Gentlefolk, beware, there be firestorms here. Crytek, the Frankfurt-headquartered studio responsible for Crysis, the first-person shooter still torturing high-end PCs years after release, just admitted the PS3 version of Crysis 2 performs better on the PlayStation 3 than the Xbox 360.
Make that “slightly” better, according to a quote pulled by CVG from a PSM3 chat with Crysis 2 development lead Carl Jones. Also make that “at the moment,” meaning there’s no reason not to hope the two versions could be at performance parity when the final code ships, end of year.
Other sites are reading this unexpected but ambiguous admission as a referendum on the game’s visual quality between console versions. Read Jones’ quote again in full: “At the moment, we’re getting slightly more performance from PS3 compared to 360.” It’s not (a referendum on visual anything). As far as anyone who’s laid eyes on the game’s concerned (back to CVG here) the two versions look “exactly the same.”
Less sensational and more intriguing is Jones’ claim that Crytek found the PS3 as easy to design for as the Xbox 360.
“We’re lucky in the fact that we’ve come to the generation slightly later than other people–the ones who were trying to build the first technology and games were surprised at how different the PS3 was,” Jones told PSM3. “We took our time and worked out the right way to approach it.”
Conventional wisdom holds that the Xbox 360 tends to be easier to program for because of its Windows-like design architecture, whereas the PS3 with its arguably more powerful but proprietary multicore setup works like nothing the industry’s seen before.
And no, before you ask, Crysis 2’s new Manhattan-based story won’t perform “slightly better” on either platform, though with author Richard Morgan as lead scribbler, it may–repeat may–improve the original’s ready-made alien invasion narrative across the board.
Follow us on Twitter (@game_on)