Crysis 3: 'We're offering 7 very distinct gameplay experiences'

New Crytek shooter will mix the openness of Crysis with the verticality of its sequel

Announced last month and set for release in spring 2013, Crysis 3 will once again see players step into the Nanosuit as Prophet as he goes toe-to-toe with hostile alien Ceph forces and the evil Cell Corporation.

Like its predecessor the game's set in New York, but the Big Apple has changed dramatically since we last visited it in Crysis 2. Prophet's on a revenge mission after uncovering the truth behind private military corporation Cell's motives for encasing NY in a quarantined Nanodome called the Liberty Dome. The giant citywide structure has resulted in accelerated vegetation growth, creating an urban rainforest which Rasmus Hojengaard, director of creative development at Crytek, told us will allow the studio to offer a range of unique gameplay experiences set across a number of distinct areas dubbed the Seven Wonders.

Rasmus Hojengaard

In our interview he also explained how Crytek intends to mix the most successful elements of the first two numbered games in the series with new CryEngine 3 advancements to create the best Crysis game yet, and discussed other issues such as combating piracy and his hopes for the next generation of consoles.

What was the design goal or mission statement for Crysis 3?

When you're on the third iteration of a game you don't approach pitches and design documentation prior to starting the game in the same way you do with a new IP, so a lot of it was just very small ideas which then snowballed, such as the concept of the Nanodome, which led to the idea of New York being overgrown due to hyper vegetation growth and so on, and then boom, you have the Seven Wonders concept.

That's the great thing about having a veteran team with a lot of experience of working on the franchise, because so much is understood, and when someone gets a small prick of an idea then immediately it blows up into a huge crater and it actually becomes more about controlling it and making sure it doesn't overflow and become too big of an idea.

That's what's great about having franchise legacy, because it's a completely different beast to wrestle when you're trying to generate new IP, where the pitch process is super heavy and people are very nervous about running with an idea because that's someone's head on the block right there.

So the concept of wanting to be Prophet, the concept of the Nandomes, the concept of hyper accelerated plant growth in an urban setting was really quickly established, and given the team's understanding of what was going on it was very quick to get gameplay prototypes up and running that fit the environment. The hacking gameplay [players can hack into mechanical and robotic constructs] came together very quickly and we had some crazy weather effects going on.

Right, because Crytek said ahead of Crysis 2's launch that it already had the third game mapped out.

A lot of those concepts that resonate in the game were established before the game even started going into pre-production, but it wasn't like a fully-fledged game, it was more like we had some concepts we thought we'd really like to explore, but agreeing as a group that that's what you want to do is actually the difficult part. It's really important to Cevat [Yerli, Crytek CEO], who was the main guy pushing a lot of these things back then, that people rallied around the ideas, because if you can't ignite the passion in the people who are going to make it then most likely you won't ignite any passion in the people who are going to play it either.

People really wanted to revisit the tropical setting [of Crysis 1] and take it to the next level, but there was still an appeal in the city setting [of Crysis 2]. But we didn't just want to do another city, so then these things got married. And that also gives us this great potential for variety in gameplay because there is only so much you can do with an island or a city in isolation before you break down the believability, but once you introduce an accelerated ecosystem you have liberties that you don't otherwise have.

So will you be mixing the openness of Crysis with the verticality of the sequel?

Yeah you could say that. Take the advantages of either of those approaches and use it when appropriate in the game, not stringently sticking to one thing, using the thing that conveys the gameplay, the pacing, the story or whatever you're trying to get across. These seven urban rainforest themes are really good fun.

So how distinct is the gameplay experience going to be in each of these Seven Wonders?

It's very, very distinct. We're not revealing what the other concepts are yet, but they range from epic, open and clear to claustrophobic, humid and nasty, and then everything in between. We play on verticality a lot and we're going to drip feed these out over the next eight or 12 months, but they're very diverse. Some of the concepts are just awesome and I can't wait to see them implemented in the game. I have to say that after 15 years of making games it's rare that I get this feeling of excitement.

What can you tell us about new weapons like the bow and new abilities like hacking?

If we forget the bow for a second and we just look at the hacking and the set weapons, the whole concept of interconnecting with Ceph DNA and technology is a big theme that we're going to play on a lot, and the shooting of those weapons and the hacking ability is a big ramp that's going to ramp up across the duration of the game.

Since we're pushing the 'hunted becoming the hunter' theme and we have the urban rainforest setting, the bow is just kind of a natural addition to that, and we also needed a way to expand a little bit on our stealth gameplay because you can't be a hunter if you can't efficiently and stealthily hunt stuff, so you can use the weapon while cloaked in some instances. At the same time we don't want to limit the weapon because it has a lot of potential, so we've added a number of ammunition types you can put on your arrows. We're only talking about two of them at the moment, a frag grenade-type explosive and a stealthy arrow you can fire while cloaked.

What CryEngine 3 enhancements has Crytek made since Crysis 2 and how will these impact the new game's visuals and gameplay?

I don't want to go into specifics too much as we're still working on and developing a lot of render features as we speak. Even the stuff that we have developed, we don't know to what extent Crysis 3 will use these features as it's still a little too early to be specific.

We have a number of new rendering capabilities that we haven't yet used in a game that we'll certainly want to push, like all kinds of tessellation systems, a new vegetation system which reacts to physics and to winds and stuff like that.

Another new feature which is a little less render specific but is actually a big deal for CryEngine is that we have quadropedes, so the [Ceph] Scorcher is a quadropede. Even though that doesn't sound like a big deal it's actually really complicated to make work, especially when you need to have all the feet align with the ground at any one point. It's not an easy feature which is why you don't see many four-legged creatures in games. It's very rare, and when it has been done often it feels a little stiff and weird, but it's turning out really well for us.

Cevat Yerli said Crysis 2 had the most advanced AI system in a game, but there were definitely some issues at times, such as aliens running on the spot facing a wall and not engaging the player.

He didn't promise that it wouldn't be buggy then, just that it'd be the best [laughs]. It's difficult, especially when originally all the AI was developed to very open spaces in Far Cry and Crysis 1. In Crysis 2 you had a new setting and this verticality that wasn't in the older games, so suddenly your AI has to adjust to these differences, and you also need to make sure it's not too heavy so that it can run on consoles, so I would say generally the whole developing for consoles in parallel with the game with Crysis 2 just presented a lot of challenges.

Crysis games are not the easiest games to port to consoles - the more ambitious your games are visually and technically the more of a challenge you're posed with in order to have less powerful hardware execute to the same level of quality. That means you need to pull on both ends in order to meet that goal, but now it's kind of the opposite because we have that reference and we can push from both ends instead, which is a completely different position to be in.

Did you consider a Wii U release for Crysis 3 and could the console handle the game?

We're not really talking about that now. The only confirmed platforms are PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

Crysis 2 was named the most pirated game of 2011, with the PC version alone downloaded in the region of four million times. A near complete build also leaked shortly before launch. How does that make a studio that's put years into a game feel and how does it impact how you approach working on PC?

It's very flattering and upsetting at the same time. Obviously you miss so much revenue. It's so clear that a lot of people want to play your game but they don't really want to pay for it, which is unfortunately really disappointing. It's also a little flattering because people are willing to bother to download these 10GB files or whatever the game takes because they think it looks great. We obviously want to avoid that this time, but even if we can convert 25 percent of those gamers into paying customers [we'll have an extra million sales].

And how do you go about doing that?

You'd have to ask someone who knows something about that, because it's not me.

Do you think there's still plenty of room for innovation in shooters on PS3 and Xbox 360 and how do you intend to show that's the case with Crysis?

This is just my personal opinion, but I guess it comes down to what other kinds of concepts people marry into the shooter genre. Right now, for example, we're pushing narrative quite a lot in this shooter, and I guess you can push that even further. For me it's always about, you know, when you fire a gun in a game, whether that's going to be interesting or not is to do with the context that exists on top of that action, at least in single player.

Also making character development play a bigger role, and how that reflects through in the gameplay, I think there's a lot of potential there. There are a lot of great looking shooters that just don't have a lot of character, so if you're not a fan of obsessively shooting a gun, often there's not much more in games to look for.

Obviously for multiplayer it's a difficult one. Changing people's habits and what they're used to in multiplayer, that's a totally different beast to wrestle. If things are not World of Warcraft or Battlefield then they are crap is kind of a general conception.

A lot of people are exploring this though. Games like Mass Effect are exploring the marriage of shooter, action and RPG elements. The trick is not to compromise anything so that you end up with a really crappy RPG or crappy shooter, so if you want to do that, you at least have to make sure they play an equal role and support each other. For me the important thing is context, always. Whenever you get a great idea and you want to do something, you have to make sure that it resonates through all of the game and isn't just some appendix you dump on top.

There's increasing talk of a new generation of home consoles being on the market by Christmas 2013. What's on your wish-list feature-wise?

I just hope the platform holders put their effort in the right places, where it's going to be helpful for developers. The worst thing that can happen is they make something that's very complex for developers, regardless of how awesome it might theoretically be. So getting hardware that allows you to quickly get prototypes up and running, and any kind of scalability they can offer will be great as well, as long as everyone has that scalability and not just a select few.

How about anti-used game measures?

From a business perspective that would be absolutely awesome. It's weird that [second-hand] is still allowed because it doesn't work like that in any other software industries, so it would be great if they could somehow fix that issue as well.

Following our interview Crytek sent us a statement claiming that Hojengaard's final comment on anti-used games measures were "not intended to be taken seriously".

via [computerandvideogames]