The PC Gaming Crysis

Oh yes, starting off my first article with a bad pun. I'm a class act. So this article is austensibly about Crysis, but it's not a conventional review. Let's get right to the point.


Crysis is a decent first person shooter with lots of options, sub-par level design, racial overtones, cool gadgets, and broken multiplayer.


Oh. Crysis is very pretty. Boner inducing if you have the hardware to run it.
Which is part of the problem and what this paper is about. Crysis is the problem with PC gaming.


Crysis's minimum software requirements are a 2ghz processor, a gigabyte of ram, and a 256 megabyte v- oh. I've lost you havn't I.
See, you don't KNOW if you meet these minimums. This is further troubled by the fact that theres four year old computers that can run this fine, yet if you go and buy a Dell tomorrow there's a shot that you won't be able to run the game. There's no incentive to really know your hardware, except "my comp is new" or "my comps probably too old for that". And seeing as people are generally content to go play on their almost-as-pretty Xbox 360 there's not exactly room for people to enter the PC gaming market without more than basic knowledge of their PC hardware. Luckily Microsoft came in and created a rating system for hardware, so you just look at the number the game needs, the number you have, and you're fine. Except you need Windows Vista for this, and the Windows Vista and Games for Windows brands are generally associated with plague, pestilence, and death despite the dark secret in the industry that they do not in fact suck.

So back to Crysis - it sets a performance bar so high that I don't think there is a mainstream PC manufacturer that actually produces a PC that can run it on medium to high settings for under $600. Why is that a problem? It just enhances the idea that PC gaming is prohibitively expensive, when realistically you can make a computer that'll run Crysis on high for $500 without any real difficulty. Why is this number important? It puts it right in the same league as console gaming's price. And a computer monitor is a fair deal cheaper than an HDTV, and said monitor supports higher resolutions than any HDTV. But now there's a game that the entire industry perceives requires a two thousand dollar investment to play, there goes any effective means to invest in PC gaming for ONE GAME, ignoring the fact that games like Call of Duty 4 and Bioshock feature better interfacing and graphics on PC as well (Okay, interfacing is another argument, but graphics are not - PC games are prettier. They have better video card technology and their monitors support higher resolutions). So now we've got an industry saying you need to spend two grand for a PC, you've got a public who doesn't want to spend two grand, and you've got a competent console generation that's obviously going to appeal to people more than a BIG SCARY COMPUTER. But this is only half the problem.

The other half is Crysis epitomizes a lot of what's wrong in PC gaming gameplay. Just because you have a keyboard doesn't mean you need to use every single key on it. While everything is nicely customizable,lets face it, if you don't have a five button mouse, you're going to be playing "where the fuck is that key" game a lot. Let's combine this with a cumbersome, badly organized multiplayer and people are going to be continuing their ongoing fellatio of Xbox Live. Naturally these flaws aren't seen in the reviewing community, it's even received a 9.5 score from GameSpot, so people are going to assume this is the great beacon of PC gaming.

So wait, the game they just spent two grand on buying a computer for isn't that good? And they're likely to believe that this is the best the system has to offer? Well you just effectively killed any incentive to play a PC game ever again.

So what's to be done about this? Microsoft has the right idea with their performance rating scale - it scans your computer, and gives you a rating. It's simple. My computer gets a 4.8 in this scale for example. It's not widely enough implemented though to be effective, and i doubt Dell is going to start saying "This computer is a 5.1 on Windows Performance". So now the pressure is to learn hardware - not hard, but who wants to learn that shit. And we're losing incentive to bring people to the PC fold. I'm not attempting to convert people to PC gaming in this article, but for those who do care about the PC as a gaming platform, the more the common market shafts PC gaming the less developement will go into it. And as developement goes down, the PC game platform dies. And Crysis is a huge part of the problem. Fuck you Crytek.