I decided to go ahead and create a Crysis 3 thread and moved my comments from the "What games have you bought recently?" thread. I bought Crysis 3 for PC. I got $20 credit plus the Hunter Edition. I'll probably put that towards Metro: Last Light assuming THQ going under doesn't cause problems with completing it. In general, quantity seems to be down but quality is back up. I'll make that trade any day. The dialogue is still garbage most of the time, but the landscapes are bigger and better, making the gameplay much more interesting. It's definitely not open world, but it is quite a bit more open than Crysis 2, and if you do some exploring, you'll often find important upgrades or collectibles. The bow is a really nice edition. You stay cloaked when you use the bow, so it's quite an asset if you are the stealthy type. You can also retrieve your arrows, meaning you are unlikely to run low on ammo as long as you are careful. A bow is powerful in this game because Prophet in that nanosuit is strong as an ox. The electric arrows are especially useful because they are anti-materiel arrows that can destroy helicopters or machinery, or you can shoot one into the water and fry CELL jackholes that are partially submerged. Exploding arrows can take out armored soldiers and have a nice delayed explosion that can take out a small group with splash damage. I haven't tested the low end, but I get the impression that we are going to get significant improvements with future driver updates and patches. For the GTX 690, which is similar in power to my GTX 670 SLI setup, the latest Nvidia driver update gives you a 65% increase in frames for Crysis 3. I have my doubts that this 65% is the last of the improvements that can be had. I wish they did a bit more testing on these damn games before they ship them. The first level is busted thanks to a weird issue with the ropes swaying in the breeze. When they are moving, they crush the frame rate. If you get it and can't run the opening area with a smooth frame rate, don't panic. The rest of the game should run better than the first level, although it's damn demanding with everything turned up. With everything at Very High and 8x MSAA or TXAA High, you're going to need a goliath of a PC to get anywhere close to 60 fps. I suspect I'll be able to run it with TXAA medium and everything at Very High after some future driver updates and patches. Right now it can still be tough to run in places with the highest settings unless I stay away from the medium to high AA choices. I did test High. It looks very nice. Very High, TXAA High, 1080p until Flickr resized it. Crysis 3 is probably the best looking unmodded game on the market currently, and it's a better game than Crysis 2 in most respects. The controls are still very similar to Crysis 2, but you have more options and much better and more open landscapes. It still clearly needs some fixes, but it's pretty decent. I made a video in an area inside a cave area wading through water that was gorgeous, but unfortunately the settings were wrong and compressed it. I'll put together a few vids when I have time. I hadn't used Afterburner for video capture before and screwed it up.
I'd compare the the size of the areas to decent sized multiplayer maps (not limited to Crysis 3; just a decent sized multiplayer map). Actually, I recognized the swampy area from a Crysis 3 multiplayer map in the Beta. It's certainly not open world, and Crytek will funnel you to certain points for storytelling purposes, but it's not all narrow corridors this time. You typically will find a modestly sized open area that you can run around and explore while you're stealth killing enemies or completing some objective, but eventually it will funnel into a bottleneck point that you have to go through to advance the story, and then it may open up to another modestly sized open area. Or maybe a building or tunnels before it opens up again. It still follows the format of Crysis 2 to a great extent, but you aren't constantly stuck on a very narrow path throughout. I happen to pick a corridor for my picture because nothing was attacking me at that point, and I used that opportunity to mess with the AA settings and take a few pics. There is quite a variety of choices for AA, which includes FXAA or various levels of MSAA, SMAA, or TXAA. 8x MSAA and TXAA High are the beastly settings that are going to give almost anyone problems. FXAA or SMAA Low will probably take care of business for you. I had a similar reaction until I realized the benefits of one of those guys who so strong he can kick cars around with heavy melee putting that strength behind a bow designed for him. You can bolt a CELL soldier to a wall with a full power draw. EDIT: Made a quick video of Crysis 3 on Very High with SMAA.
I put together a video to demonstrate one of the open areas I was talking about. This is one of the larger, more spacious areas I've found so far, so don't misunderstand that every landscape is a huge open map. Usually it isn't. It's closer to Crysis 2 than Crysis 1 in terms of how open it is. Usually it strings small open areas together with a corridor checkpoint of some sort, where you get a new objective, cut scene, or whatever to advance the story, then it typically opens up to another modestly sized open area. This level just happens to be completely open. In this video, I have already eliminated most of the enemies and objectives so I didn't have things attacking me while I was trying to explore the landscape. I may go back to using FRAPS for video capture. Afterburner gets very framey when I turn the capture function on or off.
God damn, that looks awesome. Is that running on the settings you outlined in your first post? Those visuals look like they've certainly raised the bar for quality in the FPS genre. I don't remember the "open" areas of Crysis 2 being as large as that. I know that areas of that scale aren't the norm in Crysis 3, but it's a step in the right direction. Hoping to run this at a steady 60FPS without MSAA but with visuals like that, my rig may struggle. I guess I'll find out early next week. Thanks for uploading the video.
I think I've used Very High for all the graphics settings for my Crysis 3 videos. The only thing that may vary is the AA. I don't recall what AA I was using at the time for that particular video. Probably SMAA low or SMAA medium (which is SMAA + 2x MSAA I believe). I get a very smooth framerate with the lower AA settings the vast majority of the time with everything else cranked to Very High. You won't need to go completely without AA; FXAA is not costly at all and looked much better in this game than most games I've played. FXAA and then SMAA low are the least demanding of all the in-game AA settings. I think some driver updates and patches will be needed before the vast majority of people will be able to use the most demanding AA settings, which are probably 8x MSAA followed by TXAA high. Regarding the other graphics settings, the High settings still look awesome if Very High is too demanding. Someone running Crysis 3 with all High settings with FXAA would probably require far less power than what I'm using. I may put together a video with these settings if I find an area that would be a decent place to showcase.
I've started playing this. It runs fine on medium settings at 1920x1080 with FXAA on my C2Q/GTX460 system. Even on my meager system the graphics are some of the most impressive I've seen, and I'm sure it would look amazing on a high-end PC. @AKS You really need to get an SSD. I'm seeing some nasty load stutter in those videos. You have an awesome system, but the whole thing is being dragged down because your archaic mechanical HDD can't feed it data fast enough.
The frame rate goes bonkers every time I turn the video capture on or off with Afterburner. I'm going to try FRAPS and see if that works better. I've been planning to buy a SSD this year. I assume I'd need to load all my games onto an SSD. How much of a pain in the ass is that process? And I also have quite a few games. Some of them are quite large. It looks like the SSDs around 500 GB in capacity are around the $400 range on newegg currently.
steam lets you choose where to install games now. so you can install the non demanding games on the mechanical hdd and just have windows and the demanding games on the ssd. also steam lets you export games for moving to another drive. it packs them in a directory, along with all of your content (saved games, dlc, etc) and extracts it when and where you choose to. very painless. i'd tell you where to go in the menus to do it, but I'm in Florida right now. just navigate through the menus and you'll find it.
They're worth every penny. Once you try one, you'll never want to use a computer running a standard HDD for the OS and games again. I'd recommend an Intel SSD. They use the best NAND and are the most reliable.
Crysis 3 seems to scale quite well and actually utilize the many cores of AMD's CPUs. I guess their 8-core CPUs aren't altogether awful for gaming if a game actually utilizes all of them. This is easily the best showing I've seen for AMD's flagship CPU, and it happens to be in the best looking game on the market.
Actually, the performance of latest AMD chips have finally caught up with Intel but it's so late in the game no one really noticed or cared.
Yeah, Piledriver is actually decent. I think it's generally about Sandy Bridge level. But it's too little too late. People building PCs for this generation of games have overwhelmingly gone with intel.
No, it's worse. Crysis 2 was better by comparison, and Crysis 1 and Warhead were much better. Wait for Crysis 3 to hit the bargain bin. Anything more than about $10 is too much for this game. It only has 7 missions, and a normal person will finish it in about 7 or 8 hours max. There's about as much content here as Crysis Warhead, except it's nowhere near as good as Warhead. But EA has the balls to charge full price. Thankfully I got it off bittorrent and didn't waste my money. Edit: deleted alterego's stupid trolling thread derail about piracy. Try to stay on topic people.
How can piracy or opinions about the value of the game be "off topic" if you kept your own references to them in the post above?
Because you have no intention of playing the game. You don't even own a PC. You've never played Crysis. You're just using the thread as a soapbox to express your opinions about piracy. There are other threads for that. Stop trolling and threadshitting. Discussing piracy isn't even interesting. It's played out. It's on the caliber of a YouTube comments thread.
All I did is respond to your own value judgement about the price of the game vs. the length of the game. Perfectly valid. You know that I didn't make any comments concerning piracy. I compared the price per hour to theater entertainment, and to PC games from the 1990's. You routinely respond in threads about entertainment or devices that you're not interested in yourself anyway. There obviously isn't some sort of forum rule against it.
What aspect other than quantity was better about Crysis 2? There was no point at any time in Crysis 3 that I found myself wishing it had done something like Crysis 2. Crysis 3 has better landscapes, better combat, better gameplay with the addition of the bow, and better graphics.
It just didn't feel epic or particularly memorable to me. There are parts of Crysis 1 and 2, like the tank battle with the North Koreans, the big showdown on the aircraft carrier, or fighting the giant alien robots in the rain in downtown New York that I'll never forget. I played Crysis 3 a week ago and I'm already having a hard time remembering anything about it. The bow was fun, but it made the gameplay unbalanced and too easy. The story didn't even make any sense and there seemed to be a lot of retconning. Cell was shut down at the end of Crysis 2, but in 3 they control the world. No explanation is given other than some gibberish about "debt slavery" and cheap energy. The only thing Crysis 3 did better than its predecessors was graphics. To me it felt more like an expansion pack or some zany spinoff rather than a real sequel.