“Can it run Crysis?” has been a PC-building meme for over a decade now, but once upon a time it was a legitimate question. When Crysis released in 2007, very few PCs could run it, and even fewer could run it well. The game itself was fine, but the foliage? The foliage was incredible. It felt like Crysis pulled back the curtain on the future and showed people what games might look like in 2012 or 2013. Those moments come once in a hardware generation, at best.
And now it runs on a Nintendo Switch. Go figure.
On Thursday morning Crytek announced Crysis Remastered, due to release this summer on PC, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and yes, the Nintendo Switch. Lumping all those consoles in with the PC version does not give me high hopes for seeing a second coming of the “Can it run Crysis?” phenomenon. If two 2013-era consoles and a handheld can run this remaster, your PC almost certainly can.
Still, the list of visual bells and whistles goes deep. Maybe the max settings will make your PC sweat a bit? From the announcement:
“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.”
I fell off the series after Crysis 2 and honestly couldn’t tell you the first thing about theplot anymore, except you wear some futuristic sci-fi armor. I’ll be excited to check out that foliage again, though.
Crysis played a formative role in my early PC-building benchmarks, as I’m sure it did for others. I’m looking forward to turning all my LEDs to blue (so the case runs colder, obviously) and busting out a Razer DeathAdder and the crappiest LCD panel I can find to really recapture the moment. Hell, maybe I’ll even leave the side off my case with a box fan blowing in for that extra bit of authenticity.