Crysis crashes on Windows 8 Pro - what to do?

I recently got a new PC, which came with Windows 7. I installed Crysis on it and worked just fine. A few days later, Windows 8 was released and I had the option to update - which I did.

I re-installed all of my games, and they run without any glitches as far as I can tell, all except Crysis. The errors I am getting range from an error has occurred... (with a long error code and message that makes no sense to me) to a black window that opens up for a few seconds and then crashes. Similar issues have been reported on the Steam forums and on the MyCrisis forums here and here.

I tried running it in compatibility mode with all the older operating system options as suggested in this post, but no luck, I get the same results.

I also tried patching the game with the latest 1.2 and 1.2.1 patches, it doesn't work either.

How can I get Crysis to work under Windows 8?

Solution 1:

I appreciate all the useful info you guys have posted there. Here is what worked for me:

1. Un-installed the game completely
2. Install with minimum option (no additional languages, no punkbuster)
3. By default, the shortcut to the game was using the 64bit version of the game, use the 32bit version instead.

And Voila!

The game started working again.

I hope this helps someone

Solution 2:

Try installing DirectX 9.0c. Some of the older DX9 files that were included in Windows 7 have been removed in Windows 8, and as a result, many games don't work. You can run the web installer found here or the standalone offline installer found here.

Solution 3:

I had Crysis running yesterday, in Windows 7 compatibility mode. Today I got the same error about the operating system. The only program I loaded today was Steam. I opened the task manager, stopped Steam from running then removed it from the start up list. After I rebooted, Crysis loads and runs just fine!