Zardon

Read The Review Here
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Anyone who has played Crysis has strong opinions about the game. You either loved the ground breaking graphics and open landscapes, or you loathed the fact you needed the pc equivalent of a small nuclear power plant to run it. The followup Warhead is more action oriented which manages to keep all the strong points of the first game and adds new gameplay elements while lowering the computer requirements. A sure success? ... let's find out.

LukeK

I wasn't going to get this after the first one ran like a slideshow on my PC, but after reading this review I just reordered it on Steam.

John hasn't steered me wrong yet !

macbiter

Was just about to say, Johns reviews here are always spot on, seems he has the same view of games as me.

Just preordered this myself, should be nice to play on my newly acquired Skulltrail system

When is Farcry 2 out ? heard the physX support for it is great (think I read it on DH somewhere), glad I got some 280 GTXs now.

humonous

ohhh lovely, might actually run on my computer this time !

Erroneus

Looks promising and the fact they lowered system reqs, while upping IQ is really a great move by Crytek.

Can Warhead be played standalone or does it require Crysis to be installed?

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longhorn1000

According to steam "Crysis Warhead is a standalone release and does not require ownership of Crysis to play." probably cause the engine is massively overhauled.

I hear rumours that the original Crysis might be modded with the new engine coding changes....

OmegaRED

This and other reviews are very promising; I'll definitely finish Crysis before I get Warhead...and I hope it does run a little smoother.

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BlueMak

Does it require online activation?

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

Papoulka

I don't know when we'll ever be done with people choosing to badmouth Crysis for its tech level. I am sorry that this herd mentality ("don't think - just complain") must really have hurt the sales of that spectacular game. The FACT is that Crysis would run just fine even on low-end machines. I played it through twice with great enjoyment on a six-year old 2GHz P4 with less than a gig of RAM. Graphics were supplied by an Nvidia 7600GS with 256MB. Of course everything was set "low" but still looked good even on a 24" display. Better than Far Cry - and it was a looker too. The gameplay was superb.

So we knock Crysis because the game would scale beautifully from a weak machine like that up to and even six months beyond the best hardware available!! Well, Crytek won't make THAT mistake again, you can be sure. All the idiot remarks like "insane system requirements" really hurt both them and us. And you're keeping it up here.

In the space taken by comparing bad old Crysis with the duly chastened Warhead (no raising the bar there!) - a complete non-issue - you might have discussed something that really matters: the limited activations on Warhead's DRM.

Papoulka

Dark Lord

the only redeeming feature of crysis was its graphics. the story and game play were god awful. i doubt anythings changed here.

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Partizan

I have to agree with Dark Lord. Graphics in Crysis was excellent, but the gameplay and story were average. I don't knot how the game Crysis warhead could achieve a 93 score?
(I have to admit I haven't played it yet). But to be honest, a campaign which can be finished in 5-6 hours is a bit short and does not offer any real replay value.

You can compare it to gorgeous blonde who has nothing smart to say. You go out on a date or two, sh*g her and forget her...

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brutusmaximus

Absolute nonsense. I can only make the assumption that you are one of those blinkered fans who fails to see the facts. The original crysis was designed with the ultimate high end system in place. Everything else did NOT scale well unless you lost most of the quality. I guess you missed the DX9 mods for the game which people had to make to get it running correctly? I also take it you missed the numerous interviews with people in the company. Perhaps you could take a minute from your patronising and inccurate ranting to read this interview with Crytek producer Benrn Diemer? (They even made a PC this time around so people would feel more comfortable in the requirements and could actually buy it to play the game on.) http://www.shacknews.com/featuredart...?id=999&page=2

Bernd Diemer: We want to cover [the high-end], but in Crysis, looking back, the focus was a bit off. Because we from the beginning focused on the highest range, and then over the development we scaled it back.
So what we did here [with Warhead] was focus on the mid-range, on the High setting. Not medium, but High. We're Crytek, so it's not Medium, it's High. [laughs] So then we scaled it up, and we said, "This is running, so now crank it on."
For us that's a different way of focusing on things, you're right about that. And that's one of the things we took from Crysis, that we have to focus on this as well.

Everything was set to "low"? So basically you sacrificed all the Dx10 content, high resolution textures, particle effects, HDR lighting. etc etc. and it looked awesome? Yeah of course it did. I know you are new here but here is a tip, the membership on DH are tech savvy, intelligent people who expect their brand new video card to play the latest game without compromising on all the IQ.

All the rest of your comments are so ridiculous I can't bring myself to waste a further five minutes pointing out how stupid you are.

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BlueMak

So Warhead has a DRM limit on activations?

As for the rest of the post, just three questions to you. 1)Do you work for Crytek? 2)For a game that is all about the graphics and nothing more (everything else is at best average for a modern FPS), why do you consider to be stupid to badmouth a game that fails to deliver the experience promised to the vast vast majority of gaming systems out there? 3)Everything on low on at best passable frame rates and on a 24" monitor and it still looked good...do you consider TerraWars as a good looking game?

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

Papoulka

So... did you high-end graphics afficionados simply not play Crysis, because you couldn't "turn it up to 11"? And you must be the two or three gamers who moved to Vista, since you're bitching about "very high" i.e. DX10 performance being too slow.

Bullshit. You're just whining because Crytek did not somehow, magically, enable YOUR hardware to produce the photorealism of which their engine is ultimately capable. The fact that no other developer even tried to do this continues to escape you.

Last November, an honest reviewer could say "This game runs well and looks good on any modern gamer PC. To run it at high settings will require very good equipment. To run it at the highest quality the engine can deliver will not be possible for another eight months". Now, how is that a problem?

Crysis was easily the best single-player FPS since UT99, and possibly the best ever. All the production values were above top-notch i.e. it truly did raise the bar. As well, the concept and storyline were strong and well-realized. I agree with most that the game's second half was not as excellent as the first, but even averaging the two there is no competition within memory. Great graphics, great AI, great sound, wonderful detail, seamless integration of the parts... what more do you expect!? Of course there are imperfections, and five years from now it will look like a cartoon. But what matters is how much better Crysis was and is than anything else now available.

The obvious question is: if Crysis was an unplayable slide-show for all you elitists, what did you run instead? Heavily hyped and equally expensive but greatly inferior titles like Bioshock, Hellgate London, and Lost Planet? Not for long, I bet. The most respectable alternative is UT3. But, though I have loved UT and the Unreal engine is excellent, its game concept is out of steam.

Crytek may well say that they spent too much time on the high-end graphics, especially considering how they've been rewarded for providing it: lower sales because of thoughtless, pack-mentality criticism from people who might have been happy if only the graphics settings had been labeled "Great", "Greater" etc up to "Next-Gen". Because that's what Crytek gave us. They even managed to synthesize some DX10 effects in DX9, only to be castigated for that too (!!) as in this thread right here.

Yes, Crysis looked good and played well at 960x600 on a 24" display, all settings "low", on an end-of-life PC. I *didn't* say it was awesome - but why bother to quote people accuratel? Some long-range info was lost but this rarely if ever mattered to the gameplay. I'm not talking about screenshots, though even low-res Crysis pix are striking. I'm talking active, involved FPS play in a marvelous environment.

This summer I went ahead and built a 3.8GHz QX9650 rig with XF 4850s. This runs Crysis smoothly at 1920 x 1200 and tweaked DX9 / pseudo-DX10 settings. I built this partly because I love computer graphics and needed to move up; but the new hardware didn't make that much difference in Crysis gameplay. That's because the game is so good already, and you are often very busy. Sure the leaves had more detail, but it was hard to focus on them when they were being whipped by machine-gun bullets which then went on to kick up individual sand and water plumes in the beach behind me - with a very realistic combination of sounds. Terrific!

No, I don't work for Crytek and am glad of it. That would be a thankless job. But they are clearly the premier FPS studio. They did *everything* better both in Far Cry and in Crysis. And it looks like Warhead will continue to demonstrate this skill and commitment. I bought Crysis at launch and would do the same with Warhead except that I've heard EA's DRM requires activations and moreover is limited to three. If true, this is a big problem and I want to know more about it.

I also want to hope that Far Cry 2 will be another Crysis, and am ready to spread my undiscerning, gullible fanboy enthusiasm to that camp if so. But the Dunia engine is first-gen, and I doubt that Ubisoft's ad hoc design team can really produce something as well-crafted as Crytek is practiced at delivering.

One thing's for sure: no studio is going to push the envelope again soon. For that we can thank the kind of worse-than-ignorant Crysis-bashing statements I complained about here in the first place.

Papoulka

OmegaRED

I dunno about that...

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BlueMak

Well, that settles it then. Crysis is the best FPS out there.

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The people who are regarded as moral luminaries are those who forego ordinary pleasures themselves and find compensation in interfering with the pleasures of others(Bertrand Russell)"You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a veil,You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them." - Lt. Gen. James N. Mattis
This is slavery, not to speak one's thought. [Euripides-The Phoenician Women (c.411-409 B.C.)] http://www.macedonia.info/FALLACIESANDFACTS.htm Sic semper tyrannis.

brutusmaximus

Man you are so clever, the Spinal Tap reference is just so relevant with Crysis ! Two or three gamers who moved to Vista? So basically what you are saying is that you not only played the game on "low" but you ran it on XP so you haven't even seen most of the graphic effects? Anyone with half a brain already knows that the big problem with Crysis was that the graphical hit wasn't really worth it , because the game was distinctly average.

Hey, you are the dood who played it on low, I don't think photorealism is even a question ! Its really difficult for you to argue a point when you haven't actually got high end hardware, didnt play it on anything but the worst IQ settings and didn't even attempt to use DX10.

All I can say, is thank god you aren't a reviewer, otherwise Crysis would have scored 100 in everything and hundreds of thousands of gamers would have been wondering exactly what you were smoking.

lol

I guess its my fault because I didnt run it on LOW on XP. Obviously im missing the ultimate gaming experience here. I actually ran the game last night on LOW to see what you were referencing. It looks like something 5 or 6 years old. Clearly you just haven't a clue about graphics technology which is quite confusing as you seem to be referencing it all the time when you haven't actually experienced it.

Awesome ! did you see them on the lowest settings?

Dood, seriously. Do I need to respond to this? that resolution wouldnt look good on a 15 inch screen nevermind a 24 inch screen.

Hey, I had to quote this last one, because its the first worthwhile thing you have said since you joined here. Welcome to DriverHeaven, have a poke around the graphics forums and reviews forums, quite a lot of educational stuff you are clearly in need of learning.

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macbiter

Best game ever? eh? I beat it and thought the single player campaign was inferior to Farcry, and im not talking about graphics, just the core game design.

Graphically I quite liked crysis but it was clearly in need of optimsations which im glad to see by the Gamingheaven review is something they have done with Warhead.

Who is this new guy? an EA PR rep or something? some insane spouting going on here.

longhorn1000

I was one of the few people who loved the original Crysis. It didn't run great for me and I had double the hardware capabilities of this Papiouka chap! Why on earth would you be happy running something on low resolution on low settings? I find it hard to see how someone can argue "why are people complaining when you can run it on super low resolution with most of the graphical goodness gone?". Im glad we don't have people who think this is ok !

I have preordered Warhead based on the gamingheaven review, I like the fact its been enhanced and improved, which means I should be able to play it without wondering why its stuttering in frame rate all the time.

Vikingod

Papoulka, coming here and bashing people for stating their preference is unacceptable. Your fanaticism makes you sound like a PR rep for EA.

I think there are a fair amount of people that would agree with you, that Crysis was the best ever. Then again, I think there are a fair amount that would equally disagree and say it was an attractive, mediocre-at-best, title which didn't live up to the hype that surrounded it. That hype was at least in part due to the developers claims.

Regardless, the performance issues with the title are very well documented, and the complaints have been justified by Crytek's own staff who said they missed their target market. What comes to mind is Crytek's claims that you could run the title very well, and have it look good on a 3+ year old machine. I think it's pretty obvious in hindsight that these statements were totally BS right from the start. The mark of a good business is the one that realizes that the customer is never wrong, as they (the business) should be trying to cater to those who are buying their product.

Now, lets get back to discussing the GH review please. There are thread in the Gaming Discussion for this sort of talk.

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Erroneus

>_> You are joking right?

Games like Bioshock, Half-life 2 and Deus Ex blows Crysis out of the water.

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MIG-31

I for one who quite like and still enjoy running through crysis but..I am currently waiting for Warhead to arrive...

But as for the point of the Best Game Ever..It falls short.I personally do not think there is a best game ever no matter who made or produced the game.It simply falls down an individual's preference

But if i was to choose a Best Ever Game (Which i have).I am torn between two games that offer good graphics along with top quality gameplay..

A) Bioshock or B) Call of duty 4 Modern warfare.

PS: Its nothing personal.. Im just my opinion and nothing more.

EDIT: Just finished reading the gh review,Good quality without being biased to me.Makes me a little more eager to play Warhead.

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temeteus82

Yeah there is and I'm keeping my eye on this thread so remember not to start flaming each others on this thread!

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Cannyone

I never bought Crysis. And while I was interested in this game, a recent policy change by EA, has made me decide to boycott all EA published games. Simply put the copy protection they are using limits the number of installs you can perform. And since I don't pirate games, I feel this practice is Unfair.

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