Hello. Not sure how to get this message to you, so I'll just add this comment. I wanted to thank Digital Foundry for the many hours of enjoyment you gave my son John who passed away last month. He really loved the detailed data and observations you provided on games. I used to watch your channel with him and while I didn't understand everything, my son did. I think I finally figured out what "ambient occlusion" means. Anyway, maybe you will get to read this comment and know that you gave my joy to my son through your videos. Best wishes to you and everyone at your channel.
Hello Baker. I want to wish you and your family any strength possible and my sincerest sympathy for your loss of John. That is something no parent should bear. Your message has completely warmed my heart and I am beyond joyed that our videos could, in any way, be a way you bond with your son. That is something I will treasure. I of course did not know John, but I will be spending my time thinking of him and you. If there is anything I can do, well, I can be reached here and on twitter. With love, Alex
@@alexanderbattaglia6048 , Thank you kindly for replying "in person". My son was a beautiful person and a wonderful son to me. I'm really glad that he could give you a lasting treasure as well. Blessings to you all. Norma
@Baker Canner, I'm so terribly sorry for your loss... I wont be able to say something that you've probably already heard so I will just finish it of by wishing you the best of luck to process this life changing event... My condolences and I hope you will find the space and time to get this whole situation behind you and get your life going again! Best wishes!
@@MrMclanskey , I thank you very much for your kind words. John was ill with a heart condition for five years. Over that time, I was blessed to be able to spend a lot of time with him, especially watching videos, but also doing game walkthroughs. I never knew how compelling and beautiful games could be and he taught me that. He did a walkthrough of the Witcher for me with the DLC as well and it was magic. He also did Uncharted the series for me and we had so much fun. We also did one of the Metro games and got to part 3 of Mass Effect, and some of Red Dead Redemption. We were looking forward to CyperPunk. So I have lots of great memories as I "get my life going again". Kind regards and best wishes.
Warhead is actually my favorite of the franchise. Gameplay still deeply rooted in the first one but more action-packed, alien battles in free form. Jungle levels, snow levels, more Gauss canon. Loved it.
Me too. It is so much better balanced around alien and human combat and you don't actually have to stop playing when Aliens show up like in the original.
It's amazing how well this aged. CryEngine to me has always had the best representation of real world lighting. No over-exposed scenes, crazy color grading, just natural looking scenes. That and the amount of foliage they could render on screen that also had dynamic physics, and that subtle anti-aliasing that was only applied to the leaves that made them look like real full trees when at a distance. That is something I wish they brought back with their modern tech. That subtle leaf effect really made the foliage stand out.
Same here, even got the original installation files and everything from day 1 on one of my hard drives. I feel like it might be a huge pain trying to get around the DRM in the future.
Same here, even got the original installation files and everything from day 1 on one of my hard drives. I feel like it might be a huge pain trying to get around the DRM in the future.
But yeah generally speaking one could say it's easy to do so by making a game basically unplayable on current gen systems and release it anyways. But it's still not true, because at the time, I had no problems in running it at 30fps with a shitty GPU. And even at medium settings it looked damn great, as long as godrays were enabled in the console prompt. You couldn't just achieve the same graphics/performance ratio at the time with usual AAA games; Crytek cared more about "tek" rather than money, and the results can still be seen in Crysis 2, which while got much more mainstream and ruined with shitton of filters, still looks better than most of games nowadays. I'm not even mentioning Crysis 3
not really my old phone in seven deadly sins mobile is crazy beautiful. a game that coming to 720p and 1080 and 30fps and 60... on super expensive hardware.. is sad taking a screen shot of god of war on ps4 a 2013 game looks better on 4 times less cost
@John Doe you can run it with 1080 maybe 1070 and a 4770k. And at least to me when you mess around it isn't boring. But when you play following roads it is boring.
@John Doe Agreed, it wasn't a great game even at the time. Yeah the first 'level' was really impressive and felt like it would be good, but it was all a bit meh. I actually think Crysis 2 is the best 'game' in the series and that is the one everybody hates.
I'm convinced the piracy rates were so high because the game came off as a hard to run benchmark that everyone with a gaming PC wanted to try just to see how "next gen" graphics were going to look, even if it was at 4 fps.
Partially true - later the benchmark tool ran with the demo version aswell... I remember running it on almost all the PC-s i built as a system stress test
Yeah, too many devs are quick to blame piracy for sales disappointment. I would say all games are equally pirated in proportion to their normal selling rate.
Crysis 3 was the best game in the series imo, though of course the original was the most ground breaking without question. But Crysis 3 refined the mechanics and had better overall level design that made it more enjoyable to actually play. Of course it looked amazing and even today on my 2080ti it presents a work out at 1440p at max settings
@@MaTtRoSiTyCool, Unfortunately Crysis 3 was the one Crysis game I overall disliked, that ending was the biggest Bruh of a ending for some time, still having each level being different helped, still the game was too way too short. Where would you like Crysis 4 too take place?
Gone but not forgotten. You didn't really hear much about it even when it was new so so I'd blame it on poor marketing. Those that played it back in the day still play it to this day. Good game :)
The harsh reality if "Crysis on PC" is the fact that the PC gamer elitists never really supported the game... there were barely over 500,000 actual purchases for the first Crysis since 2007 release. Don't get this wrong... millions of PC gamers did purchase Nvidia GeForce GTX 8800s but when Crytek released a couple of patches there were over one million downloads which tells you that most hardcore PC gamers actually just pirated the game. Also there was a lot of whining over the zero g stages so Crytek didn't reprise those levels which seemed weird when you play Warhead as the game feels more generic run and gun and the problem is that PC Call of Duty actually super outsold Crysis and Warhead... as such... never trust PC gamer elitists. The other problem was Microsoft themselves... they decided to rush development of Xbox 360 for 2005 instead of waiting for Direct X 10 GPUs or a simple 2007 Xbox launch in an alternate universe... Finally neither Crysis nor Warhead actually use more than a single CPU core... there is a placebo effect of running on dual CPU cores and more... It also does not actually tap the power of the GeForce GTX 8800... it's just Brute force settings. As such the PS4 and base Xbox One have eight CPU cores, 8GB of ram and a GPU with compute unit cores... and Crytek just didn't bother to rewrite their 3d engine to take advantage of that base hardware.
This game has aged INCREDIBLY well in terms of gameplay, design and tech. it felt like a game dropped in from 10 years in the future when it came out and still feels amazing today,
If I remember correctly Crysis Warhead included a stand alone online game called Crysis Wars. It was very well supported for a number of years and had a lot of cool custom made arenas/levels. I learned how to play online shooters in that game and learned that Russian players are really, really good.
This game was made in my country, Hungary, and the hungarian dubbing is amazing. Psycho swears a lot in the game and we have like 100 swearing/cursing words. :D
Hungarian is hilarious on it's own. As a Polish I used to change TV channel to some hungarian tv and have laught watching ads. And I know what you mean you have hundreds different curses etc, similar in my language, where with english language "fuck" means just "fuck".
Actually English swearing gets away with it in most places just because it's not the mother's / native tongue, if I had a game dubbed in my own language swearing I would definitely not like it as does trigger much bigger pyschological response than it does in another language, for me at least, many people use other languages for swearing around here when they're not really than angry and reserving the native tongue swear words for more severe cases of frustration and anger.
I love the blast from the past these videos provide. I had the legendary Q6600/8800GT PC you talked about and played through the original Crysis first with that PC (I believe at 1200x800 resolution to get the game running at 30). Then I upgraded to a GTX 280, and it was a night and day difference like you talked about in this video. Nerd moment: I remember how I "trained" for Warhead's release by playing the original Crysis (for the nth time) in a much more action-focused manner because that was more the nature of Psycho's character (I always played full stealth when playing as Nomad). I think this actually helped me enjoy the narrower scope of the levels, because I wasn't trying to play them like Crysis 1 levels and they really suited the action-focused playstyle.
The cutscenes in Crysis Warhead were really odd. The music would finish before the cutscene would, and there were weird pacing issues. That stood out to me when I played it back in the day.
@Dalle Smalhals Just go play the game. You'll see. I think it was related to really low frame rates. If your frame rate was lower than 30 during cutscenes, the sound would skip ahead of the audio, which resulted in some really weird experiences.
I played Warhead last year and it was awesome, but the cutscenes were really bad, Warhead and MGS4 both released in the same year but MGS4 has way better animations and cutscene direction.
Crysis Warhead has always been my favorite in the series. I remember trying to play it on a potato PC in 2010. At max settings it ran at about 6 frames per minute. At minimum settings it was barely playable, and got my graphics card so toasty it died soon after. Warhead was also the first game I played after I built myself a proper computer. Yeah, Crysis 1 had larger more interesting levels, but even on that new computer it had rather inconsistent performance that I could never got over, and I found the main character to be far less interesting than Psycho in Warhead. Crysis 2 and 3 never felt like Crysis to me at all. Sure they look nice, but everything else is lacking.
I think that's what killed the x1300 Pro I had on pci riser card, pentium 4 hp utra slim back in 2008 it was all I could. 😂 I still miss that ati gpu and I
Any Digital Foundry video is so enjoyable it's almost insulting, thank you for this analysis, I enjoyed the hell out of Crysis Warhead not so long ago and it was so fun to play to me, glad to see some focus on the expansion.
Crytek are graphical wizards. I turned on Ryse on my Xbox and it still looks amazing. One of this gen's very best on console despite being a launch title.
It does look great but the image quality is pretty bad (blurry) on xbox. Super underrated game and probably my favorite xbox exclusive this gen! Still, can't hold a candle to killzone shadow fall which is also a launch title yet is still easily one of the best looking games ever in every way pretty much (in campaign mode). I think it looks better than horizon honestly.
Gotta say I remember crysis 1 looking real, I had crisis 2 on 360 and could really see how far they were pushing the genre at the time definitely supporting the remake!
@@DC3Refom C2 is downgrade is only the fact that its linear. The graphics are improved, not significantly but noticeable and definitely better optimized
The soundtrack of Warhead was so cinematic ! Especially during the hovercraft chase, or the final mission when you get overrun by aliens in the tower !
The train level in Resistance 3 is by far the most varied and dynamic one with barely any repetition apart from that in Crysis! Another fps that is extremely under-rated!
You can change the color grading in Warhead to make it look more like Crysis by entering "r_ColorGradingSelectiveColor 0" in the console. I had the exact same issue with the visuals of Warhead and this made it much more comfortable to look at. Thanks for the video!
@@8Paul7 Probably, but most notable ones don't exist today, like Digital Reality - Imperium Galactica / Haegemonia / Skydrift / Sine Mora (this was a collab with Grasshopper Manufacture) Black Hole Entertainment - Armies of Exigo / Warhammer: Mark of Chaos / Might and Magic Heroes VI StormRegion - Codename Panzers One that is still making games today are NeocoreGames, they made King Arthur: The Role-Playing Game, Adventures of Van Hellsing, and the recent Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr game
@@Granhier glad to see there is at least something. Interesting how Poland became such gamedev powerhouse while other excom countries are struggling a bit. That said many western ones are even worse. I am glad czechland has at least Warhorse and Bohemia, plus yesterday launching Someday You'll Return which looks interesting.
This is such a helpful video. I had NO IDEA that anisotropic filtering was disabled by default on Crysis Warhead and I appreciate those downloadable files that improve the graphics further that you provided! This is gonna be my go to video every time I have to reinstall Crysis Warhead.
Warhead is the best Crysis game. Simon O'Callaghan's train level is a a triumph for the genre, and as far as scenario planning, Crysis 1 asked "what if it snowed on a tropical island?" Crysis 2 answered, "The tropical island is flash frozen." The geometry of the frozen waves alone is a visual marvel.
The opening to this video was so awesome, good work Alex! And now you got me wondering why i never played crysis warhead when i have played Crysis 1, 2 & 3...
It's blurry because it's zoomed in digitally and having it sharper like on the left doesn't always help. It's very pointy and jaggy, which doesn't exactly make it look better.
One of the recent statements by the Crysis remaster devs about being excited to remaster the original Crysis "campaigns" (plural), makes me thing Warhead might be included in the Remaster. Here's hoping! It's a great standalone expansion.
I have minimun hopes that the team is pushing the boundaries in this remaster to put everything they got one more time, i sincerely and utterly think that is more an "take this damn but now fixed thing and leave us alone" launch.
I remember playing this for the first time when I was 6 and couldn't do anything but always felt it was super cool. I beat it only when I turned 14 completed it with a trackpad 😂. I have so many great memories with this and to this day I think it's one of the best FPS games I've played
CRYSIS 3 came out in 2013. I can't wrap my head around that. I remember back in 2012 the beautiful videos and thinking "yep, here we go again with the PC upgrade" so I built a system (not just for this game) with an i7 and GTX680. Never got around to playing it until I upgraded to a GTX1080 and I still couldn't max out the settings at 2560x1440 to maintain 60FPS though I could with minor tweaks... and I recently went back to look at Crysis Warhead thinking I'd be disappointed but I was pleasantly surprised it looks fine and plays great... mixed feelings on the control system changes over time.
It's how the game ends, when the north korean commander throws tirades of "You americans, always..." at you, and you just sardonically say: "I'm a brit, muppet." and shoot him. :D
If you look carefully you'll see that paralax occlusion mapping isnt working as there is a bug in the engine when you run anisotropic filtering with it, it disables POM, there is a mod to fix this though. The bug is also in the original crysis and in the 64bit versions of the code 2
FYI, having made the "super powers mod 2" for Crysis 1, I am pretty familiar with the levels and I am fairly certain that the train level in warhead is a modified version of the vtol level in crysis 1.
Draw distance in this engine is set for each individual object. Console variables work as a multiplier for these values for each object. And the draw distance of objects in Crysis Warhead has lower values, and the developers compensated for this by increasing draw distance in the console.
@@christopherchilton1955 FF7 remake is a very mixed looking game, at it's best it is gorgeous, at its worst it has ps2 textures and characters popping in 10 feet from the player. It feels like parts where extremely rushed, and others had years of polish put into them.
FF7 Remake looks like shit decent amount of time. There are lots of environmental textures that NEVER load. And they still don't patch that abomination.
Hell of an expansion - if a little short. I actually preferred the combat in Warhead overall than the engagements in Crysis - however it wasn't as expansive nor 'epic' as the first as Alex so rightly pointed out. Would love it if they remastered this one.
12700K and evga 2080ti ftw3. Managed to basically stay at 100fps at 2560x1440p at enthusiast. Fun game and had some twist that filled pockets in Crysis 1s storyline.
Crysis Warhead was probably the first "real" PC game I played on one of my first proper "gaming" PCs - a prebuilt machine purchased off of eBay with a Core i5-750 on a Gigabyte P55-UD3, paired with 4GB of DDR3-1333 and an ECS GeForce GTS 250. It was a surprisingly okay experience for what it was at 1080p, given the GTS 250 was a rebranded 9800 GTX+, itself an overclocked 9800 GTX, which was a die-shrunk and overclocked 8800 GTS - which was, yes, an overclocked 8800 GT. Brings us nicely back to DF's video on running Crysis on a Q6600 with an 8800 GT. Unfortunately, I only found out many years later that my GTS 250 wasn't really a GTS 250 as such. While NVIDIA's reference spec calls for a 738/1836/1100 clock configuration for the core/shaders/GDDR3, this particular ECS card (the NGTS250E-1GQU-F) came with stock clocks of 675/1375/900 - even lower than that of the power-optimised GTS 250 Green at 702/1512/1000. It also used cheaper components and a very underwhelming aluminium cooler resulting is basically zero overclocking headroom. After a couple of years I upgraded to an EVGA GeForce GTX 670 Superclocked. Now that was a much better experience. It was fun going back to Crysis Warhead and seeing how much better the experience was. I haven't been back since, despite a few upgrades since then (now running a Ryzen 7 1700 with an R9 290X). Still, it's fun to look back on it. I generally preferred Crysis Warhead to Crysis.
If the remastered game included a level editor and they did Warhead as well that would be very nice to have. I can't say i'd rush out to buy Crisis 2 & 3 again though, they could benefit from a remix/remake more than a re-release perhaps.
The first Crysis was quite well optimized. I could run it on high settings with a Core 2 Duo E400, and a Radeon HD350. It ran at a smooth 28 fps at 720p. People just wanted to max it out.
Despite Crysis (original) being the thing that it is, I have mostly just used it as a benchmark and "oooo pretties" for each system I've made, to whatever extent and for whomever, since it's inception. However, I am finally playing it all the way through, for the first time... with Very High (highest) settings, at 4K , and it's always at least 65-75fps, often over 90-100. And it's just amazing to play it this way. I'll actually probably stream a bit more of it later today, if I decide to play... My channel is NOTHING special at all, but what it is, is a collection of games being played, with Riva Tuner up at all times, over various hardware configurations... Playing this now on a 4930K @ 4.4 over all 6c/12t, 16GB DDR3 1600 @ 17XX, and an RTX 2070 @ +200/+700... that is an Ivy E CPU BTW, not a Broadwell... despite the 4 in it... but this does bring PCIE 3.0, it keeps up with up to a 2080 (haven't tried a super or ti, don't have that kinda money, lol) ... Heck, even a 980x managed to keep up with a 1080 Ti, the 2070, etc... And that's only PCIE 2.0 ... But I digress a bit.... thing is, it play so damn well, the way I've always wanted it to. Also, the Crysis on Steam right now, the one I am playing... it's been tweaked to work better over many cores no? Because I see it routinely using at least 4c/8T at all times, if not more... seems to spread itself out nicely.
man Cry Engine 2 was really superb. From Cryengine 3 on everything felt way more static (Crysis 2 and newer).. they focused on consoles with the newer cryengines, that was their mistake...
Damn I remember the hitch in Crysis Warhead that Alex points out causing his fps to drop into the 40's. Haven't played in years, but vividly remembered once I saw it.
I remember almost everything from Crysis 1. If you had Intel Quad core CPUs if you restricted it to 0,1 or 2,3 cores it ran much better. Then I remember config files for "optimization" so you can actually play it. I must have done hundreds of playthroughs in the following years. Regarding Warhead. For me personally, C1 was better then Warhead. Oh, and custom levels in C1. We had so much fun with our custom levels. C2 was such a disappointment... C3 was good story-wise but nothing to write home about.
Ah, good to know this one's actually optimized. I hear this one's gameplay peak of the series, and I doubt it's getting a remaster to make it run any better.
Please do a updated technical review on Crysis 3. It isn’t my favorite game from a story perspective, but the graphics are one of my favorites. I cannot wait for the remaster to release on PC.
Just played Crysis 1 for the first time, on my pc (RX480 8gb + i5 6500). Liked it, but in many situations fps dropped to almost unplayable - the last battle was more a slideshow than a game. Today I started Warhead also...everything to max, steady 60fps. Don't know why but it's obviously much more enjoyable than the predecessor.
How ironic that i was just playing the OG Crysis with blackfires mod,im hitting 160fps in 1080 on my 165hz monitor. There should be mods for warhead and i havent tried any yet. Crysis 3 still looks good unmodded ,we need a revisit on this channel
