Crysis director says Crysis was so difficult to run that it became a meme because the highest settings were intended for future PCs: “I wanted to make sure Crysis didn’t get stale”
As part of a larger Crysis retrospective in issue 405 of PC Gamer’s print magazine, Crysis director and Crytek founder Cevat Yerli shared his thoughts on “Can it run Crysis?” meme, as well as what he believes led to the creation of this most enduring aspect of the 2007 shooter’s legacy.
“I want to make sure that Crysis doesn’t become obsolete, that it’s future-proof, which means that if I play it in three years, it will look better than it does today,” Yearley said. According to Yearley, Crysis’s highest graphics settings were designed with 2010 and later hardware in mind, and turning them on in 2007 was an act of arrogance. “A lot of people immediately tried to maximize Crysis,” he says. “And I was like, ‘Oh, that’s not why we created Ultra or Very High.’
However, Yerli may be slightly underestimating the brutality of Crysis’ graphics. In a 2020 throwback video, Digital Foundry writers John Linneman and Alex Battaglia found a more or less permanent home in the sub-30fps range, playing Crysis on a powerful 2007 system with high settings and a distinctly retro 1168×665 resolution. Then it might be best to leave the “High” setting for future PCs, and depending on your budget, maybe add “Medium” and “Low” in there too.
But it’s all just fun: it’s a big part of the Crysis lore, after all. Yearly himself seems to appreciate the continued popularity of Crysis as a memetic (sometimes still serious) indicator of gaming power: “It was an ambivalent meme that was good and bad, but I really liked it,” he said. “Last year Jensen (Huang) from Nvidia announced a new GPU and they said, ‘Yeah, and you can run Crysis on it.’
Despite the performance issues and resulting memes, Crysis remains a great-looking game that uses a number of innovative graphics technologies. Yearley was so focused on knocking Crysis’s jungle simulation out of the park that there was a running joke among the developers that Crysis had “more technology built into one tree than the entire rendering algorithm of Far Cry.”
The studio’s research team traveled to Haiti to document the tropical environment for reference purposes, which influenced Crytek’s early adoption of dynamic lighting, as opposed to the cheaper baked lighting of yesteryear, where each shadow was placed by the artist rather than modeled. Crytek also implemented subsurface scattering to achieve a “soft green translucency where the sun is behind (the leaf).”
“Subsurface scattering is a technology that already existed in engines, but it was very slow,” Yerli said. “No one has done this on a large scale.” Additionally, Crysis featured facial animation and rendering that could challenge Valve’s legendarily realistic faces in the Source engine. Yerli was especially proud of the shadows and shaders, which could reproduce fine nuances and details, including one that made characters blush: “We went crazy with that,” Yerli said.
Indeed, this is a good summation of the entire Crysis project, if you look at it. To read exclusive print articles like the full Crysis retrospective, consider subscribing to PC Gamer print magazine—you’ll also experience the magical feeling of holding a hard copy of gaming journalism in your hand each month.