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Crytek CEO wants to bring back the phrase: “can it run Crysis?”

crysis3toad

That tesselated toad did look lovely, didn’t it? Excellent toad, almost indistinguishable from the real thing, such is the power of CryEngine 3. Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli spoke about Crysis 3’s ability to melt PCs during an EA livestream at Gamescom, as well as his desire to bring back the “can it run Crysis?” benchmark that disappeared roughly around the time Crysis 2 came out.

“That will be resurrected with Crysis 3,” insisted Cevat Yerli, “I’m quite sure about that. Many PCs have been melted at Crytek, not just for the game’s sake, but working in production we get very new prototype hardware that’s not available on the market yet. So that situation causes a lot of hardware failures. It’s up to us to figure out if we caused it, or if the hardware itself caused it. That’s part of the job of being at the edge of things, and pushing the boundaries. It’s fun at times and it’s frustrating at times, but that’s why we are who we are.”


Cevat was also fairly candid about Crysis 2’s shortcomings on PC, on a technical level at least, admitting that some compromises had to be made in multi-platform development. “PCs are so far ahead now … so making Crysis 3 look great on the PC, like benchmark quality on PC, and at the same time run fantastic on consoles is going to be a challenge that we didn’t have in Crysis 2, because PCs and consoles were closer. And in Crysis 1 we only focused on PC. There is unfortunately always a compromise that we have to take, but at the same time we’re trying not to compromise the PC [with Crysis 3] but to push the consoles.”
Here’s the interview in full, should you wish to put your eyes on it.