Crytek founder Cevat Yerli is frustrated. When Gamasutra asks him about the fact that Crysis 3 isn't making the same kind of splash as its predecessors, it's obvious that this is a raw topic for him. The original game sits at a 91 Metacritic, while the PC version of the sequel has an 86. As of this writing, Crysis 3 scores a 78 on PC.
This, despite the fact that Yerli tells Gamasutra that the game is "so far, our masterpiece."
"It is better than Crysis 2. It is better than Crysis 1. Technical and creatively, and storytelling -- all aspects," he says.
Even if that's true -- after all, it is, to a great extent, subjective -- the developer anticipated lower ratings this time around. After researching, Crytek found "about 20 games that we analyzed that got hammered, sequels or three-quels, where number two, number three, or number four got significantly lower ratings than the previous iterations."
He lays the blame on two major factors.
One is the current console generation creating "fatigue" in gamers. "Some games have lost up to 20 percent, despite the fact that the games are quite good still," Yerli says. "That's because there's a certain fatigue level with the old generation currently. The markets are down." In his words, "people's expectations are much more radical than the current generation of games are doing."
"I think the new generation of consoles will reinvigorate that and help to elevate that again, and elevate new concepts of gaming which old platforms are right now limiting, too."
He also places some blame on the fact that the original Crysis came to the market "free of any burden."
When it launched in 2007, only on PC, it was released against first-generation Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 games. Thanks to that, "it was so different to others that the relative impact it created was so much more bigger than Crysis 2 or Crysis 3," Yerli says.
And if there's one thing you just can't compete with, it's the subjectivity of human memory. "So, for me, the relative impact that Crysis 3 has created is lower than what Crysis 1 did. But I would think at any level it's better than Crysis 2, and it's certainly still better than Crysis 1. People remember Crysis 1 much bigger than it was, because it had a high impact," Yerli says.
He notes that Crysis 3 has triple the budget of the original game in the franchise -- a budget it can only get thanks to the fact that it's multiplatform. But that creates limitations.
"The consoles are eight year old devices. Of course, in one way or another, they will limit you. It's impossible not to be limited by a limited console. By definition it's the case. So if it were PC only, could we have done more things? Certainly, yes. Could we have afforded a budget to make a game like Crysis 3 PC only? No. People have to understand that this is a journey of give and take."
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In my opinion, Crysis 2 was technically better than Crysis 1, but the feel of Crysis 1 was right.
Or maybe it's everything else that people are mentioning in the comments below ><
Edit: And I agree with your statement about "better" with regards to controls, UI, and complexity of elements, simply because of keyboard/mouse.
The PC see's the worst of this effect because it has the largest game library.
Crysis 1 is leagues better than 2 or 3. And 3 is the worst.
It is in fact one of the worst games I have ever played. The narrative is beyond vapid, inane and attempting forced drama. The dialog is some of the worst written and executed in a video game. The gameplay is not only boring, but formulaic and repetitive ála "enter new area, kill or evade X amount of guards/aliens" and repeat that over and over with two linear driving sections and a turret carousel as extras. For a whopping six hours that it took to finish.
Also don't talk to me about nostalgia, I played Crysis 1 two months ago, and while it had its faults, compared to Crysis 3 it was a vastly superior experience.
It just goes to prove that no matter how much money you drop into a game, or which tech you use, if the initial idea (story, gameplay elements) is garbage, there's nothing to save you. The idea behind Crysis 3 was insanely constricted by the fact that it had to be published on consoles, thus the tech had to be downgraded significantly (affecting the scope), and it had all of the Call of Duty limitations, which morphed it into a piece of unrecognizable pus-infested garbage of the original Crysis 1 idea that the franchise started with.
Awful, awful game.
Some of the new mechanics in Crysis 3 bring the game down. The bow is completely overpowered. It's far too easy to fall into a pattern of
1. "Cloak Engaged"
2. Kill everyone you see with a silent arrow that doesn't break your cloak
3. Hide in a dark corner until your suit is at full power again
4. Shoot the remaining enemies that stupidly came to stare at their dead friends
5. Collect the arrows from the pile of death you created so that you can do it all over again
6. Move to the checkpoint - repeating steps 1 and 3 as necessary.
Playing through the game feels too much like I'm playing through Crysis 2 with a bigger advantage than I need. It feels less innovative to me than the most recent Call of Duty. THAT's why it isn't seeing high marks. Blaming it on fatigue with the console is disingenuous. The problem is the design, not the hardware.
But when you compare it to Crysis 1 or warhead Crysis 2 just feels too simplified. I mean don't get me wrong, they did an amazing job streamlining a ton of control options from Crysis 1 and make you feel really mobile/agile (climbing up walls, peaking over cover, etc), but the level design just isn't nearly as good. Also by getting rid of super speed the game felt a lot slower (something I was really hoping Crysis 3 would add back in but it seems like it didn't) and less engaging.
I think the super armor mode just made the game a lot "dumber." Instead of having to use all of your powers constantly to not die and outmaneuver and confuse your enemies, you can just go cloak for a bit and kill the designated "stealth kill these guys" enemies (you always open a door and they are just standing there with their back to you) and then the gameplay turns into "pop out of cover with armor mode on and shoot guys for a bit, then go back into cover until energy recharges." Instead of being able to mix in speed and strength more (strength is pretty much limited to JUST some high jumps in C2 because things like kicking cars or the power drop are so underpowered), you only have 2 "active" abilities in the game now.
I was hoping C3 would add more powers to the game (or at least re-add super speed) and have larger environments (which I've read the game actually does for a few levels), and fix the broken AI. I'm interested in playing the game still even if the bow sounds way too overpowered (being able to shoot while cloaked seems to go against the core design philosophy of Crysis), although I can't since my PC only has a DX10 card I'll have to wait a while until I decide to get a DX11 card to play the game (even though I am able to play Far Cry 3 and Crysis 2 on my PC and have it run and look better than the console versions).
The developer of Crysis does not want the user to focus on the stuff that matters, they want us to focus on the tech the game is built upon to make the input and surrounding lead-by-the-hand sandbox levels fell more believable.
The game is a PC game and yet the argument of the developer is ""fatigue" in gamers..."because of "old generation currently." So his point is that if they had more then it would have scored better because of the more. Not the fact that the righting was bad, they didn't push the right story structures, they could have made some elements gel more. No no its because they didn't have more tech because the gamer is getting tired of the PC level graphical fidelity we are able to push with our engine.
Don't they understand that they are just pushing concepts around that have been in gaming for generations now. The only achievement they made is visuals, and a every step of the way all they have done to market their game is to remind us of how little gamers are because the engine won't even run at full settings on the latest PC.
anyway spot-on comparison to the two judge dredds AW!
I see Crysis 3 as a expansive advertisment for the amazing engine.
No matter how great your graphics are, it is the gameplay that is more important.
That's why I've sunk in more than 25 hours in the amazing FTL game (made by two folks) and have no interest at all at getting Crysis 3. I'm all standard FPS-design'ed out; I'm sure many gamers feel the same way.
It would be an incredible experiment for a gaming company to double or triple the budget for AI programming say, instead of focusing solely on graphics. Now that would be innovative and catch my interest.
When I look back on some other gaming trilogies of the last 5 years: Mass Effect, Assassins Creed, Dead Space, Gears of War, Modern Warfare, Battlefield they are definitively playing their cards well. Even if other companies catched up at the technical side in my opinion they defended their graphical throne. And besides Battlefield there is also no better sounddepartment than cryteks.
That might not mean much to the average gamer or the overanalyzing gamecritic that kind of adapts his expectations and is somewhat disappointed that not every other game can give him the gamegasm he so wildly feels entitled to, but after seeing that even the movie industry manages to constantly mess up their output with every soulless sequel they add to their Blockbuster-franchises (Transformers, Matrix, Alien/Prometheus, Resident Evil, Die Hard) I am far from taking Quality-time with any AAA-product for granted.
I am also holding my breath for Bioshock:Infinite, Watchdogs and Remember me. 3 new formulas that could either turn out very well or implode on arrival.
Sequels make a promise: we the developers really do understand what you liked about the first game, and we're going to give you that again, only better. Gamer assessments of a sequel are largely a measure of whether they thought the game kept that promise.
A reasonable case can be made -- not just an infantile "Gimme!" reaction, or a charge of gamer "fatigue" -- that the second and third games in the Crysis series did not deliver what made the first one so much fun. Maybe it was a designer failure to understand what made the original Crysis distinctively enjoyable. Maybe Crytek did understand but (as Yerli suggests) couldn't do it because of the technical limitations imposed by their deliberate choice to limit the design to what consoles could handle.
Either possibility is interesting to the designer or critic, and worth discussing, but reasons are irrelevant to the gamer who can see by simply playing a sequel whether the first game's promise was kept or not. When the spark of greatness is missing, gamers feel the loss, and the sales numbers and critical scores reflect that feeling.
I don't think that deserves to be dismissed as simple entitlement complaints. There is a substantive and responsible criticism being offered regarding the Crysis series of games. That's a discussion developers should want to have if they care about figuring out how to make their games more fun for more people.
And with Yerli saying elsewhere today that the future is "online singleplayer" he certainly doesn't give me hope he will continue to serve my market, which is purely offline singleplayer escape-from-the-world gaming.
The 2nd was fun too at first but honestly I just got bored fairly quickly. Most sp fps games do that to me now though.
I think Crysis on the pc was perhaps the last sp fps game I enjoyed.
Thus 78/100 becomes a horrible mark. Slap sequel on it, and you are asking for trouble. People see $60 for a sequel as paying for more of the same. Most times they are right. But what do I know? Keep ignoring me and ponder some deeper hidden reason that seems to elude the market.
Yerli is definitively not complaining about sales numbers or fan reaction, crysis 3 holds 3 of the top five global chart ranks.
Btw crysis 2 sold 3 million copies vs. Crysis`700K, so while it might have been a more innovative game at the time it launched it surely was not more successful.
You`re welcome.
http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=Crysis
That's not to say that Yerli doesn't talk a lot of rubbish - he's got one of the biggest mouths in gaming, and sometimes puts Peter Molyneux to shame - but in this case he's highlighting something that's well worth thinking about.
Crytek treats the first-person perspective like gold. Fully rendered first-person body parts and animations that put "floating torso" FPS treatment (i.e., CoD) to shame. I give them full credit on that level. They make the perspective feel very good.
The transition to console for C2 and C3 (didn't play 3 yet, but over-the-shoulder watched for a few hours) resulted in experiences that are a tad more linear, with less player creativity encouraged -- despite some of the multi-solution, set-piece awesomeness and entertaining Nanosuit shenanigans.
I still think Crytek is a damn fine FPS studio, and we'll see greatness from them again in the future, whether it's this genre or another (perhaps the next-gen Kinect brawler for Microsoft).
id software did a remarkable job with Rage, and it's still a FPS after all. Changing the setting can seem so much, but that won't change gameplay a bit to not at all.
You have to make games for the general audience now. I get that. But, you deliberately tried to capture the audience and lost track of what you did well in the first place.
Anyway, Crysis has always been a game made by technology junkies with little design or art sense. Just look at the ridiculous suit.
Armor:
As a player, I just don't feel like I'm that badass dude in his battlesuit. And personally, I don't think the suit looks badass either and maybe it's time to redesign it.
Armor abilities:
The two main armor abilities just aren't much satisfying to use or meaningful either. Both are just small variations of what already exists; life resistance and visibility, so really nothing special. However, I think it was a step in the right direction to add superjump, slide, ground stomp or to take someone as humanshield and throw him far away.
Aim down sight:
Crysis is a visually stunning franchise, but it's also a FPS game. The overrated aim down sight gameplay slows down the action, prevents the player from looking at those amazing graphics and just isn't as satisfying as shooting from the hip that allows the player to fully see the weapon in action, the powerful recoil, etc.
Multiplayer:
When players are supposed to play dudes in badass battlesuits, it ends up feeling like another Call of Duty game. Players die quickly (and still they have that badass armor that doesn't help them much, right?) and there are weapons such as the bow that can kill in one shot. At the top of that, there is a radar that makes things more casual and the 2 armor abilities that completely break up the game.
No surprise why a lot of experienced FPS players still prefer to play Quake or Counter-Strike over many recent FPS games. It seems like game developers lost their touch when it comes to create satisfying FPS gameplay experiences. Crysis 3 is just one case among many others.
I can't see why we, as consumers, should care about the fact that Crysis 3 was made with triple the budget of Crysis 1. To me it speaks volumes of the design process. Mostly that it happened with expectations to ride the success of previous titles and basically revolved around a discussion of which technical features/mechanics should be added/removed in order to retain/attract buyers (a technical process compared to a creative one). Did Crysis 1 really need a sequel, did Crysis 2??
No, it's not.
And I enjoyed Crysis 3.