This is one pretty game.
System Requirements
You know you're talking about a Crysis game when the developer gives not one, not two, but three different sets of system specs.
Minimum:
Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8
DirectX 11 graphics card with 1 GB Video RAM
Dual core CPU
2GB RAM (3GB on Vista)
Recommended:
Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8
DirectX 11 graphics card with 1 GB Video RAM
Quad core GPU
4GB RAM
High Performance:
Windows Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8
Latest DirectX 11 graphics card
Latest quad core CPU
8GB RAM
You'll also need around 11 gigs of hard drive space for the install.
DRM
As with most recent games from EA, you're going to need an Origin account to play Crysis 3. After you register your copy, though, you can flip Origin to its Offline Mode, allowing you to play the single-player without being connected to the internet.
Graphics Settings
Crysis 3 comes with a bevy of graphical options for your tweaking pleasure, split across two menus. This is obviously a welcome turn of events if you're a fan of the franchise, as Crysis 2 shipped with a very limited set of options as a result of its console-focused development.
The basic options screen allows you to set your resolution, toggle vsync on and off, and choose from a variety of FXAA, SMAA, and MSAA antialiasing selections. Four levels of texture resolution (low, medium, high, and very high) are also controlled from this screen. A windowed mode is available, but there's sadly no option to play in a borderless window. You can also set your system spec on the general options screen, choosing from, again, low, medium, high, and very high tiers.
If you wish to get more granular, the advanced options screen lets you manually tweak the fidelity of a number of other systems. It'd be nice if these were explained in more depth, as it's a bit vague as to what settings like "game effects" and "object" are supposed to adjust. In addition to those, you can tweak particles, post processing, shading, shadows, and water, all of which can be moved up and down the same four quality tiers as the general settings. There are five settings for anisotropic filtering ranging from 1x to 16x, and if you're not a fan of JJ Abrams, you can also turn down or off motion blur and lens flare on this screen.
One notable absence is any kind of FOV slider. The default FOV setting of 60 seems perfectly fine, but if you're a fan of playing with a high field of vision, you'll have to edit a config file or use the developer console to do so. There are a few other settings that you can only tweak via config file editing, such as maximum FPS limit, toggling the HUD on and off, and disabling the intro movies.
Quality Comparisons
Bright exteriors benefit more from maximizing the settings here than do darker levels and interiors, but for the most part Crysis 3 looks beautiful regardless of your graphics settings.
Mouse over to compare settings.
Quality: Low
Quality: Medium
Quality: Very High
Mouse over to compare settings.
Quality: Low
Quality: Medium
Quality: Very High
Audio Options
Basic sliders for music, sound effects, and dialogue volume are included here.
Control Settings
Crysis 3 has a perfectly competent set of default mouse+keyboard controls, but you're still allowed to remap anything that you like. It also supports gamepads if you're playing in the living room, with a few different control profiles if you're, say, left-handed. So long as a controller is plugged in, you can use it anytime you like, so if you want to control a vehicle with the gamepad there's no need to fuss around with the menus when you switch back to moving around on foot with your mouse and keyboard.
Menus
Navigating through menus is snappy and responsive. There is an awkward and unnecessary perspective system in the main menu that tilts the display as you move your mouse around, but it's not so exaggerated as to be truly annoying. Most menus don't require scrolling, but the ones that do are perfectly capable of being controlled with your mousewheel instead of your keyboard. It'd be nice if some of the more information-dense menus, like the multiplayer loadout screens, were reorganized for the PC version to display more of that information on a single screen and reduce the need for scrolling.
Performance
I ran Crysis 3 on my home machine, containing a Core 17 920 processor, a Radeon 6950, and 16 gigs of RAM. It's a couple years past the point where it could be considered anywhere near top-of-the-line, but it still managed to run Crysis 3 on Medium settings at 30 to 40fps at 1920x1080 resolution. On the same machine, my FPS meter ran down to the single digits when I cranked everything up to Very High, but curiously enough, the visuals don't look incredibly different if you compare Very High to Low graphical settings. If you switch everything down to the minimum settings, textures become a bit more blurry when viewed at close range, distant objects have less detail, and water effects are less robust, but the differences are pretty subtle if you're simply walking around the game world. The graphical discrepancies between high and low settings are more notable in pitched combat, though, so if you want all the bells and whistles for the visual effects turned on, your computer better pack a punch.
That said, even on the lowest settings, Crysis 3 is still a great-looking game, so if your gaming PC is anything near recent, you should be able to find a set of graphical options that offers both a steady FPS and some great visuals.
Multiplayer
Crysis 3 thankfully runs its multiplayer through dedicated servers rather than using peer-to-peer connections. You're able to peruse those servers through a browser that's effective and fairly quick, and which lets you filter servers based on their full/empty status, your ping, gametype, map, and a few other options. The PC version also increases the maximum number of players on a server to 16, whereas console versions are limited to 12.
Saves
Some thumbnails would've been handy here.
You can't save anywhere you like in Crysis 3, as it utilizes a checkpoint save system. Each checkpoint you pass creates a discrete save file, though, which should let you go back and replay levels from a spot other than the very beginning if you can suss out which file corresponds to where in the level you want to go. (That can be difficult given that all saves from a level are named identically save for a timestamp.) If you're sharing your computer with someone else who wishes to play, individual profiles with independent save files will help prevent you from overwriting each other's progress.
Conclusion
My gaming machine holds its own with most games, but it certainly isn't a speed demon compared to current cutting-edge gaming machines, so I approached Crysis 3 with a bit of trepidation given the franchise's reputation as a videocard melter. So it's a pleasant surprise to find that Crysis 3 both looks amazing and runs very fluidly on my system. If you want to run it on multiple monitors with everything maxed out, it'll obviously look even better, but you will of course have to invest in some pretty robust hardware to do so. But even at lower system settings, this is still one of the most graphically impressive games we've yet seen, and the PC port does a great job at allowing you to customize it as you see fit.
Port Grade: B+