Crysis Remastered is launching for PC, PS4, and Xbox One on September 18th but has already launched for the Nintendo Switch. The original plan was for all versions of Crysis Remastered to launch simultaneously, until backlash from fans over a disappointing trailer caused the non-Switch dates to be delayed.
As Crysis Remastered is a graphical remaster, rather than a remake, the vast majority of the story and Crysis gameplay remains unchanged. Players will once again step into the shoes of Jake Dunn, AKA Nomad, as he battles North Korean forces for control of an alien artifact. Playing as Jake revolves heavily around his Nanosuit, a high-tech body armor that can switch between a variety of modes and functions, and it's these suits that give Jake and his team their edge versus both human and alien adversaries.
The Controversy
As a remaster of one of the most famously graphically-intensive games of all time, Crysis Remastered has some big boots to fill. When the first trailer for the new game was released back in July, it received a great deal of criticism from fans who saw little improvement over the original title. In response, Crytek decided to delay the PC, PS4, and Xbox One versions of the game.
This controversy was compounded shortly after, when a tech analysis revealed that Crysis Remastered wasn't based on the PC original, but on the inferior PS3/Xbox 360 adaptation. However, this analysis was performed on the Switch version, and it may be that Crytek's delay in releasing the other versions was planned to deal with this exact issue.
Last month, a new tech trailer was released, hoping to put the concerns of the community to rest. The trailer showcased many of the graphical features that weren't included in the Switch version, including improved lighting, 8k textures, and ray-tracing. It also announced the final release date for the non-Switch versions, September 18th.
What's New
The full list of graphic improvements in Crysis Remastered is pretty extreme and leaves almost no part of the game's appearance untouched:
- High-quality textures up to 8k
- HDR support
- Temporal anti-aliasing
- Screen Space Directional Occlusion (SSDO)
- Global Illumination (SVOGI)
- State-of-the-art depth fields
- New light settings
- Motion blur
- Parallax occlusion mapping
- Screen Space Reflections and Shadows (SSR & SSS)
- New and updated particle effects
As well as these, Crysis Resmastered also features ray-tracing under certain conditions. For console owners, this means owning the Xbox One X, or PlayStation 4 Pro. The ray-tracing for these devices is powered by Cryengine's own software-based ray-tracing solution. For PC players, the ray-tracing is based on Nvidia's VKRay Vulkan Extension. As an added bonus, PC players will also be able to tap into Nvidia's DLSS technology to help smooth the FPS when running these settings.
Can You Run Crysis?
Crysis has remained a popular benchmark title for over a decade, and many new PCs and even consoles are judged by their ability to handle it. This is because the game was extremely demanding for its 2007 release, with a high cap on graphical settings. It's surprising then, that the remastered version can apparently run on quite a modest system, as the PC requirements show:
Crysis Remastered Minimum specs
- CPU: Intel Core i5-3450 / AMD Ryzen 3
- GPU: Geforce GTX 1050 TI / AMD Radeon 470 (4GB VRAM for 1080p)
- RAM: 8GB
- HDD: 20GB space
- DirectX 12
- Windows 10
Crysis Remastered Recommended specs
- CPU: Intel Core i5-7500k / AMD Ryzen 5
- GPU: Geforce GTX 1660 TI / AMD Radeon Vega 56 (8GB VRAM for 4k)
- RAM: 12GB
- HDD: 20GB space
- DirectX 12
- Windows 10
Part of this success may be down to the experience of Saber Interactive, the co-developers behind Crysis Remastered. Saber Interactive has built itself a reputation as a studio that can competently handle a remaster or remake, with over a dozen such titles under its belt. These include The Witcher 3 for Nintendo Switch, and Halo: The Master Chief Collection.
Crysis Remastered is available now on Nintendo Switch, and PC, PS4, and Xbox One versions will launch on September 18th.
