychopomp says:

“Bling
Bling Bling
More Bling Bling
AAAH MY EYES!!”

You are now my favorite person.

Edit

Bling
Bling Bling
Diamond Grill
I lost the game.

September 22nd, 2008 at 3:48 pm

Calabi says:

But what if I’m a Gamer and I’m playing on my laptop. Or my PC is Enthusiastic, and I’m more a Mainstreamer. My head hurts.

September 22nd, 2008 at 4:16 pm

dredge says:

They should have arranged them in a circle, that way none of them are the best and no-one feels bitter if they can’t handle the nicest one.

Actually, they should just have hidden it all behind a big “auto” button and made the config files encrypted binaries. If you’re gonna bitch about the settings you don’t get to play with them!

p.s. what Chis said about lowering the resolution is totally true. High settings are very smooth for me with a cheapo 8600GT 1024*768.

September 22nd, 2008 at 4:23 pm

Pwnzerfaust says:

Oh lawdy.
I admit, I chuckled.

September 22nd, 2008 at 4:35 pm

Gorgeras says:

Have they released the specs for the system used for the clips they released and were the clips non-staged this time?

September 22nd, 2008 at 4:47 pm

Fumarole says:

This is an issue for some people? Taking five minutes (really?!) to figure out that they merely changed the wording? I weep for mankind.

Nothing to see here people, move along.

September 22nd, 2008 at 4:58 pm

qrter says:

Crysis says, “Here you are… here’s where you need to end up next… have fun! See you on the other side!”

What Crysis actually said was: “Here you are… here’s where you need to end up next… whoa, waitwaitwait, you can’t go there. And you can’t go there. No no no no, not there either.. don’t go too far into that direction, you’re not supposed to go there yet! Um.. have fun!”

There’s a surprising amount of humour-fail today. Monday blues, presumably.

Or maybe you just weren’t that funny..! ;)

September 22nd, 2008 at 5:01 pm

Ergates says:

Bleurgh!
Mmpf
Hmmmmm
Phoooaarrrr!

“Change all settings to:”
Settings? what are settings?
Erm, Medium sounds good
/\/\4>< P()\/\/4|-|
11111001100111010001010101111010010101010111

Or alternatively a [horizontal] slider that has “Performance” at one end and “Detail” at the other. But that’d be boring.

September 22nd, 2008 at 6:06 pm

sinister agent says:

Congolese village
Bethnal Green housing estate
Sweaty Californian basement
Stepford

September 22nd, 2008 at 6:50 pm

Crispy says:

An options menu where the options are not clear, that’s the menu equivalent of the multiplayer respawn room with only one exit that is one player wide. Needless re-inventing of the wheel, and by re-inventing, I mean replacing with a *NEVER-SEEN-BEFORE DESIGN* wheel in the shape of a triangle.

Honestly, whoever approved this decision should be demoted back down the ranks to a tester and forced to do 10 years’ pennance to regain their previous position. I’d personally prefer it if they were never let near a game’s design for the rest of their life, though.

@Nahual
The flaw in your argument is those labels require the user to know if he is ‘mainstream’ or a ‘gamer’, whereas the rolling scale from ‘Very High’ to ‘Lowest’ makes it clear where to go if your PC can’t handle the game at one particular setting.

September 22nd, 2008 at 7:07 pm

Tim P says:

I think it is fitting to the game as you get to play the barely literate member of the team. I think all the settings should kind of resemble that. The difficulty should have been like:
Man U Fan
Man U Fan with no Man U jersey
Man U Fan at a Chelsea game
Man U Fan at World Cup

It is the dumb game with the dumb character, I hope they release a game for Prophet that is all blaxploitation.

September 22nd, 2008 at 8:19 pm

Lars BR says:

I’m not even halfway through the game yet, but I don’t like too open shooters. Crysis and now Warhead both have areas where you could skirt the action completely, which was ALLOWED, but apparantly not anticipated by the designers.

In Crysis I escaped through a swamp without being spotted by anyone, though there was a busy road on the other side of a river, and in Warhead, I avoided a busy road by swimming towards the submarine-harbour. See, that’d be okay, but those routes did not have a single enemy or defensive meassure. That’s not good level design.

Also, my brand new vista 5.9′ed gaming rig (E8600 + 4850 – I don’t like noise…), got a Gamer rating, and appears to be quite playable in 1920×1200, though it has some slowdowns… Ah well.

September 22nd, 2008 at 9:16 pm

RC-1290'Dreadnought' says:

@Lars BR: that is part of the sneaking aspect of the game.

September 22nd, 2008 at 10:05 pm

Lars BR says:

@RC: I don’t buy it. It’s not sneaking if there are no bloody enemies to see you if you mess up. Then it’s just walking.

September 22nd, 2008 at 10:08 pm

Darth Benedict says:

The names are based on the PC. A recent PC with a shitty graphics card is mainstream. A recent PC built for gaming is gamer. A recent PC with a liquid nitrogen cooled render farm is enthusiast.

September 23rd, 2008 at 1:12 am

Bill says:

aluminum
chromium
platinum
unobtainium

September 23rd, 2008 at 3:42 am

Real Horrorshow says:

RPS readers sure do like to make mountains out of mole hills.

I mean seriously, how big of a deal is this? I can’t begin to tell you how much I don’t care that Very High is now Enthusiast. It’s completely irrelavent.

September 23rd, 2008 at 8:13 am

aldo says:

Crysis 2 graphics settings;
Digestive
Fig roll
Custard Cream
Chocolate Hob Nob

?

It really is all very silly, particularly because – whilst it might mirror the old low-medium-high-etc structure – it’s completely unclear how much of a jump each setting it. At least you can view low-medium-high-very high as being (however incorrect that may be) ‘quarters’ where very high is the maximum.

September 23rd, 2008 at 9:41 am

aldo says:

Also, what about in 1-2 years time – will a ‘mainstream’ Pc then be as good as a an ‘enthusiast’ now? What if I was an enthusiast last year but have run out of upgrade money thanks to a botched football club takeover or something – is my Pc still enthusiastic enough?

September 23rd, 2008 at 10:53 am

Gorgeras says:

What Crysis needs is a less deep performance – quality curve at medium to high. You can slap nearly all settings to high and very high and it’s no problem. But shaders from medium to high is an absurd performance kill and the only noticeable changes are HDR and SO turned on. Stick q_renderer on 3, then turn on HDR and SO and you notice vast quality improvement for negligable performance loss.

Crysis remains badly optomised and whoever was in charge of setting attributes to each pre-set in the options needs a kick in the groin. Certain mods that do make actual optomisations to the game code like the Natural Mod demonstrate how this could have been easily done if Crytek hadn’t completely assumed the manner of EA. I was able to play and complete Crysis recently at acceptable settings with this mod preventing a slideshow with amazing visual quality. I realised what my PC was actually capable of.

September 23rd, 2008 at 3:07 pm

Crispy says:

Real Horrorshow says:

RPS readers sure do like to make mountains out of mole hills.

I mean seriously, how big of a deal is this? I can’t begin to tell you how much I don’t care that Very High is now Enthusiast. It’s completely irrelavent.
If they can’t take care of a video settings menu properly, that’s evidence enough that I don’t need to play this game. I don’t give money to stupid people.

September 23rd, 2008 at 9:08 pm

Deuteronomy says:

Crispy are you serious? In my humble opinion the only stupid people are the ones that can’t decipher the meanings behind some rather simple menu options.

Alec you need some new material badly.

September 24th, 2008 at 3:14 am

Rabbitrunner51 says:

What do you expect form EA Games? TBH, i just hate that company so much i wouldn’t wste my money nor time buying thier games,which alot of lately are using the worse malware ’secure rom’ devices ever made. Now thier trying to get us to buy thier games on a rental basis, put with with meriad of patches,secure rom, and all that atrocious advertising malware to boot. Will someone PLEASE give us a break here. ( ?????)

September 25th, 2008 at 7:58 am

Simon Jones says:

There seems to have been a sudden influx of YouTube-educated teenagers to RPS. I wonder where they’ve come from?

September 29th, 2008 at 9:26 am

Crispy says:

@Deuteronomy
“Crispy are you serious? In my humble opinion the only stupid people are the ones that can’t decipher the meanings behind some rather simple menu options.”

Yes, I am serious. When it comes to giving information, the difference between a good designer and a bad designer is one designs for himself and the other designs for the player.

The only thing that saves the list of options in Warhead is the fact it comes in a drop-down menu that, logically following, is either ordered from highest to lowest or is ordered from lowest to highest.

Take all of these options and instead of putting them in a drop-down menu (i.e. in some sort of order), write them on pieces of paper and give them to the test subject. If 99% of users cannot work out whether ‘Gamer’ is supposed to be higher than ‘Enthusiast’ then you have a poorly designed list of options. Obviously this is not what you need to do in real life, but your design should be able to withstand such hypothetical tests and emerge as functional as it needs to be.

But even then you have a massive drawback on the ‘Mainstream’ option. You see, all of the options except ‘Minimum’ are comments on the user themself, not on their hardware (this is exactly what Alec was getting at). A user may regard themself as ‘mainstream’ but be unaware their PC can actually handle the game at settings as high as ‘Gamer’. Ignorance on the part of the user undermines the intended message. This means they may miss out because the designer hasn’t taken into account how different types of users will approach the menu. It means this user will get a worse experience from the game, not because their hardware is incapable of a better one, but because the options menu is fundamentally flawed such that it can be interpreted to give information other than what is intended. If he then goes on to tell his friend not to buy the game because the graphics weren’t as good as he’d hoped for, a lack of catering to the user will lead to a lost sale – all because of a badly-designed menu.

September 30th, 2008 at 7:02 pm