Crysis 2 DirectX 11 patch is out, comparison inside

Crysis 2 is a bad game because it represents everything that is going wrong with the PC gaming industry. Developers are not taking advantage of new hardware and at this point, with 360 and PS3 being out as long as they have, every game is just a remake with a slightly different story line. Enough time has gone by that it has all been done before and there is no one and no way to raise the bar. Games have reached a stand still as far as people going above and beyond what is possible. Crysis 1 went above and beyond what anyone had ever seen before.

Crysis 2 was just more of the same, it didn't have the wide open areas to name one. The shaders are also a good bit over the top... I think Crysis 2 has been a big let down because a lot of gamers have a "special place in their heart" for Crysis. Everyone who knows anything about PC games (or has a decent graphics card) knows exactly what Crysis is and what it stands for. Crytek was one company that ALWAYS raised the bar and that's not what happened with the sequel. Crysis 1 was a "game changer." Everyone was expecting Crysis 2 to be a game that takes the industry in a new direction, to set a new standard for gaming. Crysis 1 not only had amazing and unique graphics, It had an entirely different style of gameplay.

In a lot of ways Crysis 2 is a step backwards. No wide open areas, limited destructibility, and some uncomfortable controls. With that I'm going to leave on this, my favorite thing to do in Crysis. After I beat crysis 1 and did the second play through with unlimited ammo I would use explosives to blow up ALL the trees. Every map looked like a clearcut logging operation after I was done with it.

Not necessarily. What the Guest has said is that there a myriad of causes for broken/underperforming games in general-at least in this portion of the post.
Cases in point:
Saboteur: Did not work with any AMD card at launch. Cause: Either AMD forgot to contact Pandemic Studios prior to launch, or (more likely) the driver team forgot to profile the game.
Batman:AA: No antialiasing for AMD cards. Cause: Eidos and Nvidia locked antialiasing to Nvidia cards to 1. optimise for Nvidia, 2. add a feature that Nvidia spent R&D developing (UE3.5 does not naturally support AA)
Laying the blame at the feet of developers might be apropos in many cases. It does not exclude instances of driver team error/oversight, lacking hardware requirement, and shenanigans between the two main discrete graphics protagonists

I'm pretty sure that qualifies as urban legend. Some of the most buggiest games in history weren't even released in the last ten years (Ultima IX:Ascension (1999), World War II Online/Battleground Europe (2001) andBattlezone II:Combat Commander (1999)...not to mention Hellgate:London, SimCity 4 etc.

That kind of depends on degree of severity and how wide ranging the problem is. If a game works with Nvidia cards but not with AMD (or vise versa) and the issue is with the driver team then why have the game publishers twiddling their thumbs until the issue is sorted out? Likewise what if the graphics card manufacturer can't get their heads around a new OS ? Do you stop all game releases until such time as the vendor gets their **** sorted out?

Yup. You get that right when you pay for a product that doesn't live up to it's advertising....unfortunately Crysis 2 at launch was everything it was expected to be- if you followed it's development (something I commented on a few times in the forums prior to launch). If however, you were unaware of how the game was (not) progressing, and it's continued delays- and just bought the game on PR hype and on the back of Crysis and Warhead then wail away. Personally I found the first game to be a very linear shooter with a Saturday morning matinee plot. Warhead lacked even that charm. Bringing Richard Morgan in as a big name SciFi author was never going to work miracles (Altered Carbon is a great book, his later efforts including Black Man, Broken Angels, Market Forces etc. are pretty derivative and one dimensional).

Care to adjust some of those figures there, smarty pants? The true numbers say that the PC gaming market is actually closer to 62% of the total market. For every Wii, there are 4 PCs. For ever Xbox 360, there are 7 PCs. And for every PS3, there are 8 PCs. Developers would have to be out of their minds to jump the PC gaming ship for a market share that's nearly half that of the PC market.

Yep, I did this as well. It's wicked fun... Did you know you can punch a tree into tiny little chunks as well? You have to be in strength mode and you also have to punch the tree repeatedly (can't remember exactly how many hits) before it will break.

I love wreaking havoc with the drill press you can find in a hut on the first map. It's fun to toss it around in strength mode to destroy buildings and vehicles (even take down trees). The physics in the original Crysis can be very impressive. This is evident when you blow up a building and see every single piece of shrapnel react differently.

Yes but it will. dx11 tessellation is absolutely gorgeous and will definitely enjoy having 2 (or more ) gpu's to fallback on than one.

pretty sick of you types acting like your so goddamn entitled.

would really like to see you make something prettier. I finished cry2 on xbox and it was good fun, and crytek made the most of what they could squeeze out from the aging xbox and ps3 within the release deadline.


take a slice of humble pie people.

what a good portion of you dont seem to realise is that crytek engine 3 is the most sophisticated engine widely available for developers at this moment. and soon that technology (come august) will be available to the indie market.

you seem so eager to knock down crytek with there 'too little too late' remarks, the engine is the big win here.

Played it through the day it came out and thought the graphics where a bit of a let down and the game play was a definate let down, however, since i paid £35 for this, i guess i might as well go through it again with the new patches and high res textures, (only have a GTX260 so i doubt I'd be able to do that!)

Kinda looking forward to this, even if it was supposed to be there from day one, better late than never.

Princeton: "Well you were actually making a very compelling argument until you said this.

You do same/better is one of the the worst counter-arguments ever."

^^^ You confused me with the other Guest. The performance argument is something you are discussing with another person in this thread.

L.

dividebyzero,

"unfortunately Crysis 2 at launch was everything it was expected to be- if you followed it's development (something I commented on a few times in the forums prior to launch). "

Exactly. From day 1, Crytek said they are making the game available on the PC and consoles. The fact that it was going to be based in New York clearly indicated that it will not be an open sandbox game like Crysis 1 was. Also, it was voiced on many occasions that Crysis 1 was too demanding on hardware so Crytek made sure that this game would run on a wider range of systems.

The DX11 problems should have been a red flag if you heard the news that NV paid $2 million to Crytek to make sure it's "optimized" for DX11. At the time this likely foreshadowed that the DX11 patch will bring Tessellation (since NV would want its cards to perform better to increase sales).

IvanAwfulitch,

You are confusing available hardware on the market vs. sales of videogames. When I discuss the total gaming market I was referring to total game sales (because that's all developers care about). I am not going to dispute the ratio of PCs to consoles that you provided. However, how many of those PCs have capable graphics cards, and on top of that how many of those gamers actually go out and buy $60 games?

Please go to VGChartz.com and check out some cross-platform games and see how well they sold on the PC. Look at Call of Duty games. Each game has sold 10+ Million copies. How many copies of Crysis 2 sold on the PC? Almost all cross-platform games sell far more copies on consoles than on the PC. So my point is not all developers are going to spend $5 million dollars extra so that you have DX11 features (since consoles can't run DX11 code). The Witcher 2 looks great, despite only being a DX9 game. Therefore, it's not even necessary to have DX11 features to have a great looking / fun game.

L.

You're now arguing that the HD 6950 is the only card that matters when examining whether or not a game must use 2 gpus to run at 60fps on the highest settings.


It matters because that is what i have, yes. You quoted my comment saying the game didn't warrant 2 GPU's. That's a pretty general statement. All you had to do was ask what I had, before spouting off saying i said the 6950 was the only anything.

You cancel your account yet?

oooww stop crying already! just face the fact that the game runs at over 30fps at 1080P res on a single card OK!

And Princeton was refering to the fact that the game graphics are pretty crap considering they were supposed to blow our minds yet a graphics card such as yours can run the game at full with ease.
It doesn't deserve 2 GPU's because it was a let down of game!

Sheesh!

I agree you do not need DX11 for a great game or even great graphics however.
Crysis 2 was supposed to have "the best" graphics, which requires DX11 to be used as it does have features that simply cannot be supported by DX9 and they do make the graphics look more realistic and once again crysis can be used as a bench mark and will be a more imersive experience.

The point of all the complaining is that before Crysis 2 was released, it was listed as DX11 compatible, it was announced again and again that it will deliver the best graphics in any game to date and raise the bar above the orginal, The company even went out on a limb and said it was making sure the PC version would be superior.

Yet all of these have yet to surface. Finally now we are going to see what the game engine is actually capable of and now we will finally see the efforts that the comany has put in for the PC version like they said.

Why would sales figures be bigger for the PC version when, so far, it has been a complete let down over what the company promised? They didn't break any promises for the console version, it came out exactly how they had planned.

I think once this patch is released Techspot should do an updated review and see what the effects are like and how they affect system performance before simply passing this up as to little to late.

Maybe an urban legend to people who didn't play computer games, but there was a time about a decade ago where I would literally download every game that came out, if I had a slightest desire to even try it, and even though all those games were cracked they pretty much all worked. And even if they didn't, it was an exception not the rule.

I'm sure you can Google enough counters to whatever I say, but these days most AAA titles come out with bugs that are reproducible across a wide range of hardware, from good to bad. The problem started when games started being viewed as commodities by large corporations that began snapping up gaming developers to add to their asset portfolio, and games stopped being released when they're done, but according to some prearranged date set a year back.

No problem. Don't let....ignorant people try and put you down and try and mark you as a pirate.

Do you know what a strawman argument is? Because it's exactly what you're doing. Your arguments are just filled with fallacies, just give up.

Burty. How dare you try and impose logic on a post made from a Techspot guest. You know better than that!

Sorry about that. THERE'S TOO MANY GUESTS! We need tripcodes or something.

EDIT: By the way Crytek. You've had 8 major patches now. Could you please fix the issue where if you die in campaign before reaching a checkpoint in the level you lose all your attachments and have to restart the level?

It's not even AI, it's scripted enemies that navigate using nodes.



They rely on nodes more than the combine from HL2. It's funny because when it comes to FPS games most use navigation zones, like UE3 games. Generally nodes are worse because the movement is all waypoint based, instead of decision making.

EDIT: Check out the DX11 page now. http://www.mycrysis.com/dx11 It says "Something went horribly wrong" Talk about encapsulating everything that is this game.

I wont refute your argument because there is a great element of truth in it in general terms. Pick any TWIMTBP or Gaming Evolved title and it is a certainty that more than half the user base will experience performance handicapping and driver bugs. What I will say is that the bugged nature of modern games- as opposed to the supposedly bug-free nature of those in the past- is more a rose-tinted glasses scenario that is exacerbated by a number of conditions:
*Direct development/code implementation by Nvidia and AMD
*The larger number of released game titles per year (add in driver team overwork/incompetance)
*The rise of entitlement on the net
*Money/greed, sponsorship/product placement, media tie-ins (covered by yourself)
*A wider range of hardware configurations, graphics architectures, API's and an ever expanding checklist of graphical image quality settings (Question: How many ten year old games weigh in at 9 Gb for instance ?)
*DRM

As for being able to pick up any old game and having a bug-free experience, I'd say that gaming experience, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder- that and a modicum of luck. Google any game and add "problem", "bug", "error" etc.. and you'll most likely be rewarded with bona-fide hits.

Pre Hansson,

I can think of plenty of PC games I enjoyed since HL2 and Deus Ex 1.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay - Developer's Cut (amazing!)
GTA IV
Dirt 2/ Dirt 3
F1 2010
Mass Effect 1&2
Battlefield 2 & BF:BC2
Dragon Age series
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
Batman AA
Bioshock 1
Call of Duty Modern Warfare 1
Unreal Tournament 3
World in Conflict
Braid
Portal 1&2
The Witcher 2
Left 4 Dead 2
Team Fortress
Burnout Paradise
Dead Space 1 & 2
Gears of War
Company of Heroes

If you don't like any of the above games, then I don't know what you want in a videogame. I tried playing HL1 and it's horrible compared to modern standards.

I think as people grow older, they just get more grumpy and life and like to complain. So the same gamers 10-15 years ago were much younger and more happy in life. Now, all they do is look at the negative aspect of a game.

Perhaps you should try playing outside of the FPS genre. Try a Zelda game for example. Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time is better than 97% of games I've ever played. Most FPS nowdays lack good single-player campaigns - so by default in my eyes they can't be considered the top genre today.

Their GameSpy network interface is still jerky and super annoying so it is hard to justify to myself to start playing this again when I know it is just going to be at the same level of all my other games (probably even less).

{shrugs}, we will see…

this
Most of the people that say crysis 2 failed aren't saying that its a bad game, but it failed to meet the standards of the original.

Exactly. It would definitely hold up as a stand alone game, but as a sequel it's disappointing.