Crytek: Past, present and the future - Part 1
Crytek, the developer behind the original Far Cry and Crysis series, with their shiny new Cryengine 3 are developing some of the best looking games this generation.
Crytek landed on the scene with the release of the original Far Cry an action First person shooter on the PC in 2004. Far Cry was published by Ubisoft and got average reviews from the critics but still sold relatively well because of the game’s sandbox nature.
The game showcased some of the best graphics of that time and Crytek suddenly became really popular with gamers because of their beautiful Cryengine. Ubisoft later ported the game with some additional content to the original Xbox and later to the Xbox 360
titled Far Cry: Instincts.
Crytek moved on from Far Cry and in 2007 brought out the smash hit Crysis in partnership with Electronic Arts (EA). Crysis is considered by many as being too graphically advance for its time, as many gamers couldn’t even run it smoothly on medium settings.
But those who could enjoy it in its full glory found that it was leaps beyond anything else out there. Even now the five year old game is often considered for graphic card benchmarking in the PC gaming community.
The game was built on the resource hungry Cryengine 2 and had sandbox game-play with the option for the gamer to go anywhere on the map and the freedom to tackle missions as they saw fit. Players could opt for Stealth, run and gun or a mix it up as they
go along.
The game did well in the market, selling over 3 million copies to date, which is pretty impressive since it’s a PC exclusive shooter. But it was also the most pirated game that year. Crytek estimated that almost 5 million users had downloaded that game off
torrents during the first few months.
Crytek followed that up with an expansion pack called Crysis: Warhead in 2008 which continued the storyline in a brand new campaign mode and addressed many of the issues the fans had with the first game. Mainly optimization issues and some game-play tweaks.
Some of the fans complained that even though Warhead was better optimized and performed better on their rigs, the trade off was in the graphics department since Crysis Warhead did not have the same level of texture detail as that of its predecessor.
In 2011 EA published the long awaited sequel Crysis 2 on PC and Consoles. The sequel was created with the newly developed Cryengine 3 which could support simultaneous cross platform development. Crysis 2 however got slammed hard by the supporters of the
original game since EA was trying to create its own Halo and Call of Duty killer and in the process lost sight of what made Crysis so unique.
Fans complained that Crysis 2 was ‘dumbed-down’ for the console crowd which was true as Electronic Arts was trying to kill two birds (Halo and Call of Duty) with one stone. Crysis 2 went for the linear level design filled with quick time events (QTEs) approach
as opposed to the sandbox which made the first game popular.
Continued in Part 2
DISCLAIMER: The views and the opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not reflect the editorial policy of bettor.com.
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