"Maximum strength, Maximum armour, Maximum speed" To PC gamers in the late 2000s, these words were the credo of a futuristic first-person shooter unlike anything else around it Crysis Developed by Frankfurt based developer Crytek, Crysis dazzled the industry with its gorgeous graphics and open-ended gameplay, which encouraged players to make the most of both their own innate abilities and the environment around them It was an uneven experience, one whose final third betrayed its strongest ideas Yet it was one that found its way into the heart of many a player, and within a year following its release it would be complemented by Crysis warhead, an expansion in some ways even stronger than the base game itself But as the years passed, Crytek would gradually migrate the franchise to home consoles, reinventing this series to better suit its new platforms for Crysis 2 The same time and effort that had gone into making the first game was there - and then some - but it lacked much of what made its predecessor special. A third entry, Crysis 3, would make an earnest effort to address players' complaints and bridge the two disparate directions the series had driven in, but the moment had passed and players had moved on. This is the rise and fall of Crysis Subbed by Jordan Kan [speaking German(?)] The story of Crysis begins in the late 1990s Cevat Yerli, an avid lover of games from Coburg Germany, had spent his early adulthood roping in his brothers and a collection of skilled developers from around the world to create video games Banding themselves together under the name Crytek with Cevat at the helm, the fledgling German studio would remain in obscurity until May of 1999, when the Yerli brothers would take a trip to the United States to showcase their work at the Electronic Entertainment Expo After struggling to gain other attendees' attention, Cevat convinced graphics card maker Nvidia to showcase one of their demos at their booth right as the E3 floor closed to the general public It would be all that they needed. The demo, titled "Exiled Dinosaur Island" was a technical marvel Where other 3D games of the same era struggled to render large viewing distances, let alone fill them with many graphically intensive objects, "Exile" showcased a vast virtual island that sprawled into the horizon populated with hundreds of trees, roaming dinosaurs, and pools of water that reflected a setting sun Deeply impressed with the nascent development studios technical prowess, Nvidia would sign a deal with Crytek to ship Exile as benchmarking software for its newly introduced GeForce graphics cards the following year Inspired by its newfound fame, Crytek would begin development of an ambitious first-person shooter called Angelus Elaborate in scope, Angelus would be showcased behind closed doors at E3 and publicly at the European computer tradeshow in 2000, before ultimately being cancelled with the game's former lead designer Brian J Odette blaming the project's shuddering on Crytek's then lack of experience Nonetheless, Crytek's work on Angelus would help it to secure a deal with Ubisoft to turn their original Exile demo into a full-fledged game that Ubisoft would publish Crytek would thus spend the next several years reinventing its breakout demo, dropping both its giant lizards and peaceful atmosphere in favour of mutants and turmoil, and developing a custom-made video game engine called CryEngine that it would run on to make it look even more beautiful Dinosaur island was out, and in its place was a first-person shooter called Far Cry "Your way inside the compound is about as clear as it's going to get, oh and one more thing: when that nuke detonates it could cause all sorts of strange things to happen." Released in March of 2004 for the PC, Far Cry follows Jack Carver, an ex-Special Forces soldier who finds himself stranded on a Micronesian Island embroiled in a war between mercenaries and genetically altered beasts known as the Tri Gens Much like Exile, Far Cry is graphically impressive for the time in which it was released, featuring massive tropical environments covered in lush foliage Gameplay-wise however, the title is uneven. Far Cry's vast open spaces afford the player a wide degree of freedom allowing them to approach each area using a variety of different tactics Whether in a stolen car or on foot running in guns blazing or sniping at enemies while cloaked by the islands greenery, Jack Carver can act with a level of flexibility unseen in most other contemporaneous shooters However, the game also features multiple indoor segments that revert to a much more linear and narrow design, doing away with much of what makes the rest of the experience special Regardless, Far Cry would prove to be a massive critical and commercial success, establishing Crytek's reputation as a highly competent first-person shooter and game engine developer But instead of immediately following up with a sequel, Crytek would hold back The studio was eager to iterate on Far Cry's design, feeling that the specific circumstances of the game's development had impaired its ability to fully realize its potential But Crytek was concerned that if the studio's next game was just a sequel, it might be perceived as a one-trick pony As a result, Crytek would hand off the Far Cry series license to Ubisoft and begin work on a new project One that would improve upon Far Cry's core tenants, yet would still be its own unique beast One day towards the end of Far Cry's development, Cevat Yerli challenged his design team to take the game's lush jungle landscape and freeze part of it, with an alien vessel at the center of this idiosyncratic landscape This episode would prove to be the inception of Crytek's next opus: Crysis First revealed to the public in March of 2006, Crysis - like Far Cry - would be a PC exclusive first-person shooter set on an open-ended tropical island, but with icy aliens and territorial North Koreans as the player's oppressors instead of mutants and mercenaries Almost immediately Crysis would grab the industry's attention with its outstanding technical prowess Far Cry had looked and run impressively, but Crysis, which used Crytek's newly minted CryEngine 2, seemed to exist on a completely different plane Early previews of the title emphasized cutting edge features such as the fully destructible physics heavy environments, realistic ambient lighting, volumetric clouds, and much more with Crytek boasting that its game contained over 1 million lines of code, a gigabyte of texture data, and up to 85 thousand active shaders The further the game approached its launch the more the game's outstanding tech became mythologized to the point of parody PC gamers would obsess over what technical specifications would allow them to run Crysis smoothly, let alone at all "One of the things that most people ask me, Randy. They always ask me. How Crysis is gonna run with this card. Well I'm not sure how Crysis is gonna run, but you know judging from the performance of the other DirectX 10 games I would wager that one of these cards should be able to play Crysis with just about everything turned all the way up without any hitch." Video game magazine Game Informer would jokingly claim that NASA supercomputers could only run the game on its highest graphics settings for 10 minutes before crashing, only to be taken completely serious "I gotta go. Listen up. I'm gonna leave you some valuable info on how to upgrade your PC Maybe you'll be brave enough to get a Geforce SLI rig I hope." "About to find a little courage soldier. Get your rig ready, it's not gonna be pretty!" When it would finally release in November of 2007, Crysis would prove to be something of a digital chimera, containing blistering graphics, great ideas, and occasionally questionable execution "Hey Nomad, you still with us?" Taking place in the year 2020, Crysis follows Nomad, a member of the elite American special forces group Raptor team Covered from head to toe in an adaptive bodysuit known as the Nanosuit, Nomad and the rest of Raptor are tasked with liberating the fictitious Lingshan islands after they are hostilely taken over by North Korean forces, and later on by a mysterious alien menace that emerges from the island's core While an entertaining yarn, the game's narrative is largely window-dressing to the titles more noteworthy features, namely its graphics Crysis is extremely pretty, and while certain textures have aged more poorly than others, as a whole the game visually holds up well with the game's lighting being especially noteworthy At any point while playing Crysis the player can use the Nanosuit to switch between four distinct modes: Strength, Armour, Speed, and Cloak Strength allows them to hit harder and jump higher Armor reduces the amount of damage the player takes. Speed allows them to run incredibly fast. And Cloak gives them the ability to turn invisible However the limited amount of energy powering each of the suits modes, combined with the high amount of damage enemies perform when not in armor mode, limits its flexibility Unless the player is profoundly skilled, it is much more advantageous to passively curtail or avoid conflicts altogether using armored and invisibility rather than running gung-ho into battle Thankfully the Nano suits lack of versatility is offset by Crysis' level design. Much like Far Cry before it, Crysis' levels are expansive and open-ended, featuring numerous rideable vehicles across both land and sea, a wide array of gadgets and weapons to collect, and multiple side objectives that can earn the player further advantages on the field The game's malleable physics allow the player to grab and throw most objects below their height And, with the right firepower, destroy much of what they can see Where the Nanosuit sometimes struggles to provide the player with adequately viable gameplay choices, the environment around the player more than makes up for it turning Crysis' levels into miniature sand boxes that portend experimentation Roughly 2/3 through the game however, Nomad becomes trapped within the aliens mothership at Lingshan's center. When he re-emerges the aliens flash-freeze both the island and much of the metaphorical sandbox it contains Levels become far more constrained and linear, offering fewer opportunities for the player to take advantage of the affordances that characterized the games first half, and placing more of an emphasis on using powerful firearms to quickly tear apart aliens Players that looked beyond the game single-player campaign would find that Crysis had a few additional experiences to offer, parts of which hearken back to the freedom of the games first half. As was common with other shooters from its era, Crysis included a multiplayer suite allowing up to 32 players at once to battle across 12 playable maps and two different modes Instant Action: a standard deathmatch type mode. And Power Struggle: which pitted Delta Force soldiers against the Korean People's Army In addition to having access to all of the Nano suits abilities, Power Struggle allowed players to gain access to vehicles and capture bases that would allow them to procure increasingly powerful weaponry While enjoyable, the mode struggled to attract a large audience and the entire suite would eventually be shut down in June of 2014 Crysis also comes packaged with a sandbox editor, allowing for new levels to be created and edited using the game's built-in assets which can then be immediately jumped into and tested. Though some players would use it to create truly impressive designs, the editor is perhaps best remembered for the abundance of youtubers that inspired to make the most of the game's exploding barrels Overall crisis made for a highly compelling package for players yearning for a next-gen experience. The game would be inundated with positive reviews upon its release, receiving accolades from across the games industry and multiple End of the Year awards. Its sales however, would be more sluggish, moving slightly over 86,000 units in the first two weeks following its release While the game's middling early sales stemmed in part from piracy, with figures provided by file-sharing news site TorrentFreak, placing Crysis as the fourth most pirated PC game the following year, the hype that had defied the game's technical promise was not without blame either Speaking to Eurogamer in 2012, Cevat would argue that Crysis was hurt in part by the barrier of entry to play it being completely distorted. While players could immediately use a high-end PC to deliver the best experience possible with it, Crysis was truly intended to be a forward-looking game designed to be scaled down to suit lesser hardware and maximized up as time progressed Regardless, Crysis would prove to have a long tail, with the games sales eventually reaching over three million units by May of 2010 as the hardware capable of running the game became more affordable and commonplace, Crysis in turn, found its way into many players libraries In the years that would follow, Crytek, bolstered by the success of Crysis, would see itself rapidly expand, establishing and acquiring multiple studios across the globe. It's satellite studio in Kiev Ukraine, which had first been established in 2006, got upgraded to a full development studio in 2007, along with Crytek Budapest in Hungary, Crytek Seoul in South Korea, and Crytek Black Sea in Bulgaria would follow in 2008. And Crytek UK, formerly Free Radical Design, the creators of the Timesplitters franchise, would join in 2009 While Crytek's prime studio in Germany would slowly begin work on an official sequel to Crysis with the help of Crytek UK, the developer was in no rush to do so immediately Instead, entrusting Crytek Hungary with developing an expansion for their first game, titled Crysis Warhead, that would follow first Released for the PC in September of 2008, Warhead follows Psycho, a member of Raptor team seen fleetingly during the events of the original Crysis in a quest to retrieve an alien machine across Lingshan Warheads plot is largely bare-bones, inconsequential, and unfaithful to the original games commitment to telling its entire story through the eyes of its protagonists, featuring multiple awkwardly directed third-person cutscenes. But it also features a far more engaging protagonist in Psycho - where Nomad is quiet and bland, Psycho is growling and arrogant adding a healthy dose of drama and humor unseen in the first game, elevating the experience Warheads gameplay is largely similar to the open-ended segments of the original Crysis but a touch more refined While Warheads levels never quite come close to the staggering size seen in some of the prime game's biggest levels, they do a consistently good job of creating unique and open-ended spaces that play to the first game strengths even after the aliens freeze over the island The expansion is not without its faults: much like in the original Crysis, Psychos Nanosuit is less powerful than one wishes it could be and a few forced firefights with the game's aliens can prove especially aggravating, but overall Warhead is a marked improvement on Crysis' tenants, making better use of its open-ended mechanics in smaller play spaces Warhead would also compact with Crysis Wars, a standalone multiplayer suite. Much like how Warhead refines the original Crysis' single-player campaign, Crysis Wars refined the original games multiplayer suite, featuring 21 playable maps, rebalanced versions of the first games Instant Action and Power Struggle modes, and a new mode: Team Instant Action, a team deathmatch style mode "They know" When Crytek first announced Crysis, it was made clear that the game wouldn't be released on home consoles The game's intense graphical and technical requirements meant that it would be best experienced on personal computers. A port for the Microsoft's Xbox 360 or Sony's PlayStation 3 or for that matter the Nintendo Wii was out of the question But then at E3 2009 Crytek would unveil that the next chapter in the Crysis series: Crysis 2, was coming to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in addition to the PC While both Crysis and Warhead had sold well, Crytek understood that they were depriving themselves of a much larger potential audience by forgoing Sony and Microsoft's home consoles, and wanted in. It was an understandable choice Crytek was now a global company with Studios all over the world to financially maintain, and needed to be pragmatic in its decision making But it was one that would have radical consequences for the series. "We create this intensity of linear FPS games, which we're not a linear FPS game we're sandbox. Well, we create that kind of intensity with all this freeform choice, so it's a really great unique experience like no other game that you play." Both Crytek and developers worldwide were now more accustomed to the Xbox and PlayStations hardware than when the consoles first launched years prior and could perform far more technically impressive feats with them than when the first Crysis had been released But the consoles were still weaker than pcs, this meant that unlike Crysis 1 or Warhead, Crysis 2 would have to be built with their shortcomings in mind rather than with the PCs strengths Additionally, in a break of series tradition, Crysis 2 would forego the tropical jungle of Ling Shan in favor of the urban jungle of New York City, taking place primarily within Manhattan. After working almost exclusively on tech demos and games that took place on equatorial islands for nearly a decade, Crytek was ready to move on to a new setting, one with greater gravitas According to Cevat, the studio pitched New York quote "As a symbolic choice for this city of the world. If the city of the world gets attacked and goes down, then every city in the world would go down. It was a symbolic choice for the fort of mankind." While well-intended, both this and the series newfound interest in home consoles would result in Crysis 2 straying far from its prior entries open-ended gameplay The series would continue to look gorgeous, but features such as the first Crysis' sprawling play spaces, destructible environments, vehicles, and more would give way to accommodate for the series new technical and narrative limitations "You don't call Force Recon for an emad evac. There're bad guys up there. I swear" As a result Crysis 2 - which would launch in March of 2011 for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC, possesses vastly different gameplay dynamics than its predecessors, bearing a stronger resemblance to that of other popular mainstream shooters such as Call of Duty and Battlefield In the series's first game the Nanosuit's limited effectiveness meant that the player had to take full advantage of their environment The player might possess superhuman abilities, but their success on the field depended on them using their suit and surroundings in tandem. In contrast, Crysis 2's levels, due to the limitations they were developed under, are linear and lacking in affordances to take advantage of while the Nanosuit is much more powerful Enemy fire is weaker Energy drains less quickly when cloaked or armored and all of the suits unique abilities are now tied to a single button press instead of different modes Like it's single player, Crysis 2's multiplayer also bears a strong resemblance to Call of Duty, with features such as killstreaks and weapons that unlock after reaching specific ranks, complimenting players nano suits abilities It's enjoyable and features six different game modes instead of Crysis Wars 3, but offers a much more homogenized experience than what came before it Crysis 2 would sell strongly upon release, but people's opinions were less glowing than they had been in the past The game was as pretty as ever, especially so for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360s weaker hardware But fans of the series prior entries were disappointed at the game's abandonment of what had endeared them to the series in the first place Speaking to Eurogamer in 2012 Cevat would push back against fans complaints arguing that what Crysis 2s levels lacked in footage on the ground, they made up within their verticality. However, he would also acknowledge that the decision to have the game set in New York may have constrained the games design more than was necessary, stating that if he were to redo Crysis 2 he would likely have utilized a fictitious location instead, quote, "I would have done something like The Dark Knight where there is this fictional city that represents mankind but doesn't force us to try to be truthful to things so we can move around buildings and create fictional buildings so it looks authentic but it doesn't limit the gameplay by its authenticity." As if to directly acknowledge this point, Crytek would port the first Crysis to the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 in October of the same year While lacking the graphical polish on the multiplayer mode of the PC version, as well as the games vtol level, the ports are otherwise mostly faithful to the original version. They were proof that, while Sony and Microsoft's consoles lacked the computative edge of contemporaneous PCs and that the series would need to continue to be built with this in mind, Crysis 2 had arguably gone overboard in its linearity "I know you're not talking about Crysis specifically here at GDC or Gamescom, but could you give us any any hint as to where the series might go next?" "No." "Not at this stage?" "I mean any any point in the future. Are you kind of planning to to do anything new at all well?" "Well, I mean Crysis is certainly not dead." "I think Crysis is alive, a lot alive" "But more than that I cannot say." In the months that would follow, Crytek would reassess its priorities with the series Crytek wasn't getting any smaller, with Crytek Shanghai opening up in China in 2012, and Crytek USA opening up in Austin Texas the following year Keeping the franchise on consoles and dealing with their limitations was non-negotiable, but the studio understood that if it wanted to regain jilted players' goodwill, they would need to return to the series as roots. And so, when Crysis 3 would launch in February of 2013 for the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC, players would travel back to Crysis 2s New York City, but now domed and overgrown with the flora and physical flatness of Crysis 1s Lingshan Prophet is enlisted by Psycho to enter the dome to New York and sabotage the Cell organization, which has been using an unlimited supply of energy harvested deep within the city to achieve global domination "Whatever they're doing it's going to bring about the end of the world we have to shut them down." "Fucking right we do." "Let's get moving." Crisis 3s level design, true to Cryteks intentions, does a decent job of uniting this series disparate halves Beginning with narrow and linear levels, and getting bigger and more open-ended to further the player progresses. By the time they reach the game's end, the player is battling across levels so large they might as well have been pulled from the first Crysis. The player can also now hack their way through mechanical appliances and loose arrows with the game's predator bow for a variety of unique effects. And yet, for everything it does to turn its environments into large and affordance laden sandboxes, Crysis 3 is still cut deeply from the cloth of Crysis 2 Even though the player now has far more toys to play with in their environment, the players suit and the guns they pick up along the way are usually strong enough to deal with most situations The game's multiplayer is likewise similar to what was offered in 2 with the exception of a new asymmetrical mode titled Hunter Mode, in which infinitely cloaked Nanosuit wearers with bows battle firearm wielding Cell operatives Crysis 3 would launch to a more lukewarm critical and commercial splash than its predecessors, with EA the Crysis trilogies publisher, stating that the game came in below its sales forecast later in the year Speaking to gamma sutra at March, Cevat would blame the game's lackluster sales on players becoming fatigued by the then current generation of consoles, and for lacking the "wow" factor that had originally helped Crysis 1 rise above its peers It also likely didn't help that Crysis 2s sweeping differences had turned off a section of the franchise's players from returning to the series Assuming, on principle, that anything that would follow would feature a similarly contrived design. To many potential buyers, Crysis 3 was likely perceived at face value as just being more of 2's linearity Rather than an earnest attempt to return in part to 1's open-endedness "So what's your plan?" "You do the fun stuff" "That's not the Psycho I used to know" "Things change" The future of the Crysis franchise remains uncertain At E3 2012 Cevat would claim that following the release of Crysis 3, the company would focus exclusively on AAA free-to-play games such as Warface, a multiplayer first-person shooter that Crytek would release in October of the following year for the PC But when asked by Eurogamer in November of 2012 if a hypothetical Crysis 4 would thus also be a free-to-play game, Cevat would admit that, quote, "We do have a plan for a free-to-play version of Crysis, but how this looks and when this will be done is to be decided." Following Crysis 3s release however, nary a peep has been raised on the franchise's future, leaving one to assume that the lackluster sales of the series final entry killed off any pre-existing plans to continue the series Cryteks history since the franchise's closure has been erratic, losing many of its international offices in rapid succession Following a series of reports in June of 2014 that Crytek had withheld payments to its UK and American employees, Crytek would let go of both studios, with its offices in Hungary, South Korea, and China being closed in 2016, and its Bulgarian studio Crytek Blacksea sold to Sega in 2017. And after two decades of leading Crytek, Cevat Yerli would step down as CEO and president of the studio in February of 2018 with his brothers Avni and Faruk succeeding his role in a joint capacity. All the while, Crytek's remaining studios have continued to work on an assortment of free-to-play and non free-to-play games across consoles, mobile devices, and VR headsets. Released in early 2018, Crytek's Hunt Showdown is a multiplayer first-person shooter in which 19th century riflemen must hunt and kill monsters across dilapidated farmlands Like Crysis before it, Showdown is extremely pretty and set within vast and open play spaces, but is otherwise a largely different experience Throughout Crysis 3, Prophet repeatedly questions his humanity, after taking his life in Crysis 2, to eventually live on as an artificial construct, Prophet is haunted by whether or not there remains a human being left within him Whether there's an emotional core, an everlasting soul beyond the cold metallic sinew he now permanently wears The same question pervades the Crysis series as a whole: Underneath the series's technical eye-candy, it's real time soft shadows, it's soft particles, its volumetric clouds, and it's advanced shader technology, is there something more? Is there a strong gameplay core, a substantive lusory experience, which will stand the test of time long after the series graphics have aged out of players favors? Crysis 1, Crysis Warhead, Crysis 2, and Crysis 3 are all good if not great games in their own respective ways But while some come closer than others, none succeed in being the perfect actualization of the first games potential late-game shake ups, forced enemy encounters, linear levels, and an overemphasis on the Nanosuit keep each entry just out of reach of its progenitors grand plan The Crysis franchise is a reminder that any series, even one that spawned as ubiquitous a meme as "but can it run Crysis?", can eventually fall. Making it all the more pertinent to realize its potential while it's still alive "They used to call me Prophet. Remember me." Our work is made possible by the generous support of our patrons. If you enjoy our content, consider subscribing to our channel and checking us out on Patreon. Thank you
