Crysis Post-Mortem with Crytek

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Will Porter turns on stealth mode and creeps into Crytek HQ

Seeing as they're so adept at (justified) high-end technological willy-waving, it's interesting to discover that in person the gents who make up Crytek are some of the most polite, interesting and decent human beings in the entirety of the games industry.

Always honest and philosophical about their achievements, our interview with them on the creation of the gameplay marvel that was Crysis was so open and so interesting that we've granted it extra room. The men interviewed were senior game designer Bernd Diemer and lead level designer Sten Hubler - let's just hope our mag is of a high enough spec to do them justice...

SUITED AND BOOTED
Bernd: The original design for the nanosuit was actually something different, back when we had our working title 'Paradise'. We had an upgrade system that started you as a normal soldier in his uniform, and as you went through the first half of the game you got upgrades to the suit, to fight the aliens with.

We tried to incorporate that into the design, but we found that it didn't work out too well because it was more of a role-playing thing. After preproduction though, we decided to give all the stuff to the player right from the start, and that's when we really started thinking about the nanosuit as essential - a core feature of the game.

MANO A NANO
Bernd: The inspiration was the 2020 Future Warrior project, which nearly every army on earth is working on. They're not looking to create superheroes, but to make people move faster and act stronger.

From that we took it a bit towards the edge, more towards sci-fi. We wanted somebody who could do cool stuff but never an outright superhero who could fly or be far beyond human enemies. We wanted to give people more choice in encounters, and so we came up with this three power system, so you could go into a situation and think 'Hey, maybe I'll cloak here,' jump on top of something or whatever.

NANO REJECTS
Bernd: We had this device, which allowed you to adjust the external temperature of the cloak to match the environment. We took that out because it was so complicated to work - fiddling with the dials. In the end we used a more digital system: you're either cloaked, or you're not.

At one time, anything we thought was cool we'd try - even our version of bullet-time. We had a prototype but, even though it was really cool, it was just one of those things you just have to do right - if we have a superpower in the game it has to be something we're comfortable with. So we thought 'No, no. We'll stick with what we have, and put it in the drawer with all our other fancy ideas.' We may take one or two out in the future.

BEWARE BRANCH MONSTER
Bernd: From the start we wanted to have this completely open world in which you have the freedom to even kill story characters, but then we got to the problem that every project like this has, that we can't tell the story if a story character is dead. It turns into something we nowadays call 'The Branch Monster,' because when you cut one thing, there'll be another head growing.

The most important thing in the end was the production value, and the story itself, so we decided to focus on a more traditional storytelling method - you want to make people care about characters in the story, and having them killable is counterproductive to that.

So now, if you were near the beginning with Psycho and he said 'Bollocks', and you accidentally dropped a grenade and killed him, you wouldn't be without him for the rest of the game. It's a lot better to have this character develop alongside the player than delivering an incredibly complex open-ended project.

GRAB CHICKEN. THROW AT ROCK
Bernd: Little Animals. Always my favourite. People just take such a lot of pleasure in killing animals! Grabbing animals and throwing them around, or just throwing discarded ovens at North Koreans. Well, the grabbing character thing was one of the great moments we had in development, because when we started it - it was pretty stiff.

We spoke about it, and thought that you should be able to grab every object in the game, but we didn't really think that people would want to grab enemies and throw them around. At the beginning we didn't even know this was possible. Later, we did a focus test, and one of the first things we noticed was that people would try and sneak up to the Koreans and grab them.

But you couldn't! So we just thought 'Oh shit! Looks like we have to put that in as well.' We spoke to the programmers and everybody said 'No, we couldn't do that, it's impossible. It'll destroy the game.' But one of the programmers did it on his own and was able to present a prototype that was so well implemented that it proved it was doable. It still had a lot of problems, but we dealt with them. It's great that we got it through. No matter what it cost, we had to do it.

KOREAN SPEAK
Sten: We always wanted the Koreans to only talk Korean, but in the focus tests some people didn't really understand the AI too well, or exactly what it was doing. So we made Delta difficulty mode for people who really want to get into the game, turning off elements that would suggest you weren't actually physically there.

For the easier difficulty levels we just said 'OK we'll do it that way' and had them speak English. It was a compromise.

SEXY WOMAN SUIT VS. GRUFF MAN SUIT
Bernd: The suit voice is something that you listen to a lot, and we wanted to give people the choice to hear it in a particular way, or just turn it off. One of our guys from the team (a vehicle programmer, actually) recorded a placeholder voice, and it was so popular with the team that they were kind of sad to think of it going when the sound team were about to do the real recording.

He was always the favourite with the team. But it also became a labour of love from the sound department, and they went to do the voice recording with one of our female actors recording the commands. And they said 'Hey - we recorded it, can we just put it in? So people can switch? People will like that...'

NO MOUNTAIN HIGH ENOUGH
Sten: With the cool stuff in that ship resting in the mountain, obviously we wanted to reveal things step-by-step in the levels leading up to it. Just suggesting at what might be to come.

One of the ideas we had was to show the mountain falling apart. The problem with a shooter is that you can't control where the player looks so, as there, you have to design it so the player follows the level and sees what you want them to see.

CRYTEK BEST BIT
Bernd: One of the things I got to play rather late in development is the fight in the graveyard against the Koreans in the nanosuits. When I played the mission, I was completely taken by surprise.

Before, in earlier builds, they were all placeholder - they looked like the North Korean nanosuit guys but they couldn't do any special stuff. They couldn't jump or cloak or whatever - then I played it and the new behaviours were in! Suddenly these guys are cloaking and jumping onto the graves - it was really my favourite moment.

STUMBLING FOES
Bernd: The thing I personally like most is that Koreans occasionally fall down when jumping over fences. When I saw that the first time I was laughing out loud. It's something for me, from a design point of view, that gives a far greater sense of immersion and makes these people much more realistic. They try to do something perfectly, but mess it up like real humans do from time to time.

These little extra things, for me, are what I'm most proud of. Away from the overall combat behaviour, which I hope people like as much as we do, we've added these little bits of behaviour. They flinch when you run at them in speed mode, if you cloak in front of them, they go 'Woah! Woah! Where did he go?'. It adds a lot to the feeling of being in a living world."

THE CHALLENGE OF GOOD AI
Sten: Our environment is very changeable, you can throw things around, you can block AI paths, cut down trees. Making the AI work in an environment that isn't fixed and steady is a major challenge, so this was far more than we had to deal with in Far Cry.

For me, from a technology point of view what we did was a major achievement. It's not actually that visible, but if it doesn't work you see it clearly. The issue with creating AI, though, is that you can never fully account for what a player might be able to do; you can't know ahead what all the possibilities are.

You have to make sure you have a system that can adapt. In a few areas there are some glitches where I would have hoped we could have dealt with, like the machine gun behaviour. There were just two or three things that didn't work out as we didn't have any more time.

CRYSTALLINE ENTITIES
Bernd: Creating the alien environment wasn't an easy process, it took us a long, long time to get right. We had to throw away a lot of things that didn't work out; we were initially designing environments before we knew what the AI was going to do. I think we constructed five times more alien rooms than you actually see in the game.

It had to look good, and the zero-G level had to be a showcase - something that people haven't ever seen before, something where people are amazed by the graphics.

It was important for us to hint to the player that this place was really big: that there was a lots more there than just what you see, that it's really a menacing hive, that you're completely alone in there and almost eager to get out it. Not because it's boring, but because you feel out of your depth.

DEATH SQUIDS
Sten: We had thought about what the creatures in this environment could look like, and we put a lot of research into people who really like to think about this kind of thing scientifically.

Several different designs popped up as to how they'd look, in the end falling onto octopus or squid-like creatures, with added claws. At one point we just had to take the cool concepts, put it all together and work out how they moved and how they attacked.

FROM ACTION BUBBLE TO ACTION CORRIDOR
Bernd: I think something that a lot of people noticed wasn't that the gameplay changes, but that it changes so abruptly. From one moment to the other we change the gameplay dramatically - in retrospect it would have been better to ease the player into it a bit more.

So you didn't have that abrupt switch where you think 'Oh my God, what?' - most people at that point, they'd be pretty good with the nanosuit so they probably have their favourite way of taking out North Koreans - and something, in all honesty, that could have done with a bit more work is the switch between free-form North Korean combat and the level after the alien spaceship.

I don't think the sections after that have bad gameplay, they drive the story forward, they are a lot more focused and through that we deliver a lot more production value and visual impact with all these gigantic aliens walking around.

But I think people got a bit confused about what they were supposed to do after they came out of the spaceship, they were just so used to picking stuff up and throwing it at Koreans.

Will Porter