Crysis Exclusive Preview - Technology and the Hardware That You'll Need to Run the Game
We get an early look at the many amazing technologies going into this cutting-edge action game, as well as an idea of what kind of PC hardware you'll need.
This exclusive video shows off the impressive graphics you'll see in Crysis.
Perhaps the most common question revolving around Crysis isn't when this eagerly awaited first-person shooter is going to ship or even whether it will appear on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. Instead, gamers everywhere are wondering what sort of PC they'll need to run the game. And it's not hard to understand why Crysis has everyone thinking about hardware upgrades. Ever since it was revealed at the Game Developers Conference, gamers have been amazed by the cutting-edge visuals in Crysis. So when we recently visited developer Crytek's offices in Frankfurt, Germany, we got a chance to find out more about the game's technology, as well as what kind of machine you'll need to run the game.
Crysis will be Crytek's second game, after 2004's acclaimed Far Cry, and the company is aiming to ratchet up its storytelling, as well as its technologies. The story revolves around an alien invasion of Earth, with the end of humanity as we know it hanging in the balance. This is a far cry from Far Cry's tale of science run amok on a remote tropical island. Still, Crysis does feature a tropical island, and it serves as the setting for the game. After a mysterious meteor crashes on the island, your special forces team is deployed to investigate. However, the North Koreans have arrived first, so you'll battle not only them but also the aliens, once the extraterrestrial threat is revealed. The early screenshots and videos of Crysis are no doubt impressive and, in some ways, jaw dropping. They show combat taking place in an incredibly realized tropical paradise. More importantly, the videos show things that have never been seen before in a game, such as how the individual leaves of a plant will bend if someone or something passes by. "We tried to make everything more cinematic and more realistic," said Cevat Yerli, Crytek president and CEO.
Crytek has always been a company on the cutting edge. As we noted in our prior preview, Crytek's roots are in developing one of the first tech demos for Nvidia's GeForce graphics cards, and the company has been working with shaders and other advanced graphics features as long as anyone in the industry. Yet just as important is how the development team works together to solve technical and artistic issues.
"Our technology team works very closely with our production team, so they are not only aware of what the future is, but they all understand what is the real dilemma of pipelines, tools, and production issues," Yerli said. For example, members of the technology team are often assigned temporarily to the production side of the office, where they can work closely together to solve issues that crop up during development. The company also does a lot of internal training, workshops, tutorials, and videos to get everyone up to speed on the latest technology. "Technology is one thing," Yerli said, "but to get the team to understand technology is another."
Crysis will let Crytek show off everything that it's been working on over the past two years. The game will feature not only state-of-the-art graphics, but also advanced physics, animation, lighting, and more. A lot of the technology incorporated into Crysis is aimed at increasing the cinematic nature of the experience, as well as creating more realistic gameplay. For instance, with deformable vegetation, it will be possible to see leaves bend and sway. The movement of foliage in the distance may reveal an otherwise undetected enemy. All objects will have physical properties that can change drastically throughout the story. The tropical jungle, for instance, will flash freeze, and suddenly everything in the frozen environment will shatter apart.
Yerli explained the full range of visual tools that Crytek is working with. Crysis' camera technology will make extensive use of motion blur, so if you spin around quickly to face an enemy, the images onscreen will blur. The lighting system makes use of depth of field so that if you focus on an object nearby, objects in the distance will blur. The game uses a new indirect lighting system that tries to model the way light and color react in the real world. Lights will "bounce" off of colors and interact to create more lifelike lighting conditions. And, of course, Crysis will take advantage of high dynamic range lighting to create more realistic light, in general.
Crytek will do something very interesting with color, as well. "We manipulate color depending on the intensity," Yerli said. So if you're in an action-packed situation, the colors in the game may become grittier or more saturated to reflect that adrenalin is flowing through your system and your senses are more alive.
Yerli was able to give us an idea of what kind of hardware Crysis will support. Keep in mind that these are by no means the official requirements, as the game is still in development. Still, this gives us an idea of what kind of technologies the game will take advantage of, and it may give you an idea of where you currently stand in terms of being able to run the game.
"Crysis will feature out-of-the-box 32-bit, 64-bit, DirectX 9, DirectX 10, and multithreading support," he said. That's a lot of technical jargon, so we'll go over each point one by one. The important thing to keep in mind is that you won't have to worry about configuring all of these settings when you install the game, as Crysis will automatically configure itself based on what kind of hardware you have.
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