The gaming world may be eagerly awaiting the arrival of Sony’s Playstation 4 and Microsoft’s Xbox 720 (Next), although neither will be able to match the raw horsepower of cutting-edge rigs when it comes to running Crysis 3 and up.
“Without breaking NDAs that are in place, realistically, from purely a price point perspective, it is impossible. It’s impossible to package $2000-3000 into a mainstream, let’s say $500 console. I’m not saying they are $500 consoles,” Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli told EuroGamer.
“So, given consumer pricing, and given the cost of production of a gamer PC and the amount of watt of power it needs, which is like a fridge, it’s impossible. They may launch a console at $2000, but the consumer pricing is usually much lower than that.”
According to Yerli, Crysis 3 will return to its roots by pushing gaming PC tech to its limits – unlike Crysis 2 which focused more on the Xbox 360 and PS3.
“This time around the consoles couldn’t gain much more. It was like a five per cent or ten per cent gain. That’s it. But the PC version, because the specs are now much more evolved, this is two years later, effectively, this is two generations of PCs we could leverage and DirectX 11 is fully rolled out, so now we could really push it,” he said.
“With Crysis 2 we tried to make the spec available to as many PC gamers as possible. Then we heard back from the loudest group, which was enthusiast PC gamers, ‘our PCs are running this game at 200 frames. What the hell? We should be running at 30 frames. Our graphics programmers said, ‘we’re going to give them a game they can’t run any more’.”
In other Crysis news, Yerli told CVG that Crytek had big plans for Crysis 3 DLCs.
“We’re still exploring that. We have some plans in mind that we can’t disclose yet, but we are going to wait a little bit to see how the beta’s running and how the game does for the first few days. We do have a big plan to support it,” he added.
It should be noted that three million gamers downloaded the Crysis 3 multiplayer beta, while Crysis 3 pre-orders apparently total 35 per cent higher than Crysis 2 back in 2011.
Crysis 3 launches on February 19 in the US and February 22 in Europe.
