After our
live demo of Crysis 3, I had a tight 10 minutes to interview Crytek’s Senior Creative Director. Here’s what I asked.
PC gamers fell in love with Crysis as a sandbox game. And I
think what we’re skeptical about with Crysis 3 is, “What’s structurally
different in terms of the level design?” Not thematically, not
aesthetically different, but what’s structurally different in Crysis 3
compared to Crysis 2? Is the “urban rainforest” simply buildings wrapped
in ivy?
Rasmus Højengaard: No. So… I mean, from a level
design point of view, the environment we created is completely different
from actually both previous installments of the game. It resonates… I
love the games, it resonates New York from Crysis 2 and it resonates the
Ling Shan Islands in Crysis one. But it takes that to a completely new
level by having this rainforest thing being built by the city, rather
than just having rainforest planted on top of the city or in the streets
or whatever way you would do it if you did that kind of overgrown city
setting.
What that does is, it gives us this great palette of gameplay
variants through these seven different rainforest concepts that we have,
ranging from an open, broader, much more of a sandbox like you saw in
Crysis 2, but also having more condensed, more claustrophobic, maybe,
settings, more linear sections with whatever strengths that brings with
it. And then we utilize whatever things work best for whatever thing we
want to convey, experience we want to convey in the game. You’ll see
broader gameplay than in Crysis 2, but you’ll also see more of the
vertical, narrow stuff that Crysis 2 had. Because each approach has
merit, and right now we just have a bigger dynamic range than we had in
each of the previous games individually, if that makes sense.
And also, the fact that we have this nanodome, having grown this
rainforest, we can push what is realistic within a rainforest, because
it’s an artificially grown environment. We can also completely change
the rules for what is valid or not valid within an urban setting. So
it’s an ability for us to add a kind of… I won’t call it fantasy, but
pushing perceptions of reality through sci-fi in a way that we couldn’t
do with the previous games.
It gives you a plot device for doing what you want to do.
RH: Yeah. It’s a great catalyst for amazing visuals and environments to play in.
Does Prophet’s bow transform into a crossbow?
RH: It’s a compound bow. The variety lies in the
types of…shall we call them warheads, that you can put on the arrows. I
guess in theory we could say that you could, if you wanted to, play the
whole game through with all kinds of different strategies only using
that weapon. Obviously there’s going to be some people who think that’s
awesome and there’s going to be some people who are like, that’s boring,
I want to play all the weapons. But it’s a very diverse weapon. From a
style point of view, we just thought it was so almost arrogant to have
the most advanced piece of technology, you, using the simplest, most
basic old-school type of weapon, the bow. And then at the same time
creating the most advanced type of bow we could come up with, so you
still kind of fit, while at the same time having a stark contrast
between what you would maybe expect Prophet and the Nanosuit soldier to
use.
This is left-field observation, but it’s an interesting
symbolism there with the bow being a native American weapon, and you’re
sort of a native American yourself, being attacked by aliens…
RH: [laughs] Yeah, you could draw that parallel if you want to.
Rasmus Højengaard is Senior Creative Director at Crytek.
Are there any new Nanosuit powers other than hacking?
RH: That’s the only one we’ve introduced now. But
the hacking one is a really interesting one, you saw a very small
snippet of it, it’s going to scale through the whole game. The
interesting part, just as the ability to shoot Ceph weapons, is that it
ties in with the fiction and what you can do as Prophet and your whole
journey of self-realization. So we don’t want to add arbitrary stuff. We
want to add depth to features rather than a lot of different things
that don’t have any depth.
PR representative: We’ve probably got time for one more.
Okay. I’ve been recording for six-and-a-half minutes, are you sure?
PR representative: Oh, go ahead.
Crysis 2 launched with four graphics settings. You could
change resolution, you could toggle on Vsync, there was HUD bobbing, and
you could change the quality settings. Are you going to launch Crysis 3
with four graphics settings?
RH: We obviously learned a lot from that, which is
why we added a lot of stuff with the DX11 pack for Crysis 2. So
obviously that’s kind of like… You can see that as a starting point. But
that being said, all this stuff hasn’t been locked down. It’s one of
these things you do very late in the production, you decide which
buttons you want to expose to people.
The thing with PC gamers, though, is that they will always find a way
if they’re really interested, right? Whether they have to go in and do
it directly in the config files, or through a UI, it almost makes no
difference. Even if you expose everything in the UI, they’ll still go
into the config files and see if there’s a couple of prototype test
render features that haven’t been activated yet. But I mean, obviously,
if we have the adjustability it makes sense to put it into the frontend
so you can adjust it directly. But I can’t say exactly what we’re going
to do. We don’t know yet.
Will you do a DX11, or HD texture pack for Crysis 3, as you did post-release for Crysis 2?
RH: Maybe? We probably want to go for making it just
native to DirectX 11 as it launches. With whatever that entails.
Obviously our reference, starting point, is wherever the CryEngine 3 was
when we released the DX11 patch, and then we’re building from there.
We’re working on some pretty badass render stuff now. How much of it and
to what extent it will be in the game is going to be hard to say at
this point, because a lot of it is very work-in-progress. But even if
just half of it makes it, it’s going to add a lot of stuff, even on top
of the DX11 patch for Crysis 2.
Understood. So, game endings have been a topic of
conversation lately. And one of the things I was actually a little
dissatisfied with in Crysis 2, that I felt might’ve been antithetical to
the spirit of the game—it ended with a quick-time event. I’m wondering
if you regret that at all, and if Crysis 3 will have quick-time events.
RH: Um… Those kinds of particulars… It’s still too
early to say. We obviously want to push the sense of empowerment, that
you do things. In order to capture casual gamers, you need to really
figure out where you layer in the complexity and where you choose to
just let people kind of go… “I’ve done this, now I can lean back and see
the whole thing unravel in front of my eyes.” We learned a lot of stuff
from Crysis 1, and we learned a lot of stuff from Crysis 2.
We want to do everything we can to make sure that we leverage the
strengths of having the player control everything and do the actual
stuff themselves, and also leverage the fact that sometimes it’s nice to
just be able to actually see what’s going on, because you don’t have to
sit and concentrate on doing five skill-based things at the same time
as watching two buildings collapse. Because you’ll either screw up the
skills or you won’t really get the full visual, overwhelming, epic
experience.
It’s such a bipolar experience, to have done a game only for PC in
Crysis 1, and then suddenly having to go multiplatform. Either of those
were extreme in their own way, and now we’ve done both, and now we want
to cover all the bases and use all the strengths of that, and then, out
of all of that, taking location and gameplay and the whole thing to a
completely new level. That’s a very convoluted way to answer that
question…
So do you think quick-time events—
PR representative: —We gotta cut it.
Okay, okay. Alright.
