Let's discuss my new favorite game...

[Uberfuhrer]

I played the demo of the game whose title is to my left. It's a delightful game -- sort of like Far Cry meets Halo, and it looks 1,000 times better, provided you have a powerful rig.

I must say, also, that the physics are simply awesome.

Has anyone tried the demo yet? I have and it's a safe bet that this game is my new favorite game. The guys at Crytek are geniuses.

I plan on purchasing it next week.

[scantilyclad]

i played a little bit of the demo, which of course i sucked horribly at, because First person shooters are just not my forte, however the game was fun while i played it, and watching trailers makes me want to play it more. Now if i could just sharpen up on my FPS skills.

[ptgatsby]

I have to second this.

This game is the first since... starcraft, I guess... that really blew me away. There is nothing horribly ground breaking tech wise, this is simply the first game to leverage graphics and physics and then spend the time to actually design the level to make use of it.

The freedom of action, the reality of actions (shooting down trees to break houses... COMMON! Driving cars into roadblocks... egad) and the AI make this game top-tier (IMO).

Absolutely impressive.

[Uberfuhrer]

Originally Posted by scantilyclad

i played a little bit of the demo, which of course i sucked horribly at, because First person shooters are just not my forte, however the game was fun while i played it, and watching trailers makes me want to play it more. Now if i could just sharpen up on my FPS skills.

What kind of rig do you have? (i.e. video card, CPU, RAM, etc.)

[Maverick]

It's cool, though even with a fairly powerful rig (C2D 6600, GF8800GTX) it's not optimal fps wise in very high. Running the game with shaders on high does seem to bring acceptable performance and the motion blur makes the movement seem smoother at 30fps than it does in other games (similar to what happens in movies). Destructible trees are nice. Graphically it's great, though *some* of the textures could be more high res. I look at the timeshift demo and I see really high res textures and am surprised that they aren't everywhere in a game such as Crysis (the worst being certain rocks where you get blurry messes).

The gameplay is good - not groundbreaking, but fine.

I'm looking forward to this.

[FDG]

Bohooo. With school and work I don't have time to play anything.

[Uberfuhrer]

Originally Posted by Maverick

The gameplay is good - not groundbreaking, but fine.

I can tell you that this game will be better than Far Cry 2, because Far Cry 2 is not being developed by Crytek, but Ubisoft, who created the Xbox version, Far Cry Instincts (they just distributed the PC version), which was considerably dumbed down from the PC version to little more than an arcade run-and-gun shooter with a really shitty AI. This could suggest that Far Cry 2 will be the same way.

I dunno, but I really loved the open-ended strategic gameplay of the first Far Cry, although it was oftentimes painfully difficult (I usually played on the God mode with this game to perfect my strategy). Crysis is similar, minus the frustration that instead settles for mind-stimulating challenge. That and it has quicksave in addition to checkpoints that Far Cry did not.

Still, CryEngine 2 is quite amazing.

Originally Posted by Maverick

I look at the timeshift demo and I see really high res textures and am surprised that they aren't everywhere in a game such as Crysis (the worst being certain rocks where you get blurry messes).

I thought that was just me and my mediocre X850XT I was playing on (I still managed to get most of the settings on High, though). But from what I understand, the Crysis demo isn't fully optimized, which is probably why top-of-the-line GPUs are having trouble handling it. And the game does seem to be highly CPU dependent -- most of my slow-downs were due to physics more than graphics.

I'm surprised at how poorly received Timeshift has been (Gamespot gave it a 6.5). I played the second demo, and I was amazed at the improvement over the first demo, where Atari was still the distributor. I thought that game looked great. More importantly, I had fun playing the demo. Nothing give me more pleasure than:

(A) Shooting someone and rewinding time to shoot him again, and

(B) Stopping time to steal the opponent's weapons and then shooting them -- yeah, he who is defenseless is far more easy to kill.

I mean the game's no Crysis, but I highly doubt we'll see a game looking as good as Crysis for a long time to come. (And by that I mean a few weeks or so.)

FWIW, PC Gamer gave Crysis a 98%. I do believe that is their highest score ever. (I think Half-Life 2 got a 95% from them.)

[Maverick]

I finished Crysis recently and I am a little bit dissapointed. It was not that great of a gaming experience. The first level was the best, after that it was OK with some occasional great moments, but it went really downhill after the introduction of the aliens. The last part of the game was a drag and I was really forcing myself to finish it. The game is relatively short though.

I played the game throughout on Very High in 1680x1050 with an average of 25 fps. The graphics are the main attraction of course along with the physics engines. The effects and animation are beautiful. Explosions are out of this world. However, some textures are so low resolution it's ridiculous (some rock, boat helicopter and wall textures look as though they come frome Tomb Raider 1). Directx10 is a load of BS and you can tweak your XP rig to run 99% of the so called exclusive features in Directx 9. 64 bit doesn't give you any speed boost contrary to what the CEO of Crysis, Cevat, was claiming in interviews.

The game was way overhyped and the reviews are all over the place. I think they should have done more of a military tactical FPS and focused on the tone of the first missions. I think it's a good game but the gameplay is too inconsistent. It doesn't provide a fun experience throughout.

[ptgatsby]

Originally Posted by Maverick

The first level was the best, after that it was OK with some occasional great moments, but it went really downhill after the introduction of the aliens.

I'm really sorry to hear that I was going to pick it up once I had a chance to play.

However, what game do you like?

[Uberfuhrer]

I have my review in my blog, maybe I should move it down here, too.

I have everything but shadows turned onto high. The low FPS in this game is not really noticeable if you have Post Processing on High, because there is motion blur. But if you're looking at the stats, then yes, FPS is relatively low. But it handles surprisingly well on a mid-range video card (though a dual-core CPU is absolutely necessary here).

A couple of settings look better on Medium quality. Also, these settings are the biggest performance killers: Shadows look more realistic on Medium, anyway; High shadow quality is just too sharp. Medium shaders also look more realistic, though they do hide some of the finer details, such as details on leaves. Still, Medium shaders look to have more color variety.

As good as the game looks, it's incredibly well-optimized. It plays better than F.E.A.R. on either of my computers.

I'm still wondering whether to crossfire my HD2600XT or to exchange it for an HD3870 when I get the money. I hesitate to buy an 8800GT because my mobo is optimized for AMD/ATI rather than nVidia.

I think these video card benchmarks are highly biased and tend to kiss up to nVidia...I wonder if it has to do with the fact that nVidia is American while ATI is Canadian?