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No Crysis For You, Console Gamers! - A Look at What Cryengine 3 Means for Gaming

GDC was packed with many announcements like Onlive, Stardock's Goo, and the next Zelda DS game. However, some would argue that the commercialization of the Game Developer's Conference is leading to less effective dialogues between developers and actual developments that change and positively influence their work.

Fortunately, Crytek came to the rescue and announced Cryengine 3, the next iteration of their award-winning game development platform. This turned many heads at the conference, as it was the first time that we saw Crytek's tech running on consoles since the first Cryengine was used for the Instincts spin-offs of Far Cry.

What does it mean for developers and us gamers?

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M337ING - contributor
Published: 248 days 23 hours ago | Article | GDC 2009 | PlayStation 3 | Xbox 360 | Gaming | PC

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FantasyStar - 248 days 23 hours ago

1 - A good read - Summary for those that always jumps to the Comments section.

-CryEngine 3 will compete with Unreal Engine 3 by lowering licensing costs. Forcing Epic to saddle up or be destroyed by Crytek. A precedent towards a cheaper, faster development times.

-CryEngine 3 will allow on-the-fly optimizations to consoles from the PC Environment to cut down on porting times, thus allowing for more consistent presentations across the PS3/360 Platform. Something that UE3 has a problem doing, aka "Bad Ports".

-Crysis is not possible on Consoles because of purely RAM limitations. It renders everything real-time and 1GB is minimum for hosting kilometers of virtual land, assets, and AI.

-The CPU/GPU on both the 360/PS3 are very capable of scaling Crysis, it's assets, AIs, and Physics.

-Far Cry 2/Grand Theft Auto IV loads data in chunks to simulate the open-world feeling. If you leave one area after doing damage, and go back, everything will have been reset.

-In Crysis, all data is real-time and streamlined directly from RAM. If you shoot a rocket, kilometers away, an enemy AI will notice that(creating a sense of realism).

-Crytek's Cevat Yerli- "Crysis as we have seen is impossible. Crysis would have to be largely changed to bring it to Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. Crysis is designed to be PC exclusive. Our internal focus is not linked to bring Crysis to consoles."

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FantasyStar - 248 days 23 hours ago

1.1 -

Personally, I'm content with Far Cry 2 for my "Crysis console" experience already. This is why I never picked up Far Cry 2 for the PC.

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M337ING - 248 days 23 hours ago

1.2 -

I thought Far Cry 2 was ok. I liked the environments and characters, but Crysis simply offered more tools to approach combat scenarios. That, and the game didn't drag on for 40 hours with repetitious environments and missions.

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blindfromthesun - 248 days 22 hours ago

1.3 -

Crysis could still be done. The article talks about real time AI and everything you do as having an effect on the world. So...if you removed this aspect and only focused on a a few square miles at a time (within eye shot distance) you should be able to pull it off. After Killzone 2, I'm convinced consoles could pull it off just fine. Maybe not at 1080p or with fancy AI, but something that looks great. Not sure why Cryteck doesn't want to make money on console ports...

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M337ING - 248 days 22 hours ago

1.4 -

But then the game would lose what makes it unique and would essentially become an Instincts-like spin-off.

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cruckel - 248 days 22 hours ago

1.5 - @ blindfromthesun

maybe you didn't read the article, but eye shot Is the whole level. The first level is a Giant U shaped gulf. From the start, you can see the whole Level.

Which makes this game soooo Beautiful and at the same time Breath taking and Awesome

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1.6 Hydrolex | 248 days 21 hours ago - deleted by mod -

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Amanosenpai - 248 days 21 hours ago

1.7 -

who needs crysis when i can do some halo 3 on 360

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blindfromthesun - 248 days 21 hours ago

1.8 - @ cruckel

I read the article. Are you trying to tell me that you can see through trees and the whole island is flat and barren? Thats what you implied. Sorry to say, but Crysis isn't set in Kansas. There are trees, hills/mountains, and buildings which obstruct your vision. If you climb a mountain, thats a different situation all together. Perhaps the terrain might have a more limited draw distance in a port. Also, did YOU read the article? The limiting factor of a console port is the dynamic AI and cause/effect game world. Like the article said, Farcry 2 would take a chunk of the map at a time and your actions never had a lasting effect (soldiers would go about specific AI routines like nothing happened). I don't remember Far Cry 2 being a bad game do you? You can retain most of what makes Crysis good. There are millions of people that would like to play Crysis but don't have the rig to play it on.

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Ju - 248 days 21 hours ago

1.9 -

BS. Memory is not an issue. Draw distance does not define the size of the world. What you can't get into the VMem/XDRAM you can stream from disk. Has been proven before. Open world works well on consoles.

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Danja - 248 days 20 hours ago

1.10 -

Do we even need Crysis on Consoles ? I played it on PC it wasn't that great of game it was good but not great , really good graphics but it was really nothing spectacular...

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FantasyStar - 248 days 20 hours ago

1.11 -

Ju, do you have any scripts you can provide to back up your statement? Everytime I try to code for X number of assets in a virtual box, I always run into buffer overflow. I don't have much of an idea on how to render all the stuff the CryEngine 2 does with only 512MB RAM total. (both RAM/VRAM combined)

Don't misjudge me, I'm just curious because you seem to know your stuff. From what I understand based on my own techniques, it's always easier to write memory scripts from HDD to RAM, then to VRAM and stream the data from RAM to VRAM because I won't run into any bottleneck with the HDD. With the limited experience that I have with the PS3 SDK: I can't seem to find a way achieve the same effect with the PS3 because the BR Drive is very limiting in how much data I can pull at a time. I try to avoid using the HDD as a crutch like most developer do, but it's so hard. I can't possibly imagine how a draw distance as great as Crysis be achievable on the consoles without at least some form of a technical nightmare.

So if you have a solution, I'd love to hear it. So far, the only solution I can think of is reflected well in the article and Crysis actually does this too on the High/Gamer setting. It dumps textures and streams in new ones when the player is X distance away from X textures, so that I can avoid memory overflow and at the same time, fake a wide-LOD. -IIRC, Uncharted did this too and did it well. However a criticism is that Uncharted isn't on a wide-scale like Crysis. And that even with 2GB of RAM: Crysis still had to stream textures the same way. How Crysis could achieve the same results with only 512MB of RAM and no noticeable drop in assets on-screen on that giant of a scale is simply beyond me. Just from what I know already about consoles, I know that the limited data rate and RAM will limit how many assets I can have on screen at one point before the player starts to notice performance drops, and I would love to avoid any "obvious" texture pop-ins for the sake of presentation.

Again, if you know a way. Let me know. PM me even.

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geth1gh - 248 days 23 hours ago

2 - FALSE!

lol, this is completely false, because onlive, the new console will be offering crysis warhead.

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-GoD_-oF-_WaR- - 248 days 23 hours ago

2.1 -

I'm pretty sure he was talking about consoles that are out now

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M337ING - 248 days 23 hours ago

2.2 -

Onlive isn't a console. It's a video of the game running on a PC streaming to your house.

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geth1gh - 248 days 23 hours ago

2.3 -

yea, he might of been, but he said that it was to stay on pcs and as of yet there is no announcement for a project to work on anything else other than pcs, and they already have crysis warhead running on onlive.

and yes onlive runs in a different way, but it is defiantly still a console. The definition of a console is a mass marketed video game device/computer correct? So does onlive not fall into that category?

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M337ING - 248 days 23 hours ago

2.4 -

Considering we don't even know if Onlive is going to succeed or even make it launch, we really shouldn't be considering it when discussing the current state of the gaming industry.

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billybob2468 - 248 days 22 hours ago

2.5 -

OnLive is (will be) a bunch of really powerful servers that are, in fact, PCs, so yeah... even counting OnLive Crysis is still only on the PC.

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dchalfont - 248 days 22 hours ago

2.6 -

on live is bs, good luck streaming hundreds of megs of textures etc every few seconds and keeping it playable

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UltimateIdiot911 - 248 days 22 hours ago

2.7 - @geth1gh

Have fun playing your games on onlive when your internet goes out, onlive servers crashing and/or when bandwidth cap moves into your area. As for me, I'll continue to enjoy playing games I OWN offline when I am not playing multiplayer.

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gregory247 - 248 days 22 hours ago

2.8 - @ dchalfont

hey dumbass... it doesn't stream the textures just the video of the gameplay

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no_more_trolling - 248 days 13 hours ago

2.9 -

i think onlive will use the same protocol as remote desktop.

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geth1gh - 248 days 9 hours ago

2.10 -

lol, like i said, what the hell do you think a console is? its a god damn pc. what makes you call it a console? because it is mass marketed. Onlive runs differently, but it is still in the console category.

and as for relying on my internet for gaming, lol, I never touch the single player part of games these days, they are just boring to play against ai these days compared to single player, so im already always playing through the internet whenever I am gaming, lol.

And my internet here on campus is very fast, and pretty much never down.

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Yipee Bog - 248 days 5 hours ago

2.11 - so in

regards to onlive, will I be able to use that service on my 3 mbps internet speed? onlive will fail outside of high bandwidth areas (at least 15 mbps or better), unless the developers know some kind of ultra compression methods, in which case they shouldn't be making games, but figuring out how to get my butt halfway across the universe for a couple hundred bucks.

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Tiberium - 248 days 2 hours ago

2.12 - ^^^

actually it works fine on a 5mb internet connection. You can play any game in 720p with minimum hitches. If you want 1080p 10 or 15mb would make sense. So with 3mb you probably could get 640p upscaled to 720p.

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Yipee Bog - 247 days 23 hours ago

2.13 - so onlive ^

is working good for you? I didn't know it was mainstream already. I guess at least you have it, since you're so knowledgeable(and Google search doesn't count). To be honest, my internet cant even stream HD from youtube, so I highly doubt I'll be able to use this service

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Sanhlami - 248 days 23 hours ago

3 -

better multiplatform graphics, cheaper development cost, more variety, and equal results on consoles.

+1 for gamers

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4 cleanhealthy12 | 248 days 22 hours ago - User only got 1 bubble - Show

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Ju - 248 days 21 hours ago

4.1 -

Crysis won't work on a console anyway. Mainly because they have no console experience and that shows as soon as you try to play that game with a controller. If it wouldn't produce these screen shots on high end gaming rigs it would be mediocre at best.

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fadic4 - 248 days 22 hours ago

5 - lmao...id rather have a consle

other then having to update my danm pc ever year or whatever u guys update... consles ftw

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FantasyStar - 248 days 22 hours ago

5.1 -

Oops.

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cruckel - 248 days 22 hours ago

5.2 - correction for ya

unless you need the latest greatest, you only need to update once every 2-3 years.

then if you want the latest greatest, it would be every few months when a better card comes out

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aaron5829 - 248 days 21 hours ago

6 - It's ok...

I played Crysis on my PC...

Best looking game ever, but, i only played it for less than 3 hours in total...

I find the gameplay erm,

*flame shield up*

Boring.

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solidsnakus - 248 days 21 hours ago

7 -

no killzone 2 for you, pc players! well now that i think of it , no games for pc players at all. go play CS source for the 532,034 time.

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Ju - 248 days 21 hours ago

7.1 -

I just had to get back play some PC games and bought myself a nice Quad (and a 9600GT, well). So, now I'm playing catch up. Got myself Crysis Warhead, Masseffect, Halo2 (WTF???), FarCry2 and GeoW. Well, I am pretty disappointed, TBH. I mean, out of that I think I get some pleasure out of GeOW and, well FarCry2 plays the same like on the PS3 (minus the motion controlled car - what I like). But other then that, I just can't get into that, ME is a joke. Back to my console for my gaming needs. Just not the same. [well, now that was off..need sleep]

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7.2 Agent VX | 248 days 20 hours ago - User only got 1 bubble - Show

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solidsnakus - 248 days 20 hours ago

7.3 -

you dont need a gaming pc to play all those old ass games. i play emulators on my laptop fine as well as most those games like age of empires 3 and warcraft3. dont really have that many other games on pc cause i buy everything on console.

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ghost-mutation - 248 days 21 hours ago

8 -

I'm excited about Cryengine being used for consoles. I'm pretty tired of seeing the Unreal Engine.

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no-spin - 248 days 21 hours ago

9 - Many PC gamers cant run Crysis let alone consoles

Is good to have defining titles across all platforms. Crysis is the PC showcase. Uncharted 2 and Killzone 2 are PS3's, and Gears 2 (i think) is 360's

Edit
As i have stated before, i know sh*t about building rigs, if running crysis is pretty standard no a days, then my bad.

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FantasyStar - 248 days 21 hours ago

9.1 -

I have to disagree with you. With the help of CUDAATS .cfgs and the natural mod. I'm able to reach into 25FPS average, with highs into the 40s @14x9 without breaking the bank. I'm sure others share my sentiments as well. Check the bio for my PC specs.

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Ju - 248 days 8 hours ago

9.2 -

Well, CryEngine3 might have some benefits for PC gamers as well. While I think the CryEngine2 beats UE3 feature wise, it still sucks that I can play GeOW with full high settings @ at least 1680x1050 while I have to tone down Crysis on the same machine to at least get a similar picture. I would rather tone down the draw distance and physics but keep the texture and lightning instead (which I can't in Crysis) to match GeOW. So, this shows a totally misconception Crytek had when doing CryEngine2. And in my opinion its because of their lack of experience in the market. Now, CryEngine 3 and because of the limited resources forced them to work in constrains. I can imagine, this should have an impact for the PC engine on the lower end as well - without sacrificing the high end gaming rigs. Can only be a good thing.

My personal opinion, however is, that CryEngine3 does not surpass the established console engine developers who have years of experience in that market. They are good enough to compete with them, though. Which is still remarkable.

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smturner68 - 248 days 20 hours ago

10 - For those of you who don't WANT Crysis...

Some that have played it on an awesome pc, probably think you're nuts, for not caring about it. However, you still don't care. The same goes for most xbox only guys. They just don't give a flying f*** about Killzone 2. I mean, I have KZ2, and it's pretty cool, but when I am on xbox live, or talking with friends, most of those guys haven't heard of KZ2, nor do they care about it. Sales show this to be true.

So, maybe Crysis IS all that. I just don't have the cash to buy a new PC. Especially to run just that game. I sure would like to see/play it running at its best!

Oh, and last night, I finished Gears of War 2. It has WAY better graphics than the KZ2 hypers gave it credit for. It is beautiful. It doesn't have as an advanced lighting system, but it is just as pretty artistically, if not prettier.

Anyway, bring on CE3. Variety is the spice of life.

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Fanboi - 248 days 19 hours ago

11 - You're all wrong

This isn't about Crysis and PC vs consoles. As usual the fanboys are too busy foaming at the mouth to notice what this article really means. No more crappy ass Unreal engine for the console, thank god. Now there is a real and viable alternative to all the Unreal engine clones.

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darkdoom3000 - 248 days 19 hours ago

12 -

crysis does look increadibly good. but im fine with killzone at the moment, my PC sucks a$$... really old, pentium 4 with 256 memory. XD

and im too lazy to upgrade atm, i dont use it much, hell i use my PS3 browser more often than my PC one... its sad.

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labwarrior - 248 days 18 hours ago

13 - Well, if cryengine 3 runs on consoles, ram will not be an issue, since will be optimized for streaming

I doubt the article writer has any clue about anything, and of course he does not work for the Crysis team, so he is definatly the last person to say how the engine will run on consoles

Crysis is coming to consoles, in fact a better version probably

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Shbzshar - 248 days 18 hours ago

14 -

damn ... i guess that settles it doesnt it... shattered dreams... anyways crysis isnt going anywhere ... i'm still 19 i'll play it eventually someday

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Cajun Chicken - 248 days 18 hours ago

15 -

A new third party engine that everyone is going to use for titles other than the damn UE3.

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jtucker78 - 248 days 15 hours ago

16 -

Crysis is cool. Graphics are phenomenal, BUT the AI and animation engine of Killzone 2 trounces Crysis.

The Helghast are so SO much more realistic than the enemies in Crysis.
From their flanking, reactions to being shot and their animations.

Crytek may be the kings of graphics, but they don't hold a candle to Guerilla when it comes to the realism of the Helghast soldiers.

EDIT:
Crysis:
http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Killzone 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watc...

Graphics:
Crysis wins

Gameplay:
Killzone 2, because - lets be honest - what are you going to be doing a lot of in a FPS? Shooting people. And in KZ2 shooting people never gets old. It's amazing and fresh everytime you play.

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Shbzshar - 248 days 14 hours ago

16.1 -

uh what about the sandbox gameplay... kill em with tanks helis and jeeps? .. i think crysis has a pretty solid gameplay to back up those graphics.. hell that bionic suit with its perks and customizable weaponry.. lot of ways to keep ppl interested...

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jtucker78 - 248 days 13 hours ago

16.2 -

Yeah, I admit Crysis is extremely feature rich. But with gameplay I guess it's down to personal preference.
I'm a Killzone 2 multiplayer man (just my opinion). I can take the hit in Graphics from high end PC down to PS3 because the PS3 does all those other things that Crysis isn't doing yet.
(I realise Crysis is also doing hundreds of things the PS3 isn't doing)
In Crysis, I'm immersed because of the beautiful world, but when I shoot an enemy it pulls me out of the game and reminds me that I'm playing a game.
Although the graphics in Killzone aren't as good the animation is much more akin to a real life opponent.
And the AI is so good that when you are playing through the single player it almost feels like you're in a multiplayer match without mics.

I wasn't trying to flame. Crysis has exceptional graphics, but there are things that are currently being done better on consoles.
Primarily character AI, motion capture and animation.

See Killzone 2 and any game using the Euphoria engine (GTA4 and Force Unleashed.) for realistic character reactions.
Heavenly Sword, Uncharted, RE4 - facial capture, and motion capture.

To me. PC's are still the kings of graphics, but more devs are heading to console first and that is where the non-graphics technology is progressing.

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Shaka2K6 - 248 days 23 hours ago

1 - CryEngine 3 runs better on Sony PS3 and makes any game on the outdated unreal engine 3 look like a n64 game.

.

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M337ING - 248 days 23 hours ago

1.1 -

The second part is true.

The engine is too early in development to argue about which one runs it better.

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helghan666 - 248 days 22 hours ago

2 -

i no needd this garbage game i have kill zone 2 here in my ps3...

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LeonSKennedy4Life - 248 days 21 hours ago

2.1 - dude

As much as I love Killzone 2...

...Crysis is better.

As far as graphics go, it's pretty hard to tell. Sometimes, Crysis is better. Sometimes, Killzone 2 is better.

Regardless, Crysis has a better campaign, better/more intricate multi-player, and a sandbox tool that no one has touched yet.

It's incredible.

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BX81 - 248 days 20 hours ago

2.2 - Hmm

Will you still feel the engine is garbage if it produces a better looking and fuller game than KZ2?

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BIOSHOT - 248 days 9 hours ago

3 -

Crysis has a better campaign, better/more intricate multi-player are you drunk and a sandbox tool that no one has touched yet.
i whant a fps were a shot people end get shot i dount whant a game were you walk around a forest lake f@@king robin hood.

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3.1 Frnicatr | 248 days 8 hours ago - User only got 1 bubble - Show

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BIOSHOT - 248 days 8 hours ago

4 -

yes Frnicatr and you think pc are not dead? 3000$-5000$ to play crysis you need to get late loser.

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4.1 Frnicatr | 248 days 4 hours ago - User only got 1 bubble - Show

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