A Crysis in Wasted Opportunities

It was 2009 when I bought Crysis, because my hardware was not capable enough to run the game when it came out in 2007. After 5 minutes of starting the game, I knew I had made the right choice. Crysis was an amazing experience unlike any other fps I had played and I'm not just talking about the ultra realistic graphics. After the initial tutorial when the game told me to disable a jammer in the huge & lush environments of the Lingshan island, giving me ample freedom to do it as I see fit, I knew I was in for a treat. I loved every second of the campaign. I have played many great fps's over the years but Crysis was the only one I replayed almost a dozen times, and got the same amount of fun every single time.

The lush open environments, the sandbox gameplay, the brilliant & sometimes downright cunning A.I and the versatile suit functions created an "emergent" element that was both unpredictable & fresh. The realism offered by Cryengine 2, I'm using the term "realism", a lot of the games are out there that has visuals which are equal or better than Crysis but lack the sense of immersion that Crysis created through it's intelligent use of physics (destructible environments, movable vegetation) coupled with the amazing visuals. The nanosuit made the player feel powerful but never took away the vulnerability factor. Yes, you can run at warp speed, jump really high & smash structures, absorb bullets & become invisible at will, but it will take only a few well placed bullets & very little time to end your super heroic power fantasy. The game forced it's players to think on their feet.

go as you like

Every time I replayed a level in Crysis, I tried to do it as different as I could from any other playthroughs before. I used to tell myself--"Okay, those 20 korean soldiers are coming for me, and I will take them down without firing a single bullet on them"--and I did, by many innovative ways like hurtling heavy objects on my enemies in strength mode, ambushing them & knocking them down with blazing speed, throwing them in the ocean or from any tall structures, shooting a barrel & throwing it on a hut & watching it explode in little pieces taking some of my enemies with it or plain beating them up in strength mode----great stuff. If everything went according as planned, it was immensely satisfying & if something went awry, it was frantic. Crysis was really a create your own superheroic adventure comic. Unlike other games, bumping the difficulty level to the highest resulted in a more realistic experience instead of the game cheating on the player by granting the enemies ridiculous amount of health.

When Crysis 2 was announced & several trailers rolled in, I was waiting desperately for more groundbreaking innovation in the FPS genre, I even bought Crysis 2 in it's first week. After playing the game in it's entirety, I realized Crysis 2 had very different design philosophies than it's predecessor. Sure, the visuals are sweet, the environments diverse & huge and the "orchestrated sandbox" that Crytek touted was functional and had it's moments----but the emergent factor was gone. The game had a higher degree of verticality than other shooters and still provided ample room to maneuver but that adventurous feeling was not there, even the early parts of the game was just another on-rails shooter with npc's (non-playable characters) yelling at you to go there, do that. The game had way too much hand holding in the form of various "tactical assessments" which basically told the player which path was the stealthy way & which would lead to a head on attack. The game did have it's moments like the "dead man walking" level but still was a far cry (no pun, really) from the d.n.a of it's predecessor. The A.I was almost broken in parts of the game where it completely killed the immersion. The multiplayer was like COD with the nanosuit with bigger environments. Sigh, what a waste of opportunity.

A different Crysis

                                               

I hoped Crysis 3 would take the franchise to a better place but it was plagued by some terrible design elements. The campaign was too short, the initial levels too linear & had one devastating game breaking element----the bow. The bow was somewhat innovative of a weapon but it was so overpowered that it completely obliterated the vulnerability of the player. You can happily kill enemies without being taken out of cloak---where is the challenge in that? Things didn't change much from Crysis 2. All in all, Crysis 3 didn't even start breaking new ground except for the solid multiplayer which is perhaps the best in the series. But Crytek's strength was in creating non-linear singleplayer experiences & over the course of Crysis 2 & 3, they shrunk that element & instead made an emphasis on multiplayer & delivering a "cinematic" experience. Needless to say, it didn't work very well.

Remember Farcry? The sleeper hit of 2004? The game was like the very core essence of the design elements of Crytek. Expansive levels that allowed multiple paths or approaches to complete an objective. There was a level called "Rebellion" which had 5 different paths. Crysis can be rightfully called the spiritual successor of Farcry and the successors of the game were a far cry (I know, terrible pun) from it's predecessors. It's like Crytek isn't the same company anymore that once made those great fps experiences. When I see Crytek stating things like the single player experience has to go away or graphics alone makes for 60% of a game--makes me shudder at the thought. The focusing on the free 2 play market too much is a sign that we might never see another single player based game from Crytek. Which makes me sad, really. I once thought Crytek would make a game someday that would be as groundbreaking as Half Life 2, I know it seems stupid but I really thought Crytek as the next great innovator in the FPS genre. It's not that Crytek was not making much profit by creating grand fps experiences, Crysis 1 actually sold much higher than both Crysis 2 & 3. Maybe Crytek wanted to increase the "mass appeal" of games or it could be that EA put pressure on them and they did not get enough time to build on their visions or any other reason I can't imagine.

It's really a shame to see a promising franchise indicated by the outstanding first game turned into just another shoot-em-up trilogy with special abilities. The first game presented a vision of a futuristic experience & the next installments failed to drive that vision forward & instead became a "could've been better" experience. As a huge fan of the original Crysis, it's disappointing that the series might be remembered quite differently than what it was ought to.