Well, I wanted to hold off weighing in on the subject of the "goodness" of this game since I had just played the demo and wanted to get into the meat of the game before I posted my observations. But having only gotten part way into the third level "Relic" I have to say it surprises me to read some of the tepid reactions to this game by what I assume are experienced pc gamers. Of course, I have some issues with some of the mechanics of the game and some of the choices made by the developers as is to be expected with any game since no one has published the perfect one...yet.
Performance and graphics wise, I'm sacrificing a bit by playing on mostly high settings and getting framerates, in the worst cases, of high teens to mid 20's @ 1680x1050 instead of the native 1920x1200 of my monitor. I think the biggest graphical sacrifice made is the shaders are set to medium and post processing set to low. However, it's been playable and hasn't diminished my enjoyment of the game and I still find myself looking around during a mission and being amazed at what I'm seeing rendered by my desktop computer. I'm also playing at the Delta difficulty which I think also adds to the fun of the game by forcing the player to be more methodical and stealthy and increasing the immersion by having the opfors speak in Korean. I fully expect to replay this game with an upgraded system in the near future to experience it in all it's graphical glory. Based on what I saw on my kid's computer, this game can still be enjoyed with mostly medium settings, medium res, on a 6800GT, single core processor, 2GB memory machine. So don't let all the scare stories put you off.
Everyone has different tastes in their shooters, and I tend to favor the more tactical ones, but I think this is the state-of-the-art (except co-op is missing, come on Crytek!) from a technology, gameplay, and production values standpoint in what can be done on a desktop computer with $50 worth of software to simulate getting dropped into an action adventure movie. People tend to nitpick some things like odd AI behavior but on the whole, I've had moments where the AI behavior has been...well...cool, or funny, or fascinating and generally entertaining. You can nitpick lots of other stuff but I think you have to take the experience as a whole, even if I don't consider this my favorite game (yet), and give Crytek their due for what they've produced.
Performance and graphics wise, I'm sacrificing a bit by playing on mostly high settings and getting framerates, in the worst cases, of high teens to mid 20's @ 1680x1050 instead of the native 1920x1200 of my monitor. I think the biggest graphical sacrifice made is the shaders are set to medium and post processing set to low. However, it's been playable and hasn't diminished my enjoyment of the game and I still find myself looking around during a mission and being amazed at what I'm seeing rendered by my desktop computer. I'm also playing at the Delta difficulty which I think also adds to the fun of the game by forcing the player to be more methodical and stealthy and increasing the immersion by having the opfors speak in Korean. I fully expect to replay this game with an upgraded system in the near future to experience it in all it's graphical glory. Based on what I saw on my kid's computer, this game can still be enjoyed with mostly medium settings, medium res, on a 6800GT, single core processor, 2GB memory machine. So don't let all the scare stories put you off.
Everyone has different tastes in their shooters, and I tend to favor the more tactical ones, but I think this is the state-of-the-art (except co-op is missing, come on Crytek!) from a technology, gameplay, and production values standpoint in what can be done on a desktop computer with $50 worth of software to simulate getting dropped into an action adventure movie. People tend to nitpick some things like odd AI behavior but on the whole, I've had moments where the AI behavior has been...well...cool, or funny, or fascinating and generally entertaining. You can nitpick lots of other stuff but I think you have to take the experience as a whole, even if I don't consider this my favorite game (yet), and give Crytek their due for what they've produced.
