» Fri Mar 06, 2009 10:41 am
Well let's take a look at the events starting all the way back to the release of the original Crysis:
Before Crysis releases:
- PC gets two (as I remember, but definitely at least one) betas.
- PC gets a demo.
- Cevat says that Crysis is not possible on consoles.
Crysis releases:
- Sales start out slow because the game has a reputation of being hard to run.
- EA says sales have exceeded expectations.
- Cevat's ridiculous personal expectations are not met and so he blames piracy, thinking that if nobody pirated, the game would have sold 10+ million copies.
- Crytek abandons Crysis and moves on to Crysis Warhead.
- The game goes on to sell more than three million copies. Beating many multiplatform games (not to mention these games did not have reputations of being hard to run).
Crysis Warhead releases:
- The game is sold for $30, but has stupid DRM with limited activations. I would not be surprised if the DRM impacted sales.
- Crytek supports this game somewhat longer than Crysis, but abandons it while there are many issues.
- The game goes on to sell more than 1.5 million copies.
Crysis 2 is announced:
- Crysis 2 is said to be a multiplatform game. This is the first major warning sign since they previously said the game is not possible on consoles.
- Some fans have fears of scaling down, but it's too early to tell (PC exclusives that go multiplatform are almost always scaled down, though).
- Very little information is revealed, but what is revealed shows that Crysis 2 will be quite different from Crysis (complete change in settings and skipping years in the story are the major ones)
- Later on Crytek shows off the game. It doesn't look bad, but it seemed far more linear compared to Crysis and the levels are much smaller. Still, too little to tell.
- Multiplayer is shown off. It doesn't look very good and features such as killstreaks don't help. The multiplayer looks a lot more generic than the original Crysis multiplayer that we love.
- gamesas is relaunched with a new design and people are told that they will get early access if they sign up.
- Turns out only people with an Xbox 360 get early access because the multiplayer beta is Xbox 360 exclusive. Shouts of unfairness are heard from the fans, but this passes.
- Later an Xbox 360 exclusive multiplayer demo is announced AND given a release date at the same time. Fans are angry at the special attention to one platform, especially since the game is supposed to show off an engine that is good for multiplatform releases.
- A while later, a PC demo is announced, but no date is given. Fans calm down somewhat, but Playstation 3 owners are left in the dust.
So up to today, there is still no date given for the demo. Seems to me that the announcement was only made to shut up PC fans.