We recently got the chance to speak to the Lead Game Designer of Crysis 2 and weed out a couple of questions that we were interested in.
PALGN: Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions about Crysis 2. First off introduce yourself and tell us what you do at Crytek.
Sten: My name is Sten Huebler and I’m Lead Game Designer on Crysis 2. Together with a team of Game Designers, I am looking after the mechanics and features of the game, like the weapons the player can use, the Nanosuit or the enemy types. During the end of the production I especially focused on the AI of the game, to make sure it’s properly balanced and fun.
Maximum Sten.
PALGN: Now that you’ve become a multiplatform developer coming from PC exclusivity, what’s it like developing for the current generation of consoles? Did you find it difficult to transition from a much more open platform to more restricted development tools?
Sten: The big challenge that developers experience when developing for both the PC and consoles simultaneously is mainly the different specs. Creating the best game possible for each of those targets can be summarized by the term “scalability”. With the PC-exclusive Crysis 1, we wanted to push our technology (CryENGINE 2) as far as we could – and the fact that Crysis 1 and Crysis Warhead are still being used for graphics benchmarks today underlines our success in doing so. With Crysis 2, we are aiming to set a new benchmark for high-end effects– but this time both for the PC and consoles.
In order to achieve this we had to grow our team, hire talent with experience in console development, create new tools, optimise our technology and adapt it to the console hardware. Of course, we also had to look into our internal structures and procedures in order to handle the increased strain on our development, developing technology and content for the different hardware but also creating builds for multiple platforms and testing them. Developing for multiple platforms simultaneously definitely had its challenges.
PALGN: The demo on PC was met with some negative feedback when options were suddenly limited severely to presets and the console was locked down, which is immensely different to what the original Crysis offered. It also seems to have seeped into the retail build as well. Do you plan on changing this any time soon?
Sten: We are taking all kinds of feedback very seriously and will address it in the game, of course. Unfortunately I can’t go into too much detail right now.
PALGN: The multiplayer aspect of Crysis 2 has been revamped entirely from the original concept that Crysis brought. Do you have plans to support and improve the multiplayer over time with extra perk add ons, maps and DLC in general?
Sten: With Crysis 2 we are offering an extensive multiplayer experience with a new style of gameplay which only the Nanosuit can provide. We have a full player progression, custom loadouts, Nanosuit modules that extend the suit gameplay even further than the core Nanosuit actions, and long term rewards with upgrades to rank, weapons and the Nanosuit 2! In the near future we’ll also be able to reveal more details about our plans regarding DLCs, but it’s still to early to promise anything.
But how does he pee?
PALGN: The CryEngine 3 is a powerful tool and has proven itself to look great not only on consoles but the PC as well where competition for visual fidelity is at its highest. Do you plan to give the community mod support by supplying an SDK, much like how you did with CryEngine 2?
Sten: You can rest assured that we will be supporting not only Crysis 2, but also our community and fans in the coming future – just like we did with Crysis 1. We cannot announce anything specific yet, but keep checking MyCrysis.com for more information in the upcoming weeks.
PALGN: Will the engine be outsourced to other companies for game development?
Sten: Oh, we’re already licensing our CryENGINE to external companies. Both CryEngine 1 and CryEngine 2 have been licensed by several companies both from games and serious games industry. We have had some great successes and developers are working on great looking games which will launch soon, that started out on earlier versions of CryENGINE. We currently have lots of projects working with CryENGINE 1 and 2 technology, Aion is a good example (NCSoft’s MMO), as is Blue Mars from Avatar Reality. There are several other MMOs in development, as well as some serious games.
The specialty about CryENGINE 3 is, that it is an all-in-one solution – AI, Physics, Networking/Multiplayer, Audio, high end effects are all included within the engine and built solely for CryENGINE 3. CryENGINE 3 is being used especially on AAA games in development; the tools and functionality have been designed and built to ease development across multiple platforms. With CryENGINE 3 we increase in real-time development – our “What You See Is What You Play” tool design now applies to all platforms, simultaneously. Lots of companies from all over the world and from many different branches are already interested in CryENGINE 3. We already announced some new licensees like for example Xaviant, OnNet and Changyou.com, and will announce several other licensees in the near future as well.
PALGN: The recent leak of the Crysis 2 Single Player portion on the PC seemed like a pretty nasty situation for you guys. How did your team take it and how did you respond?
Sten: Yeah, some time ago, an early, incomplete build of Crysis 2 was been leaked online. While we were of course deeply disappointed, we have been completely overwhelmed by the sympathy we have received from our community. Many were worried we might take consequences and abandon PC development completely, therefore we wanted to assure our community that PC gaming still is and will always be very important to us now and in the future.
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