No Crysis for EA or Consoles

There was a lot of buzz this weekend about the possibility that EA would be buying Crytek, the company currently working on the uber-shiny Crysis PC game. IGN checked in with the mammoth publisher and, at least according to EA, there are no plans for Crytek to join the EA family. Crytek did have some news to share at the Leipzig Games Convention, though: Crysis won't be on the next-gen consoles. It's just too intensive for even the likes of the 360 or PS3, apparently.

Comments

No consoles?

[Yvan256]

Crysis won't be on the next-gen consoles. It's just too intensive for even the likes of the 360 or PS3, apparently.

If they think all gamers have overpriced Alienware monsters, they're in for a big shock. I'm on Mac and I only plan on buying a Wii, that means no "Crysis" for me either.

Blizzard were able to make WoW run fine on my Mac mini G4/1.42GHz, 1GB RAM with Radeon 9200/32MB (except when there was too many players on-screen), programmers should learn to make scalable games which would allow them to release the game on the Xbox360, PS3 and Wii.

Enough with the crappy programmers already!

Re:No consoles?

[PoderOmega]

Enough with people calling programmers crappy. For example, Oblivion, every says it has huge hardware demands and crashes. It is possible that they are all hack programmers, but I tend to think management is really to blame. I am a programmer, and as much as the arrogant programmers will argue, you will always have bugs in your code if it reaches a certain point of complexity. Video games are very complex and there will always be bugs. Management is in control of the QA process and they decide when to release a game with bugs. If management and technical directors decide that X is the hardware requirements of the game, then what is the programmer going to do? I am not going to be spending my hours making my code run 4% faster on hardware below the specs set by management. I'm sure most game programmers could spend a few weeks squeezing every drop of performance out but guess what, they would get fired for wasting time. "But look, it runs on a 486!!!".

Re:No consoles?

[Piata]

I'd hardly call them crappy programmers. They're pushing the absolute barriers of PC gaming and they're not compromising their vision just so they can push more units on a console (i.e. Oblivion). It's actually refreshing to see a company going straight to the limit instead of trying to cater to their pocket book. Besides, if you bought a Mac, you weren't really interested in gaming anyways.

Re:Ridiculous requirements

[ichigo 2.0]

Well it uses DX10 so Crytek had to choose between Vista-only and DX9 level graphics. Besides, most gamers will just buy their copy of Vista from piratebay (they have great deals on software there) and thus Vista exclusivity is mostly an issue of reinstalling your OS, which is a good idea every once in a while. I for one am looking forward to formatting my c: and cleaning out all the crud my OS has accumulated these last 3 years.

Well, it goes both ways....

[Programmer_In_Traini]

Sure coders aren't always to blame, but coders aren't always shiny either. I've hired consultants that kept promising they were the "shit", that they knew *exactly* what they were talking about so you hire them and next thing you know, their work is exactly just that : shit. Because they wanna do it *their* way, or because they didn't have time, because the way its designed is incorrect....yada yada yada. For every failure there's an excuse. I know deadlines are tough and that sometimes you have to round corners but thats no reason to transform the application into a sphere!

More often than not, when bugs are emergings like there's no tomorrow it because someone, somewhere didnt do his job properly. It could be the database that is not properly designed. It could be the business rules that are not precise enough, it could be because the programmer can't do good OOP. It could be because the manager thinks its always simple and that adding people will always solve the problem or because he thinks overtime will suddenly help like god touched the "easy" button. And when you start missing deadlines, its usually a team failure, not the failure of one even if its always all too easy to lay blame on someone while conformting ourselve with the reasons why if not *our* fault.

FYI, I'm a programmer by formation, I still do development actually, but I'm also a manager, so i see both sides of the mirror. What I'm trying to explain here is that its a team thing, not only the manager or not only the programmer.

Re:What about next-Gen computers?

[pookemon]

Presumably you didn't play Far cry for you to question their ability to code.

I think it's far more likely that they don't want to delay the release of their product to go and recode it for the 360 and (especially) the PS3. They'll probably licence out that task at a later date.

Re:Whew!

[smash]

As for the "no consoles" thing, they think the 360 is too weak? Are they kidding? There are a lot of people who can't even afford a 360, nevermind the PS3.. and they expect to market their game to the "teenagers with enough free time but also somehow have hojillions of dollars" niche?

I think you under-estimate the modern game market.

There's a significant portion of well-paid, mid-20s to mid-30s gamers out there who *can* afford to buy kick-ass hardware and are also inclined to do so.

And it's not going to be a hardware purchased to "run 1 game", as a PC it used for everything.

Also, give it 18 months after release, and the crysis recommended spec will be equivalent to a base model PC.