It’s that time of the week again where our favorite reviewer rips into some poor developer’s sleepless nights with laced compliments and downright vitriol. However in this week’s review of Crysis, our beloved Yahtzee seems to bestow some degree of praise upon the game. Come again?
Crysis may be a bit of a system hog but it’s all worth it once you see the level of reality it pumps out. Apart from allowing us to partially experience the thrill of seeing 3,000 barrels explode, this video showcases the amazing physics engine the game holds.
Despite the huge amount of publicity Crysis has received, the title has not managed to convert this into performance on the sales charts. The title to date has sold a measly 86,633 units since its launch date of November 13th. Unreal Tournament 3 is doing even worse, selling only 33,995 since its November 19th release. Both games share the fact that a major system upgrade is needed for most people to get the best out of them.
Is this the consumer’s message to developers to throttle back the spec requirements of games, or a growing indifference toward the FPS genre?
So you probably thought that the announcement of being able to run three cards in SLI would mean a respectable frame rate when playing Crysis on maxed out graphics – think again. PC Games Hardware built a system containing three NVIDIA 8800 Ultras and it only managed to pump out a measly 37.9FPS. Thats over US$1800 worth of graphics cards and they only had 1X anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering on!
At this stage you may have several questions running through your mind: Is this game broken? How the hell did they even develop it? How many years until we have hardware that can run it at 60FPS? Could God create a game so system hoggy that not even he could play it? Probably not but Crytek have managed to.
EA and Crytek have announced that this year’s most anticipated title, Crysis, has gone gold. Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crytek expressed his excitement:
“We are extremely proud of what we have been able to accomplish with Crysis. We wanted to push the boundaries both visually and with open-ended, non-linear gameplay and we believe the end result delivers that vision.”
Crysis is due out November 17th, and for those who just emerged from a cave, the demo was released over the weekend.
Gamers are industrious people - over-clocking, editing files and changing settings, all to get the most out of their game. Microsoft’s underestimation of this might cause them a bit of trouble, as a gamer has worked out an easy hack which allows the Crysis demo to run in DirectX 10 on Windows XP. Yes, that’s the same DirectX 10 that Microsoft have told us is only able to run in Vista.
If you have the prerequisite DX10 graphics card, it’s simple to apply the patch:
If you tweak the configuration files in \CVarGroups\ by copying and pasting the “very high” settings (1st paragraph) IN PLACE of the “high” settings (last paragraph) the game will load the highest possible settings even though the drop-down menus display “high.”
Get ready to see your computer as the obsolete rust-bucket it truly is - the Crysis demo is out. The hefty demo weighs in at 1.77GB, and for those of you who have forgotten, these are the woe-inducing system requirements. The brave and the recently-upgraded can click the link below to download.
Thousands of PCs shut down today at the mere mention of the required and recommended specs for Crytek’s Crysis. EA and Crytek are claiming that the game will run on a 3 year old PC, this is true if you bought just about the best there is at the time - and don’t mind running it on the lowest settings. Here are the specs:
Minimum System Requirements
OS – Windows XP or Windows Vista
Processor – 2.8 GHz or faster (XP) or 3.2 GHz or faster* (Vista)
Memory – 1.0 GB RAM (XP) or 1.5 GB RAM (Vista)
Video Card –256 MB**
Hard Drive – 12GB
Sound Card – DirectX 9.0c compatible
* Supported Processors: Intel Pentium 4 2.8 GHz (3.2 GHz for Vista) or faster, Intel Core 2.0 GHz (2.2 GHz for Vista) or faster, AMD Athlon 2800+ (3200+ for Vista) or faster.
** Supported chipsets: NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT or greater; ATI Radeon 9800 Pro (Radeon X800 Pro for Vista) or greater. Laptop versions of these chipsets may work but are not supported. Integrated chipsets are not supported. Updates to your video and sound card drivers may be required.
Recommended System Requirements
OS – Windows XP / Vista
Processor – Intel Core 2 DUO @ 2.2GHz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+
Memory – 2.0 GB RAM
GPU – NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS/640 or similar
As you can see the recommended specs suggest a pretty shit-hot PC by anyones standards. Expect hardware sales to skyrocket.
The online gaming network will happily provide multiplayer technology for the highly anticipated FPS, and also host its beta version.
The beta test will be available at FilePlanet at an undisclosed date. For those patient enough to wait for the final release, you have EA and Crytek’s word that Crysis will be on shelves in November.
EA and Crytek announced today that Crysis will be available in North America and Europe on November 16. Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli thanked fans for their support and patience, reassuring us that the E3 winner is “going to be worth the wait.”