Crysis Posing Less of a Crisis for Expectant Gamers

For all of you wishing that you had a beastly computer in order to run those fancy schmancy games coming out this year, I have good news. Assuming that one of those titles in your gaming fantasies is Crysis, that is. We here at Gamer Bait have it on good authority that those of you with less-than-wicked systems are still likely candidates for fragging baddies in Crytek's upcoming release of the game. And by good authority, I mean the CEO of Crytek, Cevat Yerli. Determined to make the game playable (likely to be bought) by a larger audience of gamers (consumers) than might be expected, given its much-hyped, DX10-rendered (a.k.a. fascinatingly gorgeous) graphics, Yerli states:

"We developed almost all effects to be very scalable for different hardware specs. Fortunately this is much easier now that we can rely on the existence of hardware shaders. We believe clearly that Crysis will be enjoyed by a large audience that dates back to gamers with two- to three-year-old gaming rigs."

This is good for anyone interested in the game, for a few reasons. Obviously, the first one is that you have a better chance of being able to play the game on your rig, as long as it's not too terribly old. Yes, four years is fairly recent in the grand scheme of things, but a four-year-old computer is a senior citizen when it comes to playing the latest titles. Secondly, more people able to play the game on their systems without upgrading means that more people will actually buy the game. How does that concern you? In the short-term, it means that there will be more people online in multiplayer servers to play against, and more of a variety of servers in general. To some this may not be a major selling point. But I enjoy the multiplayer aspect of a game more than anything else, so the better that experience is, the more I feel I've gotten for my money. In the long-term, strong sales obviously generate more revenue for Crytek. As much as it costs developers to produce a game for us to buy and play, it's definitely a good thing whenever a quality title can make them a great deal of money. EA Games, Crysis' publisher, would really be OK if they didn't sell four million copies (a la HL2), but an innovative dev team like Crytek could always use the scratch.

Yerli offers but one caveat: If your system is DX9-only, try not to look at your friend's DX10-rendered display at the next LAN.

"We work hard to give everyone a great experience. You should not miss anything when [only] playing it on DX9, but if you get a chance to play it on DX10 you might [miss the fidelity when going back to DX9]."

Yerli also says that Crytek's "strong connections" with Nvidia, Intel, and Microsoft have played a large part in lessening the stress involved with adapting the game to the latest technological advancements in the computer industry. Crysis is going to be branded as part of the Games for Windows marketing push, and he goes on to say that Crytek will very likely make a move towards becoming a Vista-only development team in the future..."but that’s not 100 percent decided yet". That's fine, whatever. Just come out with Crysis already!

- Glock