The Crysis demo was released a couple of days ago. I gave it a run yesterday, just to see if my system would hold together. At first it wouldn't run, but I became a bit suspicious as my computer didn't actually lock up and I saw some text come and go. Then I remembered all those HD videos that Crytek released, they were too much for my computer to handle. Hence I decided to check out the movie directory in the Crysis installation. It was pretty big. Among these files I found a 1 kilobyte video file, probably containing a black screen or a tiny logo or something. I replaced every video file in the movies directory with that file. Surprise, it worked. Heh, I love it when I'm right.
So I ran the game again on minimum settings and I was stunned yet again. It ran. Few physics, pathetic LOD, but it ran. It virtually looked like the old Farcry, although the textures looked somewhat washed out. Most them didn't look half bad though, especially those on the NPCs I encountered. But yeah, sorry DesR85, it is indeed Farcry-ish island hopping all over again. Little suprise there. I read the next Farcry is going to take place in Africa though, so maybe that's more up your alley.
This game must really look beautiful on the higher settings, but I didn't try to push my luck. They're using a novel approach to in-game cinematics where a sort of flyby demo starts running the moment you run near a special area (usually a radar waypoint). Well, except you don't 'fly'-by, the game takes control of your 'camera' and walks you around a bit as you look around and react to what happens around you. The camera backs down a bit when it is surprised and it will nod to the NPC's that are talking to you, stuff like that. I thought it was amusing more than realistic, but I can see how this solves the problem of getting the players attention in the right direction at the right time (if you played the Halflife 2: Ep.1 commentary tracks you probably know they went through a great deal of trouble trying to pull that off without forcing the player into a certain direction.)
I'm proud my single-core pre-Athlon ATI 9800 setup was able to pull this off at a nice framerate. I might yet get this game simply because I enjoyed Far Cry in a similar manner.