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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.
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)
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 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.
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.
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
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.
"It has all of the graphics"
I consider it the opposite of an annoyance. I don't need to keep track of DVDs to shove in the drive to play a game I've already installed. I get nearly instant purchase satisfaction. Certainly faster than driving half an hour each way to the nearest retail outlet. I can reinstall on a new machine without having to find the disc and key and without worrying about whether I have another activation left.
I really don't understand how you can find that more annoying than dealing with physical media.
... 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.
*They not that
Crytek is a german company that makes the cryengine3 then they partner with a bunch of other companies to make games (like ubisoft and far cry)
Rocket Surgeon.
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.