Hello. Not sure how to get this message to you, so I'll just add this comment. I wanted to thank Digital Foundry for the many hours of enjoyment you gave my son John who passed away last month. He really loved the detailed data and observations you provided on games. I used to watch your channel with him and while I didn't understand everything, my son did. I think I finally figured out what "ambient occlusion" means. Anyway, maybe you will get to read this comment and know that you gave my joy to my son through your videos. Best wishes to you and everyone at your channel.
Hello Baker. I want to wish you and your family any strength possible and my sincerest sympathy for your loss of John. That is something no parent should bear. Your message has completely warmed my heart and I am beyond joyed that our videos could, in any way, be a way you bond with your son. That is something I will treasure. I of course did not know John, but I will be spending my time thinking of him and you. If there is anything I can do, well, I can be reached here and on twitter. With love, Alex
@@alexanderbattaglia6048 , Thank you kindly for replying "in person". My son was a beautiful person and a wonderful son to me. I'm really glad that he could give you a lasting treasure as well. Blessings to you all. Norma
@Baker Canner, I'm so terribly sorry for your loss... I wont be able to say something that you've probably already heard so I will just finish it of by wishing you the best of luck to process this life changing event... My condolences and I hope you will find the space and time to get this whole situation behind you and get your life going again! Best wishes!
@@MrMclanskey , I thank you very much for your kind words. John was ill with a heart condition for five years. Over that time, I was blessed to be able to spend a lot of time with him, especially watching videos, but also doing game walkthroughs. I never knew how compelling and beautiful games could be and he taught me that. He did a walkthrough of the Witcher for me with the DLC as well and it was magic. He also did Uncharted the series for me and we had so much fun. We also did one of the Metro games and got to part 3 of Mass Effect, and some of Red Dead Redemption. We were looking forward to CyperPunk. So I have lots of great memories as I "get my life going again". Kind regards and best wishes.
Warhead is actually my favorite of the franchise. Gameplay still deeply rooted in the first one but more action-packed, alien battles in free form. Jungle levels, snow levels, more Gauss canon. Loved it.
Me too. It is so much better balanced around alien and human combat and you don't actually have to stop playing when Aliens show up like in the original.
Same. The original game just had a vastness of scale and since of awe that was lacking in the sequels. Even compared with Crysis 3, which was designed to address the more linear level design of Crysis 2. Crysis Warhead had some really awesome moments that were both a bit more action-packed but also free-form. They managed to give players ultimate freedom here...
It's amazing how well this aged. CryEngine to me has always had the best representation of real world lighting. No over-exposed scenes, crazy color grading, just natural looking scenes. That and the amount of foliage they could render on screen that also had dynamic physics, and that subtle anti-aliasing that was only applied to the leaves that made them look like real full trees when at a distance. That is something I wish they brought back with their modern tech. That subtle leaf effect really made the foliage stand out.
But yeah generally speaking one could say it's easy to do so by making a game basically unplayable on current gen systems and release it anyways. But it's still not true, because at the time, I had no problems in running it at 30fps with a shitty GPU. And even at medium settings it looked damn great, as long as godrays were enabled in the console prompt. You couldn't just achieve the same graphics/performance ratio at the time with usual AAA games; Crytek cared more about "tek" rather than money, and the results can still be seen in Crysis 2, which while got much more mainstream and ruined with shitton of filters, still looks better than most of games nowadays. I'm not even mentioning Crysis 3
not really my old phone in seven deadly sins mobile is crazy beautiful. a game that coming to 720p and 1080 and 30fps and 60... on super expensive hardware.. is sad taking a screen shot of god of war on ps4 a 2013 game looks better on 4 times less cost
Same here, even got the original installation files and everything from day 1 on one of my hard drives. I feel like it might be a huge pain trying to get around the DRM in the future.
Same here, even got the original installation files and everything from day 1 on one of my hard drives. I feel like it might be a huge pain trying to get around the DRM in the future.
@John Doe you can run it with 1080 maybe 1070 and a 4770k. And at least to me when you mess around it isn't boring. But when you play following roads it is boring.
@John Doe Agreed, it wasn't a great game even at the time. Yeah the first 'level' was really impressive and felt like it would be good, but it was all a bit meh. I actually think Crysis 2 is the best 'game' in the series and that is the one everybody hates.
I'm convinced the piracy rates were so high because the game came off as a hard to run benchmark that everyone with a gaming PC wanted to try just to see how "next gen" graphics were going to look, even if it was at 4 fps.
Partially true - later the benchmark tool ran with the demo version aswell... I remember running it on almost all the PC-s i built as a system stress test
Yeah, too many devs are quick to blame piracy for sales disappointment. I would say all games are equally pirated in proportion to their normal selling rate.
I love the blast from the past these videos provide. I had the legendary Q6600/8800GT PC you talked about and played through the original Crysis first with that PC (I believe at 1200x800 resolution to get the game running at 30). Then I upgraded to a GTX 280, and it was a night and day difference like you talked about in this video. Nerd moment: I remember how I "trained" for Warhead's release by playing the original Crysis (for the nth time) in a much more action-focused manner because that was more the nature of Psycho's character (I always played full stealth when playing as Nomad). I think this actually helped me enjoy the narrower scope of the levels, because I wasn't trying to play them like Crysis 1 levels and they really suited the action-focused playstyle.
Crysis 3 was the best game in the series imo, though of course the original was the most ground breaking without question. But Crysis 3 refined the mechanics and had better overall level design that made it more enjoyable to actually play. Of course it looked amazing and even today on my 2080ti it presents a work out at 1440p at max settings
@@MaTtRoSiTyCool, Unfortunately Crysis 3 was the one Crysis game I overall disliked, that ending was the biggest Bruh of a ending for some time, still having each level being different helped, still the game was too way too short. Where would you like Crysis 4 too take place?
If I remember correctly Crysis Warhead included a stand alone online game called Crysis Wars. It was very well supported for a number of years and had a lot of cool custom made arenas/levels. I learned how to play online shooters in that game and learned that Russian players are really, really good.
Gone but not forgotten. You didn't really hear much about it even when it was new so so I'd blame it on poor marketing. Those that played it back in the day still play it to this day. Good game :)
The harsh reality if "Crysis on PC" is the fact that the PC gamer elitists never really supported the game... there were barely over 500,000 actual purchases for the first Crysis since 2007 release. Don't get this wrong... millions of PC gamers did purchase Nvidia GeForce GTX 8800s but when Crytek released a couple of patches there were over one million downloads which tells you that most hardcore PC gamers actually just pirated the game. Also there was a lot of whining over the zero g stages so Crytek didn't reprise those levels which seemed weird when you play Warhead as the game feels more generic run and gun and the problem is that PC Call of Duty actually super outsold Crysis and Warhead... as such... never trust PC gamer elitists. The other problem was Microsoft themselves... they decided to rush development of Xbox 360 for 2005 instead of waiting for Direct X 10 GPUs or a simple 2007 Xbox launch in an alternate universe... Finally neither Crysis nor Warhead actually use more than a single CPU core... there is a placebo effect of running on dual CPU cores and more... It also does not actually tap the power of the GeForce GTX 8800... it's just Brute force settings. As such the PS4 and base Xbox One have eight CPU cores, 8GB of ram and a GPU with compute unit cores... and Crytek just didn't bother to rewrite their 3d engine to take advantage of that base hardware.
This game was made in my country, Hungary, and the hungarian dubbing is amazing. Psycho swears a lot in the game and we have like 100 swearing/cursing words. :D
Hungarian is hilarious on it's own. As a Polish I used to change TV channel to some hungarian tv and have laught watching ads. And I know what you mean you have hundreds different curses etc, similar in my language, where with english language "fuck" means just "fuck".
Actually English swearing gets away with it in most places just because it's not the mother's / native tongue, if I had a game dubbed in my own language swearing I would definitely not like it as does trigger much bigger pyschological response than it does in another language, for me at least, many people use other languages for swearing around here when they're not really than angry and reserving the native tongue swear words for more severe cases of frustration and anger.
Any Digital Foundry video is so enjoyable it's almost insulting, thank you for this analysis, I enjoyed the hell out of Crysis Warhead not so long ago and it was so fun to play to me, glad to see some focus on the expansion.
This game has aged INCREDIBLY well in terms of gameplay, design and tech. it felt like a game dropped in from 10 years in the future when it came out and still feels amazing today,
The opening to this video was so awesome, good work Alex! And now you got me wondering why i never played crysis warhead when i have played Crysis 1, 2 & 3...
The cutscenes in Crysis Warhead were really odd. The music would finish before the cutscene would, and there were weird pacing issues. That stood out to me when I played it back in the day.
@Dalle Smalhals Just go play the game. You'll see. I think it was related to really low frame rates. If your frame rate was lower than 30 during cutscenes, the sound would skip ahead of the audio, which resulted in some really weird experiences.
I played Warhead last year and it was awesome, but the cutscenes were really bad, Warhead and MGS4 both released in the same year but MGS4 has way better animations and cutscene direction.
This is such a helpful video. I had NO IDEA that anisotropic filtering was disabled by default on Crysis Warhead and I appreciate those downloadable files that improve the graphics further that you provided! This is gonna be my go to video every time I have to reinstall Crysis Warhead.
Crysis Warhead has always been my favorite in the series. I remember trying to play it on a potato PC in 2010. At max settings it ran at about 6 frames per minute. At minimum settings it was barely playable, and got my graphics card so toasty it died soon after. Warhead was also the first game I played after I built myself a proper computer. Yeah, Crysis 1 had larger more interesting levels, but even on that new computer it had rather inconsistent performance that I could never got over, and I found the main character to be far less interesting than Psycho in Warhead. Crysis 2 and 3 never felt like Crysis to me at all. Sure they look nice, but everything else is lacking.
I think that's what killed the x1300 Pro I had on pci riser card, pentium 4 hp utra slim back in 2008 it was all I could. 😂 I still miss that ati gpu and I
Crytek are graphical wizards. I turned on Ryse on my Xbox and it still looks amazing. One of this gen's very best on console despite being a launch title.
It does look great but the image quality is pretty bad (blurry) on xbox. Super underrated game and probably my favorite xbox exclusive this gen! Still, can't hold a candle to killzone shadow fall which is also a launch title yet is still easily one of the best looking games ever in every way pretty much (in campaign mode). I think it looks better than horizon honestly.
Gotta say I remember crysis 1 looking real, I had crisis 2 on 360 and could really see how far they were pushing the genre at the time definitely supporting the remake!
@@DC3Refom C2 is downgrade is only the fact that its linear. The graphics are improved, not significantly but noticeable and definitely better optimized
The soundtrack of Warhead was so cinematic ! Especially during the hovercraft chase, or the final mission when you get overrun by aliens in the tower !
Warhead is the best Crysis game. Simon O'Callaghan's train level is a a triumph for the genre, and as far as scenario planning, Crysis 1 asked "what if it snowed on a tropical island?" Crysis 2 answered, "The tropical island is flash frozen." The geometry of the frozen waves alone is a visual marvel.
@@8Paul7 Probably, but most notable ones don't exist today, like Digital Reality - Imperium Galactica / Haegemonia / Skydrift / Sine Mora (this was a collab with Grasshopper Manufacture) Black Hole Entertainment - Armies of Exigo / Warhammer: Mark of Chaos / Might and Magic Heroes VI StormRegion - Codename Panzers One that is still making games today are NeocoreGames, they made King Arthur: The Role-Playing Game, Adventures of Van Hellsing, and the recent Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr game
@@Granhier glad to see there is at least something. Interesting how Poland became such gamedev powerhouse while other excom countries are struggling a bit. That said many western ones are even worse. I am glad czechland has at least Warhorse and Bohemia, plus yesterday launching Someday You'll Return which looks interesting.
@@christopherchilton1955 FF7 remake is a very mixed looking game, at it's best it is gorgeous, at its worst it has ps2 textures and characters popping in 10 feet from the player. It feels like parts where extremely rushed, and others had years of polish put into them.
FF7 Remake looks like shit decent amount of time. There are lots of environmental textures that NEVER load. And they still don't patch that abomination.
You can change the color grading in Warhead to make it look more like Crysis by entering "r_ColorGradingSelectiveColor 0" in the console. I had the exact same issue with the visuals of Warhead and this made it much more comfortable to look at. Thanks for the video!
The train level in Resistance 3 is by far the most varied and dynamic one with barely any repetition apart from that in Crysis! Another fps that is extremely under-rated!
I have minimun hopes that the team is pushing the boundaries in this remaster to put everything they got one more time, i sincerely and utterly think that is more an "take this damn but now fixed thing and leave us alone" launch.
Thanks for the review and in depth analysis. I play all three Crysis games every year or two, but a have never played Warhead. I will have to look into it and maybe add it to my yearly schedule.
One of the recent statements by the Crysis remaster devs about being excited to remaster the original Crysis "campaigns" (plural), makes me thing Warhead might be included in the Remaster. Here's hoping! It's a great standalone expansion.
It's how the game ends, when the north korean commander throws tirades of "You americans, always..." at you, and you just sardonically say: "I'm a brit, muppet." and shoot him. :D
If you look carefully you'll see that paralax occlusion mapping isnt working as there is a bug in the engine when you run anisotropic filtering with it, it disables POM, there is a mod to fix this though. The bug is also in the original crysis and in the 64bit versions of the code 2
FYI, having made the "super powers mod 2" for Crysis 1, I am pretty familiar with the levels and I am fairly certain that the train level in warhead is a modified version of the vtol level in crysis 1.
I remember playing this for the first time when I was 6 and couldn't do anything but always felt it was super cool. I beat it only when I turned 14 completed it with a trackpad 😂. I have so many great memories with this and to this day I think it's one of the best FPS games I've played
It's blurry because it's zoomed in digitally and having it sharper like on the left doesn't always help. It's very pointy and jaggy, which doesn't exactly make it look better.
CRYSIS 3 came out in 2013. I can't wrap my head around that. I remember back in 2012 the beautiful videos and thinking "yep, here we go again with the PC upgrade" so I built a system (not just for this game) with an i7 and GTX680. Never got around to playing it until I upgraded to a GTX1080 and I still couldn't max out the settings at 2560x1440 to maintain 60FPS though I could with minor tweaks... and I recently went back to look at Crysis Warhead thinking I'd be disappointed but I was pleasantly surprised it looks fine and plays great... mixed feelings on the control system changes over time.
This was great man, thank you so much. I loved the OG but this expansion has its amazing moments. I also didn't particularly liked the color grading and preferred the OG natural looks. I also really hope the remaster brings back the system killing options for future hardware as well. When this game runs fast, it is so fun to play and nothing is like it. I encourage everyone to look up NanoSuit Ninja's TH-cam videos on Crysis.
Hell of an expansion - if a little short. I actually preferred the combat in Warhead overall than the engagements in Crysis - however it wasn't as expansive nor 'epic' as the first as Alex so rightly pointed out. Would love it if they remastered this one.
Draw distance in this engine is set for each individual object. Console variables work as a multiplier for these values for each object. And the draw distance of objects in Crysis Warhead has lower values, and the developers compensated for this by increasing draw distance in the console.
If the remastered game included a level editor and they did Warhead as well that would be very nice to have. I can't say i'd rush out to buy Crisis 2 & 3 again though, they could benefit from a remix/remake more than a re-release perhaps.
Damn I remember the hitch in Crysis Warhead that Alex points out causing his fps to drop into the 40's. Haven't played in years, but vividly remembered once I saw it.
The executable was *nearly* identical between the two versions. If you can't get Crysis to play on your system (which as I understand is the norm these days) you use the 64 bit executable from Crysis Warhead in the Crysis Bin64 folder. It can be used in the Bin32 folder as well, the previous fix was to install the Crysis 64 executable in the 32 bit folder. I still play both games often, Crysis when I'm in a sniper mood and Crysis Warhead just because Psycho is my favorite character out of the entire series. Psycho may have actually used the word "moppet" instead of "muppet" as he may have been calling them a child. I always thought it was just an accent thing, now I'm not sure. Love those two games. Honestly Crysis and Warhead are what actually got me out of the budget realm. I was always several years behind on cheap parts. My first serious video card was a 3870, the 4000 series had just been released and the 3870 cost me a cool $159.
Please do a updated technical review on Crysis 3. It isn’t my favorite game from a story perspective, but the graphics are one of my favorites. I cannot wait for the remaster to release on PC.
Ah, good to know this one's actually optimized. I hear this one's gameplay peak of the series, and I doubt it's getting a remaster to make it run any better.
Crysis series brings a lot of memories and one of them was spending a lot of money just to play 720p on my e6550, 8800gt and an audigyzs 5.1 My experience = priceless!
12700K and evga 2080ti ftw3. Managed to basically stay at 100fps at 2560x1440p at enthusiast. Fun game and had some twist that filled pockets in Crysis 1s storyline.
Hello. Not sure how to get this message to you, so I'll just add this comment. I wanted to thank Digital Foundry for the many hours of enjoyment you gave my son John who passed away last month. He really loved the detailed data and observations you provided on games. I used to watch your channel with him and while I didn't understand everything, my son did. I think I finally figured out what "ambient occlusion" means. Anyway, maybe you will get to read this comment and know that you gave my joy to my son through your videos. Best wishes to you and everyone at your channel.
Hello Baker.
I want to wish you and your family any strength possible and my sincerest sympathy for your loss of John. That is something no parent should bear. Your message has completely warmed my heart and I am beyond joyed that our videos could, in any way, be a way you bond with your son. That is something I will treasure.
I of course did not know John, but I will be spending my time thinking of him and you.
If there is anything I can do, well, I can be reached here and on twitter.
With love,
Alex
@@alexanderbattaglia6048 , Thank you kindly for replying "in person". My son was a beautiful person and a wonderful son to me. I'm really glad that he could give you a lasting treasure as well. Blessings to you all. Norma
@Baker Canner,
I'm so terribly sorry for your loss... I wont be able to say something that you've probably already heard so I will just finish it of by wishing you the best of luck to process this life changing event... My condolences and I hope you will find the space and time to get this whole situation behind you and get your life going again!
Best wishes!
@@MrMclanskey , I thank you very much for your kind words. John was ill with a heart condition for five years. Over that time, I was blessed to be able to spend a lot of time with him, especially watching videos, but also doing game walkthroughs. I never knew how compelling and beautiful games could be and he taught me that. He did a walkthrough of the Witcher for me with the DLC as well and it was magic. He also did Uncharted the series for me and we had so much fun. We also did one of the Metro games and got to part 3 of Mass Effect, and some of Red Dead Redemption. We were looking forward to CyperPunk. So I have lots of great memories as I "get my life going again". Kind regards and best wishes.
@Z3U5 Thank you kindly. It is very difficult, but I try to stay focused on being thankful for the time that I DID have with him.
Warhead is actually my favorite of the franchise.
Gameplay still deeply rooted in the first one but more action-packed, alien battles in free form. Jungle levels, snow levels, more Gauss canon.
Loved it.
Me too. It is so much better balanced around alien and human combat and you don't actually have to stop playing when Aliens show up like in the original.
@@Ana198 man I never understood why people say that about original crisis. I love the aliens and those latter levels.
Same. The original game just had a vastness of scale and since of awe that was lacking in the sequels. Even compared with Crysis 3, which was designed to address the more linear level design of Crysis 2. Crysis Warhead had some really awesome moments that were both a bit more action-packed but also free-form. They managed to give players ultimate freedom here...
It's amazing how well this aged. CryEngine to me has always had the best representation of real world lighting. No over-exposed scenes, crazy color grading, just natural looking scenes. That and the amount of foliage they could render on screen that also had dynamic physics, and that subtle anti-aliasing that was only applied to the leaves that made them look like real full trees when at a distance. That is something I wish they brought back with their modern tech. That subtle leaf effect really made the foliage stand out.
Kingdom Come is the best looking released Cryengine game to date. It looks and plays so amazingly lifelike.
@@8Paul7 Still need to check that out. Hunt has been disappointing...though it looks great.
@@activatewindows How is Hunt disappointing?
Full alpha coverage. Pretty sure that's the AA for tree leaves. Or alpha transparencies.
@@8Paul7 I would probably agree. Looks as good or better than Crysis 3 Remastered. Kingdom Come is incredible.
it's insane how well this game has aged graphically
Crytek's tech was far ahead of hardware...
@@un80rns warhead of hardware
But yeah generally speaking one could say it's easy to do so by making a game basically unplayable on current gen systems and release it anyways. But it's still not true, because at the time, I had no problems in running it at 30fps with a shitty GPU. And even at medium settings it looked damn great, as long as godrays were enabled in the console prompt. You couldn't just achieve the same graphics/performance ratio at the time with usual AAA games; Crytek cared more about "tek" rather than money, and the results can still be seen in Crysis 2, which while got much more mainstream and ruined with shitton of filters, still looks better than most of games nowadays. I'm not even mentioning Crysis 3
not really my old phone in seven deadly sins mobile is crazy beautiful. a game that coming to 720p and 1080 and 30fps and 60... on super expensive hardware.. is sad taking a screen shot of god of war on ps4 a 2013 game looks better on 4 times less cost
@@simlife445 Agreed, people have their nostalgia goggles on again, the graphics here aren't as good as I remember.
I remember Crysis: Warhead pretty fondly. I still have the DVD on my bookshelf.
Still got the Crysis 1, 2 and Warhead DVD on my vault. (Yes thats right, Vault).
I also have a DVD...because I had to watch it as a movie bebause my PC couldnt run it...
I still got my Warhead and original Crysis DVD too!
Same here, even got the original installation files and everything from day 1 on one of my hard drives. I feel like it might be a huge pain trying to get around the DRM in the future.
Same here, even got the original installation files and everything from day 1 on one of my hard drives. I feel like it might be a huge pain trying to get around the DRM in the future.
I wonder if Crysis was so far ahead of its time that it is in fact its own remake
That's deeep
He hit 40FPS @4k 2080ti
@John Doe you can run it with 1080 maybe 1070 and a 4770k. And at least to me when you mess around it isn't boring.
But when you play following roads it is boring.
@John Doe Agreed, it wasn't a great game even at the time. Yeah the first 'level' was really impressive and felt like it would be good, but it was all a bit meh.
I actually think Crysis 2 is the best 'game' in the series and that is the one everybody hates.
@John Doe I thought it was a pretty fun game. The Suit powers with some fun weapons and mostly open levels made it much better than most shooters
5:38 the 2080 and 2060 in 2008 would’ve been frightening
I am in fact a time traveller, apparently.
Or perhaps I said one thing and my mind thought another :P
I spotted that, but I was going to let him off!
@@alexanderbattaglia6048 Haha, it's kinda funny tho.
Be sure gonna be rtx 2080 grafic
Not really. Cause the game would still be CPU bottlenecked to mid 30 fps.
I'm convinced the piracy rates were so high because the game came off as a hard to run benchmark that everyone with a gaming PC wanted to try just to see how "next gen" graphics were going to look, even if it was at 4 fps.
Partially true - later the benchmark tool ran with the demo version aswell... I remember running it on almost all the PC-s i built as a system stress test
yea that's the problem when yous ell a game on being a tech demo more than gameplay. The gameplay in crysis is good, but it's not genre defining
Eh, back then a lot of great PC games did not do so well. More correctly - selling 1 mil is not bad, but not good enough either.
Yeah, too many devs are quick to blame piracy for sales disappointment. I would say all games are equally pirated in proportion to their normal selling rate.
Most people just wanted to know "can it run Crysis"
I love the blast from the past these videos provide. I had the legendary Q6600/8800GT PC you talked about and played through the original Crysis first with that PC (I believe at 1200x800 resolution to get the game running at 30). Then I upgraded to a GTX 280, and it was a night and day difference like you talked about in this video.
Nerd moment: I remember how I "trained" for Warhead's release by playing the original Crysis (for the nth time) in a much more action-focused manner because that was more the nature of Psycho's character (I always played full stealth when playing as Nomad). I think this actually helped me enjoy the narrower scope of the levels, because I wasn't trying to play them like Crysis 1 levels and they really suited the action-focused playstyle.
It's crazy that this game still has scenes and lighting that look good, 10 years later.
I am still waiting for the "Crysis 3 Revisited" Video. It's been almost 2 years now xD
Great to see more Crysis content though!
Same here.
Crysis 3 was the best game in the series imo, though of course the original was the most ground breaking without question.
But Crysis 3 refined the mechanics and had better overall level design that made it more enjoyable to actually play. Of course it looked amazing and even today on my 2080ti it presents a work out at 1440p at max settings
@@MaTtRoSiTyCool, Unfortunately Crysis 3 was the one Crysis game I overall disliked, that ending was the biggest Bruh of a ending for some time, still having each level being different helped, still the game was too way too short. Where would you like Crysis 4 too take place?
@@seswrt1746 sometimes the shortest stories are the best lived
@@chrismusiclover9893 HAHA.
If I remember correctly Crysis Warhead included a stand alone online game called Crysis Wars. It was very well supported for a number of years and had a lot of cool custom made arenas/levels. I learned how to play online shooters in that game and learned that Russian players are really, really good.
I wonder why it's forgotten. It was magnificent.
because it was just an expansion pack to Crysis
Cause it was a spin-off. Probably also too closely to 'Crysis', both in terms of style and release-time.
it was really magnificent
Gone but not forgotten. You didn't really hear much about it even when it was new so so I'd blame it on poor marketing. Those that played it back in the day still play it to this day. Good game :)
The harsh reality if "Crysis on PC" is the fact that the PC gamer elitists never really supported the game... there were barely over 500,000 actual purchases for the first Crysis since 2007 release.
Don't get this wrong... millions of PC gamers did purchase Nvidia GeForce GTX 8800s but when Crytek released a couple of patches there were over one million downloads which tells you that most hardcore PC gamers actually just pirated the game.
Also there was a lot of whining over the zero g stages so Crytek didn't reprise those levels which seemed weird when you play Warhead as the game feels more generic run and gun and the problem is that PC Call of Duty actually super outsold Crysis and Warhead... as such... never trust PC gamer elitists.
The other problem was Microsoft themselves... they decided to rush development of Xbox 360 for 2005 instead of waiting for Direct X 10 GPUs or a simple 2007 Xbox launch in an alternate universe...
Finally neither Crysis nor Warhead actually use more than a single CPU core... there is a placebo effect of running on dual CPU cores and more...
It also does not actually tap the power of the GeForce GTX 8800... it's just Brute force settings.
As such the PS4 and base Xbox One have eight CPU cores, 8GB of ram and a GPU with compute unit cores... and Crytek just didn't bother to rewrite their 3d engine to take advantage of that base hardware.
I was just browsing to Digital Foundry's old Crysis videos.Alex is preparing for Crysis 3 analysis I think :D. Thank you Alex! You're awesome!
This game was made in my country, Hungary, and the hungarian dubbing is amazing. Psycho swears a lot in the game and we have like 100 swearing/cursing words. :D
Hungarian is hilarious on it's own. As a Polish I used to change TV channel to some hungarian tv and have laught watching ads. And I know what you mean you have hundreds different curses etc, similar in my language, where with english language "fuck" means just "fuck".
Psycho is a British guy xD but yeah it's so much fun to hear him swearing to death
@@override7486 russian swears:"hold my beer"..
@@emulation2369 you mean't vodka?
Actually English swearing gets away with it in most places just because it's not the mother's / native tongue, if I had a game dubbed in my own language swearing I would definitely not like it as does trigger much bigger pyschological response than it does in another language, for me at least, many people use other languages for swearing around here when they're not really than angry and reserving the native tongue swear words for more severe cases of frustration and anger.
I'm shocked to know that this game wasn't included in the crysis remastered trilogy
Any Digital Foundry video is so enjoyable it's almost insulting, thank you for this analysis, I enjoyed the hell out of Crysis Warhead not so long ago and it was so fun to play to me, glad to see some focus on the expansion.
This game has aged INCREDIBLY well in terms of gameplay, design and tech. it felt like a game dropped in from 10 years in the future when it came out and still feels amazing today,
5:40 Alex has gone mad with nvidias newer shitty naming system and is now calling a 280 a 2080 haha
And he called the 260 a 2060.
I can never get enough crysis videos. Especially of the original and warhead. They're so great.
The opening to this video was so awesome, good work Alex! And now you got me wondering why i never played crysis warhead when i have played Crysis 1, 2 & 3...
YAAAY, Alex's monthly Crysis video. I love Alex though, so I'm happy.
The cutscenes in Crysis Warhead were really odd. The music would finish before the cutscene would, and there were weird pacing issues. That stood out to me when I played it back in the day.
@Dalle Smalhals Just go play the game. You'll see. I think it was related to really low frame rates. If your frame rate was lower than 30 during cutscenes, the sound would skip ahead of the audio, which resulted in some really weird experiences.
I played Warhead last year and it was awesome, but the cutscenes were really bad, Warhead and MGS4 both released in the same year but MGS4 has way better animations and cutscene direction.
This is such a helpful video. I had NO IDEA that anisotropic filtering was disabled by default on Crysis Warhead and I appreciate those downloadable files that improve the graphics further that you provided! This is gonna be my go to video every time I have to reinstall Crysis Warhead.
I can't wait to see Crysis Remastered.
you mean re ruined with worse graphics, DLC and a female lead character? I can
well its out....have you seen it yet? lmfao
It's amazing
These games still looking amazing and kicking asses. Thanks for this video!
Crysis Warhead has always been my favorite in the series. I remember trying to play it on a potato PC in 2010. At max settings it ran at about 6 frames per minute. At minimum settings it was barely playable, and got my graphics card so toasty it died soon after. Warhead was also the first game I played after I built myself a proper computer.
Yeah, Crysis 1 had larger more interesting levels, but even on that new computer it had rather inconsistent performance that I could never got over, and I found the main character to be far less interesting than Psycho in Warhead.
Crysis 2 and 3 never felt like Crysis to me at all. Sure they look nice, but everything else is lacking.
I think that's what killed the x1300 Pro I had on pci riser card, pentium 4 hp utra slim back in 2008 it was all I could. 😂 I still miss that ati gpu and I
One of Alex's best videos yet! Also, loved the whole intro. Well done 👏
Crytek are graphical wizards. I turned on Ryse on my Xbox and it still looks amazing. One of this gen's very best on console despite being a launch title.
It does look great but the image quality is pretty bad (blurry) on xbox. Super underrated game and probably my favorite xbox exclusive this gen!
Still, can't hold a candle to killzone shadow fall which is also a launch title yet is still easily one of the best looking games ever in every way pretty much (in campaign mode). I think it looks better than horizon honestly.
looks great but it is a very bad game
@@mauriciochacon your opinion
I knew it! As soon as I saw you tweet about your upcoming video! Been looking forward to this all day!
Gotta say I remember crysis 1 looking real, I had crisis 2 on 360 and could really see how far they were pushing the genre at the time definitely supporting the remake!
Crysis 2 was a quite a big down grade, effects, particles, graphics, the campaign was OK, multiplayer was fun though.
@@DC3Refom C2 is downgrade is only the fact that its linear. The graphics are improved, not significantly but noticeable and definitely better optimized
@@3dcomrade the only good thing about crysis 2 was the multiplayer. It was downgraded in every way being developed for consoles first and ported to pc
"Turning the graphics to very high was not exactly a playable experience." - every Crysis player back in the days :)
Yeah I remember when I applied high settings my pc was like...
"ENERGY CRITICAL"
😭
mine 9800gt 512mb - gg ez 😎
I thought warhead was a lot harder. I was able to beat Crysis at 15-20fps, but I ended up rage quitting Warhead, despite running near 60fps.
That is so crazy I was actually just going to install this again and try to play around with it. I miss this game thank you
5:38, im sure im not the only person to mention this, but my dear friend, you said 2080
The soundtrack of Warhead was so cinematic ! Especially during the hovercraft chase, or the final mission when you get overrun by aliens in the tower !
Warhead is the best Crysis game. Simon O'Callaghan's train level is a a triumph for the genre, and as far as scenario planning, Crysis 1 asked "what if it snowed on a tropical island?" Crysis 2 answered, "The tropical island is flash frozen." The geometry of the frozen waves alone is a visual marvel.
Awesome video Alex Battaglia! Thank you for this :)
Don't mind me, I'm just sitting here proudly pounding my chest as a Hungarian, since this was made by a local studio
RIP Crytek Budapest
Are there any hungarian studios making games today?
@@8Paul7 Probably, but most notable ones don't exist today, like
Digital Reality - Imperium Galactica / Haegemonia / Skydrift / Sine Mora (this was a collab with Grasshopper Manufacture)
Black Hole Entertainment - Armies of Exigo / Warhammer: Mark of Chaos / Might and Magic Heroes VI
StormRegion - Codename Panzers
One that is still making games today are NeocoreGames, they made King Arthur: The Role-Playing Game, Adventures of Van Hellsing, and the recent Warhammer 40,000: Inquisitor - Martyr game
@@Granhier glad to see there is at least something. Interesting how Poland became such gamedev powerhouse while other excom countries are struggling a bit. That said many western ones are even worse. I am glad czechland has at least Warhorse and Bohemia, plus yesterday launching Someday You'll Return which looks interesting.
RIP? Did Crytek shut down?
@@akshithnair578 Not Crytek itself, but most of their sister studios did, including the one responsible for Warhead
There are AAA games coming out in 2020 that look worse than Crysis: Warhead
Example?
@@Spright91 Well I think that some of the texture work in FF7Remake is less impressive than the original Crysis.
@@quesocoatl21 FF7 Remake is an amaaazing looking game. Bad example.
@@christopherchilton1955 FF7 remake is a very mixed looking game, at it's best it is gorgeous, at its worst it has ps2 textures and characters popping in 10 feet from the player. It feels like parts where extremely rushed, and others had years of polish put into them.
FF7 Remake looks like shit decent amount of time. There are lots of environmental textures that NEVER load. And they still don't patch that abomination.
You can change the color grading in Warhead to make it look more like Crysis by entering "r_ColorGradingSelectiveColor 0" in the console. I had the exact same issue with the visuals of Warhead and this made it much more comfortable to look at. Thanks for the video!
OG Crysis and Warhead are still some of the best looking games I've ever seen.
I'm so happy PC analysis videos are BACK
You guys do excellent work!
The train level in Resistance 3 is by far the most varied and dynamic one with barely any repetition apart from that in Crysis! Another fps that is extremely under-rated!
I vividly remember launching the game in 2010 , and was getting 7 fps in mainmenu and a slideshow ingame.
Beautiful video
I have minimun hopes that the team is pushing the boundaries in this remaster to put everything they got one more time, i sincerely and utterly think that is more an "take this damn but now fixed thing and leave us alone" launch.
Thanks for the review and in depth analysis. I play all three Crysis games every year or two, but a have never played Warhead. I will have to look into it and maybe add it to my yearly schedule.
This was actually the first Crysis game that I played. Loved it so much!! I was amazed that my 9600 GSO was able to run it.
I can confidently say enjoyed every second of this Game
Warhead is still one of the best standalone expansions for any game
Digital Crysis the Foundry, next week another Crysis episode.
One of the recent statements by the Crysis remaster devs about being excited to remaster the original Crysis "campaigns" (plural), makes me thing Warhead might be included in the Remaster. Here's hoping! It's a great standalone expansion.
they said they won't
As a Brit, hearing a German man say “muppet” has made my day.
It's how the game ends, when the north korean commander throws tirades of "You americans, always..." at you, and you just sardonically say: "I'm a brit, muppet." and shoot him. :D
Yes I know, that’s why Alex says it at the start of his video. Because I am British, like Psycho, I found it funny to hear it in Alex’s accent :)
If you look carefully you'll see that paralax occlusion mapping isnt working as there is a bug in the engine when you run anisotropic filtering with it, it disables POM, there is a mod to fix this though. The bug is also in the original crysis and in the 64bit versions of the code 2
The thing I most remember about Warhead was that it had levels with aliens that were actually good.
I just want to say this: as hungarian, I thank you for pronouncing Budapest almost perfectly, and not saying it with an english pronounciation!
FYI, having made the "super powers mod 2" for Crysis 1, I am pretty familiar with the levels and I am fairly certain that the train level in warhead is a modified version of the vtol level in crysis 1.
Just give Alex more Crysis games and he will find a million reasons to talk about them :D True fan right there!
I remember playing this for the first time when I was 6 and couldn't do anything but always felt it was super cool. I beat it only when I turned 14 completed it with a trackpad 😂. I have so many great memories with this and to this day I think it's one of the best FPS games I've played
Holds up better than I remembered
Crysis Warhead was really awesome at the time and ran well enough on my 8800gt. Thanks for this Alex!
Psycho is a badass, never forgotten
I totally forgot about Warhead. I remember running it on low everything on my Dell laptop and loving it! Total 2008 memories.
20:37
I don't know...on the left side image looks sharper and also with 50% more fps, so what the point to blur it with AA like that
Yeah I don't get it either.
It's blurry because it's zoomed in digitally and having it sharper like on the left doesn't always help. It's very pointy and jaggy, which doesn't exactly make it look better.
CRYSIS 3 came out in 2013. I can't wrap my head around that. I remember back in 2012 the beautiful videos and thinking "yep, here we go again with the PC upgrade" so I built a system (not just for this game) with an i7 and GTX680. Never got around to playing it until I upgraded to a GTX1080 and I still couldn't max out the settings at 2560x1440 to maintain 60FPS though I could with minor tweaks... and I recently went back to look at Crysis Warhead thinking I'd be disappointed but I was pleasantly surprised it looks fine and plays great... mixed feelings on the control system changes over time.
This was great man, thank you so much. I loved the OG but this expansion has its amazing moments. I also didn't particularly liked the color grading and preferred the OG natural looks. I also really hope the remaster brings back the system killing options for future hardware as well. When this game runs fast, it is so fun to play and nothing is like it. I encourage everyone to look up NanoSuit Ninja's TH-cam videos on Crysis.
I just want Crisis Wars multiplayer remake, one of the best game ever!!!!
Your totally wrong.
It was THE best multiplayer ever.
Warhead was my entry to crysis. Before I even knew what resolutions and frame rate were
Warhead is a lot of fun! Re-played it several times over the years.
Warhead was never forgotten...
That title card alone should net Alex a raise
It's heart warming how you review games on Q6600 CPU and at the same time sad, because i upgraded my PC with the same processor just half year ago.
Putting this game on my wishlist! (for a pickup during a sale) Looks pretty cool to me, as a FPS fan.
Definitely not forgotten by me. Warhead was even better than the original for me! Can’t wait for the remasters!!
Hell of an expansion - if a little short. I actually preferred the combat in Warhead overall than the engagements in Crysis - however it wasn't as expansive nor 'epic' as the first as Alex so rightly pointed out. Would love it if they remastered this one.
I never forgot. I play it every year
8:28 the movement animations of psycho are amazing
Draw distance in this engine is set for each individual object. Console variables work as a multiplier for these values for each object. And the draw distance of objects in Crysis Warhead has lower values, and the developers compensated for this by increasing draw distance in the console.
Man I loved this game. It's a shame it was so underrated.
Crysis warhead and crysis 2 was my childhood game and I LOVE both of them
agree color palette from original crysis 1 is quite unique, it looks very natural (even more than many current titles)
If the remastered game included a level editor and they did Warhead as well that would be very nice to have.
I can't say i'd rush out to buy Crisis 2 & 3 again though, they could benefit from a remix/remake more than a re-release perhaps.
Damn I remember the hitch in Crysis Warhead that Alex points out causing his fps to drop into the 40's. Haven't played in years, but vividly remembered once I saw it.
The executable was *nearly* identical between the two versions.
If you can't get Crysis to play on your system (which as I understand is the norm these days) you use the 64 bit executable from Crysis Warhead in the Crysis Bin64 folder. It can be used in the Bin32 folder as well, the previous fix was to install the Crysis 64 executable in the 32 bit folder.
I still play both games often, Crysis when I'm in a sniper mood and Crysis Warhead just because Psycho is my favorite character out of the entire series.
Psycho may have actually used the word "moppet" instead of "muppet" as he may have been calling them a child. I always thought it was just an accent thing, now I'm not sure.
Love those two games. Honestly Crysis and Warhead are what actually got me out of the budget realm. I was always several years behind on cheap parts. My first serious video card was a 3870, the 4000 series had just been released and the 3870 cost me a cool $159.
Please do a updated technical review on Crysis 3. It isn’t my favorite game from a story perspective, but the graphics are one of my favorites. I cannot wait for the remaster to release on PC.
I wish I would've watched this just one day sooner lol. I just played Warhead AND beat it tonight. It was very short, but I really enjoyed it.
Finally able to now play both the games maxed out on an acer Helios 300 1080p. My Life is now complete. Greatest games ever.
Ah, good to know this one's actually optimized. I hear this one's gameplay peak of the series, and I doubt it's getting a remaster to make it run any better.
They needed that shiny console money. Thank you Alex! Merci/Danke Alex
This wonder was my first Crysis 🤗🤗!! I really love Psycho XD. Crysis 😍😍, my favourite saga. I really want to play the Remaster right now!!
I cant wait to see what they do with switch. Itd be a treat to see how far its pushed
I'm a simple man, I see a video of DG about Crysis I press play.
13:10 One could've fooled many by showing that clip of what's to come next gen at this year's E3 or Summer Game Fest
I like the naming schema for graphics quality. I wish more games used it, devs would have fewer performance complaints.
I had a 470 back in the days and bought a 580 specifically for Crysis, I even recall it having Crysis screenshots on the back of the box
Crysis series brings a lot of memories and one of them was spending a lot of money just to play 720p on my e6550, 8800gt and an audigyzs 5.1 My experience = priceless!
12700K and evga 2080ti ftw3.
Managed to basically stay at 100fps at 2560x1440p at enthusiast.
Fun game and had some twist that filled pockets in Crysis 1s storyline.
Thank you for making this video, I only have to wait for the Crysis 3 video.