Crysis 2 PC edition OT

[Grall]

I've reached the point where you need to cross the bridge from the prison island, and after a bunch of running and fighting (including two of those walking tank fuckers) and then the game becomes non-interactive. Suddenly during the event you're playing God of War, press key X, or you die.

I'm not fond of this shit, I never was, not even on the PS3. Especially not when I think I'm in a realtime cinematic, sit back and let go of the controls, and there's no big flashing graphic telling me what to press so I'm ready for it.

So I get killed of course, for no good reason, and the last respawn point was AAALLL the way back at the start of the bridge. CURSES! I friggin' hate games consoles and the cheap-ass way they use checkpoints to arbitrarily fuck with the player upon death. Would it absolutely have KILLED them to keep quicksave/load for the hardware-superior PC version of the game or what?

 

[swaaye]

I think I blame Capcom for QTEs. Everybody wants to emulate them apparently.

The checkpoint thing gets annoying mainly when they haven't tested it adequately for annoyances. Checkpoints don't bother me as long as they tried to place them well.

 

[Grall]

Well, the lack of testing is something I found with Crysis 2 on two separate occasions when I got stuck in geometry in areas that were not difficult at all to reach. It's not as if I was looking for places to get caught in, I saw a crack in the edge of the collapsed roadway in the big giant pit where you need to sabotage the tall pillar thing, and it looked as if I could use it to jump back up to the level of the road above after having finished my sabotage effort.

...Except the crack turned out to be a bit bigger and deeper than first anticipated... I couldn't jump out of it, because once stuck there my legs wouldn't reach firm ground. Apparantly the player's hitbox was large enough to cause me to get wedged. Fail...!

Had to reload an earlier save there. Was nothing else I could do. The second was on top of the X-ray baggage scanner inside the Hargreave building where apparantly I got caught between the top of the scanner and the ceiling. Gah! It's right in the path you travel, but fortunately I managed to extract myself out of that spot eventually. I'd already killed all the guards, otherwise I'd been toast.

Other than that, C2 has been rather kind to me actually. No odd crashes or other glitches (other than some flickering smoke and textures). I rather enjoy the storyline too, it may be corny and derivative and not quite as interestingly unique as the original Crysis, but there's some nice plot twists in there that I found entertaining, and it's always fun to massacre lots of alien invaders of course...!

Ok, I fully admit to being a weaksauce nubcaek here because I play on the easiest setting, but I find the best way to deal with the alien invaders is to just run up to 'em in stealth mode - preferably from behind - and beat the crap out of them. The weakest alien soldier goes down easy peasy. No real reason to even switch into armor mode. The more powerful soldier can be dangerous though - best to use armor on him.

I've even killed a tank by repeatedly smacking it with my weapon, but I think its AI was confused at the time because it didn't seem to be fighting back most of the time. I still got hurt plenty though, so I prefer blowing 'em up with explosives if there's any available. Tossing all my nades under its feet softens it up good, then a couple bursts with a submachinegun and it's toast.

The nanosuit upgrades are very nice too by the way. I got most of them unlocked now. The improved stealth and power upgrades were particulary useful. Some of the others don't actually seem to do anything, like the one supposedly showing enemy paths, or the proximity alert thing. Not sure what the hell those are supposed to do, I never saw either of 'em do nuttin. But whatever.

I wanna clock the game first, then I want to see if there's any config file tweaks for this game that lets me carry all weapons, give infinite ammo and so on. I really enjoyed that in the original game, infinite Scar ammo, add a silencer + sniper scope and a whole wagonload of Koreans... Recipe for fun that was!

 

[Grall]

Oh, just finished the game. Was pretty cool, and overall a rather epic experience!

I'm just a tad annoyed over the enemy AI, which is quite spotty at times. Sometimes they home in on me even though I'm cloaked and got the stealth upgrades (particulary aliens do this), sometimes they're dumb as rocks and don't really react even though I sniper their buddies standing not very far away from them, and sometimes they can't pathfind properly, and instead stand spinning around on the spot or humping a piece of scenery... The issue with enemies aiming in your direction even though you're stealthed, and instantly locating and firing on you when you decloak remains from the original Crysis too, and it's quite annoying at times. They also instantly know you've tossed a nade somehow, which is just bizarre.

...And, I almost got stuck on geometry again on the final level but managed to get loose before any enemies spotted me.

Other than that, plus the previously mentioned consoleitis are the only real blemishes on this game. I had a pretty grand time playing it for the most part. Some of the later levels are really stressful and you don't get to exercise your hit-and-run abilities much with squiddies chasing you all over the place and shooting off all of your energy so cloaking becomes impossible, but it does ratchet up the tension and create some variety for sure! I guess I'm not complaining, if I could just stealth through the entire game and sniper everything in sight it could get a wee bit boring.

So, I think Crysis 2 is a lot of fun, while the game could have used a bit more spit and polish, I'd happily give it 8 or even 8.5 out of ten as it is. The story's exciting and engaging IMO, and there's some cool WTF moments here and there like in the original game. Maybe not AS cool, but that's to be expected I guess. We know more about the universe now, which sort of eliminates some of the surprise.

So a really good game IMO. If it'd been PC-centric it would have been even better, but it's still good enough.

 

[suryad]

Just in time for my recently acquired Intel 990X! Just gotta wait till Q4 2011 for my video card upgrades for some MAXIMUM alien ass kicking!

 

[Mize]

Grall finished it?
Damn.

Now I have to.

 

[Grall]

Grall finished it?

Only on easy diff. Show you're more of a man, and do it on hard!

Now I have to.

Yes. Yes you have.

Btw, is it really such work, you think? The game didn't engage you at all?

 

[almighty]

Just in time for my recently acquired Intel 990X! Just gotta wait till Q4 2011 for my video card upgrades for some MAXIMUM alien ass kicking!

You do know that a 2500K Sandy Bridge CPU will kick the shit out of that 990X in gaming and pretty much most other things don't you?

 

[DuckThor Evil]

You do know that a 2500K Sandy Bridge CPU will kick the shit out of that 990X in gaming and pretty much most other things don't you?

He said he got it for cheap + no need to upgrade the motherboard and any ram issues with having less or have to buy more, and the "true" successor for 1366 slot is still coming pretty soon also, so might as well go all out then and make sure the console ports run really good times 10.

 

[pjbliverpool]

You do know that a 2500K Sandy Bridge CPU will kick the shit out of that 990X in gaming and pretty much most other things don't you?

I don't think the difference would be that great in games - although the 2500K should be a little faster. However, heavily threaded apps should be quite a bit faster on the 990X and if games ever start using more than 4 threads then it may take over there too. I think Suyrad got a stupidly good deal on that 990X anyway.

 

[Mize]

I'm in some of the later levels and now this thing is bringing a 4.5 GHz i7-2600k + 2x 6970 in crossfire to its knees! Ouch!

 

[pjbliverpool]

Ouch indeed! Although I'm gonna guess the GPU's are the weak point there and probably down to a combination of tesselation being more tuned for Fermi's capabilities and crossfire scaling not being too good.

 

[Lightman]

I'm in some of the later levels and now this thing is bringing a 4.5 GHz i7-2600k + 2x 6970 in crossfire to its knees! Ouch!

Not to mention this patch broke multiplayer even more than it was broken before.
Now for no apparent reason your frame rate can nose dive while in heavy fight or when Ceph is attacking. This is not GPU dependant coz I've dialed my settings to below what I had up to patch 1.8 namely Extreme. I had no problem maintaining 60FPS, but after patch it's like lottery between 60FPS and 10FPS. I won't even mention Orbital LASER super mega lag bug! This is really driving me crazy.

Simply horrible on Crytek side not to squash multiplayer bugs on PC quick enough

 

[Grall]

I'm in some of the later levels and now this thing is bringing a 4.5 GHz i7-2600k + 2x 6970 in crossfire to its knees! Ouch!

Lots of brick walls (tesselation mayhem) and large open spaces seem to be Cryengine 3's particular way to defeat the 6970...

With my boards still downclocked @ 500MHz to keep heat under control, the framerate starts to sag with everything on ultra even at only 1280*1024... (Yeah, my widescreen monitor died.) Don't feel like clocking the cards back up to full in the middle of summer, they're noisy enough as it is during winter!

 

[Mize]

Lots of brick walls (tesselation mayhem) and large open spaces seem to be Cryengine 3's particular way to defeat the 6970...

With my boards still downclocked @ 500MHz to keep heat under control, the framerate starts to sag with everything on ultra even at only 1280*1024... (Yeah, my widescreen monitor died.) Don't feel like clocking the cards back up to full in the middle of summer, they're noisy enough as it is during winter!

Forgot to mention I'm running 19x12 ultra...

 

[homerdog]

That's ridiculous if it can bring down twin 6970s. It looks great but I'd expect a game capable of stressing that amount of GPU power to look much better, at least BF3 good.

 

[Mize]

That's ridiculous if it can bring down twin 6970s. It looks great but I'd expect a game capable of stressing that amount of GPU power to look much better, at least BF3 good.

I totally agree. I'd wager there are some nV "optimizations" (TWIWMTBP) that I'm hopeful AMD can address with a future driver (near future as I won't be playing it much longer).

 

[almighty]

The problem is that CPU's are still no were near powerful enough to run more then 2x GPU's.

A 5Ghz Sandy Bridge CPU still bottlenecks the living shit out of Tri-SLI GTX 570's at 1920x1200.

We have been at the point were CPU's are the problem and not GPU's since AMD launched the 5000 series GPU's.

 

[pjbliverpool]

The problem is that CPU's are still no were near powerful enough to run more then 2x GPU's.

A 5Ghz Sandy Bridge CPU still bottlenecks the living shit out of Tri-SLI GTX 570's at 1920x1200.

We have been at the point were CPU's are the problem and not GPU's since AMD launched the 5000 series GPU's.

I disagree. A £160 i5 2500 is enough to maintain a solid 60fps in virtually any game at any setting as long as the GPU power is there. But to maintain 60fps at max settings in some games you need 2 or 3 £250 GPU's. Thus i'd argue there is no bottlneck in the CPU space at all since why do you need more than a solid 60fps at max settings?

Or rto look at it another way, if you limit a PC to one of each unit, a single GPU and a single CPU, the bottleneck in modern games will almost always be the CPU even though it's the cheaper component. So CPU's are actually relatively more powerful when it comes to running games, but you can counteract that by using multiple GPU's with 1 CPU 3x the cost (or more).

 

[almighty]

I disagree. A £160 i5 2500 is enough to maintain a solid 60fps in virtually any game at any setting as long as the GPU power is there. But to maintain 60fps at max settings in some games you need 2 or 3 £250 GPU's. Thus i'd argue there is no bottlneck in the CPU space at all since why do you need more than a solid 60fps at max settings?

Or rto look at it another way, if you limit a PC to one of each unit, a single GPU and a single CPU, the bottleneck in modern games will almost always be the CPU even though it's the cheaper component. So CPU's are actually relatively more powerful when it comes to running games, but you can counteract that by using multiple GPU's with 1 CPU 3x the cost (or more).

Take it from me, A 5Ghz Sandy Bridge CPU can easily maintain 60fps on average but it drops like a bitch as well.

I've seen Bad Company 2, Crysis, Warhead a quite of few other games drop below 30fps because said Sandy Bridge CPU couldn't keep up with the on screen action, Even with a single GPU installed.

60fps average is nothing, It's keeping it constantly at 60fps no matter what is happening on screen and there's no CPU that can do that in any game.

And another way to look at is that if I've dropped my hard earned cash on 3x £250 GPU's then I damn well want all three of those GPU running full tilt..