Crysis director says it was so hard to run it became a meme because its highest settings were meant for future PCs: 'I wanted to make sure Crysis does not age'
As part of a larger retrospective on Crysis in issue 405 of PC Gamer's print magazine, Crysis director and Crytek founder Cevat Yerli shared his thoughts on the "Can it run Crysis?" meme, as well as what he believes led to this most enduring aspect of the 2007 shooter's legacy.
“I want[ed] to make sure Crysis does not age, that [it] is future proofed, meaning that if I played it three years from now, it should look better than today,” Yerli said. Crysis' highest graphics settings were designed with the hardware of 2010 and beyond in mind, according to Yerli, and to flick them on in 2007 was an act of hubris. “A lot of people tried to maximize Crysis immediately,” he says. “And I’m like, ‘Oh, that’s not why we built the Ultra mode, or Very High’.”
Yerli might be underselling Crysis graphical brutality just a bit, though. In a 2020 retrospective video, Digital Foundry writers John Linneman and Alex Battaglia found a more or less permanent home in the sub-30 fps range playing Crysis on a 2007-era powerful system at High settings and with the decidedly retro resolution of 1168x665. The High setting may also have been best left to future PCs then, and depending on your budget, maybe chuck Medium and Low in there too.
But it's all in good fun: That's a big part of Crysis' legend, after all. Yerli himself seems to appreciate the continued popularity of Crysis as a memetic (sometimes still serious) measure of gaming horsepower: “It was this ambivalent kind of meme that was good and bad, but I actually enjoyed it,” he said. “Last year, Jensen [Huang] for Nvidia announced a new GPU, and they said, ‘Yes, and it can run Crysis.’”
Behind the performance woes and their resulting memes, Crysis remains a great looking game that pushed a number of innovative graphical techniques. Yerli was so focused on knocking Crysis' jungle simulation out of the park that there was a running joke among the developers that, in Crysis, "One tree has more technology built in than the entire algorithm for rendering Far Cry."
A studio research team went to Haiti to document the tropical environment for reference purposes, influencing Crytek's early adoption of dynamic lighting, as opposed to the lower-cost baked lighting of yesteryear, where every shadow is placed by an artist rather than simulated. Crytek also implemented subsurface scattering to nail the "soft, green translucency where the sun is behind [a leaf]."
"Subsurface scattering was a technology that existed already in engines, but was super slow," Yerli said. "Nobody had done it at scale." Crysis further had facial animations and rendering that could challenge Valve's legendarily lifelike Source engine faces. Yerli was particularly proud of shadows and shaders that could replicate the little nuances and details, including one to make characters blush: "We went over bonkers on this one," said Yerli.
And really, that's a good summation of the entire project of Crysis, when you get down to it. To read print-exclusive stories like our full Crysis retrospective, consider subscribing to PC Gamer's print magazine—you'll also get that magical feeling of holding a physical bundle of game journalism in your hand each month.