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Crysis 3 Review: Amazing Graphics, Still a Benchmark Buster, Boring Gameplay
MojoKid writes "Let's get one thing clear up front. Crysis 3's graphics are absolutely stunning. Crytek's latest game doesn't raise the bar — it annihilates it. At the highest settings, Crysis blows Battlefield 3 out of the water, makes mincemeat of Max Payne, and makes the original Crysis — itself a graphics powerhouse — look more like the first Call of Duty. Crysis 3 really is that stunning, provided that you've got the graphics card to handle it. Like the first game, this title is capable of bringing even a high-end card to its knees. Everyone who worked in the artistic departments at Crytek, from character animations to texturing, deserves an award. The people who wrote the game's plot, on the other hand, don't. The game's design and some poor pacing decisions completely undermine what should be its greatest selling point. Crysis 3 could've been a great game but it feels like a science experiment. How much poor gameplay will players suffer through in exchange for utterly amazing graphics?"
"There's a unique Hunter Mode, in which most players start off as Cell operatives but transform into Hunters once killed, and an Assault mode in which each player only has one life." Nice to see them catching up to the modding community, snicker snort. What's next, a co-op mode? So it's not a good single player game, and it's not a good multi-player game, how many benchmarkers are out there?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
wtf? Now there's no standard to measure games?
-Dave
How much poor gameplay will players suffer through in exchange for utterly amazing graphics?
People will sit through literally metric shit tonnes of bad game play with poor to mediocre graphics.
I would list examples, but I feel like getting a [citation needed] response instead of listing my overly subjective choices.
Silence is a state of mime.
The original Crysis had some pretty brilliant sections, along with a lot of mediocre, boring or just plain terrible sections. I still haven't beaten the game, but I've played that one hostage-rescue mission a couple dozen times, along with a few of the other good parts. Seriously, if they had just stopped right when you enter the alien ship/base/whatever, it would have been a good (if a bit short) game. As it is, it's a game with levels you'll only play through once.
So, then, how good is Crysis 3 at its best? Does it get back to that wide, open-approach gameplay, where you can plan things out and approach it several different ways? Do you ever get that Predator feeling? Or is it terrible from beginning to end?
The review barely touches on this, mentioning one or two good vehicle sections, but FYI, don't bother with TFA. It's three pages full of no details. It's not a review, it's an executive summary of a review. I'll wait for better reviews and better benchmarks.
Looking at the images in the article make me feel pathetic, because they don't look all that much better to me than the previous gen. It makes me feel like I have a deficient art sense or something. Maybe it falls into the uncanny valley, but instead of a valley, it's a plateau, where incremental improvements just don't seem any more realistic.
Here's a link to an actual graphics demo, instead of just screenshots. It is impressive and I like it (I especially like the fractal plants that you can zoom in on), but ultimately it still feels like a cartoon, and in that way not any more immersive than Myst.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Before the "Crysis was always a tech demo" posts, nope, Crysis 1 wasn't at all. It was a very good game with a slightly weak end 1/3
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2790285&cid=39706557
Crysis 2 however, was an abomination and has scared me off considering Crysis 3.
You could probably get the same stuff done on half the hardware if the engine were properly optimized and things were written closer to machine-code level.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
All the Crysis games are rubbish. Maybe they should reduce their games to something less ambitious, like a demo, to sell licenses for the engine itself. Particularly if it takes 18 months for most users' hardware to catch up with the requirements.
I don't play games much, but those are the first realistic game graphics that I have ever seen!
"It has a lot of Graphics".
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People who focus solely on graphics are idiots. Fucking stupid idiots. Idiots that should be slain with an M10 keyboard.
Games are for having fun. 8/16 Bit games are more fun than most modern graphic monsters.
If I want to see realistic graphics I would play meatspace aka THE REAL LIFE. Not even Crysis 100 can beat those graphics.
Or watch a dumb movie.
Why would anybody bother spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on fancy PC's just to play games that play better and look just as good on a $200 console?
Mouse + Keyboard controls?
Sometimes a console controller just isn't convenient (or one is too old to get used to it)
I watched some HD Youtube videos of Crysis 3 at max settings. Sure, the graphics are great from an engineering perspective, but artistically? All they seem to have done is made it look as realistic as possible. Where's the imagination?
Also, the article linked mentions the composer deserves an award. Sorry, but all I heard were "music effects" rather than any sort of soundtrack. Maybe I was watching the wrong videos...?
if not... .
I'll just have to wait until they finish with all of their DLC and sell a "kitchen sink" edition for half price. Too bad, 'cause I've got a pair of 4gb GTX 680 video cards and three 2560x1440 monitors just waiting to be worked hard.
Yeah, I'm sure I'll just buy the DVD version eventually but they'd already have my money if they sold it on Steam.
Just decided to actually do something non-boring with the time.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Games all look the same. Oh wow, look, these four pixels here, out of a few million, totally blow out of the water the four pixels from before! Self-important idiots.
In the 1980's all the games turned into platform games. Major companies with big budgets would buy a license to a movie, make a platform game, then market it heavily. It became such a production line, that they had their own toolkits and engines to churn out the latest platform game. The shops would only sell the marketed games and the world became bland and boring and the market collapsed.
Every single game looks like a first person shooter these days! FFS, I'm soooo bored, it's like watching the same story over and over again. What are they autistic?? And the reviews, they compare the micro detail of FPS #1 vs FPS #2 because the macro detail is the same: people running around, jumping from platforms shooting stuff.
Never mind the people writing the plot, what about an original idea to begin with!?
I was 'eh until the helicopter over the vegetation bit. That much geometry changing at once looked great.
But I was unimpressed with Crysis 1/2 gameplay, who's signed up to license the engine so far?
Playing in 1080p with a real framerate, instead of 720 with all sorts of compromises for 256 mb of video memory? Controls that are vastly superior for FPS, RTS, and other game types? Not having to pay monthly for online play, while being bombarded by ads on the dashboard?
I was astonished to find that this was a review of a PC game. I honestly had no idea that people still played PC games. Why would anybody bother spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on fancy PC's just to play games that play better and look just as good on a $200 console? Why would somebody put themselves through that kind of hassle and expense?
First person shooters are simply not fun to play on a console, at least for some people. It slows them down, and for those who have gotten pretty decent at twitch motions with a mouse, it's like having a ball and chain around your right wrist.
Charisma is the measure of someone's ability to lie with a straight face.
Excellent troll.
Thousands of dollars, thankyouverymuch. And games don't play better or look just as good on a console. There isn't a single console on the market that actually renders HD content. (Well, maybe the WiiU. I haven't checked that one.) They upscale. They can't even do a true 1280x720 and I'm playing at a real 7680x1440. And I don't know how anyone plays FPS games with those little nub-sticks. I can use whatever control system works best for the game I'm playing. Racing wheel, joystick, flight yoke, keyboard, mouse, even a gamepad.
Keyboard and mouse are king. Microsoft did a test that put average pc players against some of the best console players. It wasn't even a real contest, the pc players destroyed the console gamers. That is why you will never play in a server that has both.
starcraft 2. also PCs arent divided into generations.
The multiplayer and graphics combined are good enough to make me feel like my purchase was warranted, and ill probably purchase dlc in the future too. With all the crappy console ports out there that don't even come close to tapping modern hardware, i'd say this purchase is a no brainer for anyone with a machine that can handle it.
One thing that pisses me off with a lot of modern games such as Crysis 3 (and this also includes Crysis 2) is that they rely entirely on autosaving at checkpoints. No ability to quicksave at any point at all. Autosaves are fine, but the removal of traditional manual save functionality is such a huge step backwards it affects enjoyment for me. This was highly irritating in Crysis 2 because the game likes to highlight various tactics in infiltrating a base (assault, stealth, hybrid approach), but the lack of an ability to make your own saves when desired really screws up the ability to perform stealth properly. Mess it up and you'll find yourself throwing a grenade at your feet in order to force a reload of the last checkpoint, at which point you'll need to start the whole area again. Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Dishonored have the ability to create manual saves at any area (and multiple saves too) and this makes performing stealth far more desirable. You can save several times during your progress and if you stuff up, just reload the last point which might be most of the way through a section, as opposed to a checkpoint which would only occur at the beginning and the end.
But I need not ramble, because graphics do not appeal much anymore on their own if the gameplay is boring. Have them together, great, but graphics are nothing without some meat.
Raenex is a dickhead
Well, a $200 console that has graphics just as good won't be on the market until 4 years later, games now are more backward-compatible than ever, you don't have to purchase Xbox Live, the gamepad is still beaten by the mouse+keyboard, and that's pretty much it.
I was astonished to find that this was a post from someone who uses slashdot. I honestly had no idea that many slashdot users even bothered with console games. Why would anybody bother spending money on locked down, DRM'd to hell boxes with inferior IO, when they make sufficient money to play FPS on the best platform available: one they probably already have an instance or two of in the house already thanks to the nature of their employment. A few hundred bucks on a video card vs the cost of a games-dedicated black box, tv (one that doesn't lag), controllers, network subscriptions, and overpriced game discs is a no brainer.
If you're running a PC at 1080 then resolution isn't a strong argument since many/most TVs are 1080p. Now if you're running at 1920x1200 or better yet, 2560x1600 then you've got something...
Controls are the real factor.
Why would anybody bother spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on fancy PC's just to play games that play better and look just as good on a $200 console?
The graphics cards on modern gaming PCs are much better than the aging consoles currently on the market.
>Xbox 360 : 6 years old
>PS 3 : 6 years old
Many of Crysis 3's gameplay problems can be traced to the pacing, as this review pointed out. The strange part is that Crytek largely got the pacing right in the previous two games. Crysis 2, for all its faults, was a brilliantly paced game. Even Yahtzee agrees on that point: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0MblIn-lVc
mod parent as troll
"to play games that play better and look just as good on a $200 console?"
Oh you have no idea do you? if it was so comparable how come if they put pc players, and console players in the same multiplayer game, the pc players mop the floor with console player? Hint it has something do to with all the extra resolution, better input devices, and speed/smoothness of the machine. Besides a pc does a lot more than a console, and its easily upgradeable.
Rocket Surgeon.
...for decent pacing and non-moronic controls in the game. The original Crysis was pretty linear but the plot was fun. The problems were the enormous dead spots of repetitious, brain-dead game play. It felt like someone pruned a great game to fit on game consoles and that the remaining material was stretched out by overuse of player traps, psychic AI, clip brushes and weakening the player's armor and weapons. Spectacular levels, though.
I heard Crysis 2 is great but I will have to take someone's word for it, because they trashed the player controls so badly that it's unplayable. With this legacy, Crysis 3 has nowhere to go but up. :)
Why would anybody bother spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on fancy PC's
Chances are you need a PC either way. Normal PC + console is usually more than gaming PC with no console.
and look just as good on a $200 console?
They often don't. Unless the console was recently released or the game's graphics aren't very good to begin with, the game on the console is usually on medium settings at best.
I've seen no $200 consoles that focused on graphics. The Xbox 360 and PS3 were both more than that. Furthermore, if you don't care about graphics that much (which I don't), you can get a good computer for less than $600.
VERY few console games actually run at 1080p whether or not your TV can accommodate that resolution. Among the titles that you'd compare with Crysis 3 for PC, ZERO of them run at 1080p.
If you're running a PC at 1080 then resolution isn't a strong argument since many/most TVs are 1080p.
Console games, however, are often not. Seriously, check the box next time. Quite a lot of them run at either 720p or 1080i (God of War III, for example, can only run up to 1080i). I've seen some that don't even offer 1080i, although I can't remember which ones.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Coming soon to a PS4 near you. Probably :(.
Why on earth haven't we moved onto realtime raytracing?
It seems to me like just about all of the game engines out there are simply hacks piled onto hacks piled onto hacks. In the end, you get something moderately usable and playable, but it's not scalable at all. The maximum quality that engine is capable of is as good as the game will ever look, period.
If games were built using ray tracers instead, then you're only ever limited quality wise to what the host hardware can reasonably pull off at a given resolution. You want more indirect lighting bounces? Refractive ray depth? Reflective ray depth? More subdivisions on your soft area shadows? Fine, those are all sliders that you can tweak (or let the game tweak them for you), but your hardware may or may not be able to maintain an adequately playable frame rate if you're exceeding the maximum recommended threshold.
Since ray tracers scale a hell of a lot better then modern day game engines, there's always an excuse to run out and buy the latest NVIDIA or AMD GPU when some new breakthrough is made on the hardware end that allows OpenCL and CUDA code to run that much more faster. You could have a ray tracer game written today that looks OK now, but looks jaw-droppingly fantastic 3 years in the future because a ray tracer will scale up almost indefinitely. They're also embarrassingly parallel too, we've already got a few "almost realtime" ray tracers out there for CG work (Octane Renderer comes to mind), but those are far too realistic/accurate for realtime use as a gaming engine.
So seriously, why are people still busy obsessing over clever little tricks to make your modern day game engine run a little faster or look a little better?
Isn't it about time that we stop treating GPUs as GPUs (in the OpenGL/Direct X sense) and more like general purpose processors, and make the leap to realtime ray tracing?
So Crysis 3 is just a demo CryEngine3 which you pay for. I guess it's great if you are a game developer. It sucks if you are a game player since the gameplay sucks.
There was a time when game programmers didn't need realistic graphics to make an interesting, captivating, and fun game.
You live 5 years in the past dude
Better install Windows if you want to play any game.
Microsoft? Yeah right. If they did a "test", how do you explain the surface or the zune?
controllers suck, i hate FPS with controllers, there are a few games that are ok, but FPS games realy suck.
graphics are significantly better, when did xbox come out, 1800's? the computer world has far surpassed that shitty piece of hardware
Computers can multitask, i can play a game and switch over to surf the web, switch back to game or whatever
I dont need to deal with Fucking disks, i hate them and they hate me
I am not locked down, modding on pc can make a game so much more interesting after vanilla runs its course,
If your a pirate then PC is the way to go
Most decent games hit the PC as well
Video cards to play practically every game, you dont need a high end card to play a game...unless your a dumb developer...like crysis
Computers in itself are mutli functional and can do a variety of things, what can your xbox do? not much, play dvds and some video formats, they are not all that impressive
Computers are honestly rather fun to put together, its not a hassle, i love the smell of a newly motherboard and the acid wash...of course i will admit that its not normal and possibly not healthy.
Being on the bleeding edge of graphics is essentially meaningless. In a few years this could easily become the default standard. If it can make high-end graphic cards cry, what about the average person's machine?, will it make it outright explode?, (no, not literally).
Great story, great gameplay, great characters, these are the things people will remember fondly. Personally, I still love Ocarina of Time, which used about a dozen polygons per character. I still love Megaman X, in all of it's 16-bit glory. I NEVER hear anyone fondling reminiscing over Far Cry, even the original, which came out like a decade ago.
I agree with TFS. I have about 1000 to 5000 hours of playing Crysis 1-2 behind my belt and the only video games I have ever spent more than 50 hours on in my life is Crysis and The Godfather, Godfather made it with about 200 hours playing time total until I got bored.
Crysis 3 sound great but I am trying to cut down on it ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Some Mexicans do have blue eye you know. I'm not sure why anyone would care though, it's a recessive trait; a genetic defect.
... when I played the original Far Cry.
Pretty engine, then zzzzzzz.
Haven't touched a cryengine game since then.
I apologize for the lack of a signature.
Why would I spend a couple hundred dollars on a console when I already have this PC to get work done that also can play games? Considering what recent graphics cards have seemed to have a longer useful lifetime for games, and that other software is finding more and more uses for graphics cards, I no longer even upgrade PCs for games and instead upgrade them when I need to for work purposes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BeZneKBIVI
"I can take double anything you can!" Gotta love the quality of the dialogues, with lines that you'd expect to hear in some particularly competitive porn movie, rather than in a game about nanotechnological beefcakes vs. north korean aliens.
A list of resolutions on consoles: http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=46241 As you can see, many titles don't support 720p. And some have both low resolution and no AA.
To be fair, the gamepad is sometimes superior to keyboard+mouse. Kb+mouse wins in fps and pretty much any strategy game (rts,tbs etc). Platforming and racing the gamepad has a clear advantage. Of course, you could always buy a gamepad for $20-50 to your PC...
The console is also a more social experience, more people can play together at the same screen. But on the other hand, you can do so freakishly much more on a PC than play games. Pricewise you must probably compare the console+decent laptop against a gaming laptop/desktop to find what is cheaper. You also pay publisher tax on console games.
Because console games play like crap and look like crap compared to PC. They always have and always will. Go look at the screens and videos for Crysis 3 and then realize that not even the PS4 or Xbox 720 will be able to touch those levels of detail.
I prefer to spend my money on a quality PC that can handle everything, from work, to entertainment, to communications rather than spend less for a shitty PC and still have to buy a console for $600 if I want games (albeit low quality Japanese shit with blocky/blurry graphics, poor controls and bad gameplay). Nah, better to spend $1000 for a PC that can do it all and do it all better.
Which reminds me of playing the original Unreal Tournament or Quake III on the DreamCast, with keyboard, mouse, hooked up to a PC monitor and on the LAN/internet with ethernet card add-on.
Some console makers did get it. Others didn't. Sigh.
Great graphics is useless if there's no boobies.
There certainly was something special with DreamCast. It managed to get the game developers to do cool stuff.
Typing of the Dead was just so awesome.
... and look just as good ...
I think it's time you went out and get your eyes checked. Why not google comparison graphics between console and computer games to see how the creators have to horrendously butcher the console games to make them playable at 30fps. ... yes that's right 30fps is still the target for console games too.
What you end up on a typical console is a short rendering distance, poor AA, often lack of 1080p resolution, ugly hacks to make things like shadows and light rays processable by the horrendously underpowered CPUs and GPUs, and in some cases downright weird things like foliage omitted and replaced with textures. Add all that to the jerky vision due to low framerates and a shithouse control scheme and I'll happily spend a few hundreds of dollars for an enjoyable experience.
How much poor gameplay will players suffer through in exchange for utterly amazing graphics?
For my part, not a lot. I think modern computer games (modern movies) are far too focused on "amazing effects" and too little on content; as it is, I still find the old COLOSSAL CAVES (it that old, so it requires all caps) game better than things like WoW. A good game should challenge you, it should stretch your imagination, it should be witty, intelligent, engaging and imaginative.
Here is what I would like to see in a game:
The game universe should be physically plausible - ie, things thrown should follow a path determined by plausible, physical forces like gravity etc. Just imagine the possibilities in simulating a radically different physical reality - relitivistic or quantum effects, or possibly one where gravity is not of the standard, Newtonian shape, or a non-istropic universe.
The environment should be plausible - I find it quite off-putting when biology, characters or cultures are nothing more than objects to smash or navigate around/over/through.
It would be good if the game universe is one you would like to explore, even without actually playing the game. And it would be good if there wasn't just one game plan, but a number of different, possible games that would function on their own, but all happen in a setting where they occasionally brush against each other.
A good exampe of something that has many of the features is Crossfire (see http://crossfire.real-time.com/) - it also illustrates that graphics don't have to be very good to make a game enjoyable. It isn't a physically plausible universe, but it scores on many of the other points I mentioned.
"How much poor gameplay will players suffer through in exchange for utterly amazing graphics?"
It's just like real life! Incredible graphics, but with long stretches of boring mechanics. How long will we tolerate it?
For some reason, even with the polygon count getting higher and higher, the shaders and lighting improving more than ever, I don't see video games achieving photo-realism any time soon.
I don't even think it has to do with tech advancing. Seems to me it is a matter of choosing a more true-to-life color palette. The real world is not as colorful as games present it. At best today's games look like CGI-material.
The original Metal Gear Solid for PlayStation with it's infinite shades of grey or the original F.E.A.R. did a lot of things right in this respect imho.
"Of course, you could always buy a gamepad for $20-50 to your PC... "
That's the real power of PC really...
Would buy it for the graphics, and to test my 690 out... ...if it were on Steam.
No love for EA.
I just finished the SP last night - I had no issues with the game play or any bugs. I play cautiously so the game lasted a little longer (total game play ~10 hours)
It was entertaining - the graphics were nice and the game play, better than average.
I truly cannot use a console controller (always pc since quake 1) so I did enjoy a non-ported pc designed game as opposed to a game ported from console like Far Cry 3, Assassins Creed or Dishonored. I also enjoyed Borderlands 2.
I've always found PC gaming to be a terrible deal. But console FPS games are also ridiculous because the control scheme is wonky (forward/backward/strafe on one stick, turn/aim on another? it should be walk/turn and strafe/aim!)
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The original Call of Duty was the best (most fun) single-player FPS I've ever seen.
Game X on your console will never ever look or play any better than it does right now. Nothing a game that pushes the envelope and has a laggy/stuttery feel to it. Or dumbed down graphics to avoid that.
Yet on a PC it can not only be made to look better, but play better/smoother as well. At the same time.
Verdict: Just another trying-too-hard-to-be-clever-and-failing-miserably troll. Did you get enough attention yet? No? Class, everyone stare at DogDude, he hasn't had enough attention yet to compensate for way his parents ignore him at home.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
its not BS. keyboard/mouse is and always will be superior for any game that can take advantage of them (unless they totally botch the port like Dark Souls ...)
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
You are making the classic mistake. Comparing a console to a properly built gaming PC is like comparing a Honda Accord to a Formula 1 car. People do it because they want performance that cannot be found anywhere else.
Good-bye
You could play Unreal Tournament 3 for ps3 with a Mouse and Keyboard. Not sure if the same went for the 360 port.
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