Rumor: Crysis is going to the 360?
Whether Crysis is really selling well or not, is up for discussion. What’s undeniable is the recent buzz that Crytek’s resource hog game is mentioned in—a console port. Sure, Crytek may huff all they want that the “current-gen” consoles can’t handle Crysis, but you can’t deny that porting them over to the Xbox 360 and the PS3 would bring in better sales.
What you’re seeing is a screenshot of an Austrian retail Web site revealing that an Xbox 360 version is coming on November 20, 2008.
Strangely, there’s no listing for a PS3 version in said Web site. Then again, if there’s anyone we should listen to, it should be Crytek. To date, the company hasn’t commented on this news, but if you look closely at their Web site’s job section, you’ll observe that they’re looking for a PS3 programmer.
The Austrian retailer could be correct. However, it’s hard to discount what’s implied by Crytek’s site.
Here’s my theory: Crysis already has a 360 programmer in their ranks, and they could be working on the port as I type this—thus the November ’08 release date. There’s a chance the PS3 version would come later since they still don’t have a PS3 programmer, unless it’s an old advertisement.
Whatever the case, I’m sure that Crytek is up to something. Let the speculations commence.
I’d be surprised if there wasn’t some sort of console version in development. Although it’s likely going to be something other than a direct port, that’s not really what Crytek does. However it’s also likely going to look a lot worse than the PC version, but hey – at least you won’t need to upgrade to play it ;)
Perhaps it won’t be so bad. After all, Crysis still looks terrific even in “low” settings. In addition, console games run better than PC games since they have fewer resources to manage.
I haven’t actually played Crysis in low detail (only high), but if it’s anything like UT3’s detail scaling then low must still look pretty amazing. I doubt they’ll have to drop it all the way to low for consoles though, probably more like medium detail-ish? Although you can’t really tell until it is released.
That said – UT3 on the PS3 was supposedly going to be amazingly well-optimized for the PS3 architecture and still it runs with a 30 FPS hard-lock. Does that mean these latest consoles aren’t quite as powerful as advertised? Or did Epic just slack off on optimization in the end? The latter seems a tad unlikely, because Epic tends to gain most from it’s UE3-tech sales.
Then again – CoD 4 managed beautifully with it’s 60 FPS lock! All they did was reduce texture detail to 1/4th of the PC version – and performance is about on par. Maybe that’s the route Crytek will take with the console version!