Crytek bankruptcy watch thread

[DalekFlay]

Crysis 2 was at least a somewhat decent corridor shooters. It's much better than a CoD game, for example.

 

[Average Manatee]

So then what's the point of comparing them if you admit that they aren't comparable? Compare Crysis to Far Cry/GTA/Oblivion or something. You'll find it looks really good even at low settings.

 

[chestburster]

Far Cry 3 sold 9 million copies.

FC3 sold well because (a) it's got that motion captured performance of that Vas dude. CINEMATICS! (b) it's HYPED as "Skyrim with guns", not "Crysis 1, but with worse graphix and less emergent sandboxy gameplay", not "Far Cry 2, but with less fire physics and more inane writing".

Anyway, at this point Crytek really is fucked. They can't realistically make another Crysis game with better graphics than Crysis 3 and better gameplay than Crysis 1. And if they fail to deliver on either one of the two, they're fucked. Homefront 2 looks not better than Crysis 3 and seems play just like Crysis 3, only with Philly setting instead of Crysis 3's New York. Homefront 2 will fail and Crytek will be bought by some Russian mafia F2P company.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

That Belarusian thug outfit running World of Tanks already expressed interest to annex the German company.

annex

 

[Infinitron]

Comment from NeoGAF:

It must kill them to see far cry turned into a huge AAA series while Crysis 3 became an excellent $5 pc benchmark tool.

Ouch.

 

[Jick Magger]

 

[Tehdagah]

Crysis 3 multiplayer was pretty good.

 

[Infinitron]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...-sparks-concern-over-homefront-the-revolution

Crytek UK exodus sparks concern over Homefront: The Revolution
High turnover, unpaid wages and of a lack of trust in management.

There are fresh concerns over the fate of upcoming shooter Homefront: The Revolution amid the ongoing problems at Crytek.

Over 30 staff have left Nottingham-based studio Crytek UK since development on Homefront began in 2011, according to a list of names provided to Eurogamer overnight.

We won't publish the names, but the list includes staff who held key positions in art, design and programming.

Yesterday Kotaku revealed that Free Radical Design co-founder Karl Hilton had left his role at Crytek UK as managing director. According to company records seen by Eurogamer he left the board on 28th May 2014. His future at Crytek UK remains uncertain.

The studio has seen a high turnover recently, according to one source - the result of staff being paid late on a number of occasions. According to the official Crytek website, Crytek UK is home to 130 employees.

A small number of Crytek UK staff left recently to work at Star Citizen maker Cloud Imperium Games. Star Citizen, which holds the world record for the most amount of money raised ever by a crowd-funded project, is being built using Crytek's own CryEngine, so it makes sense for the developer to hire those with experience using the technology.

Yesterday Eurogamer reported that Crytek has struggled to pay staff across its network of studios on time and in full in recent months. The news followed the publication of an article by German magazine GameStar that alleged Crytek was nearing bankruptcy, but investment may be on the way. In a statement issued to Eurogamer Crytek denied the report.

According to one Crytek UK source, staff had their suspicions as early as the middle of last year when bonuses were withheld. Now, morale is low, with staff feeling "lost". There is a general lack of trust in management, Eurogamer understands.

Another source at Crytek UK told us staff were each paid £600 one month then £700 the next because of the problems.

The situation at Crytek UK obviously raises questions over the future of Homefront: The Revolution, slated for release at some point in 2015 for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Crytek UK was once Free Radical Design, creator of the TimeSplitters franchise. Crysis maker Crytek bought the company out of administration back in February 2009 and renamed it Crytek UK. It has worked on the multiplayer portions of Crysis 2 and Crysis 3 and contributed to Xbox One launch title Ryse: Son of Rome.

Crytek UK had been working on the Homefront sequel since 2011 at the behest of publisher THQ. When THQ went bust in 2013, Crytek bought the Homefront IP, had Crytek UK continue its development using the latest version of CryEngine and secured Deep Silver as publisher.

Crytek UK attended E3 last week to present Homefront to press within publisher Deep Silver's meeting room. Crytek UK's goal with the game is to bring guerrilla warfare to the streets of Philadelphia, and get back to Crytek's roots, creating an open freeroam sandbox environment for players to explore.

Deep Silver declined to comment when approached by Eurogamer. Crytek also declined to comment.

One source said Crytek UK was still home to a number of high quality and loyal staff who were desperate to deliver the new Homefront. Whether they will get the chance remains to be seen.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

Why anyone would want to make a sequel of the game that was crushed even by Dorito eaters? I had to check on yt the game, it was another corridor shooter with immersive cinematic moments. Make PC exclusive, something sandboxy like first Far Cry, but maybe in Sci-fi setting. FFS, first Crysis sold well on computers well, despite Cevat crying in interviews. Of course it wasn't instant but it worked for them in the long run. Maybe they should asked themselves, why people mostly give the first part most of the praises?

 

[DalekFlay]

Homefront 2 looks nothing like the original, they're just following the old "any IP is better than new IP" mindset.

 

[Wirdschowerdn]

http://kotaku.com/sources-crytek-not-paying-staff-on-time-ryse-sequel-d-1594967505

Jaaa Sparsamkeit muss sein!

 

[chestburster]

Would be cool if Crytek is bought by some Chinese company and is ordered to make a Homefront 3 where you're Chinese/KPA and fight evil 'Murican invaders.

 

[AW8]

Morgan Freeman is still waiting for the first black President.

I'm still waiting for Crysis 2

 

[Outlander]

Thread title should be changed to 'CryTek is now a 100% fucked lol'

 

[DalekFlay]

I had an utter piece of shit PC when Crysis came out and played it on medium with a few settings on low and it looked amazing. Screenshots of 640x480 Crysis with no AA or AF isn't really an accurate portrayal, as even a shitty PC at the low end could play the game at native res and such. When I got a better PC shortly after and replayed the game, it honestly only looked better in lighting and processing effects, not so much the core look.

In any event that game looked fucking stunning when it came out, better than most games still look today. It running even on a quality rig at that time was pretty impressive. Compare it to fucking Watch Dogs which runs like ass on a high-end rig and doesn't look that great.

 

[abija]

I had <20 fps on a e8400 + 8800gt in 1080p. That CPU was released some months after Crysis and there was a performance patch already.
Iirc I played it at 1280x720 to get like 40+ fps and that machine was definetly on the higher end of the spectrum.

What I remember vividly is their documentation asking to keep the scaling on centered timings in order to not fuck up the image quality...

Watch Dogs might not look fine because they suck or w/e, but it can be maxed on 3 year old hardware. It's not even in the same leagues with Crysis.

 

[Dexter]

I remember running it on an E8800 with 4 or 6GB RAM I think and on a 8800GTX I specifically bought for that game (and because even games like Neverwinter Nights 2 started to run like shit on my previous card) and it ran "fine" at around ~40FPS with most graphics settings on High and occasional drops. Most of the problems I had with the game were me having to restart it after a specific time because it tended to get slow after some time of shuffling memory due to some memory leak. Your benchmarks don't really represent my experience with the game and I still consider it one of the best looking games ever, and it wasn't even all that bad as a shooter, unlike Crysis 2/3.

 

[DalekFlay]

Your memory is faulty or you have a curious definition of "utter piece of shit PC" for the time, which wouldn't even have been able to play the game at low with an acceptable framerate.

Actually, given that a lot of people on here still use 4:3 monitors and post 640x480 screens of Morrowind on low settings, you're probably right. I probably do have a different definition of "shit PC" than many here do.

Either way, the claims at the time that even a brand new 8800 off the shelf ran the game like shit were highly exaggerated.

 

[Wilian]

I ran it with 8800GTX and Core 2 Duo and in DX10 mode the game ran sluggishly @1680x1050 on almoust any kind of high+ setting. Funnily enough, switching to DX9 mode and doing few tweaks in .ini I got a game that ran at 60FPS stable and still looked like it was running on Very High settings or even better at places (Very High in-game were max settings for DX10, locked in DX9 mode).

DX10 was total performance killer for about no visual gain what-so-ever but considering how smooth the DX9 ran I have no hard time believing mid-tier PC running it at acceptable FPS with alright settings.

 

[DalekFlay]

Considering the 8800GTX was the top-end card for when Crysis was released, running with "most" things on high at 40fps isn't very good. The benchmark shows the 8800 512MB, which came out later, running Crysis at a pathetic 720p at 50fps, which is presumably with everything on high but no AA/AF (which is listed on the other bar). The 312MB runs it at 40fps, and the 8600, which was roughly "average" for a gaming card, at 18fps, and 0-1fps with AA+AF For reference, that card ran good 'ol Oblobian at 45fps at the regular resolution of 1280x1024, and Crysis' contemporary WiC at 1280x1024 at 25fps, assuming that like the Crysis test those are with everything on high. Unusually, processors were a pretty big bottleneck for Crysis at the time. Single-cores were hit extremely hard, and the game didn't actually natively support quad cores in 2007. iirc I had a fast, albeit single-core gaming athlon. The minimum spec for Crysis was a 6800 - "Our slowest machine, a 3.0GHz Pentium 4 paired with a GeForce 6800, barely managed to run the game at the lowest settings". For comparison, WiC's minimum was a 6600, and it ran pretty well on my cut-down 8800.

Crysis on the highest settings was meant for future PCs, not modern ones at the time. They said this themselves, the "very high" stuff was meant for years down the road. The "high" spec on a 8800 should have run fine, a rock solid 60fps in dx9 mode. There are people who refuse to lower setting below max though, and Crytek pissed these people off by including a very high future-proofing spec that couldn't really run on modern PCs at the time.

 

[Wilian]

Considering the 8800GTX was the top-end card for when Crysis was released, running with "most" things on high at 40fps isn't very good. The benchmark shows the 8800 512MB, which came out later, running Crysis at a pathetic 720p at 50fps, which is presumably with everything on high but no AA/AF (which is listed on the other bar). The 312MB runs it at 40fps, and the 8600, which was roughly "average" for a gaming card, at 18fps, and 0-1fps with AA+AF For reference, that card ran good 'ol Oblobian at 45fps at the regular resolution of 1280x1024, and Crysis' contemporary WiC at 1280x1024 at 25fps, assuming that like the Crysis test those are with everything on high. Unusually, processors were a pretty big bottleneck for Crysis at the time. Single-cores were hit extremely hard, and the game didn't actually natively support quad cores in 2007. iirc I had a fast, albeit single-core gaming athlon. The minimum spec for Crysis was a 6800 - "Our slowest machine, a 3.0GHz Pentium 4 paired with a GeForce 6800, barely managed to run the game at the lowest settings". For comparison, WiC's minimum was a 6600, and it ran pretty well on my cut-down 8800.

Crysis on the highest settings was meant for future PCs, not modern ones at the time. They said this themselves, the "very high" stuff was meant for years down the road. The "high" spec on a 8800 should have run fine, a rock solid 60fps in dx9 mode. There are people who refuse to lower setting below max though, and Crytek pissed these people off by including a very high future-proofing spec that couldn't really run on modern PCs at the time.

Yes, they said that after the shitstorm of the awful DX10 performance had. Unoptimized shit. Prior to release they were all in bed with Microsoft and NVidia to bite on that DX10 hype, to get full experience with 8800GTX and all sorts of other marketing bullshit.

 

[DalekFlay]

Yes, they said that after the shitstorm of the awful DX10 performance had. Unoptimized shit. Prior to release they were all in bed with Microsoft and NVidia to bite on that DX10 hype, to get full experience with 8800GTX and all sorts of other marketing bullshit.

The DX10 performance was shit, for sure. Not saying otherwise. I'm not even sure I would play it in DX10 today, let alone back then. DX10 performance was shit in general for years, because there was no reason to bother optimizing for it.

All I am saying is I had a older PC when Crysis came out, ran it on low/medium mix of settings, and it looked amazing.

 

[DalekFlay]

The oft-repeated notion that, from the end-user's perspective, Crysis looked and ran well on low-end computers simply isn't true. If you were playing at the lower-mid end of the system specs, you were getting 3rd-tier visuals and performance. I'm sure everyone has their subjective experiences, but based on going back and looking at contemporary benchmarks, I think my point stands.

You can throw as many benchmark reports at me as you want. I can only repeat: "All I am saying is I had a older PC when Crysis came out, ran it on low/medium mix of settings, and it looked amazing." I can't pretend that isn't true.

Edit: Horrible typo that burned my eyes.

 

[Machocruz]

I only played the demo of Crysis, on Radeon 3850 HD, 4gb RAM, and a Core Duo 2 3.0ghz processor. This was a couple years after release, and I don't know what grade my hardware would have been considered then. I didn't check fps, but I do remember that it felt like getting behind the wheel of an expensive sports car compared to other games at the time. It oozed power and quality, on a combination of High and Med settings IIRC. I'm still using the same hardware, so I'm going to DL the full game and see if it is as I recall the demo being.

 

[Average Manatee]

I ran it with 8800GTX and Core 2 Duo and in DX10 mode the game ran sluggishly @1680x1050 on almoust any kind of high+ setting. Funnily enough, switching to DX9 mode and doing few tweaks in .ini I got a game that ran at 60FPS stable and still looked like it was running on Very High settings or even better at places (Very High in-game were max settings for DX10, locked in DX9 mode).

DX10 was total performance killer for about no visual gain what-so-ever but considering how smooth the DX9 ran I have no hard time believing mid-tier PC running it at acceptable FPS with alright settings.

Yes, this has always been a problem with people reviewing hardware performance. Putting everything on max with no concern of what it actually helps. Turn off DX10 that does nothing, turn off retarded motion blur that flat out makes the game worse, turn down AA to 2x max, the highest you're gonna notice in actual gameplay. Suddenly your FPS is at least 2x as high.

For the record my 8800GT ran on generally high settings (minor tweaking involved) @ 1280x1024, hitting around 50-60 FPS