Erik Novales's Blog

There has been quite the deluge of FPS releases and demo releases lately, and it’s been hard to keep up with all of them. I noticed that the single-player demo for Crysis had been released, so after a lengthy download, I sat down to give it a shot. To give a frame of reference for my comments, I’ve never played Far Cry, nor any of its console iterations, so I’m looking at both Crytek‘s design and engine from a fresh perspective.

Just to get this out of the way quickly — the game looks great. It’s easily the most convincing jungle environment that I’ve seen in an FPS, and there are many nice graphical touches in the environment and on the characters themselves. I should confess that I’m playing the game on a rig that’s a year and a half old, and, consequently, playing on only medium visual detail. (For Vista users, there is apparently a DX10 version which looks quite a bit nicer.) The physical interactivity in the world is also very cool, although it should be noted that this happens less frequently than you would expect — bullets don’t really jostle and knock over things very much. Grenades, though, can shake apart small buildings, and vehicles can drive through buildings as well. It’s pretty funny. There is still numerical instability in the physics, though — it’s fairly easy to get vehicles to do funny things when driving over rough terrain or other objects. But hey, it’s still fun, and that’s what counts, right?

The gameplay is moderately free-form, in that you are given goals to advance the storyline, but you can go about achieving those goals in whatever manner you choose. This basically boils down to having the freedom to approach objectives from any angle, and using any means necessary to take care of enemies in your path. You can take a rubber raft (with mounted .50 caliber machine gun) around the island, and try and surprise an outpost from behind. Or, you can drive a jeep (with mounted .50 caliber machine gun) straight up the road at the outpost, and go in guns blazing. Or, you can sneak through the jungle and snipe enemies with your silenced rifle. I didn’t have the patience to do much of the latter.

One gameplay wrinkle involves "powers" that your super-special covert ops suit gives you. At any given time, you can be in armor mode, speed mode, strength mode, or stealth mode. The functions of armor mode and speed mode are fairly obvious. Strength mode gives you a boost when jumping, as well as the ability to hurl items (and people) long distances. Apparently it also greatly reduces recoil when firing, but I didn’t really mess around with it too much. Stealth mode is basically Predator camouflage, although the battery on it seems to run out quite quickly. The various modes of your suit are kind of neat, but I didn’t take the time to configure/figure out a way to switch between them very quickly, which would have made them more useful. The standard method involves holding down the mouse wheel and using a context menu — not exactly something that you can do while on the run.

The story and dialogue so far are adequate — nothing too special here. It’s pretty much your standard macho sci-fi boilerplate. Apparently EA left the screenplay documents in the demo install, so if you care to have a look, you can spoil yourself to your heart’s content. It took me about an hour to get through the demo mission (which is apparently about a tenth of the game), which ends on an obligatory cliffhanger.

Overall, I enjoyed the demo. I got a bit of an Operation Flashpoint vibe from the way that you could approach tactical situations in many different ways, and the fact that there are lots of different vehicles around for your use. I’m curious about whether the multiplayer will include cooperative missions, or if it will only contain adversarial multiplayer modes. They do seem to indicate that the mod tools can be used for multiplayer levels as well as single-player levels, but it’s unclear if the game’s networking will really support expansive, scripted missions in multiplayer. I know that there are a lot of challenges in making that kind of stuff work in a multiplayer environment that don’t exist when you’re talking about a single-player game.

It’s not all roses, though. I do have a list of gripes about the game:

1. I had a really hard time making out enemies through the foliage. This may be realistic, but the AI doesn’t seem to display much of a disadvantage when fighting in the jungle, which made fights very frustrating for me. I would have to rely on the radar display to locate enemies, rather than spotting them visually.
2. It’s difficult to locate ammunition pickups amongst the debris of the battlefield. Since almost every object can be picked up, and the HUD displays a message any time you aim at a nearby object, it can be difficult to locate the important stuff, a.k.a. ammo, in a densely-populated area.
3. The game noticed that I had a wired Xbox 360 controller plugged into my PC, and all of the tutorial prompts referred to buttons on the controller, even though I wasn’t using it to control the game. (I’m actually not sure if the tutorial text would refer directly to keyboard/mouse buttons if the controller wasn’t plugged in, though.)

I can’t say for sure that I will pick this game up when it hits store shelves, but it looks pretty solid. It’s also interesting to me from a technical perspective because I believe it’s one of the first multi-platform engines that has really started to embrace multi-threading. (Note that I say "started" — from public presentations and technical talks, I believe they are still somewhat hamstrung by their legacy architecture.)

I was at Target the other day, buying some household goods, when I decided to detour into the games section. What I found on the PC racks amazed me:

That’s right — almost four years after it came out, I found three copies of the PC version of Secret Weapons Over Normandy on the shelf. They must be dumping the rest of them on the market — I know they haven’t been there very long, as the Target location I was at is fairly new, and from what I know about the distribution business, deals often involve taking old stock off someone’s hands in order to get the latest and greatest.

I have to say, it was a pleasant surprise to see it on the shelves again after so long.

This is a great analysis of PS2 game sales and Metacritic scores for games released through December 2006. There are a few conclusions that I think can be drawn from this:

• For a game to truly reach blockbuster status, it must be good.
• There are many games that are good, but which don’t sell many copies.
• Regardless of what you may have heard about the PS2 install base and how it makes any game project profitable due to its size, there are a lot of games out there that will not make back their development costs. Even if you double the North American sales for a title (generally accepted to be a crude estimate for worldwide sales), many titles are still well south of half a million copies.

This kind of data really convinces me that Wii development is not the panacea for game developer profitability that some suggest. The mass market still must be regularly “convinced” to buy new games — it’s not like the hardcore market that Microsoft and Sony court, which keeps up-to-date on gaming news of its own volition and buys 10-12 games a year. Smaller-budget Wii games simply aren’t going to get much of a marketing push, and will face stiff competition from their peers as well as Nintendo itself. I’m also convinced that Wii consumers will still overwhelmingly prefer to buy Nintendo-produced games — this has been borne out by the sales figures released so far.