Poll Crysis 3 launched this week 4 years ago. Crytek now in shambles. What went wrong and what they need to do to fix it? (19 votes)
Ahh Crytek the creators of the Crysis which was the poster boy of PC Gaming and PC Graphics is now no where near the level they were 5, even 4 years ago. This week marks 4 years since their last AAA title Crysis 3 hit the market. The only games they have released over the last couple of years was Ryse: Son of Rome which wasn’t that great and a couple of forgettable VR Titles like the latest The Climb and Robinson: The Journey. It’s been 4 years and no major AAA Ttile. What’s even worse they are losing talent and according GS Article they haven’t even payed their current employees for 6 months which is ridiculous. One of their top graphics guys Tiago Sousa who was the Lead R&D Graphics Engineer at Crytek left to work at ID (coincidence that Doom looks so good). Which begs the question. What went wrong? Me personally, thinks they abandoned PC Gamers and PC Centric development. When Far Cry came out on the PC it pushed PC technology. One of the First Games to use Pixel Shader 3.0 and it’s use of HDR. I remember I couldn’t run Far Cry with HDR on my GeForce 4 64MB DDR but once I switched to GeForce 7600GT which supported HDR and Pixel Shader 3.0 you could see the instant difference with the water and the HDR the game looked significantly better. With Crysis they even raised the bar even more. Although, I couldn’t run the game maxed out I still pre-ordered it and when I did build a new rig the year after Crysis came out I was in awe of it’s graphics on my HD 4870. I remember so much hype in the PC Gaming Community with the release of Crysis, even the $600 GeForce 8800 GTX Ultra couldn’t max out Crysis. I remember drooling over screenshots of the game prior to the games release and where people were trying to extract every last juice out of their PC so they could play Crysis at the best possible settings. There was a lot of excitement of PC Gaming forums about people’s hardware and trying to max out Crysis (great times). With Crysis Warhead which was another PC Centric game, the game was an excellent follow up to Crysis. I think the problem started with Crysis 2 which they dumbed it down and focused on Console Development first instead of PC first. Although, the game got better looking as it progressed it nowhere set the bar like the original Crysis and it now had competition from DICE with BF3 with the new Frostbite Engine which looked as good if not better then Crysis 2. By the time Crysis 3 came out, although the graphics were better the game was never as good as it’s predecessor. It turned into another corridor type shooter, I still have the game just didn’t find it interesting enough to finish it which says a lot about how far it fell coming from a guy who pre-ordered the original Crysis.
Also, add to the fact that they went a spree of opening studios in USA, UK, Turkey, Ukraine and even some staff in South Korea and adding all that financial burden didn’t help. I am like what where they thinking opening up all those studios? So, in my opinon it was a mix of abandoning PC Gamers and pushing PC Graphics and PC Centric development combined with the fact that they opened up too many studios without the financial resources to back it up is what is causing their current predicament. Seriously, they are now focusing on VR Games? Don’t they realize that it’s a niche market and they aren’t going to enough funds generated to pay off all the costs of their studios.
What they need to do now is go back to their roots and only have one or two studios instead of like half a dozen all over the world and focusing on making another hit Crysis title that is NOT console centric but PC Focused and then dumb that game down for the consoles. And for those who say PC Focus development will not sell need I remind you Crysis and Crysis Warhed sold Millions and was enough to continue to develop more PC Centric games. It’s just that they decided to get greedy and focused less on quality and console centric development and making stupid business decisions like opening up too many studios, acquiring gaming assessts which they can’t afford or use and selling them (Homefront anyone) is what caused their current financial issues.
So, what do you guys got to say?
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