Crytek: We want to ensure same experience on all platforms; PC players want “Crysis only on PC”

PC gamers are overprotective of their franchises, says Crytek’s Rasmus Højengaard. He mentioned in an interview that PC gamers wanted the Crysis IP only on the PC.

He also assured them that the PC version of Crysis 3 will ship with a lot of high-end graphical features.

“PC players, fundamentally only want Crysis to be on PC, right? And, you know, that’s kind of understandable when you consider how the original game – and even Crytek itself – started out,” he said to Spong.

“But, we’re definitely pushing this game a lot from a visual standpoint, and for sure there’s going to be visual goodies in it that you can only get if you have a super-high-end PC.

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“At the same time, we want to ensure if you don’t have a super-high-end PC, the game will still look amazing. On top of that, we want to make sure the experience is not different from platform to platform,” he added.

He also mentioned that the challenges to push hardware these days are a lot more difficult compared to 2007-08.

“The challenges nowadays are a little bit different, to be honest. Five, maybe eight years ago, the challenges developers faced were rather broad,” he said.

“Now, the challenges are more specific in terms of technical features. Can you do area-based soft shadows? Ray-traced area lights? Bounce lights? All this memory-heavy stuff that build up the subtleties of photo-realism – these are the things that take up all the computational cycles.

“And it’s not like we have a little switch where can you flick this sort of stuff on and off. It all takes a lot of resources from either the CPU, or the graphics memory. So it’s a different world now with different challenges than there was five years ago.”

I wrote an editorial recently describing what exactly is wrong with Crytek nowadays, and the point I’m trying to make here is that the Crysis IP is fast becoming irrelevant after the poor performance of Crysis 2 commercially, and considering the indifferent reception to Crysis 3’s gameplay trailer — this approach of putting games on all platforms may backfire on them soon.

“They will also be unable to make other studios adopt the CryEngine 3 en masse, unless it can match the new Unreal Engine in cost and features. Believe it or not, Crytek is headed for irrelevancy and they don’t have much time to change it around…”

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