So I started playing Crysis 1 again...

Flammablezeus

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I loved the first one when I got used to the suit shortcuts to use your powers without manually switching. I also loved the cloak a lot more, as it felt less cheap and broken than in 2 and actually required you to be smart about how you play.

I did also love the little things, like speed mode increasing your normal speed and reload speed, while strength mode stabilised your shots and made you throw things further.

The openness and interactivity of the levels is something I also really miss and thought would become standard. It kind of reminded me of Goldeneye in a way, how you'd be given an open level and a bunch of objectives and then get left to your own devices. That's something that really does need to make a comeback.
 

Evonisia

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Glad you liked it, I remember enjoying it a bit.

My biggest issue with Crysis is that it felt a little less organic than FarCry 1 does (FC1, incidentally, is my favourite game so I am teh bias). For instance you never actually have to use vehicles in FarCry 1 and thank fuck for that because I've yet to play a "Cry" game that had vehicles that were tolerable. I also prefer the Trigens and find their goofy story somewhat engaging, something I can't really say for the aliens. Plus nostalgia, man, I go back to it every year at least once (though I don't think I'll revisit the 360 port every year).
 

Ambient_Malice

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Evonisia said:
I also prefer the Trigens and find their goofy story somewhat engaging, something I can't really say for the aliens.
Far Cry was originally supposed to be about aliens invading Earth and using resurrected dinosaurs to do the job.
 

rvbnut

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Guy from the 80 said:
I loved Crysis, right until the aliens appeared.
Same. Every time I replay Crysis, once I get up to that point; I stop playing right there.
 

Morgoth780

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rvbnut said:
Guy from the 80 said:
I loved Crysis, right until the aliens appeared.
Same. Every time I replay Crysis, once I get up to that point; I stop playing right there.
That seems to be a very common complaint.

Asclepion said:
So the Ceph exterminate the human race, right?

The series doesn't do some kind of stupid "This is the leader Ceph, if you kill it all of the other ones die" Deus Ex Machina, right?
I'm certainly not going to argue that the narrative was top notch. It definitely isn't a game you play if you want a good story. However, I think the characters and story were both "good enough" in that they interested me enough to keep playing. That is how I generally decide whether a story is "sufficient." With Mass Effect, for example, I'm not sure if it's because I'm playing the trilogy in succession or if I just don't care about the story anymore, but in ME3 I'm having trouble getting through it since I'm not finding the story interesting. Although the whole war assets thing I'm finding kind of off putting as well.

Ambient_Malice said:
I dislike how Crysis 2 is considered a "CoD clone" when it doesn't resemble Call of Duty in any meaningful way, unless you count Advanced Warfare.

>Bullet sponge enemies with advanced AI.
>Open urban levels with very little "you didn't keep up - you're dead".
>Plus the... almost total lack of resemblance to CoD.

Then there's Crysis 3, which returned to more open environments, yet C1 fanbois still weren't happy.

You want an example of an FPS series which was actually dumbed down?

Far Cry. First Ubisoft turned Crytek's Far Cry into the super linear, yet somewhat decent, Far Cry: Instincts. Then they progressively turned Far Cry into an FPS Assassin's Creed collectathon with Far Cry 2, 3, and 4.

Crysis 2 and 3 still play more or less like Crysis. The biggest difference is a change in setting. But, to be fair, C2 and C3 are quite determined to nerf the nanosuit. The games do it both mechanically and narratively. In C2, your nanosuit fails repeatedly. In C3, your nanosuit makes you vulnerable to Alpha Ceph influence. Crysis 3's dramatic climax in space emphasises the relative unimportance of the nanosuits.

edit:
Also, what's with the revisionism when it comes to Far Cry and Crysis? Neither game was actually "open". You want an "open" FPS where you run around shooting trees in half? Try something like Delta Force. Crysis, like Far Cry, was a series of open areas connected by strictly linear segments. Far Cry had one or two levels which were indeed quite "open", though, to be fair. But a majority are just disguised corridors.
C2 did make a number of changes that brought it closer to CoD. The maps were definitely more enclosed and linear, and there are less open spaces. I'm not saying that C2 is a bad game, I think it's just a let down for a variety of reasons. It didn't resolve the cliff hanger at the end of the first Crysis, it almost could have been the first game of a series on its own entirely. It dumbed down the use of the nanosuit, which is part of what made the first Crysis so fun in my opinion. Just, in general, although it fixed some of the problems Crysis 1 had (being limited by enemy weapon pickups in terms of weapon use, aliens that cause a difficulty spike), which is definitely good, it also threw away part of what made the first game so good. I'd agree that Crysis 1 is pretty linear in terms of objectives, but there are generally speaking a lot of ways to travel from objective to objective. You want to take a vehicle? You can do that. Run? You can do that? Swim part of the way? You can do that.

It's certainly not an open world game, but the variety of ways to approach objectives combined with the nanosuit powers encouraged creativity. Or just abusing cloak, if that's your thing.

Smooth Operator said:
Well I also loved it at the time, but then as I described it back to people I realized the parts that were great came down to the engine. Everything else content wise was average, but pretty looking.

I guess for the Halo/CoD generation this series must look like it has descended from heaven itself, but again I played shooters before that and Crysis even with it's improvements on the simplistic FPS formula is still severely lacking.
What older shooters would you recommend, specifically?

shrekfan246 said:
Adam Jensen said:
I love Crysis 1 and Warhead. A lot of people dismissed that game as just a game with good graphics. Like that means it can't have good gameplay. And it does. Crysis literally has most things that gamers want out of a modern shooter, so dismissing it as a dumb shooter is quite frankly dishonest rambling of a hater. I understand the criticism towards later parts of the game when aliens show up, but I enjoyed those parts as well.

Crysis 2 and 3 suffered from obvious dumbing down for consoles. And yes, that's the correct word to use. The game wasn't streamlined. It wasn't finely tuned and modernized. It was dumbed down. It was turned into something that resembles CoD in almost every aspect.
Okay, I'll bite.

You want to know why I like Crysis 2 and 3 far more than 1 or Warhead?

Because they're more functional as actual games.

By which I mean, sure, the gunplay of Crysis is good. The variety of weapons and firing modes is really awesome, the variety in how suit functions change the gameplay is awesome, even the variety in enemies isn't that bad. But what really lets it down is the AI, the actual combat and the suit power drain, and the pointlessness of the world they created.

You want to play Crysis like a stealth game? Fuck you, the cloak wears off after one shot, two if you've got a sound suppressor and have toggled single-fire mode. Also, good luck ever getting around the map while cloaked because if you're not crouched or prone then your cloak wears off after about five seconds. Oh yeah, and just to put the cherry on top, we spawn in enemies out of the ether whenever enemies are alerted to your presence. Oh, so hearing that makes you want to go into encounters guns blazing? Fuck you, the armor mode is just the regular health meter from any other first-person shooter, so you'd damn well better be hiding behind cover. Oh yeah, and all of these guys in regular military fatigues can take just the same amount of shots as you if you don't hit them in the head. And if you're incredibly unlucky then getting a headshot won't even kill them in one shot. Oh yeah, and Speed and Power modes are basically useless outside of trying to get around these massive empty maps we've made that have nothing to do in them except for going to the next objective. Oh, and I hope you really love the gorram FY71, because it's the only assault rifle you're going to get any ammo for. Also, good luck with taking out any tanks; you'd best hope you stocked up on RPG ammo. Oh, wait, you can't get more than a few shots per rocket launcher! Hahaha!

Obviously I'm being exaggeratedly abrasive, and I don't want you to take any of that as anything more than overblown and exasperated snark. But Crysis is another one of those games I've tried to go through multiple times and I can just never get through it, while I've played through Crysis 2 twice (once on a higher difficulty, which is pretty rare for me to do) and I finished Crysis 3 pretty much within a week or two after it was released.

I've got nothing against difficult games or even unfair games, but to me Crysis just seems poorly balanced.
Perhaps Crysis 1 requires a bit more player agency than most games. Which you could argue is a bad thing, or a good thing.

I do agree with much of what you said. Perhaps I'm just biased in ignoring much of problems and praising the bits I really enjoyed.
 

Evonisia

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Ambient_Malice said:
Evonisia said:
I also prefer the Trigens and find their goofy story somewhat engaging, something I can't really say for the aliens.
Far Cry was originally supposed to be about aliens invading Earth and using resurrected dinosaurs to do the job.
I think I prefer the way they went with it. FarCry even outside of the Trigens was far too goofy to take seriously, so washing the story in goofy science logic was probably the right thing to do. Plus when the humans start becoming Trigens everything just seems like James Bond on bath salts.

Morgoth780 said:
I do agree with much of what you said. Perhaps I'm just biased in ignoring much of problems and praising the bits I really enjoyed.
It's what I do for FarCry. Love, not hate man.
 

Sixcess

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Morgoth780 said:
rvbnut said:
Guy from the 80 said:
I loved Crysis, right until the aliens appeared.
Same. Every time I replay Crysis, once I get up to that point; I stop playing right there.
That seems to be a very common complaint.
It is and it's one that I share.

The problem isn't that the aliens are difficult, it's that they're boring. The enemy AI goes out the window since they just zerg rush you. Choice of weapon goes out the window since they're ridiculous bullet sponges. Exploration goes out the window because most of the alien sequences are so linear they may as well be on rails.

That's one way that Warhead improves on the original a lot - a better balance of human and alien adversaries, and far less do-this-exactly-this-way-or-die.
 

endtherapture

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Crysis is a quality game. It's so open and interactive in a great way. I spent hours just on the first few levels completing the objectives in different ways. It's brilliant how you can play the game you want, whether it's playing using vehicles, running and gunning or slipping in and out without even being soon.

I remember discovering I could shoot palm trees down to crush enemies, and then throw the palm trees at even more enemies. It was honestly brilliant. The second game was far more linear and had less ways to play through the game, which was why it wasn't as enjoyable.
 

Morgoth780

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Sixcess said:
Morgoth780 said:
rvbnut said:
Guy from the 80 said:
I loved Crysis, right until the aliens appeared.
Same. Every time I replay Crysis, once I get up to that point; I stop playing right there.
That seems to be a very common complaint.
It is and it's one that I share.

The problem isn't that the aliens are difficult, it's that they're boring. The enemy AI goes out the window since they just zerg rush you. Choice of weapon goes out the window since they're ridiculous bullet sponges. Exploration goes out the window because most of the alien sequences are so linear they may as well be on rails.

That's one way that Warhead improves on the original a lot - a better balance of human and alien adversaries, and far less do-this-exactly-this-way-or-die.
So in your opinion the alien section took away the ability to be creative. Which I can understand, and creativity is probably the "spark" so to speak that makes Crysis 1 fun.

endtherapture said:
Crysis is a quality game. It's so open and interactive in a great way. I spent hours just on the first few levels completing the objectives in different ways. It's brilliant how you can play the game you want, whether it's playing using vehicles, running and gunning or slipping in and out without even being soon.

I remember discovering I could shoot palm trees down to crush enemies, and then throw the palm trees at even more enemies. It was honestly brilliant. The second game was far more linear and had less ways to play through the game, which was why it wasn't as enjoyable.
Yeah, I'd very much agree with your statement on 2. I still thought it was a decent game, it just lost the personality that Crysis 1 that made it special.

I honestly hope Crytek doesn't make a Crysis 4. Not because I wouldn't jump all over it and buy it when it got a decent deal, but because I doubt it would live up to the original of the series.

Also, which was better, Crysis 2 or 3? Metacritic (because, you know, Metacritic is an omnipotent, omniscient god and we should all bow down before it) states that generally people preferred Crysis 2 to Crysis 3. Personally, at least when I started Crysis 3, I thought it was better. It had a lot of subtle details I liked, such as the changes to the HUD when you picked up a Ceph weapon. I'm not sure which I liked more though. I will say that although the bow is a bit of a gimmick, I think it's a pretty good implementation. Having different draw weights was nice, although I always used the heavy weight - I don't think you were given enough arrows to justify either of the lighter ones - and the arrows themselves were different and fun to use. Plus, it generally had more open areas than Crysis 2 seemed to have, and generally seemed more similar to Crysis 1 - although still not quite on its level.
 

LetalisK

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I remember liking Crysis 1, then Warhead, then 3, then 2, in that order. I just remember the story in 2 getting really dumb and not getting much better in 3.
 

Alatar The Red

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Crysis 2 and 3 are pretty terrible. They dumbed almost everything down. You can make arguments for the visual direction and enemy variety/coolness factor but the mechanics themselves in the sequels were dumbed down.

The suit modes were mostly taken away to make the game easier and faster to play on a controller. Levels were streamlined, chopped into bits and decreased in size for faster paced shooty-shoot sections as well as resource usage on consoles.

Gun models suddenly got huge for resource usage reasons.

Almost all the plants and jungle was switched to city environments that are much easier on the hardware and don't need much physics work at all to look good.

Destruction physics were pretty much gone as well. In crysis 1 you could break houses, fences, cut down trees, you could even break walls by hitting them in strength mode. In C2 and C3 almost everything is stationary and there's nothing even close to resembling C1's destruction.

shrekfan246 said:
You want to play Crysis like a stealth game? Fuck you, the cloak wears off after one shot, two if you've got a sound suppressor and have toggled single-fire mode. Also, good luck ever getting around the map while cloaked because if you're not crouched or prone then your cloak wears off after about five seconds.
That's the point. The stealth mode / gameplay is working as intended. You're supposed to stealth to get to some hiding place and then pick off enemies one by one with a silenced gun. And when they're about to notice you use stealth again to switch positions. Always pick off people with single head shots.
 

Vivi22

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The Madman said:
It really annoyed me that when Crysis was first released it was overlooked or dismissed by so many people as being just a tech demo game and little more. It wasn't, Crysis was genuinely one of the best games released that year and continues to remain a damned solid fps even years later.
To be fair, they made it really easy for most people to dismiss it as a tech demo when the majority of players couldn't even run it well until a few years after it came out.
 

shrekfan246

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Alatar The Red said:
shrekfan246 said:
You want to play Crysis like a stealth game? Fuck you, the cloak wears off after one shot, two if you've got a sound suppressor and have toggled single-fire mode. Also, good luck ever getting around the map while cloaked because if you're not crouched or prone then your cloak wears off after about five seconds.
That's the point. The stealth mode / gameplay is working as intended. You're supposed to stealth to get to some hiding place and then pick off enemies one by one with a silenced gun. And when they're about to notice you use stealth again to switch positions. Always pick off people with single head shots.
I never said I thought the system was broken.

I implied that I think the way Crysis does it is poorly implemented, and I stated that I think taken as a whole the game is really poorly balanced, but I do believe all of the individual mechanics are pretty solid if taken in a vacuum.
 

Alatar The Red

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Vivi22 said:
To be fair, they made it really easy for most people to dismiss it as a tech demo when the majority of players couldn't even run it well until a few years after it came out.
Crysis 1 actually scaled really well. The game looked better on medium than most 2007 games did on ultra.

The only reason people say that it didn't run well is because its max settings didn't run well until much later when we got the CPU and GPU grunt.

The problem with that line of thought of course is that crysis looked MUCH better than anything else at the time when maxed out so I don't see any reason why anyone would have expected it to run at max settings without some nuclear reactor breathing below your desk.

Graphics in games scaling with time is also quite nice since it creates replayability for games. For many PC gamers crysis 1 was the first game they played for a few hours after getting a new PC. And this continued for years through many upgrade cycles. Having absolutely amazing maxed out graphics that scale a couple of years into the future is great and it's a shame that more games don't do it these days.
 

mistercheese

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I've been playing Crysis 1 recently. The game becomes even more fun when you stop using guns, set the difficulty to delta, and add 'cl_strengthscale = 300' to the difficulty file. There is nothing quite like crashing a car into an outpost, destroying their AA vehicle by punching it into the sea, then destroying the enemy helicopter that arrives by punching physics objects at it. The enemy KPA are commendable for being mostly competent, despite occasionally throwing grenades that don't get past their own cover.

Far cry 3 actually can provide much of the same good gameplay, you just have to ignore all the upgrades and go at it with the guns you find and your own skill. The upgrades only add too many easy solutions to the games challenges (for example, heavy enemies would normally provide supressive fire and require flanking to shoot the back of their heads, but upgrades allow you to just shoot rockets at them, then immediately heal all the damage they dealt). It is also funny when all the characters comment on you having excessive tattoos and guns when you have only the base tattoos and an AK.
 

Magmarock

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Perfect Dark is one of my favorite games of all time. Crysis very much reminds me of it; even how it goes a bit down hill when the aliens appear. And just like Crysis, Perfect Dark was a technical marvel.

I wish more games were like it.
 

Donteatmypanda

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Fond memories I will now share of purchasing my PC specifically for this game... I was not disappointed... Back in the day was restricted to using DX9 which ran at a prickly but suprisingly playable enough framerate on my phenom955be with gtx275 to enjoy the pretty visuals and soak in the by then 2 year old hype. When win 7 came out my framerate improved when using dx10 mode with increased visual effects quality now available for me! I promptly re-completed the game to enjoy the improved photo real visuals that crytek sought to provide me(at a huuuge cost for buyers in 2007 and a handy discount for me in 2009).
For years to come I would dip back in to replay every few months refining my stealthy but increasingly speedier path through the various levels in some cases taking huge driving shortcuts now focusing on speed rather than my patented "have-to-kill-everything-that-moves" tactic that I learned so well from my 90s shooter training background.
Crysis 1 has become an tri-annual holiday for me.
After upgrading my graphics to a GTX570 a number of years ago I found I could now ramp it up to 1080p maxed out settings holding a 35-40fps average taking in the familiar sites (with the additional 'natural lighting mod' that seemed to refine the sunset vistas just photogenically enough to warrant my effort in its installation...)
That feeling of exhilaration when sprinting through level 3 relic using a now familiar combination of throwing, cloaking, shooting, sprinting and driving... I have this down to an artform.
For the first time buyers crysis 1 is a sore memory of disappointment as they had to settle with the now antiquated PC tech of 2007 and a blatant sales product for nvidia and MS, for me, it is my total recall holiday destination made just right for my 2011 3 billion transistor GPU ready to hypnotize me with its calming ocean waves and billowing palm tree vistas... See you on the island...