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GDC Europe 2009: Cevat Yerli speaks about the next iteration of Cryengine and why games aren't going to get any better looking over the next three years
Crytek co-founder Cevat Yerli talks and vents about trends and what's to come
COLOGNE, Germany--As the head of one of the highest-profile PC development studios in the world, Crytek CEO and founder Cevat Yerli is well placed to hold a session titled "The Future of Gaming Graphics." Crytek has been responsible for Far Cry and Crysis--two of the most cutting-edge games on the market upon their release, and he is currently hard at work bringing Crysis 2 to the PC as well as Xbox 360 and PS3.
Cevat Yerli addresses his peers.
Yerli was keen to stress that between now and 2012, we shouldn't expect games to advance much beyond what they look like today. "Games 'til 2012 will not look very different than [they do today], since engines are bound to console cycles." Yerli forecasts that the next major CryEngine upgrade will arrive in 2012, around the same time he believes the next generation of console hardware will arrive. That said, he fully acknowledges the strength of the Wii and the prospect of an elongated console life cycle and warned that if a new generation didn’t arrive in 2012-2013, then "it could be a long time."
While Yerli claims that the current graphical benchmark has been set, he says that we should still expect "huge gains in physics, AI, and simulation of special effects" over the next few years. He also says, in reference to the Fox animated movie series, that by 2013 "you will be able to do Ice Age in real time." Matching animated movies in real-time seems to be a major goal for Yerli, who used Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within as a benchmark for CryEngine 3.
"We wanted to beat the faces in the Final Fantasy movie, but doing in real time what they were doing offline. Every day I was getting posted images from the Final Fantasy movie," he joked. He then proceeded to show a video of the incredibly lifelike facial models in the latest iteration of the engine. "One face has more technology than the entire first Far Cry," he claimed.
CryEngine 3 is the company's current technology foundation, which Yerli claims will form the bedrock of the company's games until 2012. Yerli showed off a demo of Crysis rebuilt using the latest technology. It included 3D volumetric clouds, soft particles, parallax occlusion mapping, and a 7km view distance. Clearly, Yerli is undeterred by the criticism he received for the original Crysis and its high system requirements. “It was always my dream to have a game that I could play now, and then in two years when I upgrade my PC, play again,” he stated.
Crytek co-founder Cevat Yerli talks and vents about trends and what's to come
We asked first about what Yerli thought about the next-generation of consoles to come, particularly because Crytek's CryEngine 3 is supposed to be 'next-gen ready' and a few comments made at Yerli's earlier talk about the potential influence of Nintendo's Wii. "I think it makes sense to grow the console market into a physical gaming space," he said. "On the other hand, the way I'm looking at this, there's going to be a PC platform that's going to deliver gaming at the quality, three years from now, that no console game market will be even close to. We will get demand from people that want this quality [points to a CryEngine 3 screen] and I feel like there must be a new evolution of a new platform that has this horsepower, is physical in interaction space, and allows online connectivity inherently. So it may be online only."
Yerli is referring to the Wii's motion controller or Microsoft's Natal (which he referred to as "very interesting") when he mentions the physical aspect of consoles. "I think if somebody has the foresight on that and takes a gamble, and maybe takes an intermediary step with a project like Natal or physical device, but makes it at the heart of the next experience. Right now it's a patch to a console."
shift of core gamers back to the PC might be in store, says Yerli, if the focus on consoles is motion-control inputs and mass appeal. "[It's] because of the quality that PC gaming offers. It would be online, you would be highly connected, you would have user-generated content, you will have potential physical entertainment too, and certainly the graphics quality there. The general technical quality of the platform will just blow away everything else."
The world of hardcore gaming and pretty graphics will attract more players because of its visual flair, says Yerli, over the less spectacular console visuals. "In three years from now where CPUs will have 32, 64 cores -- those games, you can't do anything close to them on the current generation...As people gravitated to console, it was the only reason because consoles were one point higher than the PC [graphically], and it was cheaper to be a console gamer. It still today is. For the next 2 or 3 years it'll be like that. But PC is stronger in online gaming, and that will be the case until consoles can become inherently only. Xbox Live is a good initiative; PlayStation Home is a good initiative. But they're not at the core. They're not fundamentally online."