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Just when you thought the “Can it Run Crysis” meme might be finally, mercifully consigned to the dustbin of history, Crytek has announced it’ll be remastering the original game for modern hardware.
The original Crysis, released in 2007, was lauded for amazing visuals. It was one of the first AAA games to use DirectX 10 and it was the tremendous difficulty of running it at top detail and high resolution in that mode that gave rise to the “Can it run Crysis?” meme in the first place. It was somewhat ironic that Crysis got saddled with the reputation at all, because the game actually scaled quite well at lower detail levels when running DX9, and was playable on a broad range of hardware.
The remastered edition of the game is being developed by Crytek and Saber Interactive. Saber Interactive is known for doing various remasters and ports with a little licensed IP tossed in: Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary for Xbox 360, Halo: The Master Chief Collection for Xbox One, World War Z, Ghostbusters: The Video Game Remastered, and The Witcher 3: Complete Edition for Nintendo Switch were all done by SI. The game is dropping soon; the statement references “this summer,” which implies a launch date 2-4 months from now for all current platforms. Here’s what Crytek has to say:
Crysis Remastered will focus on the original game’s single-player campaigns and is slated to contain high-quality textures and improved art assets, an HD texture pack, temporal anti-aliasing, SSDO, SVOGI, state-of-the-art depth fields, new light settings, motion blur, and parallax occlusion mapping, particle effects will also be added where applicable. Further additions such as volumetric fog and shafts of light, software-based ray tracing, and screen space reflections provide the game with a major visual upgrade.
“We are excited to be working on the Crysis franchise again, and to bring all the Crysis fans a remaster worthy of their passion for the game,” said Crytek CEO Avni Yerli. “It’s an exciting opportunity to be able to bring Crysis back to PCs and current consoles – even Nintendo Switch! – so that a whole new generation of players can experience the thrill of a battle in the Nanosuit.”
The reference to “software-based ray tracing” implies that Crytek won’t be relying on any specific hardware to handle its ray tracing efforts. In truth, it isn’t clear how we’re going to talk about ray tracing once AMD’s RDNA2 is available. Up until now, there’s been Nvidia RTX, which implements the Microsoft DirectX Raytracing (DXR) standard. Once AMD also supports DXR in hardware, we may see companies fall back to that point — except that it’s also possible that Crytek wants to perform some ray tracing on cards that may not support DXR at all. Basically, it’s not clear what level of ray tracing support we’ll see for GPUs outside of the RDNA2 / Turing+ families, even in games that support the feature via a pure software solution. Crytek has released a “Neon Noir” ray tracing benchmark capable of running on both AMD and Nvidia hardware, so clearly the company is working on a vendor-ambivalent ray-tracing solution.
Crytek hasn’t had much in the way of major releases lately and the company’s game engine isn’t as popular for third-party projects as it once was; we’ve heard more about the company’s legal problems with Amazon than about any new software IP of late. The company’s latest project, Hunt: Showdown, released earlier this year to moderately good reviews but didn’t make a major splash before coronavirus ate everyone’s release calendars.
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