For everyone complaining that this should have come out at launch, I suspect it simply was a financial and release window issue. Sure you can blame EA for making them release early, but in reality they probably wouldn't have been able to do this (multi-platform engine) at all without their funding.
Crytek obviously had to hire a ton of people to develop a scalable, cross-platform engine at this level. Since 2 of the 3 platforms being targeted are sitting at basically DX 9 feature sets, obviously that had to be their initial concentration. While certainly the DX 11 work was somewhat in parallel (they didn't do all of this in a few months), realistically finishing the DX 9 path first made the most sense. Once it was complete, they'd obviously spent a SHIT TON of money on development already ... with zero returns. If they also felt the release timing was good then versus now ... the best course of action seems obvious.
I suppose they could have waited to release the PC version entirely, but since a majority of PC gamers aren't even at DX 11 cards yet ... why bother waiting? If they release another title this console gen, I really don't think we'll see the same issue. The engine is now much further along for DX 11, so concurrent 'full' releases probably won't be an issue. The basic problem here was they were in the midst of finishing an engine while trying to release content. We'd love to pretend companies have unlimited funding and can just work on stuff with unlimited time lines ... but that's simply not realistic.
SneakyStephan said:
Unless they store all their textures in one big encrypted file when you install it, why would it matter.
And if they do , then that is their fault.
I don't remember the huge fallout 3 texture packs etc needing a 64 bit file system.
I just read the post above, if the game is going to need 4 GB of ram (yeah, right) with this texture pack, that's still not an excuse for not having at least semi decent textures for the pc version.
The textures in the game at release are awful.
I suspect it's more of an issue of 32-bit OS's capping single application memory spaces to 2GB. It's possible this would put it over that. Also, it's quite possible this is more of a forward thinking move. Even if this particular game doesn't need it, they are in the midst of working on a scalable engine. It's quite possible their future 'high res texture packs' will require it, so it makes sense to get the engine ready now.
Could they have made better textures? Sure, but let's assume this does utilize more than 2GB (total game footprint) ... they would have had to make an extra tier of textures. Yes it would have been nice, but given what they already had on their plate ... it probably just wasn't in scope. As I said, I really don't think this will be an issue in the future ... just one of the things that happens when its the first title on an in-progress engine. Only so much can get done at once.
