LOL .. It wont be the original campaign.. it will be a severely modified version of it. The map sizes alone will be scaled down by a factor of at least 10 . Pretty much making it a completely different game in my opinion.

Can it really be called Crysis if it is so different a game though? Surely they would need to rename it?

@Vapus – Do you have some facts to back that up. This is from the 1UP article:

“While it is the same game that PC gamers got to experience in 2007, today’s announcement says the game will be “modified and enhanced” for release on consoles. Although the original Crysis engine, CryENGINE 2, was ported to consoles in 2008, the game will be remastered using the CryENGINE 3 (what powered Crysis 2) with new lighting, effects, and other visual goodies.”

So – let’s see some proof before we start throwing consoles under the bus again, aye?

Its simple math mate.. and therin lies the bitterness for me.. be prepared for a tunnel version of the former .. and no its not based on any other fact than my knowledge that all current consoles simply cannot load maps of that size ,, nor can they stream portions of it that would make anyone feel they are in a massive erea , as they did with crysis one. . beyond that the phsyics will have a scripted feel, as they did for me on the pc version of crysis 2. Sure there might be some shiny lights and a great new way to show a texture on a console.. but that wont be the game i played.

Wouldn’t it depend on how they handle things like viewdistances?

Regardless, Crysis was nothing special as a game. It was very pretty (except the last crappy level), but it was otherwise pretty ho-hum in terms of gameplay.

So far what I’ve seen previewed of the 360 version (not seen anything of the PS3 version) it’s almost exactly the same as the 2007 PC version with the exception of some of the textures (compression artifacts are noticeable on some of them), the physics are all there running without a hitch and the lighting effects are awesome.

The CryEngine 2 used for Crysis originally wouldn’t work on consoles (even though they did actually try to use it to cram Crysis onto the 360 during the dev cycle leaving behind 360 pad support in the PC version) but CryEngine 3 has been heavily optimised for both consoles with features such as amortised animations (updating animations every 5th frame instead of every single frame which is visually indistinguishable except to superman and pigeons but uses a fraction of the resources) and greatly improved streaming as well as pushing almost all the rendering effects into the post processing phase of the render (aka differed rendering) which allows way more visual effects to be used without killing performance (quite often it’s only lighting that gets differed this is what “broke” msaa for PC gamers for a while).

What will definitely be missing is parrallax occlusion maps (aka POMs) which were featured in the “very high” Dx10 mode of the original Crysis, they wont be there not because the consoles can’t do them but because Crytek don’t seem to be able to ever get them right.

Personally I’m looking forward to it because even with a newer PC which far far exceeds the recommended requirements for Crysis I still can’t get a smooth game experience from it without cutting back on some of the pretties while all the 360 videos show it running fluidly “as is” warts and all.

Well having now played it I can safely say it is an absolutely awesome conversion reminiscent of the Xbox 1 version of Doom 3.

The game is almost 100% intact in every way, with the exception of the VTOL flying level everything is here and some things have even been improved!

The physics is all present and correct (not scripted), dynamic lighting is not only present but improved with Cryengine 3, SSAO is being done (can’t speak to the PS3 version however but I know the PS3 has “issues” with SSAO) and many of the broken textures in the PC version have been replaced (blurry low res textures on mountainsides in particular and the broken overcompressed specular maps in the ice covered levels) they’ve even tweaked some of the AI foibles and slightly suspect game mechanics!

It’s not all glory however. While the 360 pad has been well implemented using a tac scope on your rifle for example, slows down your aim so much that the AI can simply move out of the way (and they will too, the AI aren’t stupid) leaving you having to back out and reacquire or desperately pushing the stick as far as it will go trying to track a moving target.

The sound has been tweaked so that it now responds to your surroundings in ways you’d expect although for some reason human voices seem to be totally unprocessed and you end up with a rather odd feeling of displacement whenever someone speaks.

And whatever code it is that dictates the movements of the “tentacles” on the flying Ceph doesn’t seem to want to behave and it somehow doesn’t look right.

And lastly and perhaps most unsurprisingly the shadows haven’t survived the conversion very well, they’re all present of course but they’re quite a lot lower res than the PC version and they’re rendered at a fairly short range meaning you can see them “pop in” in the middle distance as you move, as well as this some of the objects also “pop in” visibly although they seem to “fizzle in” in a way reminiscent of the Unreal Engine based texture streaming system.

All in all it’s rather good though. It churns out it’s mandated 30 fps without complaint or indeed any noticeable slowdown and strangely looks better and not as good as it’s PC big brother all at the same time.

If your PC is the behemoth the original game needs to behave itself then you may as well save your money, if however you make do with budget or midrange components (like me) then the £14.99 asking price for the console version is very worth it to enjoy a genre defining game in (almost) all it’s glory!