Crysis 2

I love the technical explanations behind the decisions, they give much better insight in to the how and why's. It's a shame a lot of the devs do not come out and say it themselves.

To Furyo why is the 2011 PC market so much worse then it was in 2007. It was my understanding that over the years the PC market did not shrink, it expanded just not as rapidly as the console market did because they could target the casual crowd much better due to the lower cost and simplicity. And as far as I know the cost of making a AAA game in 2011 are the same as in 2007 for multiplats since consoles have not changed. So by all accounts all the major platforms including the PC are more profitable now then they were in 2007. It doesn't make sense to skip so much on the PC port, it's destroying your well respected brand for a few weeks of work.

Quote from Furyo

it costs too much money to maintain different assets and code bases for all.

^This.

Quote from Furyo

So you're saying that since we were a PC only game in 2007 we need to stick to these roots only until the end of time? The hardcore AAA PC market was still ok in 2007. This is 2011 now.

If your point is that the game shouldn't have been called Crysis then, just try and pitch a brand new IP concept to a publisher that doesn't even own you. Good luck getting any funding.

I was pointing out that adding a quick save to a PC version isn't as hard as your guys are making out, sure you have to make some decisions on what needs to be saved and what doesn't but that doesn't make it impossible to do otherwise your going to have to deal with fans that are gunna be very annoyed and probably won't buy your next game.

Either way im done with this thread, I personally don't care what decisions you made as I don't have crysis 2 nor did I think the first was that amazing so I don't fall into the above group so it doesn't effect me, im just pointing out that whats his face had a valid complaint.

Quote from Gloglebag

a few weeks of work.

Quote from Vilham

adding a quick save to a PC version isn't as hard as your guys are making out, sure you have to make some decisions on what needs to be saved and what doesn't but that doesn't make it impossible to do

wow you guys are right, i never noticed it before. it's totally just laziness.

Quote from Rick_D

wow you guys are right, i never noticed it before. it's totally just laziness.

Where did I say it was down to laziness? It's clearly a decision your leads made and clearly it was a bad one (or they knew this would happen and decided their PC market was irrelevant) else there wouldn't be many people complaining about it.

Quote from Gloglebag

I love the technical explanations behind the decisions, they give much better insight in to the how and why's. It's a shame a lot of the devs do not come out and say it themselves.To Furyo why is the 2011 PC market so much worse then it was in 2007. It was my understanding that over the years the PC market did not shrink, it expanded just not as rapidly as the console market did because they could target the casual crowd much better due to the lower cost and simplicity. And as far as I know the cost of making a AAA game in 2011 are the same as in 2007 for multiplats since consoles have not changed. So by all accounts all the major platforms including the PC are more profitable now then they were in 2007. It doesn't make sense to skip so much on the PC port, it's destroying your well respected brand for a few weeks of work.

There are a lot of things that changed since 2007. The holiday season of 2007 was unarguably the real start of this generation. We saw the first AAA games of this gen come out all within a few months of each other, whereas all 3rd party games on x360 and ps3 up until that point were simply ports of PS2 and Xbox titles. Gears of War kinda was the first to pave the way, and if you need a reminder of how low detail certain 1st party games looked then, look no further than Resistance FoM.

So yeah we are still in the same generation, but since 2007 competition has been going exponentially better. Whereas Resistance could pass like a good looking game then, you need to put out an Uncharted 2 or God of War 3 now to compete. And whereas Fallout 3 looked barely ok in 2008, New Vegas looks so dated it doesn't even qualify as current gen anymore. GTA, Red Dead Redemption and Assassin's Creed came by and took the throne.

So yeah costs have gone up enormously, even within this gen. In the same timeframe, since 2007, the industry has seen a massive move of previously PC gamers to consoles. It's very understandable: 2007 marks the year X360 and PS3 (although the PS3 only really picked up after the Slim design) really started to sell. And the hardcore market has remained stable for over a decade now. There are no more hardcore gamers now than there were when Soldier of Fortune came out. These guys have moved on. They bought the X360 and the PS3, when all they could see from the industry was basically identical graphics they would find on their PC, with very hardcore niche games like Crysis providing one of only a handful of exceptions along the way.

The PC market is doing well, but it's changed radically too. You still have that hardcore PC group, the likes of which would sell a kidney to go to QuakeCon. But by far and large the PC market is stuck on WoW, The Sims and Facebook.

Finally, on to your last point, it's not just a few weeks worth of work. Allowing players to change the DoF on PC is only possible if you're using an engine that even was built with that in mind in the first place. CryEngine and Unreal will allow that technically speaking, other engines simply won't. And then you need to take into account everything else. For instance, optimization issues that arise from changing the DoF. Or your post effects that no longer get rendered well. There is never a simple change in a 3D engine.

Quote from Vilham

So you're saying that since we were a PC only game in 2007 we need to stick to these roots only until the end of time? The hardcore AAA PC market was still ok in 2007. This is 2011 now.

If your point is that the game shouldn't have been called Crysis then, just try and pitch a brand new IP concept to a publisher that doesn't even own you. Good luck getting any funding.

I was pointing out that adding a quick save to a PC version isn't as hard as your guys are making out, sure you have to make some decisions on what needs to be saved and what doesn't but that doesn't make it impossible to do otherwise your going to have to deal with fans that are gunna be very annoyed and probably won't buy your next game.

Either way im done with this thread, I personally don't care what decisions you made as I don't have crysis 2 nor did I think the first was that amazing so I don't fall into the above group so it doesn't effect me, im just pointing out that whats his face had a valid complaint.

You're totally right it's feasible. And yes it was decided we shouldn't have it. Because when we did study adding it, consoles screamed at us for raping them. Could we have added it for PC only? Yes maybe. With a few hundred man hours rewriting the entire save system.

I have started playing Crysis 2 yestarday, at first i was sceptical, but after couple of hours it really turned out nice. I was afraid that the gameplay will be just like any others FPS. I must say i played first crysis just for less than an hour so i don't have "crysis background". I like that city jungle theme a lot and in my opinion it was good desicion to move out from a jungle in to a big city.

Quick save - to be honest with you i think quick save option every 5 sec of play would make that game to easy. If someone is really new to FPS games, ok i can understand that, so maybe oldfasion way, the easiest game level could have that quick save option turned on ?

I love the music what i don't like are those birds (particles ?) flying above the city, those are to big and look too fake for the rest of the environment, but it might be just my opinion

But a guy literally added a lot more options to the crysis graphics setting within 2 days.

Yeah, by tweaking files without an interface. Both things that Crytek would have to work on, first testing the impact of all changes (debug time) and by creating the menu and interface specifically for the PC version, which would have required additional UI work, debug and translation. In other words, at least two weeks worth of a dozen's people work.

It's worth bearing in mind that most developers aren't given enough time to do everything they want to do. It's all well and good saying it'd only take a few weeks/months to do certain things, but when you're already working crunch hours and barely managing to get everything done for what is probably a tough mother fucker of a deadline it's not really an option — at least not until a post-release patch (more sales = more likely to get them).

Not that I'm defending things missing from Crysis 2 or anything like that, but the chances are if Crytek had the time to sort certain things out they would have. Yes project leads would have made decisions regarding what needs to be left out, but it would have been a case of 'It's either X or Y that goes, which is it?', not 'Let's get rid of this because you know what, fuck PC gamers!'.

Quote from Zyndrome

Lets not hope your boss gets any ideas and announces "Ok guys, we're porting Crysis 2 to the 3DS and iPhone as well, we'll start on monday."

Hey, iPhone got Unreal and IDTech. Crytek would be just THROWING AWAY that market if they didn't port!

Also this conversation just made me think of something: I'm going to be terribly depressed if Deus Ex 3 doesn't have quicksave.

Also Far Cry 1 didn't have quicksave support ingame but you could save anywhere you wanted with the console. What with Far Cry's save system working that way, and Crysis 1's save system working that way, I naturally assumed that Crysis 2's save system would work a certain way. I'm not going to pretend to remotely understand the technical advantages one sort of save system might have over another, the only one I've ever written is "write this plain comma delineated text to a scores.txt file in the same folder as the exe" and "load this comma delineated text from scores.txt, break it into arrays, and load it into player variables for the player to choose to load". I'm coming at this from a gamer's standpoint. The people buying the game don't know or care about how hard a certain feature might be to implement. If they want it, they want it. If it hurts the game for them that it's not there, then it hurts the game.

Quote from Furyo

Yeah, by tweaking files without an interface. Both things that Crytek would have to work on, first testing the impact of all changes (debug time) and by creating the menu and interface specifically for the PC version, which would have required additional UI work, debug and translation. In other words, at least two weeks worth of a dozen's people work.

He did have a visual interface, in fact that was the whole point, you did not have to type in console commands or add commands string in the short-cut.

Regardless, Crysis 2 provided less in terms of PC customization then the first game, and most other games on the market. And if I remember correctly the first sold very well and it's the money from PC gamers that allowed crytek to expand and fund their endeavour on the consoles.

Yeah but it's too easy that way JSL. If people complaining aren't willing to take part in a conversation and have actual answers other than joyfully bitching away at this or that because it's fun or they have the right to, then just as equally anyone else is entitled to dismiss their bitching entirely. I'm all for having a discussion and actual feedback from gamers, but it doesn't help if all they want to do is rip us a new one and not listen to the actual causes for their complaints. It really isn't going anywhere.

Theres a difference between a visual studio hack up interface and a properly integrated UI screen, which is then tested internally, externally, going through first party cert and localisation.

Quote from Gloglebag

And if I remember correctly the first sold very well and it's the money from PC gamers allowed crytek to expand and fund their endeavour on the consoles.

No it's not. Far from it. EA's money allowed Crytek to expand and fund their endeavour on the consoles. If you think making the most pirated PC exclusive for 3 years running gives you anywhere from 20 to 60 million euros to pour into your next game, you're sadly mistaken.

Quote from Furyo

No it's not. Far from it. EA's money allowed Crytek to expand and fund their endeavour on the consoles. If you think making the most pirated PC exclusive for 3 years running gives you anywhere from 20 to 60 million euros to pour into your next game, you're sadly mistaken.

I don't think you guys beat Spore. Spore was a game people pirated as some sort of message about DRM (online activations! oh god! man, we've come so far since then). Crysis 1 just got pirated as a benchmark, and there aren't THAT many new top of the line PCs built each year, are they?

Quote from Furyo

Yeah but it's too easy that way JSL. If people complaining aren't willing to take part in a conversation and have actual answers other than joyfully bitching away at this or that because it's fun or they have the right to, then just as equally anyone else is entitled to dismiss their bitching entirely. I'm all for having a discussion and actual feedback from gamers, but it doesn't help if all they want to do is rip us a new one and not listen to the actual causes for their complaints. It really isn't going anywhere.

I recognize that, but still people aren't going to strike off a complaint from how they might describe the game to their friends because "Oh I wish it had X but they said it was too hard to implement in a cost effective way. Ah well, besides that it was pretty good. Maybe next game, right?". As people have said in this thread, it's not just a technical quibble on their parts, but a serious impact on how they play games, making them feel restricted from experimentation, and frustrated due to dying and going back to checkpoints.

Also I just remembered Far Cry 2 had PC exclusive quicksave, and its normal save system was super confined, save points at indoor spots, separated from the open world. I appreciated that extra step because really, relying on those save points would've made that game fucking unplayable. >_> Getting run over and having to restart not minutes but HOURS back from the last time I was close by to a store or safehouse? Ughhh. That would happen exactly ONE TIME and then I'd never play it again ever.

Quote from Gloglebag

a few weeks of work.

Quote from Vilham

adding a quick save to a PC version isn't as hard as your guys are making out, sure you have to make some decisions on what needs to be saved and what doesn't but that doesn't make it impossible to do

Vilham, I live with one of gameplay coders. Save&Load is the most complex and bitch thing you can deal with in a video-game. It's sounds easy as fuck, all you need to do is save the current state of the game and the load it like it was... Right? WRONG. I think I'd risk it to say that half the bugs in games are caused from save&load problems. It's complex, and it's hard to implement and it generates a lot of problems.

Sometimes we have to ask ourselves if we are so speed oriented that we cannot take the time necessary to save a game the old fashion way. I can honestly say that I have never used a quick save/load option in a game. Now of course, I cannot play nearly as often as I once did but when you think that saving any game takes less than 4 or 5 seconds its a bit OTT to cry about not having a quicker way.

/2cents

Quote

":vht04ydb]

Vilham, I live with one of gameplay coders. Save&Load is the most complex and bitch thing you can deal with in a video-game. It's sounds easy as fuck, all you need to do is save the current state of the game and the load it like it was... Right? WRONG. I think I'd risk it to say that half the bugs in games are caused from save&load problems. It's complex, and it's hard to implement and it generates a lot of problems.

Why don't you just save an entire carbon copy of the level in its current state like Deus Ex, huh!?

Quote from Orpheus

Sometimes we have to ask ourselves if we are so speed oriented that we cannot take the time necessary to save a game the old fashion way. I can honestly say that I have never used a quick save/load option in a game. Now of course, I cannot play nearly as often as I once did but when you think that saving any game takes less than 4 or 5 seconds its a bit OTT to cry about not having a quicker way./2cents

lol