Here's the link.
Just some random snipets:
Awesome.
That means they've had to make your task exponentially harder to compensate, of course. This time you're taking on whole armies, fleets of vehicles, aliens the size of volcanoes and stranger things still. The resulting conflict is action of a higher order of magnitude. Every ten seconds something explodes, and a Crysis explosion is a hell of a thing to see.
Where's teh gameplay?:(
Yes, you can pick up, throw and even beat people with live chickens. You can pick up, throw and beat people with anything smaller than a car, and in this we include wheelbarrows, spades, tree trunks, grown men and even most of a car. At one point in our playtest we shot a man's helmet off, caught it, beat him to the ground with it, shot him again and dropped it on his body. Anything smaller than a tree can be held in your left hand while you fire with your right, even when you're using an assault rifle or shotgun, so alternating between bonging people with a spade and shooting them in the face is seamless. They even encourage you to beat people when they're down by introducing a chance that a fallen soldier will get back up if you don't. This, again, is what a game should be about.
I need an uber-computer to even run it!:cry:
Every sane person is wondering how all this is going to run on their system. We asked Cevat Yerli, Crytek CEO, what gamers with a limited budget should buy to make sure they can play Crysis well, and his first answer was two gigs of RAM. The single gig most of us have is going to struggle with environments of this size, and with this much smashable stuff to keep track of. Next on the shopping list is, predictably, a GeForce 8800 - but the GTS model in that range is fairly affordable, and not a huge step down from the GTX. The surprising part is that Cevat says a Core 2 Duo E6600 processor ($300 nowadays) is enough to run Crysis on Ultra High settings with that setup. That chip is likely to undergo another price drop before Crysis comes out, too, so don't rush
Teh AIs worse than Halo!@1!2 :?
A big part of the reason for that is that the AI has to understand that a fallen chunk of tree is cover. It has to deal with and exploit an environment that can dramatically change with every gunshot. When they first implemented this, Senior Game Designer Bernd Diemer discovered that he could grab a fallen tree and hold it in front of him to become completely invisible to the AI. This tactic is frowned upon in the real military as unsporting, so it had to be tactfully explained to the AI that a walking tree is deeply suspicious.
Aliens are rip-off of matrix, war of the worlds, etc...
The temperature theme runs throughout everything about the aliens: they're actually blind to everything except the infra-red spectrum. That means if you're standing right by something that's on fire, you're almost invisible to them. But even if you're crouching in the darkest corner, you're lit up like a firework unless you're using your suit's Cloak mode to bring your surface temperature down
The game will be short! :cry:
But despite the enormous amount of effort that went into the destructibility system, Crytek don't consider it the most important feature of their futuristic new engine. That, they say, is the sheer size of the areas it can chuck around. Far Cry let you boat around huge rolling vistas before picking an angle of approach, but Crysis levels are bigger still; the one we played - the third mission of the game - takes two and a half hours to complete.
What are teh action bubbles?
Levels are divided up into what Crytek call "action bubbles:" areas with a high density of enemies that would constitute levels in a lesser game, such as a barracks or a Korean-occupied plantation. In Crysis, these are connected in ways they couldn't be if they were separate levels: if the soldiers in one camp have time to contact the others to call for reinforcements before you take them out, jeeps and choppers will cart fresh meat in from one to the other. You could even use that to your advantage, sneaking round a camp and attacking it quickly before moving on to the next, so that troops leave your real objective to protect the other. It's Far Cry writ large, a more complex equation and a more engrossing experience altogether.
The indoor will suck like Far Cry! :cry:
It's also more consistent. Crytek is painfully aware that the indoor sections of Far Cry were banal and unworthy of the rest of the game, so you're outdoors for almost the entirety of Crysis. Even when you are indoors, they've built every interior around what they call their "veni vidi vici" philosophy: you come, you see the whole area, then you choose how to go about conquering it. Tight corridors and linear paths don't let you do that, so they've done away with them completely. All of which raises the question - do they have any idea how crappy the last few levels of Far Cry were? They do. When we asked Cevat Yerli how he felt about them, he used the word "horrible" three times in one sentence. He admits they were rushed to get the game out before Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, and they were considered the least important sections since the fewest players would reach them. But the betrayal of their principles clearly still pains the developers, and they've paid particular attention to Crysis' final section to make it up to us.
It's just random shooting and the horror sections won't be scary! :cry:
It plays out almost entirely inside the alien craft, in zero gravity. The challenge was to create a situation that would raise the intensity and difficulty, but without compromising the veni-vidi-vici approach. They want scares, but they refuse to script them the way Doom 3 does. If you do that, Cevat points out, the game's the same every time you play, and completely un-frightening after the first play-through. And Crytek games are built to be replayed to death.
The solution is what Cevat calls "systematic horror." The mothership is designed without a sense of up or down, and is riddled with nooks and crannies. So even though you can see the whole area before you float into it, you're constantly going to be - shall we say "surprised" - by things springing out at you from angles you didn't think to check. He says this part won't be complete until it's so traumatic that playtesters can't get through it in one go without needing a break to recover. And for many, that's already the case.
I think that answers all the doubts console sheep had about Crysis. Halo 3 be better than this? I don't think so.
And what Crysis preview will be complete without new screenshots? :)
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