Did you play Far Cry? I didn't, or rather I goofed around with the demo a bit but never really fell in love with the predictable mechanics enough to lobby for a review or play it to completion on my own. The lush island-sized jungle arenas were gorgeous, true, but the A.I. never rose to the challenge, and at this point, I bore quickly wandering around head-popping clueless thugs and mutant beasts regardless of a game's photo-realism.
Spiritual sequel Crysis, Crytek's tale of anti-grav aliens wreaking climatological havoc off the coast of the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, is shaping up to be only secondarily about graphics, and that's saying something after hearing how good it looks from PC World's Danny Allen, who spent a good couple of hours with the game yesterday and put together this video with some of the action:
Crysis seems to have in spades that other games only pretend to (say Gears of War, for instance): true, tactically shrewd, contextually "aware" artificial intelligence, and in remarkably freeform environments to boot.
Take Call of Duty 2's occasional "go anywhere, do X objectives in any order you like" levels and marry them to a much more spatially sophisticated opponent, one who might, for instance, launch flares to signal reinforcements in a pinch, notice bent or broken foliage the way guards in Splinter Cell notice shot-out lights, then actually follow your crumpled back trail -- even wave to signal distant gunboats at sea if you're fighting on a beach and/or near the ocean.
Since everything in Crysis is fully destructible, battles can dynamically reconfigure an environment (rocks shatter, buildings collapse, trees topple, crates burst apart), but the enemy fully understands it relationship with those changing objects, allowing it to adjust realistically in terms of using cover and tactically reacting as battlefields transform.
We'll of course believe all that only after seeing it working in Crytek's final code (recall the noise made about Bethesda's radiant A.I., which turned out to be a lot of sound and fury come ship time) but color me arguably the most jazzed about this game's potential this fall. Nearly a full year behind schedule, it finally ships this September 2007.
For more up-to-the-minute blogs, stories, photos, and video from the show, visit our E3 2007 Infocenter.
