A tribute to the best looking game ever - Crysis

It's hard to believe Crysis was released almost a decade ago - on 2017 November 13. It's still one of the best looking games even today even without mods not to mention how groundbreaking it was at the time. A true PC game that took risks and was truly impressive. Respect to Crytek.

Even today, it seems, no game can surpass Crysis in each and every aspect graphically. Just to name a few features this game has:
*One of the first game to feature Ambient Occlusion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifdAILHTcZk
*Real geometry 3D ocean with reflaction, refractions, light rainbow, foam effects - you almost want to touch it
*Parallax Occlusion Mapping - cute pebbles!:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOB63M1kHgg
*Real time sun lighting and shadows
*Real 3D volumetric clouds
*Depth of field
*Huge open spaces
*Dense vegetation with physics
*Subsurface scattering - look at the shadows on leafs:
http://i343.photobucket.com/albums/o477/cel08093/myvillagetod.jpg
*Highly detailed characters and faces
*God knows how many other fantastic things!

People called it "unoptimized", maybe, but mostly it was way way ahead of its time. And very scalable settings too, just that everyone wanted to have it all!

 

Impressive for it's time, and for quite some time after that, but wouldn't say it was very impressive by today's standards, I installed it again a while ago and wasn't really excited by how it looked any more (Without mods)

 

The lighting is a bit flat by default though it's impressive what people managed to create with the tools for Crysis 1 even without the later on shader replacements and more in-depth editing.

Just a couple of adjustments to the lighting and you had some really good looking scenes for back in 2006 and the game was also one of the first with ambient occlusion and the texture and model detail was pretty impressive for it's time although some of the environment is a bit low-res without texture packs.

Pretty cool use of physics as well with much of the props in the games various levels being breakable and then there were the physically accurate water system too.


Also one of those games that scaled both up and down where there were actually a significant difference in visual fidelity between the lowest settings and the highest instead of smaller changes to shader complexity or shadow resolution even if those can have pretty noticeable performance impacts in newer games.

Those time-of-day (TOD) art images and custom maps and mods were what really impressed me though although much of it disappeared when the original Crysis mods website was revamped some years back though much of it might still be available.



EDIT: A couple of engine updates later and Ryse really showcased some amazing visual fidelity even if the gameplay was pretty simplistic though well Crysis 2 and Crysis 3 weren't bad either.

As for third party licenses I don't think the engine managed to compete very well against UE3 (And now UE4) although it saw some popularity in for example a number of MMO games.
(I suppose Kingdom Come is a pretty good showcase of what the game engine can do with environments too, well if they ever get that released ha ha.)
(And Star Citizen although it's partially Lumberyard now I believe, Amazons take on Cry-Engine after a licensing deal.)



EDIT: Depends on the game more than the engine but the first Crysis does use more natural looking visuals instead of overdoing it with shader effects and the like though again it's more down to the game rather than the engine.
(Screen-space everything these days with a bit of chromatic aberration added in. )

 

It's starting to show it's age now.

 

Crysis looks better then ARMA 3.. (minus map size of course)

See what I mean. Of course Arma has better textures and geometry (more polygons), but those are like the easiest things to do. Even Battlefield does not always surpass Crysis, but it compensates with many many post process effects..
But here you go


Game from a DECADE ago. Mind boggling

 

Oh look... it's this thread again.

Seriously this seems to pop up every few years. And, really, it's a little sad that the one thing Crysis is remembered for... is it's visuals.
But, yeah, visually it was and (in some ways) still is amazing looking. But, gameplay and story (as I've said before and will anytime it's brought up) were never the game's strong suit.

 

If only Crytek get of their asses and use Cryengine 5.x to make Crysis 4 with all new API goodies, it would be amazing.

Instead they are still making that crappy Hunt game that is delayed couple of times already.

 

Did it come with 4k as an option back then??! I don't recall. or is this vid from some release like those re-mastered games?

anyway, it really does look amazing even today. but...... much as I enjoyed the game I felt it was really buggy, very detached.. like how he punched the alien.. or how the grass looks so amazing but the spare tyre on the ground looks cartoon. hmm..

 

Comparing an Arcade Shooter with Simulation :funny:

 

Gameplay style doesn't mean anything when it comes to comparing two games that are praised for realistic visuals.

 

crysis did look good its just to bad the games it self are boring

i think i put more time in minecraft then i did with crysis to me eyecandy is the last of my worries

 

Crysis was a tech demo. The jungle vegetation and physics are still pretty impressive but everything else about the game is very dated.

Besides the visuals, the gameplay and story was awful.

 

Dont forget that Crysis was the game that destroyed one of the most revolutionary GPU's ever made, the GF8800 series.

So yes, it was more of a benchmarking tool for some and for others it was a game.

 

And I still remember the E3 they were showing Crysis on the floor. Cevat Yerli bragging about it, and claiming people could run it smoothly, maxed on a 8800 GTX.

Then, it came out, people couldn't run it smoothly on said card maxed... and he tried to start making excuses. Then... got incredibly silent.
Sometimes, developers simply put the wrong person up front to talk up a game.

 

I love Crysis, not only for it´s graphics but also for the great gameplay. Yes i really like Crysis as a game, crazy! For me it was much better than most shooters released at the same, like Bioshock and COD4, and i still play it everytime i do a significant upgrade to my system. I´m waiting for my new monitor to install it again and give it another spin despite the fact that i already finished the game several times...

But for me more important than the visual/technical impact, it was the impact that Crysis had in the gaming industry. Crysis pushed the technical boundaries of games at the time and was called a tech demo because of the amazing graphics and because of how demanding the game was in term of hardware. In the end the game was a modest success. Around the same time Nintendo released the Wii with ****ty graphics and the montion controllers, people loved it and it was an huge success. From that point on game makers stopped pushing the envelope regarding graphics and started making games that could run even on weak hardware.
So in a certain way, Crysis marked the end of an era of making PC games as good and demanding as possible replaced by console ports. For good and bad.

 

I liked it too. Not the best game gameplay wise, but far from being worse either. Tank mission was awesome, you had the freedom to either drive a tank or go on foot, toggle invisible, run to the nearby grove and create diversion. It was very fun and tank explosions looked fantastic.
Story...well typical B grade Uwe Boll stuff

 

I enjoy Crysis, it's combat was nothing great... and the AI wasn't nearly as "smart" as people made it out to be.
But, for what it was... it had it's moments of being enjoyable.

Yet, around the middle of the game it completely falls apart.
Once you reach the cave system, from then on the game's pacing is awful. And the gameplay falls apart.
I've spoken on it a lot, yet people always react as if I simply hate the game. Say a game is overrated, you must be saying it's awful.
Which isn't true, a game can be overrated but still be good. And that's where I am. It's good, until it's not... but, Warhead was better.

And, I prefer Crysis 2 and 3 with their more urban setting, better alien designs, and more stylized visual look.

 

for it's time in 2007, the game yes was a groundbreaking one in terms of visuals, but not after 10 years, the vegetation system is good, but it started to show it's age with the character animations and weapon modeling, gameplay is fall completely apart as some people said here, mid way through when u enter the cave or just before. i could still hop in for a while to the game's first level, but that\s it , it lost its charm already and the game wasn't optimized enough as i remember, took a lot of ressources and gets low fps on a rather good hardware, anw the game is not compatible with today hardware, as this was made with core2duo in mind back then.

 

I will give Crysis credit for one thing.
Back when it was released, it still actually ran pretty smoothly even with low frame rates.

 

I think Crysis has aged extremely well. Even today we don't really see the level of destructibility that we see in that game in most first-person shooters, including interactive foliage that actually reacts when you move through it, and the A.I. and physics were definitely ahead of their time.

It's a game I still have installed and load from time to time every time I get a new graphics card to see how it runs compared with to how it ran on my old Athlon64 X2 with an ATI RADEON HD 3850 graphics card (the last AGP card I bought!). I think it ran at something like 15-20 fps at 1024x768! lol