Crysis Remastered is coming. Will it become the new gaming benchmark?
posted Saturday Apr 18, 2020 by Scott Ertz
For many years, the unofficial test of a gaming PC's power was its ability to play the game Crysis. For a while, it was simply whether the game could be run on the system at all, but over time it became a test of what settings the game could be run on, and what framerate the game would then play at. That statistic quickly became a badge of honor among the gaming community. All of this was because of the incredible graphics - something that was far ahead of its time. It was almost as if the game was a time traveler, showing what the future of gaming might look like.
However, with time, the game caught up with the future it might have come from, and the "can you run it" phrase became a meme rather than a boast. In fact, the original game can now run on a Nintendo Switch - far from the most powerful computing system. But, another time jump might be in our immediate future, as Crytek has announced Crysis Remastered is coming this summer. The timing is far from coincidental, as the first two titles in the franchise take place in the far off year of 2020.
The game will release on the PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and the Nintendo Switch. While it might seem that a remaster coming to the Xbox One and PS4 would suggest a game with lessened capabilities, that is far from a certainty. The original title, which once tested the boundaries of PC hardware, was made to run on consoles only a few years later. Today, the ability to build a game that can scale to console hardware is far easier than it was at the time, meaning that a remaster on PC could be a different experience than the one on these significantly older consoles.
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.
So, will the new version of the game become the benchmark by which all future computers are measured? Probably not, but one can hope that "Can it run Crysis?" will become a part of the gaming landscape once again.
