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Crysis 2 Leaked Over a Month Before Launch
iviv66 writes with this excerpt from Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
"According to a thread on the Facepunch forums, a developer build of Crysis 2 containing the full game, multiplayer and the master key for the online authentication has been leaked, and is currently freely available from all sorts of astonishingly illegal websites. This sounds like it might be a serious tragedy for Crytek. Crysis 2 was scheduled for release on the 22nd of March, so the leaked build could be dangerously close to finished."
EA and Crytek have responded to the leak, saying that the illicit copy is incomplete and unfinished, and that "Piracy continues to damage the PC packaged goods market and the PC development community."
Reason is unless Crysis 2 is some major departure from their earlier games, it is just more crap. Crytek could go out of business and it would do no real harm to the gaming industry.
Reason I say this is their games fail to impress these days in pretty much every way. Graphics wise Farcry and Crysis were very advanced... but were advanced because they required hardware not yet available. That really isn't impressive when you think about it. Doing more with more is always possible. I mean I could make a game engine that used NURBS instead of polygons and did full Radiosity rendering which would look stellar, but would run at alike 1 frame per couple minutes on current hardware. That wouldn't really be an achievement, 3D modelers already do that. It would be an achievement if I could do it in real time, but just doing it and saying "Well hardware will catch up some day" wouldn't mean much.
The flashy graphics impressed more in the past but these days, graphics are pretty good all around. We are starting to get beyond the point where better graphics matter so much. That isn't to say there's no room for development, until we have photorealistic rendering there is room for development, but it isn't a big deal, most games look quite good and the quality of the artists doing the textures/models is more important than the engine.
Then of course there's the gameplay. Crytek games start you in what seems to be an open island world, that actually has very linear game play, and presents you with some fairly satisfying sneaky gameplay. Then they turn in to a monster game and become about twitch shooting, carrying the biggest gun possible, and reloading every time a monster touches you since they do a lot of damage. Ok, ok, they were technically "aliens" in Crysis, same shit.
I just find it hard to give a shit about Crytek. I agree that piracy is not at all helpful to PC gaming but if Crytek goes under it will be no real loss to gaming. Their games are not worth playing and almost nobody licenses their engine since you can license engines that run far better on actual, existing, hardware.
I'll ignore the leak just as I'm going to ignore the game, unless on the off-off chance it is actually a real departure from the crap they've made earlier and worth buying.