This is not Far Cry. The nanosuit your character wears in this spiritual successor turns you into a full-blown superhero, and it renders you near-unstoppable.
That means they’ve had to make your task exponentially harder to compensate, of course. This time you’re taking on whole armies, fleets of vehicles, aliens the size of volcanoes and stranger things still. The resulting conflict is action of a higher order of magnitude. Every ten seconds something explodes, and a Crysis explosion is a hell of a thing to see.
You and a small team of similarly nanosuited marines are sneaking your way across a Pacific island, toward the place where a very large alien craft fell from the skies. The place is crawling with Korean troops - with whom the US can’t risk a war - but you and your black ops comrades are firmly off-the-books. That means you can kill them. Your teammates have their own objectives rather than following you like dogs, so they don’t cramp your style for the brief sections when you’re with them. And you don’t need to stick together much, because as you can see, one nanosuit tends to be all you need for a given situation.
So what’s left for the developers to do on Crysis? Well, the chickens are too relaxed. Right now the chicken AI is simplistic, and when an earth-quaking explosion epidemic erupts around them, they seem improbably aloof. See that car? There’s probably a chicken waddling calmly across the road behind it. Personally we think they should keep this in - after the deafening bangs, scorching shockwaves, screams and gunshots, the sight of a unflustered hen sauntering around as the shells tinkle to the floor is rather soothing. And if you don’t feel that way, you can always pick it up and throw it into a fence.
Yes, you can pick up, throw and even beat people with live chickens. You can pick up, throw and beat people with anything smaller than a car, and in this we include wheelbarrows, spades, tree trunks, grown men and even most of a car. At one point in our playtest we shot a man’s helmet off, caught it, beat him to the ground with it, shot him again and dropped it on his body. Anything smaller than a tree can be held in your left hand while you fire with your right, even when you’re using an assault rifle or shotgun, so alternating between bonging people with a spade and shooting them in the face is seamless. They even encourage you to beat people when they’re down by introducing a chance that a fallen soldier will get back up if you don’t. This, again, is what a game should be about.
Crysis is nuts. Whacking people with a log is every bit as central as fighting ice-spitting aliens in zero-G. It might look more serious and realistic than Far Cry, but the stuff it lets you do is just absurd. You expect a successful and wealthy developer like Crytek to go all “professional” and make a serious, pared-down game like Half-Life 2, concentrating on doing a few things really well. Instead they’ve gone crazy with seemingly superficial niceties such as being able to break vegetation at the precise point you shoot it, grab anything that’s lying around, and customize every weapon. The result is incredibly free-form, incredibly fun and incredibly silly. However sinister your sleek nanosuit looks, you can’t keep a straight face wearing it when you’re holding a bunch of bananas to throw at the Korean military.
Every sane person is wondering how all this is going to run on their system. We asked Cevat Yerli, Crytek CEO, what gamers with a limited budget should buy to make sure they can play Crysis well, and his first answer was two gigs of RAM. The single gig most of us have is going to struggle with environments of this size, and with this much smashable stuff to keep track of. Next on the shopping list is, predictably, a GeForce 8800 - but the GTS model in that range is fairly affordable, and not a huge step down from the GTX. The surprising part is that Cevat says a Core 2 Duo E6600 processor is enough to run Crysis on Ultra High settings with that setup. That chip is likely to undergo another price drop before Crysis comes out, too, so don’t rush.
If you don’t have any of these things and you need a new motherboard too, you’re still looking at a hefty layout, but to play at max settings this seems surprisingly reasonable to us. Well, not quite max settings. Crysis actually has graphical features built in that no PC available this year will be able to make use of. Cevat estimates it’ll be 18 months after release before technology catches up with his game. They put these features in partly to keep Crysis current after release - they say it’ll be the best-looking game for the next three years - but also, let’s face it, because they’re enormous graphics geeks.
But here’s the really crazy part: it took Crytek two years to make it possible to shoot a tree in half. They got it working the day before they had to demo it to the press, a video of the presentation quickly went online, and just as quickly racked up 50 million downloads. So it was worth doing, but it was inordinately hard.
A big part of the reason for that is that the AI has to understand that a fallen chunk of tree is cover. It has to deal with and exploit an environment that can dramatically change with every gunshot. When they first implemented this, Senior Game Designer Bernd Diemer discovered that he could grab a fallen tree and hold it in front of him to become completely invisible to the AI. This tactic is frowned upon in the real military as unsporting, so it had to be tactfully explained to the AI that a walking tree is deeply suspicious.
Bernd says that if they’d realized just how insanely hard full destructibility was going to be, they wouldn’t have even tried. But now that they’ve done it, everyone who plays Crysis has a hard time going back to anything else. Things just don’t feel like they’re made of wood unless they snap the way they do in Crysis. And it’s so darkly satisfying to shoot the base of a tree you suspect a soldier’s hiding behind, then nail him in his shocked face while he scans for alternative cover.
At some point before you reach the crashed alien craft, its inhabitants activate an on-board weapon that freezes the entire island to make it more habitable for them (they come from a subzero world, naturally). This is what they’re planning to do to the whole planet, and if the effect on this island is anything to go by, it will highly suck. The tropical paradise turns into a surreal Siberia, and the aliens come out in force now that they can roam more comfortably. Your team regroups to cope with the alien onslaught, hostilities with the Koreans are dropped in deference to the greater threat, and you press on to the craft itself as a team.
The aliens’ cryogenic weaponry can freeze any of you in your tracks. Centrally heated nanosuit supersoldiers such as yourself can shake off the ice with a brisk wiggle of the mouse, but Korean soldiers in their breezy fatigues aren’t so lucky. If they get frozen, they shatter, and the shards of their icy flesh become lethal shrapnel.
The temperature theme runs throughout everything about the aliens: they’re actually blind to everything except the infra-red spectrum. That means if you’re standing right by something that’s on fire, you’re almost invisible to them. But even if you’re crouching in the darkest corner, you’re lit up like a firework unless you’re using your suit’s Cloak mode to bring your surface temperature down.
Naturally, turning the whole jungle into a brittle popsicle of its former self only heightens the cathartic fun of smashing everything in sight. But despite the enormous amount of effort that went into the destructibility system, Crytek don’t consider it the most important feature of their futuristic new engine. That, they say, is the sheer size of the areas it can chuck around. Far Cry let you boat around huge rolling vistas before picking an angle of approach, but Crysis levels are bigger still; the one we played - the third mission of the game - takes two and a half hours to complete.
It’s actually becoming a problem: it takes a tester the whole afternoon just to play it thoroughly through once. It’s pretty easy to remember what you were doing if you have to stop and reload the mission later. The fragility of the terrain means you can see at a glance “Oh yeah, that’s where my jeep exploded.” Areas that aren’t flat and black tend to be areas you haven’t been to yet.
Levels are divided up into what Crytek call “action bubbles:” areas with a high density of enemies that would constitute levels in a lesser game, such as a barracks or a Korean-occupied plantation. In Crysis, these are connected in ways they couldn’t be if they were separate levels: if the soldiers in one camp have time to contact the others to call for reinforcements before you take them out, jeeps and choppers will cart fresh meat in from one to the other. You could even use that to your advantage, sneaking round a camp and attacking it quickly before moving on to the next, so that troops leave your real objective to protect the other. It’s Far Cry writ large, a more complex equation and a more engrossing experience altogether.
It’s also more consistent. Crytek is painfully aware that the indoor sections of Far Cry were banal and unworthy of the rest of the game, so you’re outdoors for almost the entirety of Crysis. Even when you are indoors, they’ve built every interior around what they call their “veni vidi vici” philosophy: you come, you see the whole area, then you choose how to go about conquering it. Tight corridors and linear paths don’t let you do that, so they’ve done away with them completely.
Sure, Crysis is a damn pretty game, but as much as we love to check out destructible vegetation and demonstrations of "vehicle headshots" in single-player and tech demos, the boys at Crytek have been eerily quiet about multiplayer. Thankfully, we were able to steal some time from Crysis director Eric Lagel, who graciously took a moment to answer our questions and give us a basic overview of Crysis' multiplayer options. Of course, we're not satisfied with just hearing about multiplayer, so expect a hands-on report in the weeks to come...
GameSpy: What lessons did you learn from Far Cry that are now being carried over to Crysis?
Eric Lagel: The main lesson we learned was to make sure there will be community support from the beginning. It's essential in order to meet gamers' expectations in online multiplayer.
GameSpy: For the record, what are the announced multiplayer modes?
Lagel: The announced multiplayer modes are Instant Action, Team Action and Power Struggle.
GameSpy: The first two modes are a bit obvious, so can you elaborate on the Power Struggle mode?
Lagel: In its core, the Power Struggle mode is an open-ended team game where each team's goal is to destroy the fortified enemy base. In order to achieve this, players will have to earn access to extremely powerful weapons (i.e. the XM102 rocket launcher or the EM70 EMP rifle). That is enabled by the capture of specialized factories, where players can buy weapons, equipment and vehicles to support their team effort.
GameSpy: One of Crysis' big features is the nano-suit and its variety of powers. First off, how will nano-suits work in multiplayer, since they are persistent in single-player?
Lagel: The nano-suit will work in multiplayer the same way it works in single-player: it grants players instant and decisive means to overcome opponents. There are various ways of using the suit in multiplayer, and once you've tried it, you won't want to go back to standard modes.
GameSpy: Related, can you discuss how you balance out the nano-suits, since they essentially turn each player into a super-soldier?
Lagel: Actually the nano-suit balances itself very well, since every user has the same capabilities. It can match every player's play-style. In team play, it really translates into some interesting possibilities, for example some players activate speed mode and draw attention away from cloaked teammates who can then unleash a surprise attack. Honestly, there are so many possibilities that we haven't even seen them all and we're sure gamers are going to come up with some creative strategies once the game is out.
GameSpy: Will there be vehicles, and if so, do you imagine them to be very fast and loose vehicles with off-the-wall uses like in the Battlefield series, or will they be taken a bit more seriously, like in Halo matches?
Lagel: There are definitely vehicles, and they are serious investments for players who choose to utilize them. They are not meant to be disposable, but part of your achievement in the game.
GameSpy:Will alien technology (such as their variety of ice- and cold-creating weapons) be useable in multiplayer?
Lagel: That will definitely be the case; we are working on some really cool things that we'll be able to tell you more about at a later date.
GameSpy: Are the maps in multiplayer their own unique set of maps, or are they areas from the single-player campaign that have been converted to MP form?
Lagel: The vast majority of the maps are multiplayer-only, with only a handful having been converted from single-player areas.
GameSpy: For the single-to-multiplayer maps, what kinds of changes did you have to make to adapt them for multiplayer use? Additionally, what basic criteria do you have for map design (i.e. do you prefer maps that make players move around, or maps where players tend to cluster around common landmarks)?
Lagel: To get a portion of a map from the single-player game to multiplayer, there are a few selected changes that include the suppression of Instant Action, and then the addition of the multiplayer rule set. The choice of these maps is based on an extremely simple assessment: "That would be a very nice environment for multiplayer."
GameSpy: Do new features of CryEngine 2 change the way you approach maps (i.e. does "destructible vegetation" make for harder, or easier to design, jungle levels)?
Lagel: Indeed, the power of the CryEngine 2 allows us to create some really interesting level designs, with the destructible vegetation being the most obvious one. You'll definitely be able to take advantage of these, either to help you hide, or to help you clear a path to your opponent.
GameSpy: Can you talk about mod support, as in how much support will Crysis have for mods (will it just have a map editor, or a full-fledged SDK where users can conceivably make a whole new multiplayer mode)?
Lagel: There already is a pre-SDK that is available for selected mod teams. Due to their feedback on its content it assures that we can provide all the things the mod community needs to build outstanding mods. The final SDK will be available at the release of Crysis and together with the fully functional Sandbox2 Editor, we have very powerful tools for the modders out there.
GameSpy: With Crysis being a semi-realistic blend of near-future sci-fi and modern military, will there be persistent stats and ranks like in Battlefield, or will each match essentially be stand-alone? Can you talk about why you made the decision on whether to have persistence or not?
Lagel: Each match will be stand-alone. The decision as to why we don't have persistent statistics is simple: many, if not all, of the open PC statistics can be cheated in one way or the other. We are very aware of how cheating happens in PC online games, and do not want to provide a feature until we can figure how it can be deemed reliable and trusted.
