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And I think the obsession with maxing out settings is stupid, if a game will look even better when I decide to replay it in a couple of years thats a good thing in my book.

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Nahual: Wouldn’t the better question be “why do people keep making new racetracks when my four-door sedan tops out at 60mph?”?

good question. Answer: the universe does not revolve around you

If you want to force the notion that your 60mph 4 door sedan is a race car, you are inevitably going to face disappointment.

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Crytek is made up of smart guys–it’s not like they were ignorant of the fact that the game pushed hardware to its limits. They didn’t lie about the minimum specs. I don’t understand why people are complaining about how good the game looked.

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I also can’t believe that ppl with Athlon X2′s and Geforce 7800 cards complained about Crysis. That’s like some n00b trying to play Gears of War on his PS2.

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What’s the point in people making racing tires when your lawn mower powered Honda can barely do 60 mph?

I hope that illustrates how incredibly silly this argument that keeps showing up is. Either put down the cash to max out the game (an argument that was obsolete ONE YEAR AGO, now a days any decent new gaming pc or a $400 upgrade can do it) or accept you’re not top of the line and use the lower settings which still look better than most everything else in the market.

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One of the biggest reasons I upgraded to a GTX 260 was specifically to experience Crysis in a better, smoother, more visually awe-inspiring way. (The other was for Dawn of War II, for very similar reasons.) Totally shallow, perhaps, but I don’t think I’m alone out there (and, well, I got a very nice deal, at 150 USD after rebates…). You might think it silly, but Crysis has been on my mind for a long time as one of those titles that I simply must replay the very next time I get another hardware upgrade. (I still go “WOW!” every time I see the opening sequence. Human skin has never been shown anywhere near as realistically. Even UE3 games simply pale in comparison.)

Likewise with Supreme Commander, though for one reason or another it fails to hold my attention as well as Crysis does.

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Until you got to the dockyard with the submarine, at which point the framerate dropped a bit and stayed low for a long time and while it was still just about playable, cutscenes simply weren’t watchable. Had to turn down shaders to fix it, which got rid of the lovely motion blur :( but there are worse fates.

Either way, from my perspective, “extremely negligible” is slightly inaccurate. They might be extremely negligible at the high end of the scale, but not from where I was superjumping.

And, “Whats the point of that?”

Eventually higher end hardware becomes the norm, and you’ll have to spend some time updating the engine. While you might be able to update as you go along (ie: Source, Valve), it’s probably a little easier to sell an engine on the basis of it being shiny (Unreal Engine 3 anyone?), and game engines should, ideally, be still around years after their original release when hardware that can finally take advantage is around, even though the original game that used it doesn’t exist anymore. The question does arise about why they bother to cram so much into the games when it can’t be used, but then if your game doesn’t implement all (or most) of the engine’s features, it’s a bit harder to wave at people.

Nobody plays Doom 3 or Crysis long after release, sure, but they still use the engines.

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Whats the point of that? What purpose does it serve to create a game engine that won’t be able to do its full thing until years after its release?

well, it’s relative I guess.
If you’re always going to use hardware that is at least 3 years behind, then you will never get to see the cutting edge of PC gaming. Some of us needed to wait a few months to experience Crysis fully, while others will need maybe a few decades? I don’t know. You’re not the target audience I guess.

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subedii says: Well gee whiz, neither could Unreal, Doom III, any number of tech heavy games when they were released. Heck, I even remember reading an interview with John Carmack about Doom 3 (this was before release). He was saying that the highest texture settings available in the game wouldn’t be useable until we reached graphics cards with 512 MB of RAM.

So tell me, how recently was it that we actually got hold of those? And does including features such as this make the Doom 3 engine “unoptimised”? Man I’d hate to have to tell Carmack that he doesn’t know how to make a good graphics engine…

A question to the group:

Whats the point of that? What purpose does it serve to create a game engine that won’t be able to do its full thing until years after its release? Using the example given is anyone, anywhere now rushing out to buy Doom 3 or the Crysis series to play it so they can see it in its graphical glory with proper 512MB equipped cards?

I guess my problem with all this is that with all the hoopla over future-proofing a game, when hardware has finally caught up to it no one gives a shit, because who is still playing it?

Although I won’t argue that this is all necessary in the end as someone has to push the envelope to keep the entire industry moving forward. I don’t have an issue with the engines that do, but I simply won’t buy the resulting games they are attached to. But the points brought up are valid ones, without question.

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