I am not trying to promote Crysis 2… I’ll wait for the reviews like everyone else. (I didn’t actually finish Crysis 1… as beautiful as the game is, I didn’t find it that fun and stopped half way through… twice; after the alien freezes everything).
Anyway, I do love seeing the cutting edge of video game tech as I think it drives most technologies in the computing space, and for the last 5 years it sure has seemed that Crytek is unmatched when it comes to photo-realistic rendering in games.
CLARIFICATION: As pretty as CryENGINE is and as much of an amazing feat it is, I never think graphics replaces gameplay.
I was trolling around for screenshots of Crysis 2 for our last Crysis post, and game across this one:
I had to actually stare at the picture for a while before I could find artifacts that would lead me to believe it was fake (pixelation in the reed’s leaves). Apparently the mod over at Crymod.com (chicken2) has a whole slew of ultra-mega-nature screenshots like these taken from Crysis 1 that are damn near photo-realistic.
Solely from a game-engine-technology point of view, I find it amazing that CryENGINE has been capable of rendering scenes this realistic for almost 4 years and we aren’t really making use of it anywhere besides the Crysis franchise.
Maybe there is something inherently difficult with using CryENGINE, who knows, I just know that the Unreal Engine seems to be the winner (holy shit that is a lot of licensees) right now as it gets licensed for everything from FPS to RPGs to mobile games.
Remember 10 years ago when you thought your brain would explode when games finally “looked like real life?“, I sure as shit do… playing on my 3Dfx Voodoo2, waiting for it to overheat and explode.
Well it looks like that is here, and apparently we don’t really care about it after all… I am sort of sad.
That is not a Crysis 2 screenshot. That’s a Crysis 1 screenshot. It uses the Cryengine 2, which is the engine for Crysis 1. Crysis 2 uses the Cryengine 3, which is a downgrade.