The Next Crysis...

 

 

The name ‘Crysis’ gets largely associated as a glorified tech marvel, a showcase for the most expensive and extravagant graphics hardware of the 2007-2015 era, but what often gets overlooked is that the Crysis series of games also stand out as some of the most innovative and genre-redefining experiences in the history of First Person Shooters. In fact Crysis, a game that was released waay back in 2007, is still unsurpassed when it comes to the sheer interactivity and gameplay possibilities that you can get out of an FPS, sounds unbelievable but true. Even in the age of full Path Tracing and all the other technological breakthroughs of today, Videogames haven’t really evolved as much as the corporate-industry-juggernaut would have us believe, especially in terms of pure gameplay.

The Crysis sequels succeeded in bringing the core gameplay theme to a much more smaller and tighter scale, while still retaining a significant chunk of the gameplay variety. And this is how they did it—where the first Crysis utilized it’s incredibly large and open ended levels coupled with the versatile Nanosuit to deliver a truly non-linear and free form gameplay experience, the sequels dialed down on the levels but doubled up on the Nanosuit by making it far more modular and customizable in moment-to-moment gameplay and thereby still achieved a considerable amount of non-linearity. But this time, it was centered mostly around the Nanosuit than the levels themselves.

This is an important distinction when discussing the Crysis trilogy as both the second and third games are often unfairly accused of being ‘dumbed down’ and going the Call of Duty way when both games, even in their most linear sections, still offered at least 3 different ways of playing through them. Crysis 2 and 3 weren’t ‘dumbed down’ but were streamlined, and still offered vastly different ways of playing. And when compared to the shooters of today, they stand out as strikingly futuristic, in terms of the sheer amount of gameplay expressions available.

Of course, now that Crytek has announced that Crysis 4 is happening and is well underway, it really opens up a whole slew of exciting possibilities and can have us genuinely stoked for another groundbreaking, boundary-pushing re-imagining of the tactical FPS genre, and hence this article.

One thing that’s apparent right off the bat is that as the Consoles of today are far more powerful than they’ve ever been which means Crysis 4 would not be limited at all by going multi-platform as happened with both Crysis 2 and 3. And although they were great games by themselves, the fact cannot be avoided that being released on the PS3 and X360 severely held them back in fundamentally major ways, cause in all honesty, a full Crysis 1-like experience would be impossible on the Consoles, so the compromises were simply inevitable.

Maximum Crysis...

But this is where it gets really promising, as the difference in raw power is much less between the PC and the Consoles in the current era of gaming, Crytek would not need to compromise the way they had to with the Crysis sequels and Crysis 4 can truly be as ambitious and groundbreaking as it can aspire to be. So yeah, the fact that a new Crysis game is in development in this day and age is a great news all by itself.

Also, I hope Crytek gets a proper and fair development time for Crysis 4 and they’re not put under pressure from EA to rush the game as I suspect happened with Crysis 3. When the news came out that Crysis 3 would be released on February 2013, I thought it was quite a bit early cause Crysis 2 (which came out at 2011) had around 4 years of total development time before that. And this severely restricted (and unfair) timespan was likely the cause of the awfully short campaign of Crysis 3 which became a kind of Achilles heel for the game.

Both Crysis 1 and 2, even Crysis: Warhead were sumptuous single player experiences that completely filled us up, and Crysis 3 was an anomaly among them that had only 7 levels with the last one so out of place, so contradictory with everything the trilogy had stood for in terms of gameplay themes, I can’t help but think of it as more of an afterthought that was added late into the game. Crysis 3 as a whole, definitely felt underdeveloped in many ways and I can’t think of anything else other than it’s botched development time for all of it.

And if given it’s due development time, I have no doubt that Crysis 4 can be another landmark title in the FPS genre and potentially the best Crysis yet. And all it’d really take is the massive, open-ended levels from Crysis 1 coupled with all the gameplay advancements we’ve seen in Crysis 3 (the Bow should definitely make a triumphant return along with the ‘Heavy Armor’ module) with the latter necessarily adjusted for the former and voila, you’ve got all the ingredients of that perfect Crysis playground. While Crytek would obviously be implementing many evolutionary gameplay tweaks and other quality-of-Life changes on top, but as long as those two elements remain as the fundamental basis for the gameplay, it'd be a surefire win for the game.

Of course, Crytek needs to flesh out the story quite a bit this time around as the plot of Crysis 3 was another of it’s weak link, with the whole ‘Alpha Ceph’ branch and how forced it felt. The only saving grace in Crysis 3’s story came from the character arcs of Psycho and Prophet, which culminated in ways that are surprisingly deep, emotionally powerful and far more memorable than you’d find in most shooters out there. Make no mistakes, even with it’s short development period and other compromises, Crysis 3 still has the highest highs in the series.

So as a jaded Crysis player and an ardent Crysis lover, I’d say that there has never been a better time for Crysis 4. With both PC’s and Consoles now more capable than ever before, the Gaming World is finally ready for the most epic and spectacular Crysis to be unleashed. So bring it on Crysis 4.