Crytek Is Letting Their Fans Suffer [Opinion/Rage]

Be warned, the next few paragraphs are going to contain a mass amount of hate speech towards Crytek, so if you are, for some reason, madly in love with them, redirect to another page right now. Good, now that we got that out of the way let us begin. I have lost all my respect for Crytek, yes the studio that brought us Crysis, one of the best FPS’s to date. Frustratingly, Crysis 2 is a complete and utter failure from a development view. I’m not talking about gameplay changes or storyline or any of that crap, because that can all come down to personal opinion. I’m talking about how Crytek is raking in huge amounts of profit off a game that was put onto shelves worldwide and is completely broken. These are not minor bugs, they are game destroying bugs.

First off the issues with Single-Player. There are not many issues that plague the SP of Crysis 2, though there is one that can completely cripple your experience against the Ceph: Nano Catalyst loss. For those of you that don’t know, Nano Catalyst is the “shiny dust” you collect after killing Ceph enemies, and is used to purchase upgrades for your Nano Suit. So I’m sure you can imagine the difficulty experienced by players who start the game, only to see that Nano Catalyst count all the way back at 0. This means no Nano Suit upgrades throughout the entire SP, which in truth isn’t really game-breaking, but it does strip an entire component out of the game. And then, to add icing to the cake, the latest patch that has been released (1.2) states in the release notes that the bug is fixed with this update, and I can honestly tell you that it is not. So, broken game and lies. Good start Crytek.

Now to the meaty bit, the Multiplayer. There are so many issues plaguing players that I don’t even know where to start. Probably one or the worst, and most frustrating, is the resetting of ranks. As in Call of Duty, you rise through the ranks while playing on Ranked servers in Crysis 2, that is if you can find a server that does not crash every few seconds (another serious issue). The real problem starts when you decide to take a break and quit Crysis 2. Many players, including myself, have logged back on, only to find our ranks reset back to 1 and all unlocks locked again. What is even more ridiculous is that with the Limited Edition of the game (which is like every copy) you get a redeem code that takes you straight to level 5. Not only do some of the codes not work entirely, but the level 5 rank is only temporary, because as soon as you start a match you are reset back to level 1 again. So, obviously, players have flocked in the masses to the Crytek forums, upon which they can see a link that relates exactly to this problem. Upon clicking the link, said player is presented with a screen that says “You are not authorised to read this forum.” Are you kidding me? Not only are Crytek refusing to fix this issue, but they are denying access to the thread on the forum.

Apparently, the online ranking system works like this: A player’s experience, stats and rank is only updated when said player manually quits a game and allows the online client to update the profile. That means, if a server disconnects (which happens frequently) or your internet drops suddenly, all your experience will be discarded from the last time the profile saved, whether that be 1 game or 100 games ago. Then, on top of all this, your profile sometimes does not even update at all, whether it be after quitting mid-game or even when a game has finished. Had anyone heard of this before the release, there would not have been one copy sold worldwide.

As you may have noticed above, there is a real issue with Ranked servers. Not only are they incredibly unstable, but the ping is surreal. It is difficult to find a server with a ping below 150, and this is not a local problem. And on top of this, there is no real point in playing on Ranked servers at the moment, because many players are being able to earn experience and rank up on Unranked servers. Yes, that means players using hacks and cheats on Unranked and unsupervised servers are being able to be displayed on Leaderboards and rank up extremely quickly. Oh and Cheaters, that is another huge issue. There seem to be no Admins at all on any of the Ranked servers, as there is an enormous abundance of cheaters and hacks that are being used, such as auto aim bots and over-powered weapons (hacks that change the damage value of the weapons). It is so bad that there are even numerous posts on the Crytek forums by cheaters, bragging about how they are able to play matches with hacks, only getting kicked after a few matches and then being able to join again straight away.

I could continue like this forever. For example, I could go on about how players who have downloaded their game illegally are receiving a more stable MP experience than those who have forked out nearly R400 for the real copy, and I have seen this first hand. Right now, I am feeling cheated and ripped off by Crytek, and their blatant lack of support is only fueling my frustration. There is one post by a Crytek admin on the main problems thread on the Crytek forums, with nearly 180 pages of replies, consisting of further complaints and issues plaguing players. With an average of 12 posts per page, that is nearly 2200 posts regarding issues, and not one has been met with a reply from Crytek.

Crysis 2 looks stunning and plays fairly well. That is where the experience stops. No DirectX 11 support is another pressing issue, and after all of this I can just give one statement: Either Crytek get their shit together really quickly, or they will soon know what it feels like to be utterly abandoned by their clients.