Crysiswatch: Day Three

The NVIDIA Forceware update released yesterday seemed to solve the worst of the problems, even though I still get a bad disc read error the first time I try to launch the game (the second attempt always works).

Until I got the Blue Screen of Death.

This game is doing everything it can to halt my forward progress. At this point I feel like maybe if I don't finish this game the world will end, that a malevolent force is ensuring my frustration by casting error incantations at my processor and video cards.

I will gather my strength by playing something that works, like Team Fortress 2.

Then once more into the breach.

Artificial Intelligence, Real Stupid

Crytek has a job opening for a Senior AI Programmer.

Please, someone, someone very good, apply for this position. Hell, someone apply who has at least heard of AI, because the developers at Crytek don't know shit.

Nearly three years ago I wrote about Far Cry's horrible AI. It has gotten worse.

Not only are the dreaded player-seeking helicopters back, but there are several new tricks that basically amount to cheating. Koreans who can take three rifle shots to the face and at least seven to the body. Fifty cal machineguns with small armor plates that magically deflect bullets and even goddamn direct grenade hits.

There was the time I launched a fucking rocket into a sniper tower, blowing its roof off, and both of the snipers in it survived.

Or the time I very cautiously approached a position and thoroughly scouted the area. Completely clear. Then I got into a jeep. My radar lit up with three enemies in a circle around me. Yes, enemies spawn in out of thin air. These are not augmented sci-fantasy enemies with crazy powers - these are just grunts that apparently slide through dimensional folds.

When they aren't killing you over and over again, the enemies are outrageously dumb. They drive into obstacles. The boat drivers will putter around once their gunners have been killed, not even attempting to fight. When you cloak and decloak, most of the time enemies won't look at your last known position. Instead they'll just forget you were there and get distracted by some other shiny object.

I watched a tank turn its gun toward me. I cloaked. The turret swung back to the allied tanks. I uncloaked. Turret came back toward me. Cloaked. Turret swung away. Satchel charge, BOOM. Dumb.

It's pretty clear that the AI wasn't even touched between Far Cry and Crysis. The game's idea of challenge is waves of hard-to-kill enemies. And I've already seen instances of being out of range of the health tracking, so an enemy you're sniping runs around being shot and taking no damage at all.

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So I got Crysis working for a little bit (obviously). Now it just freezes twenty minutes into a playsession.

Jesus what a shit game.

Crysis

Crysis would be a great shooter.

If it weren't the buggiest piece of shit I've ever tried to run. Settings don't seem to matter. Display drivers don't matter. I even installed the RC1 beta Vista SP.

First it wouldn't read the disk.

Then it would crash trying to load saves.

Then it would shut off my mouse and keyboard.

Then objective updating completely bugged out.

DirectX 9 or 10, it doesn't matter. Low, High, Very High settings, it doesn't matter. I even turned on single processor affinity, which seemed to help things until it triggered a huge memory leak.

This thing is a buggy piece of shit on a computer pretty much designed to run a game of its kind: Core 2 duo, dual 8800s, 4 gigs of RAM.

When it runs, it looks great and runs fast. The gameplay is a sleeker iteration of Far Cry, which is also a blast. It's not quite a sandbox game, but you have a larger array of tactical options available at any one time.

But it has more major bugs than I've encountered in any game, ever. They might patch it soon, but I'm likely to uninstall it in the meantime.

*Sigh* Back to The Witcher, I suppose. Which is a post for another time.