Incredible detail, realtime lighting, destructible environments, single-digit framerates and
godrays everywhere. Who can forget the first time they saw THIS SCENE from Crysis?
The Crysis Remaster is here. It’s alright, I guess- it looks prettier than the original,
provides raytracing without the need for DXR-compatible graphics cards, and is a lot less buggy to
run. But I’m a tad disappointed by it. Because it could have been more.
The first and third games were the best looking things out when they were released. And while
the second game had a rough journey, it looked great on the consoles and eventually looked
great on PCs too. But in 2020, graphical competition is tougher than ever and the Crysis Remaster
just feels like a polished version of the original, with limited raytracing support.
Some parts of it look great, but others I’d argue are still overshadowed by the wonder
that was Crysis 3. It’s similar to the original in that maximum
settings will absolutely crush any PC out there. They’re playing into the meme by
calling the top quality settings ‘Can it run Crysis’?, proudly claiming it will ‘demand
every last bit of your hardware with unlimited settings’, presumably cos it turns the view
distance up to a ridiculous level. But I think they’re missing the point. I’ll talk more
about this in a bit, but you want comparison shots so here they are.
I’ll start with the graphics settings in the remaster. There are several, ranging from
LOW up to ‘CAN IT RUN CRYSIS’. Low of course looks the worst - though this
being CRYSIS REMASTERED, still looks very nice. What you give up are the shadows- they’re
quite blocky, and don’t extend far into the distance at all. The texture quality looks
like a game from 10 years ago. And the ambient occlusion looks eerily similar to Far Cry
3’s, where all objects cast a shadow behind them, regardless of how far away that might
be. This only happens at LOW. And I assume was required so that the likes of the Switch
could cope with this title. Moving up to Medium makes it an acceptable
standard. If your PC isn’t the fastest, at least try this before dropping to low because
the extended shadow and draw distance, as well as better texture quality, makes it a
more enjoyable experience. Foliage- of which this game has plenty of- no longer looks like
splattery blobs of colour. Plus, if you game at medium, you can be safe in the knowledge
that it looks better for you than for others who switched to low.
HIGH is about as far as you should bother going unless you have excess computing power
to spare. It enables raytracing, the textures for the most part are as good as they need
to be, and the shadows no longer shimmer so noticeably, and get that fuzzy kind of outline
that you’ll look at and go… yeah. That looks fuzzy, but probably quite nice.
Beyond high settings, not a lot changes up-close. Some textures get better, like the banana
box here, the raytracing gets sharper, the draw-distance on smaller objects gets greater,
and the ambient occlusion across the whole image ‘improves’, though you’d struggle
to notice the differences when actually playing the game. Oh, and the biggest change with
these higher presets is that your framerate drops considerably.
The one time you’ll want a preset above HIGH is when staring out at distant scenery.
The drawn shadow distance extends further out all the way through to the highest ‘Can
It Run Crysis’ option, which you can see here greatly improves (or at least, darkens)
distant hills and mountains. But aside from in these situations where you’re wanting
to get a nice new desktop wallpaper, you’re probably better off at high preset which will
give you greatly improved FPS which will aid you in general gameplay.
The other difference the top quality ‘Can it Run Crysis’ setting has is for shadows
to become increasingly diffuse the further away from the object that’s casting it.
Because the sun isn’t just a tiny point in the sky blah blah blah. It’s just unfortunate
that running the game at top quality settings tanks the framerate so greatly. GTA 5 had
the same shadow effects and didn’t slow it down anywhere near as much, as I recall.
The big new feature in Cryengine, that they’ve been working hard on for years, is raytracing.
And it’s not the sort that we’ve seen in other games- the effect seen in Crysis
can be run even on older Nvidia and AMD cards. You might remember that demo of the drone
flying down a street, which was when they first showcased this. But Crysis is the first
large, open game to support it. While I commend them for doing this, it comes with some pretty
significant limitations of its own- which in a way I feel defeats the whole purpose
of raytracing in the first place. The reflections behave kind of like a low-quality version
of the actual world, with extremely limited view distance. Almost like you’re peering
into a Playstation-3 version of the world. Kind of like GTA 5’s reflections, I guess.
It does at least mean that even current console generations can do ‘raytracing’, and you
won’t have to get a DXR-compatible graphics card to view it. But it seems a shame to go
so far only to stop short of actual, full-blown raytracing done properly.
Looking at this reflection, some trees pop in and out of existence, and it doesn’t
extend far enough to show the cliffs in the distance. And the less said about the character
the better. So yeah, it’s a fake version of raytracing, but it’s cleverly done and
will most likely be ENOUGH to get within spitting distance of the real thing in most situations,
unless you literally find a mirror and stare into it. Later on in the game -spoiler alert-
everything’s ice, so you’d think it would be a great chance to showcase the tech. But
it wasn’t the case. NOTHING reflected, apart from vehicles. If you want reflective surfaces,
this was the best example I could find. In its reflections, it showed other parts of
the vehicle. This is done with a combination of ‘raytracing’ and ‘screen space reflections’,
which is why some bits of the reflection disappear as the camera moves, while others remain.
This is likely done to strike a balance between system performance and close-up detail, and
to mask the lower underlying quality of the raytracing found in this game.
I think we’ll be seeing more of this kind of compromise throughout the Playstation 5
generation. While we can now do full raytracing, it requires a HUGE amount of processing power
and could be argued is overkill for the task it needs to fulfil. The sort seen in Crysis-
and probably Unreal 5, will make more sense given the hardware compromise. But like I’ve
already said, I feel it defeats the purpose of raytracing in the first place, which is
to simulate reality without any shortcuts or weaknesses. Being so close to achieving
the real thing and then slapping a load of constraints and limitations to it just feels
like extra work to me. I’ve talked about the remastered edition,
but HOW DOES IT COMPARE TO CRYSIS? You can split it up into categories. First
up: indoor areas. And this is where we see the BIGGEST improvement. The interiors in
Crysis were ugly. They looked like they didn’t have any lighting at all! This didn’t look
good, even for the time. It got away with it cos it was made of destructible elements,
so there was no way they could fake the lighting in here, given the technology constraints
at the time. But with the remaster, it’s wonderfully lit with global illumination,
and the bits that should be dark are darkened by ambient occlusion. It’s an unquestionable
improvement. I particularly love how bright and colourful places bleed their colours out
onto near-by surfaces, giving it all a warm glow. And this lighting all changes as you’d
expect as the building changes or destructs. Another large improvement is to the distant
scenery. There is a LOT more distant detail in the form of rocks and trees, especially
at higher graphics presets. Like you’d expect, this comes with a framerate penalty. And I
disagree with the depth of field and haze effects they use to cloud it up- there’s
more detail, but you can’t always see it. Some of the textures are majorly improved,
too. Like this banana box here. And the sand texture, which is nicely parallax mapped,
even at lowest settings. But there’s one change that I find questionable-
and that’s to do the artistic style of the game. The original often looked drab, understated
or dark. But the remaster ups the brightness and saturation, and gives many of the surfaces
new shaders. And I don’t know if this is necessarily an improvement.
The palm trees, for instance. I much preferred the older style, which gave the leaves a sheek,
waxy finish that nicely reflected sun or moonlight. The newer ones seem more like cloth to me.
It could be that they mimic the subsurface scattering that goes on inside leaves more
accurately. Maybe these are technically better. I just don’t like them as much as the older
ones, which I remember being so impressed with at the time.
Take a look at this jungle scene. The remastered’s colours are much more saturated, much deeper.
They’re just two very different styles, and I think if people had to pick which was
the prettier, they’d choose the remastered edition.
Also I’m not sure about this guy’s face. The remaster’s textures are higher quality,
but something about the lighting and bloom effects makes it feel like an inferior console-port
to me. I just can’t put my finger on why.
I THINK what they’ve done is to make Crysis a more… traditionally beautiful game. They
have airbrushed the island, upped the saturation and have thrown all sorts of post-process
effects at it to make it look better than real life.
PROBLEM IS, that removes it from reality and throws it into the same classification as
literally any other tropical island game I can think of! It looks a lot more like Far
Cry 1 and 3, which I always considered a more ‘cartoony’ series. The original Crysis,
on the other hand, felt grown up, gritty and sophisticated. And that’s because it actually
mimics reality. Before making the original game, the team
went to Tahiti and took loads of pictures and set out to create the most realistic looking
game they could. You can see -from these extremely low-resolution images- that they succeeded!
Yes, the grass and polygonal edges give it away, but aesthetically, it’s difficult
to tell which of these is the original photo because they recreated the feel of these environments
so faithfully! Which is what’s been removed from the remastered
edition, which has instead prioritised a glamorised, fictional tropical island look. They’ve
airbrushed the shaders and lighting to transform each level into a perfect tropical paradise.
It’s fine for them to do that, I just wish they had kept the original vision somewhere
because it’s the one I find more appealing. I guess they felt realism prevented the game
from looking better. And I’m also not sure the remaster’s visuals
do justice to the hardware requirements at higher settings. For the original game, they
created a pre-rendered movie called COREX, then set out to make a real-time game that
matched, or surpassed, the look of that movie. It wasn’t their intention to make something
that slowed PCs down. They simply built the game to a certain level of quality.
Since the original game, they redid Crysis for consoles, using a newer, more optimised
version of the engine, and I believe it’s THIS that this remastered edition has been
built from, since the same levels and stuff are missing.
The benefit of this is that low settings in the remaster look VASTLY superior to the original.
The original game on low settings is laughably bad while at a glance, the remastered one
faithfully retains the look of the higher settings. In fact you could even say it looks
better than high settings. I’m not going to benchmark in this video,
I’d rather do that on slower hardware. But it will be interesting to see if the remaster
runs better than the original. Imagine how incredible that would have been in 2007!
In conclusion: if you want to play Crysis, you might as well play on the remaster because
on a technical level it is likely superior in every way and I do prefer the way you don’t
have to manually change your suit function every time you want to jump, sprint or punch
something. But I disagree with a few of the graphical design decisions they’ve made.
More could have been done, and while it’s Crysis 2020, I don’t think it looks good
enough to be Crysis 2020. Oh, Crysis… what a frustrating series you
are. You’d tease us with greatness, only to eventually go down that tired old alien
route every single time. Far Cry was great… until you had to fight the Trigens. Then with
Crysis, that too was fun until the aliens showed up. Then they reassured us they had
made the aliens more fun… and made the WHOLE second game about fighting Aliens. And it
wasn’t fun. Finally, it seemed they had learned their lesson, and they made the third
game about fighting humans again… only to forget about that 3 missions in, cramming
the rest of the game full of bullet-sponge aliens. The series has always been great when
it’s an open-world sandbox that lets you prey on humans. Yet it never does more than
to tease of that before inevitably becoming an uninspired arena shooter again, against
dull monsters. Just because we have an overpowered suit, it doesn’t mean we want overpowered
enemies! We want to feel powerful, and to be able to use our abilities and stealth to
outsmart human opponents. But while the team never seemed to understand
what people liked about Crysis’s gameplay, graphically, they were on point! The games
always worked as fantastic visual showcases for the engine they were based on. And despite
my dislike for the artistic direction this remaster has gone in, it’s all based on
good tech. With Crytek’s financial difficulties these past few years, I hope the remaster’s
a success, firstly because the Unreal Engine needs competition. And second, so that we
can get a proper, full-blown Crysis 4 that can be built from the ground up to look great…
but also, convincing. And please, no aliens this time.