GamerZines: The original Crysis pushed the technological envelope so far, and this time you've been able to put your technology onto the consoles. How has this been accomplished?
Nathan Camarillo: At the beginning even we said there's no way this type of game would ever run on a console and then we thought if we don't do it someone else will, so we set a challenge for ourselves. We looked at what we were doing and how we were accomplishing it, what power the consoles had and we structured Cryengine 3 around pulling this off. Having it scale per platform, so it gets the most power out of Xbox 360, PS3 and also PC. If you have a PC with a specification comparable to consoles you can expect that experience, whereas if you have spent $4000 on a PC, and you have all the latest, greatest hardware we'll scale with that as well, resulting in an amazing visual experience.
No-one should feel like they are missing out, because the core experience is still the same. Same environments, same weapons, same enemies, same interactions etc. You won't miss out on anything, it's just that if you've spent the money your hardware will be utilised.
GZ: We saw the game demoed on a Xbox 360, why not the other platforms?
NC: Ask EA, it's more of a marketing thing really. This was the choice and the message we wanted to give out. Everyone is saying this looks awesome on 360, people are really amazed, but it scales so the PC one is going to look fine. If we showed it on the PC, people would wonder what it looks like on console so...It's easier to wow people from the bottom up and continue to wow them.
What I always tell everyone is that we don't really talk about PC specification or PC features, but we do release screenshots and people say those look awesome, and they have to come from somewhere.
GZ: Crysis 2 almost seems an entirely different franchise due to the new suit and new alien menace. Is it about building on the success of the original, or creating something new?
NC: The core, the nanosuit gameplay itself, is very much like it was in the original Crysis with really strong AI and strong combat versus humans and bi-peds. These are things we did really well with in the original game, we even had really good weapons but they weren't necessarily appreciated. We want to expand the arsenal a bit more - some being conventional, others based on cutting edge science technology, closer to what the nanosuit itself is.
There were a lot of things that were really good that we want to keep doing. We want players to notice those but the things that we wanted to address required drastic changes to really pull off. We couldn't just do Crysis 2 in a jungle with two new suit powers. It would have been a watered down sequel even if it was on console, we've taken some really bold steps because we are building a franchise. If we prove that we are able to do this and people are wowed then we can take the Crysis IP wherever we want. We could stay in the urban environment or we could mix things up, we want to prove that this is a versatile game which can go anywhere. It's up to us what story we want to tell beyond Crysis 2.
GZ: It's mainly the new alien menace which seems completely different to the original game. What was the thought process behind that move?
NC: Part of it was based on the criticisms of Crysis 1, the flying aliens weren't necessarily well received. You spent the whole game learning about concepts such as hiding, cover, super abilities and gaining vertical advantage then suddenly we introduce flying aliens which invalidates all your cover and then there's the zero-g environment where there's no cover at all. We wanted to leverage some of the systems and the gameplay gamers had learnt by making aliens bipedal and using cover to challenge the player.
In addition there are other aliens we haven't revealed yet, that you'll see in subsequent demos, some of them are very mobile and can come into the environment in ways that you wouldn't expect and challenge you for vertical supremacy. If you are on the ground they are going to try and get higher than you, it is an advantage because it invalidates your cover. At the same time if you fight for vertical supremacy, you'll lose the ground-based cover opportunities. So you're always bouncing around with the aliens constantly vying for the advantage.
