Confidence of Crysis: Crytek Interview

Senior designer Bernd Diemer tells us what makes Crysis different, and why the developer isn't ready to announce console versions of the shooter.

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Now that Crysis as a game is more mature, the team can afford to think of the fun things it has to include. But a year and a half ago, when the developers were trying out their ideas, the most important thing was that they were able to go from drawing board to keyboard in a short amount of time.

Shortening this gap down was largely the result of the way Crytek works. The team emphasises prototypes and iterating, meaning they'll make changes over and over and see how these changes affect the gameplay.

A perfect example is the nanosuit you get to wear in the game. This gives you various superhuman powers, such as boosted strength or speed, but you need to use it properly to do what you want to do.

"We spent a lot of time designing the feature on paper, but you need to really try it out, and that process needs a lot of fast iteration," says Diemer. To try out lots of ideas very quickly, the team worked in small units where two programmers, an artist, an animator and a level designer would quickly turn ideas into gameplay. Then the team would decide whether the changes made the cut and would stay or whether they would go straight into the bin.

Creating prototypes is a necessary step for developers, who constantly need to show off their game to people outside the team, including to the media. But these prototypes were important internally as well, because an important part of introducing a new feature into the game is convincing the people making the game that it actually makes the game more fun.

"It's important that your team buys the new feature, because if you have this nice grand idea, and your team doesn't really like it or doesn't really support it, then the whole game is going to suffer," Diemer says.

Apart from the nanosuit, which is generally acknowledged to be the major gameplay design innovation, the biggest shift you'll see in Crysis is in AI, according to Diemer. This is because the game world isn't static. Rather it's constantly reacting to you, when you touch it and when you break it. Because of this, he says, the team "had to teach the AI that the environment is constantly changing".

This approach is complicated by the open nature of the gameplay. Unlike some games, where you need to trigger events in a linear fashion to make any sort of real progress, Crysis has been designed largely without this directional attribute. You'll be told where you need to end up and what you need to do, but how you get there and how you achieve your objective is, for the most part, up to your imagination.

"It's a completely different approach," says Diemer. "Ours [approach] is it has to be open and the game has to react. If people go right instead of left, they still have to find something to do."

Given the emphasis on photo-realism and realistic behaviour, the environments are naturally an important part of the game too. There are three main ones in Crysis, including the much publicized jungle areas, other frozen areas, and the zero-G locations set inside the alien ships, where you'll have six degrees of freedom for movement.

"We started out with the jungle," says Diemer, "because that's really where our expertise as a company comes from, based on the technical innovations we did with the CryEngine 1 [in FarCry]. We took the next step and said, 'Hey, we know how to do a jungle that looks really cool, but now we want to do photorealistic.'" Getting that right involved a lot of research, including trips to Hawaii. Only for research into how lush foliage looks, of course.

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