Time Extend
Remembering the benchmark for sandbox shooters laid out in Crytek’s strong suit
Remembering Crysis as the benchmark for sandbox shooters, as laid out by Crytek
Right now, your PC can probably – probably – run Crysis. But even as recently as 2015, anyone incanting PC gaming’s most famous meme in response to a new hardware release wasn’t asking an entirely redundant question. What Crytek created in 2007 was a technological spectacle so advanced, and so astonishingly different to the look of its contemporaries, that it took mainstream PCs almost a full decade to accommodate its demands. On launch day back in November 2007, anyone who hoped to enjoy the sandbox shooter (whose scarcely believable screenshots had been ubiquitous in the gaming press for months) at anything like a smooth framerate was about to get their paradigm shifted.
This was mid-noughties PC gaming in a nutshell. A new release would come along and dictate a higher bar for hardware than your current machine could manage, and its allure was strong enough that you’d invest the requisite hundreds into those specs to play it. Then a couple of years later the next Half-Life 2, Oblivion or Arkham Asylum would arrive and you’d either invest in more cutting-edge PC parts or declare insolvency.
But nowhere was it more true than with Crysis. In many ways, the primary activity in the game was simply getting it to run. It was a sort of preliminary puzzle which involved finding the correct combination of dropdown menu options to unlock a path forward, beyond the flip-book drawings of a jungle that arrived on your monitor every half-second or so, and into a fullmotion interactive experience. This was a puzzle which might have taken months to reach a satisfying solution.
With such an expensive barrier for entry, Crysis was never going to reach a mainstream audience. Instead it found a cult of ultra-engaged enthusiasts who could scarcely believe their luck at having such a lavish release aimed squarely at them. This was most players’ first look at postprocessing techniques such as motion blur, depth of field and RGB split HUD effects. The physical behaviour of every object you picked up and threw, from barrels and crates to turtles on the opening level’s beach and, later, terrified KPA soldiers, felt instinctively right. The texture work on its character models’ faces still feels contemporary now, and being surrounded by three-dimensional plant life instead of interlaced static sprites seemed transformative. At least, for the few enthusiasts who could actually play it.
Those enthusiasts weren’t just given a skin-deep tech demo, though. Crysis’ story and situation were gripping in their own right, providing an amped-up analog of Predator with extra technobabble. A team of super-soldiers, clad in secret military tech which gives them the appearance of skinned robot bodybuilders, descends on the Lingshan Islands to stop North Korean forces capturing an archeological dig site at the island’s centre. Dr Rosenthal’s team there have discovered something which, you’re told, “might change the course of the world”.
It’s not breaking new ground by any means with this setup, nor does it have to in order to keep the player’s attention. Instead the focus of Crysis’ storytelling wisely narrows on the Nanosuit itself. Not just a mechanical convenience to afford the player invisibility, super strength, speed and armour, it’s a symbol of prestige and exclusivity. Just as the game itself pandered to a prototypical PC ‘master race’ whose belief in their platform’s superiority was suddenly validated, the Nanosuit made you feel extremely special to be occupying it.
The opening cutscene feels more like a promotional trailer, explaining the suit’s abilities and playing out tightly orchestrated scenarios in which each of them shine. And as the squad prepare to parachute-drop into Lingshan, special care is given in the script to emphasise what a position of privilege you’re in to be wearing the Nanosuit. It saves your life almost immediately when your parachute becomes tangled, an efficient way to create a bond, while a fallen comrade has to be retrieved and taken back to HQ to stop the North Korean KPA forces laying hands on the suit’s technology.
And it works. Plenty of games before and since have given you invisibility, extended jump height and unnatural pace. But while they’re usually explained through the prism of the supernatural, or just as a necessary
quirk of the control system ( Quake players running at what feels like a non-stop 50mph, say), in Crysis you owe them all to your suit, which also defines how you look. The microtransaction revenue from PUBG and other games in which you can’t see your own avatar while playing tells us what a powerful element appearance – even perceived appearance – can be.
It’s helped along by a brilliant bit of sound design which marries a macho, phase-effect voiceover announcing your selected power with an unironic “maximum armour” with otherworldly effects such as something contracting very tightly over your skin, or flushing your body with a stimulant. Bullets, too, ping and zip with uncharacteristic detail for 2007. In this way, it sounds just as good as it looks, and Crytek demonstrates a real mastery of triple-A production values in a game whose audience was in truth much narrower than that of a triple-A release.
By placing such emphasis on this aspect of the game, Crytek consigned Crysis to be remembered first for the way it looked, and far less for the way it played. But as an evolution of its bravely sandbox debut shooter Far Cry, and a prototype for open-world combat games that would dominate the landscape for many years afterwards, Crysis is worth remembering.
The trick is that it’s a sandbox and a linear corridor shooter at the same time. In any given situation on Lingshan, you have a large grid of real estate to prowl around in and choose the angle of approach on your enemies. Your Nanosuit’s powers, too, give you the choice of exactly how you’ll take them out. Barrelling in with an assault rifle and maximum armour engaged is an approach no less viable than any other, particularly on lower difficulties. But when you might have sneaked in cloaked and moved from guard to guard taking each one down silently, or jumped to a vantage point and sniped an explosive barrel to take out a whole cluster of enemies in one, it feels like the least imaginative one.
IT’S A LINEAR JOURNEY FROM WAYPOINT TO WAYPOINT, DENYING YOU THE KIND OF FREEDOM IT FEELS LIKE YOU HAVE
With breadth of approach in most encounters and a generous area in which to enact it, the first half of Crysis identifies the things open-world games are best at. But it’s a deceptively linear journey from waypoint to waypoint, denying you the kind of freedom it feels like you have. Forget about making your way to the dig site on the mountain at Lingshan’s centre at the start of the game – you’re unable to break away from a very carefully curated sequence of beaches and encampments.
You’ll first notice this when you get into a vehicle and quickly run out of road, or water. The pleasure of commandeering enemy equipment and using it to travel safely and quickly gives way to the realisation that you didn’t really need a jeep after all, because the waypoint’s just down the road by that blockade. But these
momentary glimpses of how the sausage is made don’t ruin that feeling of liberation and experimentation. This might be Crysis’ crowning achievement, moreso even than its startlingly high-resolution turtles.
Which makes it all the more frustrating when Crysis changes pace at the halfway mark. Following Far Cry’s deeply flawed blueprint, the gratifying fights against smart but under-equipped human enemies give way to something much sillier and less suited to sprawling jungle canopies. As if bound by an obligation to introduce terrible enemies after a certain number of hours, Crytek ushers in squid-like alien machines to the fight at the very point you’re relishing KPA encounters most. The effect this has on combat is disastrous: Crysis’ alien machines can’t be sneaked up on or grabbed by the throat. They’re faster than you and also airborne, which nullifies your
Nanosuit’s speed ability. There’s one way to take on your new enemy, and it’s shooting them when they appear, and stopping shooting when they die.
There’s merit in the idea of turning the tables on the overpowered player, erstwhile very much the hunter in their exotic military attire, and making them into prey for something meaner and with a greater appetite for bullets than a North Korean soldier. But it’s the specific choice Crytek made to simplify combat to the point of tedium, undermining its closing hours.
Two sequels over the following six years would fail to deliver on the promise of those Lingshan beaches in the first game’s opening act, even as technology caught up to allow true open worlds. The industry proceeded to grow in the direction it had felt like Crysis wanted to go, most notably with later Far Cry sequels developed by Ubisoft after it acquired the name in 2006. But Crytek seemed resolute in its refusal to acknowledge the tenets that brought the first game its cult following, stripping away every characteristic which had previously seemed integral with each new release.
Still, whatever mistakes were made later down the line, Crysis remains a significant part of the history of sandbox shooters. Indeed, it has endured a lifespan far beyond any expectation, not just for its everevolving visuals but for the Nanosuit, an invention that made it feel as though you – and your poor, long-suffering PC – could do anything.