"Can it run Crysis?" For a decade now this has been the go-to question for any new
computer... or old computer, or calculator or pinball control, or really anything at
all because that's more of a punch line than a serious question these days. But
10 years ago whether or not something ran Crysis was a legit inquiry, and for
good reason: nothing ran Crysis! At least, nothing ran
Crysis to its full potential. When it launched for Windows PCs on November 13.
2007. Crytek's new game was an unparalleled juggernaut of graphical
fidelity and forward-thinking tech. Under the hood was CryEngine 2, an engine that
was uninterested in only being the most impressive in 2007. Nope, it sought to be
the most impressive for years to come. Crysis was so hard to run that even the
best graphics cards of its day were unable to smoothly play it maxed out.
Your best-case scenario was using something like the 768MB nVidia
GeForce 8800 Ultra, which at the time was the fastest single card solution on the
market and cost over 800 US dollars. But even this beast could only crank out seven
frames per second on the very highest settings! And while it was one of the few
that could get into the 20s at lower resolutions, several competing cards on
the market couldn't even render enough frames to count. So when this game was
new there was no one playing it with all the bells and whistles *and* a decent
framerate, because it simply wasn't possible yet. Whether this was due to
ballsily ambitious design, bad optimization, or a combination of both,
the result was that Crysis was the go to game for benchmarking purposes over
the next several years. And any time a new GPU came out to the question was
inevitable: "Can it run Crysis?" But Crysis was more than just a glorified benchmark
or a graphics snob tech demo. I mean, it was those things, no doubt, but it was
also a shooter worth playing in its own right. I remember downloading the demo
and being absolutely hooked from the beginning because it felt like a
spiritual successor to Crytek's previous game, Far Cry, just with way more detail,
improved combat, and much more environmental interaction. Of course it
looked and ran like day-old dookie on my system but due to the stealth meets
action FPS gameplay and the infinitely variable
physics sandbox, it was an intoxicating combo I couldn't resist.
So when the full game was out I was all too happy to grab a copy, free it from
its cellophane prison, and pop the DVD into my Windows Vista rig knowing all
too well that I would not be able to fully enjoy all its features yet.
Thankfully today it's no problem to run Crysis on even a half-decent PC so for
the rest of this video we'll be fulfilling my 2007 fantasies and be
enjoying Crysis on a machine that can actually run Crysis. Crysis begins with
logos, brand deals, animations, notices, copyrights, and finally a very green main
menu. And before we do anything else it is Crysis tradition to jump straight
into the graphics options because there are a lot of options to optionally
optionate here. And this was built to use DirectX 9 for the most part. DirectX 10
was available, and it had some graphics options for that as long as you had
Windows Vista. Or at least that was the idea since it turned out you could
activate a lot of the DirectX 10 features through tweaking some files and
get many of the DX10 options in 9. They didn't all work perfectly but they were
there. Once you have all that sorted it's time to get onto the game itself and
it comes in single-player and multiplayer flavors. Eh, the multiplayer
was there on launch at least. It has since been disabled after the GameSpy
servers shut down some years ago. There are some fan patches for getting online
multiplayer to work since the publisher, Electronic Arts, never patched it. But
good luck finding a match on a whim, you're probably gonna have to wait
around for a special event of some kind, or just get on a local network and play
in classic LAN mode if you happen to know... "real people." We're just gonna be
sticking to single-player for the most part in this video though. The game
really comes alive on the harder difficulty modes, I do recommend playing
them. It's rather fascinating what it does with the hardest one - disabling
not just a crosshair but making the enemies speak their own native language,
and not English. After that you get a pre-rendered but rather pointless intro.
Just a trailer for the game that you're seconds away from playing, I'm not really
sure what the point of this is. After this though is a scene rendered in real
time that is a little bit more useful, introducing you to the
main characters: a US Special Forces group known as the Raptor Team. Mm how machismo.
After this you're literally tossed into
the game world where you play Nomad, also known as Military McBoringSoldier. He's
not a silent protagonist but he may as well be with how empty of a vessel he is.
Anyway, due to some unknown interference you lose control of your chute and
miss the landing zone entirely, dropping you into the ocean temporarily
losing your powers so you can get reacquainted with them. And from here
you're given an effective but unusually dark tutorial. I don't mean that tonally,
I mean like, it's just dark, it's hard to see stuff. Crytek could have easily blown
their wad from the very beginning if they chose to. But they didn't, instead
choosing to reveal the true splendor of the environment and the lighting and
everything until after you're familiar with the mechanics. Once you do get
through all that though you get the full daytime reveal and wow: look at all the...
everything! This was mighty impressive back then. Honestly it still looks pretty
good. Although it looked more like this when I first played it, and it was
probably the same for many of you too that's just -- hehe -- that's just how it was.
Yeah, seeing this huge island set before you it just seemed like anything was
possible! But it's worth noting that Crysis is not an open-world game but
more of a series of large instanced zones taking place across a huge map. You
don't really run into invisible walls so much as you do... creative ways to try and
limit you from going outside the mission area one way or another...
*EXPLOSION*
The story takes place on the fictional Lingshan Islands in the Pacific Ocean
which has been subjected to a hostile takeover by North Korean armed forces mm,
compromising American archaeologists along the way. And that is why you, a
group of US special elite soldier dudes, are going there to try to evacuate them.
That's the main mission at least but along the way there's all sorts of side things
that keep coming up, and the result is that you're gonna be shooting a lot of
dudes. Not to mention messing around with the
environment! The level of physicality going on was pretty unprecedented at the
time. You can pick up and interact with hundreds of objects that would otherwise
just be static details, including bottles, and fruits, and animals, man. Yeah you can
pick up animals, why not; throw a chicken at a guy,
it's not gonna do anything but you can do it!
*chicken and shooting noises*
You can also use explosives to demolish buildings and
vehicles in spectacular fashion
*buildings and vehicles exploding spectacularly*
and cut foliage into little pieces using a spray of bullets, or punch down trees a
couple years before Minecraft made that popular. Hehe, "poplar."
Or take the slow and more quiet route by going invisible with silenced weaponry. Yes you are equipped
with a Nanosuit which can augment your armor, strength, speed, and stealth. And
you're presented with a wide range of weapons including pistols, shotguns,
rifles, machine guns, rocket launchers, remote explosives, gauss guns and even
some sci-fi stuff! Most of which have alternate fire modes of varying types.
And each weapon can be customized on the fly with upgrades you loot off of
enemies: suppressors, sights, scopes, magazines, lighting options, sleep darts,
grenade launchers, and more. You want a 10x sniper scope on a 12 gauge or a
laser sight on a minigun? It's absurd and it lets you do it so why not!
This leads to an arsenal that is constantly evolving, keeping the game
feeling fresh. Combined with the suit abilities and the environment often
falling apart around you in chaotic fashion, and each playthrough can feel
quite unique. This combination of stuff was just so
cool to me back then. I hadn't seen this kind of weapon customization, especially
on the fly, and not hidden away in some kind of menu. It just made the whole
thing feel more organic like it was constantly changing at any time due to
random pickups. There are also quite a few vehicles to hop inside, many of which
have their own set of weapons. You got things like boats and trucks, APCs,
and VTOLS, and just all sorts of things litter the map. And for some reason
everything has nitrous, even pickup trucks and boats. So I always just
assumed the North Koreans hired Dominic Toretto to design their vehicles. Now, as
for the story itself... well, slight spoiler alert maybe?
You probably gotta know this by now: it's aliens! It's always aliens in
these kind of games. While there's plenty of crazy crap happening in the first
half of the game due to the North Korean army, the latter half of the game is
pretty much all aliens. Rather cold, squid-like aliens who gradually litter
the island with more snow and tentacles than a Frosty the Snowman hentai. As to
whether or not this all comes together effectively, well, I've seen it said that
Crysis begins as a great game, then becomes a bad game,
before finally turning into a good game by the end of the campaign. And you know
what, I somewhat agree with that. When Crysis is at its best you're sneaking
through forests scouting out enemy bases and more or less role-playing as the
Predator, executing a plan of assault with what feels like an infinite number
of gameplay outcomes. But when Crysis is at its worst you're on a far more linear
path blasting through swarms of soldiers with eagle vision and aliens with cheap
attacks that just aren't satisfying to kill. Although I admit, being able to grab
the smaller ones and just punching them into submission, that's pretty sweet, but other
than that they're just annoying. Then there are these zero gravity levels
which, yeah. I can take or leave. It's often confusing to navigate in this mode
and there's almost zero opportunity to use the tactics that you've learned up
to this point. I guess that's kind of the purpose of an extraterrestrial vessel:
levels just there to mix things up, and it achieves that. And I remember being in
awe of the awesome alien ship design back in 2007. This is just such a cool
thing to explore, especially in such high detail. However, as back and forth as I go
with these zero-g levels, the VTOL stuff after that? Screw that completely. it's
awkward to control, with a mouse and keyboard especially, and your ship is
made of aluminum foil or something, making for far too many sudden deaths
and quicksave spamming. Especially when the random tornadoes show up, alongside
bundles of enemies taking random potshots. Still, despite it being a kind
of an up-and-down experience, I think Crysis is lots of fun even ten years
later. At least in the levels where it gives you free rein to approach each
situation how you want to by experimenting with tactics, physics,
abilities, and customized weapons. Still kind of sucks that the protagonist is
about as interesting as a bucket of sand, I'd rather play anyone else on the team.
And it seems Crytek knew this because the next game in the series was Crysis
Warhead in 2008, a standalone expansion pack where you played your teammate,
Jason Statham -- I mean -- Psycho!
*Psycho Statham speaking*
Psycho's story parallels
that of Nomad's in Crysis, which makes sense seeing as Psycho frequently
went off to completely different parts of the island during that campaign. The
single-player story here is about half as long as the original game's 12 or so
hour campaign, but the new weapons, improvements to the AI, and a protagonist
with an actual personality make it worth playing if you liked the main game. Also
introduced with this was an extra disc called Crysis Wars, a standalone
multiplayer version of Crysis Warhead with several new modes and balancing
tweaks. Then in October of 2011, several months after Crysis 2 was already out,
they released Crysis for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. And it made sense
seeing as they'd already made a console-friendly engine for Crysis 2. So they
used the tech to bring over the original game. It was mighty impressive
considering what they had to work with in terms of hardware, and they even took
the chance to remove those crappy VTOL levels entirely because of the player
backlash four years prior. Anyway that's pretty much it for what I want to talk
about in this video regarding the original Crysis a decade later. I would
still heartily recommend giving Crysis a shot, especially on PC where it still
looks and plays pretty nicely on a modern machine. Sure, it's no longer the
cutting-edge graphical powerhouse it used to be, but that's fine!
The gameplay still holds up for the most part and its experience of stealthy
action gameplay with a crazy interactive environment holds up pretty well. It's an
engaging feeling of an open-world FPS without relying on open-world FPS tropes
that we see so often nowadays: like obnoxious amounts of trite collectibles,
radio towers, territory takeovers, arbitrary crafting, and randomly
generated encounters to pad out the game length. That stuff isn't here and it
doesn't need to be and it's better for it, I think. It's a scripted single-player
shooter that plays it straight while still providing a satisfying feeling of
open-ended possibilities and player experimentation. And you can now get
Crysis without that hellish SecuROM DRM that it originally came with that
limited the installs to 5 and all that kind of junk. At least, if you get it
online through stores GOG, which are of course DRM-free. I'll
provide an LGR affiliate link to buy it on GOG DRM-free down below in the
video description if you'd like to visit it that way.
But even if not then I hope you enjoyed this LGR retrospective taking a look
at Crysis a decade after the fact. Holy crap I'm getting old. And if you want to
continue to get old with me then perhaps you'd like to see some of my other
videos revisiting all sorts of things, new and old, and older, and newer, and
everything in between because that's what I do. New videos every Monday and
Friday, so thanks for sticking around if you do that. And as always thank you very
much for watching what you just did!