Crysis Multiplayer Beta Impressions

Graphics

Hmm. Now we come to graphics – an area I’m sure you all want to know about but which I am frankly worried to talk about. The graphics are the one area of Crysis which have previously been above and beyond question and the general consensus has been that if you don’t think they are more beautiful than life itself then you’ll have to hand in your official geek uniform and name tag.

Our standard gaming rig defaulted to medium on the game's settings. There’s been a lot of rumours going around that the game always defaults to low, but those rumours are wrong. I think that’s something which has sprung from the fact that most people don’t have a sufficiently powerful PC. That’s an idea Richard seems to agree with at least, seeing how he took over the game at one point to bitch at one beta player who was whining about the performance.

Even on medium our system struggled a bit though and, just so you know, this isn’t exactly a weak PC. It’s the system I use to test all my games on – 2GB of RAM and an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTS 640MB. In the end I had to take advantage of Tim being away at IDF and I stole one of his 8800 Ultras in order to play the game – but even then the framerate was still woefully low.


Being reckless, I pushed the settings up to high anyway. See all the screenshots in this article? They were all taken on the highest setting possible. The beta prevents players from pushing up to the Very High mode and doesn’t let anybody use DX10 at all, just so you know. Our average framerate was, according to FRAPS, in the low teens.

When I first started playing the game I was utterly bowled over just like everyone else in the office was. The multiplayer obviously scales back on a number of fronts and you shouldn’t expect to see destructible trees anywhere in the level, but it still looks gorgeous. There was a number of sweet little effects which really helped the game to feel immersive, such as the way water dried off the screen when you come out of the water, an effect done so beautifully that it puts even BioShock to shame.

Still, even with anti-aliasing on full the game still looked rather jagged and sharp for our liking and there were a few clipping problems we spotted when we ran through the bushes.

That said though, it has to be pointed out again that at this point the game is still in beta and it isn’t really fair to judge the graphics and gameplay performance on this current build. It’s actually fairly typical for beta builds to be much more of a resource hog and far less polished than the final retail release because the code is not fully optimised quite yet. That’s why we’re not doing a full graphical breakdown of what users can expect from high, medium and low settings.

There were also a few effects in the game which divided opinion quite starkly – especially motion blur and depth of field. On the high setting both of these elements come into full force and even turning on the spot slightly gives you a huge jolt of motion blur to cope with. Even when Richard was just watching me play the game he still found it nauseating.

Rounding Up...

So, is Crysis the next best thing or a just a very pretty but still dead fish floating in the vast and ever-changing ocean of PC games? The chances are you’ve already made up your mind on the issue, but you still came here and read this far in order to hear my thoughts so you’ll still have to sit down and listen. Or read. Whatever.

The problem with Crysis as far as I can see is that it may be perilously close to falling into the same trap as Far Cry – ending up a gorgeous game with some very interesting gameplay elements, but still marred on a few basic issues. The short ten hour length of the singleplayer game and the quick movement between the jungle, frozen island and spaceship environments may just be a saving grace for the singleplayer game if rumours are to be believed.

With the multiplayer though, the gameplay still feels a little confused and broken. Wonky physics and performance issues are easily forgiven in a beta version, but the actual premise and the design of the power struggle mode is still something I’d call into question. Even the gamemodes themselves could change as the game moves from beta to gold status and if you’re one of the few people who’s genuinely confused about whether or not Crysis will live up to the hype then you’re going to have to hold on and wait until you can get a taste of the game.

Don’t worry though – it’s not long now.