Slashdot Mirror
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
Mexican Americans don't like to go to the movies where the
dude has to wear contact lenses to make his blue eyes brown
cause don't it make my brown eyes blue....
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 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?
I don't respond to AC's.
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".
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
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?
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
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
...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. :)
Does this run on linux or do I have to install Windows 8.
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.
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.
This design is wicked! You most certainly know how to keep a reader amused. Between your wit and your videos, I was almost moved to start my own blog (well, almostâ¦HaHa!) Excellent job. buy runescape accounts I really loved what you had to say, and more than that, how you presented it. Too cool!
... 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.
If some one wishes expert view regarding running a blog then i suggest him/her to pay a quick visit this website, runescape accounts sale Keep up the pleasant job.
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.
Great graphics is useless if there's no boobies.
... 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.
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.
The original Call of Duty was the best (most fun) single-player FPS I've ever seen.
The website wholesale and retail for many kinds of fashion shoes, like the nike,jordan, also including the jeans,shirts,bags,hat,glasses and the decorations. All the products are free shipping, and the price is competitive, after the payment, can ship within short time. the goods are shipping by air express, such as EMS,DHL,the shipping time is in 5-7 business days ! YOU MUST NOT MISS IT http://www.sport3trade.net/ Discount jordan shoes $35, Air max shoes $35, Nike/shox $35, handbags $36, Sunglasses $16, New era cap $12, wallet $19, belt $18, jewelry $15, T-shirts $20, DG Jeans $36, (NFL MLB NBA NHL) jerseys $25, http://www.sport3trade.net/