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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.
"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/
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'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.
If I want to see realistic graphics I would play meatspace aka THE REAL LIFE. Not even Crysis 100 can beat those graphics.
Yeah, I prefer to look at the alien Ceph in real life too. They are far more realistic-looking than the in-game ones.
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 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...?
That's the problem. Creating super high resolution graphics is strictly a technical issue. With a little knowledge, anyone can do it. Actually coming up with a compelling/interesting story line requires a lot of creativity, and that is a talent few people have. It's the same reason why movies have a gazillion dollars worth of special effects but the movie sucks.
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.
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
Borderlands is a great example where interesting graphics are far more effective than hyper-realistic graphics.
The rotoscoping/cartoon effect in borderlands is used really well, and even though they are low fidelity the styling more than makes up for it. Plus you dont need such a high-end card because high resolutions are less important.
Interesting artistic style and good gameplay/story/humour will always trump eye candy.
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.
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
"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.
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 :(.
The problem was the complete and utter lack of explanation of depth of gameplay. I suffered from it in game 1.
Reality was that you actually had 3 main ways of approaching any problem, and several combinations of these. But it was never told. Instead, the default way was "either cloak and stalk or maximum armour and decent gun". They didn't even tell you that maximum strength let you stabilize the extremely heavy full auto weapons for glass cannon approach, or that you could use maximum speed to play like ninjas of action movies if you wanted to. A real shame.
You live 5 years in the past dude
Better install Windows if you want to play any game.
cause it takes a core 2 quad to look only slightly better than quake 3
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.
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.
... 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.
What you are saying there is what the Real Time / High Performance Ray Tracing crowd have been claiming since, what, 2001? Unfortunately for them, the stuff the "normal" graphics community has been able to come up with on graphics cards is always at least several notches better than what RTRT has been offering, ever since then. This is a chase that has been going on for a decade now, and the gap does not seem to be closing anytime soon. So the discussion you are trying to start here has been over for several years now - and it seems like no-one is listening to the RTRT crowd anymore. And with good reason.
This is not to say that the research conducted by the RTRT crowd was and is useless - far from it. The new high performance algorithms they came up with were instrumental in the resurgence of path tracing and such, i.e. modern highly realistic offline rendering techniques. But for gaming purposes, the party seems to be over. Remember: hacks are not hacks if they are capable of powering a well-selling game in a stable, repeatable fashion.
And indisputably true facts, like the bit about RTRT scaling so much better, can be true for all they like, but that does not automatically mean that they are also relevant for practical engineering in settings where people are trying to earn Real Money by writing games people end up buying.
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.
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.
... 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?
One thing that the cartoon effect in Borderlands (both) does, for me at least, is make the suspension of disbelief much easier.
Sure, it takes you maybe a few minutes in the beginning to get there, but once you're there, you're not yanked out of it, because something sticks out like a sore thumb.
Take Diablo III as an example. Blizzard went out of their way to make some amazing looking cinematics for their cut scenes. But that rips you out of your story and then pushes you back into the usual graphics again afterwards.
Compare that to Borderlands, where the cut scenes are, at most, rendered at a better quality than your regular settings.
Also, there's a lot to be said about interacting with the world's deadliest 13-year-old, when the character manages to be both adorable, funny and really scary at the same time.
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.
Never seen the Quake Wars / Wolfenstein etc. ray-traced games? They basically have to have a lot of machine behind them to replicate even quite old games. And, to be honest, they look not much better.
Sure, the shiny-shiny effects of a chandelier reflecting a million-and-one droplet's reflections looks really nice the first time you stare at it, but to be honest I played through Mirror's Edge the other month and I didn't look at the graphics once. When you do, you realise that actually it's all just clever tricks because you're NOT going to stand around while enemies are chasing you looking at a chandelier.
On the other hand, I played Dear Esther yesterday. It's *not* a game, I have to hasten that, it's much closer to tech demo / arty-farty piece, but it looks really, really beautiful. It probably can't do huge reflections, it probably cheats like hell on the shadows, fog, and everything else. It's just a bog-standard 3D engine but it looks really nice and pretty enough for you to say "Wow, I'll zoom in on that, that looks cool". And you have the time and inclination to do so because you're SUPPOSED to and there's nothing driving you to enjoy anything but the scenery.
Ray-tracing had its day. We can do it now, in high-res, on high-end machines. But it's really no easier to do and no prettier to do and not worth the power to do. The models have to be made differently, but involve the same or more work as normal 3D "cheating" models used in games (with mipmapping, bump-mapping, etc.). They don't look any prettier until you're doing things like hundreds and hundreds of tiny glass beads reflecting each other and - to be honest - how often does a game NEED that? And, in the end, the performance isn't on the same scale. Sure, a high-end gaming machine can probably do it, but the average gaming machine can't, so it would sell much less for more effort.
And ray-tracing is exactly the kind of thing that's providing the research, shortcuts and techniques that go into the modern graphics programming anyway. It's just like the historical stealing of OpenGL hardware and techniques from high-end CAD systems to run games nowadays.
I don't want a ray-traced game. I'd pay more for greater worlds, greater freedom, greater storyline, more recorded lines, more plot, more expansions, more physics, destructible enviroments (all things promised by every game and rarely delivered) etc. before I'll pay for shiny chandeliers in the mansions I'm shooting to pieces.
"Of course, you could always buy a gamepad for $20-50 to your PC... "
That's the real power of PC really...
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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First part is wrong.
The market crash to which you're referring happened in 1983 and had nothing to do with the platform craze, which happened after 1985 with the advent of the NES.
I agree with everything else. Most platform games eventually became bland and uninspired (Terminator, Robocop or Rambo platform games for NES anyone?)
We're rapidly getting there with modern games. Every so-called AAA game seems to be either an FPS (a COD wannabe, more precisely), an MMORPG, or a 3rd person action RPG. Lame.
That, along with consolitis (which doesn't fully explore the capabilities of modern PC hardware) and obnoxious DRM are the reasons I'm withdrawing from games altogether.
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
Im not withdrawing, im going full retro. My Steambox will be able to play almost anything from the past 30 years.
Good-bye
The Walking Dead is another one. Killing zombies is subservient to the characters and story, and the comic book art suits it well.
Take Diablo III as an example. Blizzard went out of their way to make some amazing looking cinematics for their cut scenes. But that rips you out of your story and then pushes you back into the usual graphics again afterwards.
I loved Warcraft III for those cutscenes. It's actually the reason I bought the game, after seeing a scene in the old show Cinematech. Obviously this is an old example, as I'm not much of a gamer.
And Butt Stallions. Don't forget the Butt Stallion.
You could play Unreal Tournament 3 for ps3 with a Mouse and Keyboard. Not sure if the same went for the 360 port.