The lighting looks awesome.
What I don't like is the soft, buttery look compared to the original, combined with the saturated colours the game looks more comic like than before.
This is where I wish Crytek had kept rendering modes like they had in the original Far Cry. They had Default, Improved, Cold, Paradise, and Cartoon, IIRC. Crysis 1's look is kinda like FC's Cold. Wheras the remaster is kinda like Paradise. If I had some screenshots I'd post them. Some people prefer the "cold" look and that amounts to desaturating a bit and dialing back things like bloom. Because Crysis 1 is so visually different to a lot of other Crytek games you can't please everyone, but this is exactly where offering options would be a good idea.
Remasters as a general rule are well served by being transparent and taking fan feedback onboard. I feel like the secretive approach Crytek/Saber are taking with Crysis Remastered is doing them a disservice because fans have expectations and fans have varying tastes. Crysis is not a one size fits all IP, and something as fundamental as Nanosuit voice: Male/Female/Off is a demonstration of that. Old school Crytek loved options. They also embraced modding, and I'm wary about how they're gonna handle modding for this remaster. (The existence of a Crysis modding channel on the official discord is kinda encouraging, mind.)
Another point is the nanosuit controls. Are they the same as 2011? Do we have options?
All this teasing and dripfeeding is resulting in Crytek trying to control the narrative around the game but paradoxically losing control at every turn because stuff keeps leaking. And it keeps leaking in extremely wonky quality. The bit crush on that leaked trailer is insane. You can barely see what you're looking at when the camera is moving.
Something does stand out to me, though. Notice the rows of vegetation running between the banana palms? (The water tower in the background is a frame of reference for position.) Those don't seem to be present in the original version running at max settings. You've just got individual bushes with grass textures. (And no anisotropic filtering because Crysis 1 doesn't support AF out of the box due to an incompatiblity with Parallax Occlusion Mapping.)
But beside the changes to level design, the game has a starkly different look to both 2007 and 2011 Crysis. But I do think it's kinda cohesive. Updating the visual style of Crysis was always going to be fraught with issues, and until we see some really high quality footage and high quality screens as well as knowing what options we'll be getting, it's hard to judge. There are some clear niggles like the nanosuits being too bright when outdoors. But on the flipside, the scenes in direct sunlight look really, really nice.
The biggest problem with Crysis graphics mods has always been that they look selectively good. They look good in some scenes, absolutely hideous in others. Clashing art styles, mismatched textures, pasty lighting. I've always hated how so many Crysis mods turn everything so garish and ghastly. No warmth. No sense of mood.
Some people will always complain that official remasters don't jack all the textures up to 8K and stuff like that, but the goal should be cohesion. While Crysis 1 was a bit uneven visually, it had a cohesive (very underrated) art direction and lighting direction. Fan mods generally do not. And this is where the remaster will either pull through or completely fall apart, Assasin's Creed 3: Remastered-style. The faces in CR look mostly good, which is encouraging. But I do have some quibbles about how Prophet looks when outdoors. And I wanna see a good 10 minutes of uncut high bitrate footage. No editing to hide issues. I wanna see how hut interiors look, how the time of day transitions look. I wanna see how the AI behaves. Potential AI improvements as a result of the engine upgrade are something I'm definitely curious about.
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