EA released Crysis 2 yesterday (unless you live in Europe, in which case you’ll be waiting a few more days), and it’s been interesting to see the reaction among PC gamers. Let’s not forget that many PC gamers view Crytek, the game’s developers, as something of a PC gaming star, so their reaction is certainly worth highlighting. Let’s just say that some people are slightly annoyed with the game as it exists today.
The biggest complaint you’ll find online is the lack of DirectX 11 support. A thread on a popular hardware enthusiasts’ forum has people pledging to boycott the game until such support is included. It’s just strange that here we are in 2011, and Crytek, which has a history of absolutely pushing PC hardware to the max, couldn’t deliver DX11 at launch; there’s not necessarily that same “whoa…” feeling you get when first starting the game. It’s disappointing more than anything else. (Crytek told IGN that the game will support DirectX 11 at some point.)
There’s also the related complaint that the game’s graphics settings aren’t easily changeable. You’ve got a few different settings to choose from (extreme, very high, etc.) and that’s it. No being able to change in-game anti-aliasing, no being able to adjust the filtering, shadow quality, particle quality, etc. Odd.
I ran into a glitch where the screen would frequently flicker in sunny or other light-heavy areas. Changing the name of the .exe to bioshock.exe or rift.exe fixes it. Supposedly this glitch only affects people with dual-GPU setups.
There are other complaints. The default field of view has been panned, with people saying, only half joking, that the character’s gun takes up one-third of the screen. (This can be changed rather quickly with a few different cvars.) I’ve also seen complaints about the small multi-player battles. Wasn’t Tribes 2 able to host 64-player matches nearly 10 years ago to the day? That’s not to say bigger is necessarily better, but this is Crysis we’re talking about: so much of the experience is about turning things up to 11, as it were.
We’ll have our full thoughts in a few days, but I just wanted to point out some of the things I’ve seen here and there.
UPDATE~! I forgot another one of the big complaints I’ve seen: the lack of a level editor.