Surely the only thing they can do here is include the whole continent? Given the amount of time over which they're developing it, and the teases they put out about how revolutionary it will be, I'd expect to see the whole of Tamriel with an Elder Scrolls-like level of detail in a single-player game.

For anyone who's been having trouble with desktop and browser instability with the latest drivers, as I was, these might do the trick. I've got a 460 GTX and wasn't able to install anything past 314.22 without getting frequent crashes.

Been using 331.58 for the past week or so (which were posted in the Nvidia forum as a test driver) and all's been well so far.

That UK sales number is actually a bit misleading, as the game came out here on the 29th - so that "first week" number is more like "one and a bit days."

Pike wrote on Mar 2, 2010, 05:14:
I saw a news story last year about how they were planning to make all of the Volume I book quests soloable, does anyone know if they've done that yet?

I haven't checked it out myself yet, but yes, this is supposed to happen with this new book. I can finally finish 'em...

I don't know who General Hammond is, but I do know Don Davis as Major Briggs in Twin Peaks... can't believe he's dead! What a shame.

Great stuff, doing it with a download. I was expecting them to come out with new (expensive) hardware.

I don't think he's saying you *need* a second card for it, just that it might encourage people with money to burn to, er, burn it.

As for support, I would think devs will be much more willing to include PhysX now, if it's a standard ability of all 8800 cards.

I agree with Tanto Edge - a big part of the problem with the Crysis engine seems to be optimisation. It's like they're just throwing everything at the GPU and expecting it to cope without doing any proper scaling, and thus it runs shoddily on any hardware.

Other recent games like Call of Duty 4 look amazing, and I can play that at 1920 x 1200 on my X1950 Pro at a great frame rate. Yes, the graphics are obviously more "pre-rendered" than Crysis, but at least it works.

Remember a few years ago when new graphics driver releases from ATI or Nvidia would sometimes improve general performance by 10-20 per cent? They were really honing the hardware. That's what Crytek should be doing with the game, optimising it to run as fast as is possible, not adding yet more gunk. Along with improving the AI, general scripting and so on, of course...

This is sort of inevitable but doesn't interest me in the slightest. The only way it would work for me is if they carried on with the single player games as normal while a whole different team did the online rubbish. But then, there ain't as much money in single player RPGs any more, so that probably won't happen. Ho hum.

I mean, we all know they're evil but have they become so powerful that they can be this openly evil?

Evil? They're just, like, games... Is this really such big and/or important news? On the back of my FIFA 07 box it says:

"EA may retire online features after 30 days notice posted on www.easports.com"

Sooo... it's not like it's out of the blue. And they have been doing this for a while. And, like, it's only a game... again... some perspective needed?

This comment was edited on Aug 5, 00:38.

Just had a press release from EA saying it's the 16th Nov:

EA AND CRYTEK ANNOUNCE NOVEMBER 16TH RELEASE DATE FOR CRYSIS
Start Counting Down to One of the Year's Most Highly Anticipated First Person Shooters
Chertsey, UK – August 2, 2007 – Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) and Crytek, award-winning developers of Far Cry, today announced that CrysisTM, will be hitting retail stores in North America and Europe on November 16, 2007 exclusively for the PC. A technical achievement featuring stunning DirectX 10 and DirectX 9 visuals...

[blah blah blah snipped]

Is it anything like Dungeon Keeper?

Based on the 360 demo (I assume the PC is the same), no, at least not in terms of actual gameplay. It's more of a third person strategy management combat... er... quite hard to describe really.

I don't think Nvidia or any other manufacturer has any excuses for shoddy or incomplete Vista drivers, really, given that Vista was delayed and in development for so long. It's not as if they didn't have adequate advance warning, after all.

This comment was edited on Jun 1, 19:56.

Wow... nine years?

The waterfall was amazing, ditto the sound atmosphere. So was the gradual change from day to night over the course of the game's levels - great little touch (which just about every shooter seems to have copied at some point).

Also, it was incredibly LONG, as I remember, especially by today's standards.

I used to be a big EQ2 player and whenever people were whingeing in the forums about the latest nerf or whatever, there would always be those saying, "Wait till Vanguard comes out! Then we'll see what a real MMORPG is like! It'll kick EQ2's ass!" etc. etc.

Uh huh. Messiah Syndrome, I call it... so what's the Next Big Thing on the MMORPG list, which will totally blow away everything that's gone before? (No really, it will this time.)

Not defending this - it's obviously a ploy to get you to upgrade - but a) it's clearly stated this might happen on the box, and b) the "2005" titles actually came out in 2004, so they're two years old.

Quite. None of these charts are accurate. No company gives away its sub numbers (apart from Blizzard, because they can, because they're so huge). It's all supposition and estimates based on server numbers at a particular point in time. It means nothing.

Oh please god no, not Al Lowe and his sub-teenage 'jokes' again... isn't he a bit old for all that nudge-nudge innuendo and fart gag nonsense?

3DMark doesn't and never has had anything to do with real-world game performance. Why not just license the HL2/Doom 3/whatever engine and make a benchmark around that, if so? And why aren't MadOnion actually making their own engine and licensing it, if they are so cutting edge?

The 3DMark stuff is solely about fillrate, ie. the amount of things you can have on screen at once. Actual game engines aren't just built around that - they have to figure in AI and lighting and visibility and multiplayer performance, so they're much more efficient. 3DMark is a pre-rendered cut-scene in a film, attempting to run in real-time: games don't actually do that.

The last two posters hit it on the head. Games aren't about engines any more - that's why they get licensed. Engines are... well, not easy, but easily reusable.

It's all about the content: textures, story, modelling, scripting and whatever. THAT takes all the development time.

It's like film: anyone now (with a decent digital video camera) can make a film, but unless you have ideas and talent and a script, you aren't going to be bothering Hollywood any time soon.

It's so sad, but also so interesting, to see a mod team saying "We're going to do this and this and this and make a whole new game." More often than not, as soon as the scale of the task becomes apparent, the mod team gives up, slowly. And those that don't go on to work in the industry, which makes a lot of sense.

Uh... ramble over.

Just looked at the SWG website. Seems like they're going all out, one last time, to get people playing it, with tons of incentives. And also effectively telling older players "This is the way it's going to be, if you don't like it, get your money back on the expansion."

Unprecedented, as Blue says. On the one hand, it's great to see a company realising not everyone likes their plans. On the other, it really smacks of desperation. Surely if this ploy doesn't work, SWG will be dead within six months?