Crytek tried to explain the huge difference between Far Cry and Crysis, the latter of which was released a few years later.

It’s remarkable how good Crysis still looks today, and how advanced it is compared to Crytek’s previous game, Far Cry, even though it was released only three years earlier. Crytek developed several brand-new technical features to achieve Crysis’s visual fidelity—from subsurface scattering that makes leaves transparent, to special skin shaders that allow characters’ faces to blush. In the first part of its 25th-anniversary video series, the studio revealed that the most significant difference between Far Cry and Crysis had nothing to do with raw technical power.

“In Far Cry, the art department created a natural environment as they imagined it. You could say they built the jungle from their heads. In Crysis, we mimicked nature as closely as possible. I think that made the biggest difference. While the technology wasn’t so different in some areas, the way we built the environment and used technology—like trying to mimic nature exactly, how leaves look when sunlight passes through, how the ocean looks, how water refracts light, and so on—the artists and engineers worked together to create a virtual environment that matched our references exactly. This mindset is what made Crysis stand out so much from everything else,” explained Crysis art director Marcel Schaika.

At a pivotal moment in Crysis’s development, the team traveled to Haiti to collect as much reference data as possible on the island’s rainforests. Tom Deerberg, Crysis’s lead 3D artist, said that if you want to create a real place, the best thing you can do is go there, gather impressions, and bring them home. Schaika and Deerberg are both artists, so they naturally judge Crysis’s success from an artistic perspective—which makes perfect sense. Most modern games now use physically based rendering, a technique that builds models and materials using photos and 3D scans of real objects, to create lifelike worlds.

This is essentially what Crytek did in 2007, and it explains why its environments still look so stunningly realistic, nearly 18 years after launch. Unfortunately, Crysis 4 has been put on hold because Crytek laid off 15% of its workforce in February.

Source: PCGamer, Crytek