CEO Cevat Yerli joins lead designer Sten Hubler and producer Bernd Diemer to dissect highly decorated FPS; emphasizes need to stay true to the original vision but retain flexibility.

SAN FRANCISCO--The 2006 Electronic Entertainment Expo offered gamers a number of reasons to be excited about the coming year. However, trumping much of the noise coming out of that show was a solitary tech demo from Far Cry developer Crytek for its upcoming EA-supported shooter, Crysis. The Frankfurt, Germany-based developer had already established itself as a technological powerhouse with Far Cry's stunning CryEngine, but crowds were not prepared for the lush tropical environments and jaw-dropping breakable foliage on display.

As impressive as the showing was, it came very close to not happening. That and other tidbits were presented to a bleary-eyed crowd still reeling from Thursday's night's festivities in a postmortem session for the game kicking off the final day of the 2008 Game Developers Conference. Helming the session was none other than Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli, who was joined by Crysis lead designer Sten Hubler and producer Bernd Diemer.

As is how postmortems go, the Crytek trio first laid out what had been learned from their previous efforts, in this case 2004's Far Cry. (Far Cry's subsequent sequels were handled by Ubisoft's Montreal studio.) First and foremost, the team was proud of Far Cry's peerless visuals and the technology powering the game. Yerli felt these features were complemented by the game's sandbox design and responsive human artificial intelligence.

However, despite its glowing critical reception, Far Cry had its problems, with Yerli specifically calling out the game's "B movie story," bad jokes, and lack of a quicksave option. Yerli blamed problems with the story on the fact that it was shoehorned in near the end of the game's development, while the lack of a quicksave feature was purely a design decision, calling the move "egotistical." Yerli also noted that the game's difficulty wasn't balanced properly and that the artificial intelligence for the nonhuman wasn't up to standards, due mostly to the fact that the enemy types changed drastically throughout the course of the game's development, from dinosaurs to aliens and ultimately mutants.

The goal for Crysis, then, became to turn all of the weaknesses from Far Cry to strengths, while at the same time improving upon everything the team did well. For Yerli, this all began with his original vision, which was to take the lush, warm tropical paradise of Far Cry and encase it in ice. "The Vision" also included maximizing players' ability to express themselves through the game by offering a variety of play styles. In so doing, he wanted players to outsmart the game by forcing them to think before they shoot. Lastly, Yerli's vision called for realistic sci-fi, namely an alien invasion that is as believable as possible.

In 2005, the process of actually making Crysis began to coalesce. One of the team's top priorities at the time was to "create the best-looking game ever," and to do so, Crytek signed on Venice, California-based Blur Studios to mock up a prerendered video using assets from the game to set a benchmark to aspire to. "The goal was to get step-by-step closer to these visual benchmarks," Yerli said.

One of the first steps in accomplishing this goal was to take a "business trip" to Tahiti, Yerli noted, with Hubler chiming in with, "We're coming from Germany, so we really don't know what a real tropical environment looks like." Real research was key, the team noted, and it was important to get a handle on how standing in a tropical forest and looking through the trees actually feels. "To make the best-looking game, we had to capture a believable world," Yerli continued.

Then came E3 2006, and with it a proving grounds for the work that had thus far been channeled into the game. Yerli revealed that the most striking scene shown off of the game--when a soldier mows down a clump of trees in the forest using a minigun--only made it into the demo due to a little luck with the timing. It had taken nearly six months to get only one tree to break apart at an acceptable 300 frames per second, and an equal amount of time to be able to reproduce the effect on any object of choice.

Yerli felt breakable vegetation was one key aspect coming out of the show that went on to define the game. However, it presented severe problems with the game's AI, namely the fact that if a player is able to completely obliterate an object in the game, then the enemy looks a bit silly hiding behind the now nonexistent obstacle. Using that as a starting point, the team underwent an extensive AI overhaul, addressing a variety of issues ranging from animation to open-ended gameplay.

The challenge, Yerli noted, was achieving "human" AI and not "perfect" AI. "Perfect AI, anyone can do. Human is a more difficult challenge, because you have to replicate humanity," he said. To illustrate how Crytek overcame this obstacle, he showed a video of North Korean soldiers pouring over a stone fence, with most landing on their feet, but a few tripping and falling.

The other key concept of Crysis, which wasn't even fully realized at the time of the E3 showing, was the game's distinguishing nanosuit. The nanosuit was born out of Yerli's realization that even though the core shooting was fun and the company had hit its visual bar, Crysis "had nothing to bring to the table yet in a meaningful way." Initially, the nanosuit was to gain power over the course of the game, with the fully featured suit playable only available in the last five minutes of the game. That was a problem, of course, and necessitated a reimaging of the feature.

For the nanosuit, Yerli insisted that "customization be king." By that, he meant that the suit should allow players to a wide variety of choices and ways to express themselves, whether that be through run-and-gun, "Rambo-style" gameplay, more tactical stealth, or a combination of the two. Outsmarting enemies also played heavily into the design of the suit, and the team explicitly wanted to avoid the FPS staple of "run in and shoot them before they shoot you" gameplay. They also wanted players to be able to experiment with strategies, make mistakes, retreat, and then try again.

The suit went through a significant iterative process, where the team returned time and time again to play testers, who invariably reacted in "unexpected ways"--which, as the team noted, is the nice way of saying the testers were idiots. The suit's visual interface underwent some of the most significant overhauling, with the few iterations involving catering heavily to the micromanaging crowd.

These complex systems--which, according to Diemer, were more likely to result in "death by chicken" than anything else--were eventually streamlined into binary suit powers (that is, strength or speed) that could be accessed quickly and intuitively. As the game had been in development for quite a while by the time the nanosuit began to take shape, it caused a good deal of friction between its proponents and the level designers, who essentially had a good deal of work negated. While painful, Hubler noted that it aided the team in realizing freedom in a sandbox level design.

Concluding the postmortem, Yerli noted the importance of keeping the vision and sticking to the quality bars set in the beginning. Yerli also noted that the vision should only act as a seed for the development team--"a vision is developed by a team; it's seeded by a visionary." Closing, he stressed that visions that are forced will inevitably fail, and that it is necessary for a team to buy into that vision to maintain passion and inspiration.

(Source: Gamespot)

Crytek has released the SDK. Which is good news for all the MODs out there. Now they can really dig in and see what the can do with Crysis.



- Download Crysis Mod SDK v1.0 @ CryMod
- Download Crysis Mod SDK v1.0 @ Torrent
- Download Crysis Mod SDK v1.0 @ InCrysis
- Download Crysis Mod SDK v1.0 @ RiseToDelta

- Official CryENGINE2 Documentation
- SDK Forum Section

Full Story...

Next-Generation had a private sit-down with Crytek. They talked about weather Crysis will be coming to consoles or not.



Full Story...

Crysis has officially won the "2007 Best Technology" award at the Game Developer Conference.

Crytek has released Weekly Update #4 for us. Check it out below.

Greetings Community!

Gamasutra posted a nice article about Crysis from the GDC, check out a piece of it below.



Be sure and read the rest of the article, by clicking here!

Softimage has announced they will support Crysis on their SOFTIMAGE|XSI software.









Read the press release >>

Download the CryENGINE2 plugin for XSI >>

Weekly Update #3, check it out below!

We found this article where Cevat Yerli talks bout movie deals that are in the works, check out the article below, or read the full interview here.

The mod team from Obsidian Edge have posted an announcement, check it below,

The guys from the Medieval Conflicts Mod have sent us over an update for you to check out.

We have worked out our problem and we can now take your affiliate requests, link submissions, and general contact information!

If you have submitted your questions within the last week or so, please re-submit and we will get right to it.

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Ciaran sat down with the leader of the CryRecon mod for a one on one chat. Here is a snippet from it below.

TCHQ: What all will be in this mod once it is completed?

CryRecon Team: As a quick rundown:
An advanced player controlled squad system, allowing for command in both the open battlefield and in QCQ situations, this will include the facility to stack your team on approaches, breach doors and clear rooms as well as more open maneuvers such as way-pointing, hold and follow and suppressive fire and flanking. Also the player has the ability to see through the eyes of his team mates via the helmet mounted camera system.

Aerial support, via precision airstrike, heavy bombing runs, AH-1Z Super Cobra and AC-130 gunship support, and close recon via the DragonWarrior UAV system. The player may also call in vehicle/ammo/weapon & medical supply drops that may also be purchased via the token system.





A new weapon arsenal for the player and his squad featuring present day prototype and production weapons that will be assigned to the battlefield by 2010.
A mixture of wide open battlefields, coastal areas, rich forests and CQC urban warfare set in both the Highlands, temperate low land areas and cities of North Korea.

New vegetation types native to North Korea.

Completely new custom audio for weaponry, characters, music and sound effects.

Be sure to read the full article here!

We have been experiencing troubles with our email accounts on the website. If you have submitted any information or tried to become an affiliate in the past week, please send me a private message and I will get it taken care of. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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Message from DIFTOW:


From CryMod:
Current Status
Fugitmdup, a team member of the Jurassic Park Mod, has brought us some sad news regarding the mod development. He has announced that he will be pulling the website off the internet, and disabling the mod in the ModDB page for now.

A New Hope
Fortunately, the news may not all be bad. The team is in contact with the licensing department of Amblin Entertainment to seek permissions to use certain assets from the Jurassic Park movie, so it's quite possible that he may be bringing everything back online real soon.


The Alternative Plan
However, if it should turn out that they cannot obtain the necessary permissions, the team leader, DIFTOW has announced that they have something else in store for you that could be far better.

Also, if you should wish to talk with the team or view updates on the current progress of these discussions, the team has left their forums online so you can visit and receive these updates as they become available. You can also check back inside their post on our forums, as the team may also be posting updates there whenever they can.


Related Links:
- JPMod Forum Jurassic Park Mod Forum

Welcome to another feature on TheCrysisHQ.com! This weeks feature highlights another great total conversion mod for Crysis. We sit down with the leader of the mod for an up close and personal interview about his mod, Medieval Conflicts.

Medieval Conflicts is a first person, medieval total conversion for Crysis. Set during the Hundred Years’ War, it will be a battle between England and France. The mod will feature a unique combat system that allows for skilled blocking and attacking. In other words timing will be a key factor in playing the game. Our maps will be based on real, historical battles from the Hundred Years’ War. Each map will be unique and will require a different style of gameplay to succeed. A few will center around using the vehicles at your disposal to attack and others will focus more on your sword fighting skills to achieve victory. With Medieval Conflicts we hope to create something that will hold true to the history of such an important period of time while making a challenging yet fun experience.

Read the full interview here!

EA have just reported that Cyrsis has gone platinum which means that the game has sold over 1 million copies. This destroys earlier reports that the game was selling poorly. Well done Crytek!

Hey guys, we are back online on our new server. But as you can see not everything is functioning perfectly yet. We are working as hard and as fast as we can to get these bugs fixed for you. Please be patient with us as we are doing everything we can.

The guys from Jurassic Park Mod sent us in this update, check it out! Also you can check out all of the mod updates and more images in our forums! Click Here!

For this weeks feature we sat down with the dev team from MechWarrior: Living Legneds for a one on one interview. Below I have cut out a small snippet from the interview, check it out.

TCHQ: How many new maps can we expect?

MWLLT: Currently we have approximately 8 maps in varying degrees of completion. Our goal upon release is for 10-15 maps total.

TCHQ: Can you explain to us a little bit about the factions, and what we can expect in game play?

MWLLT: Essentially it breaks down to choosing between Clan and Inner Sphere. The main difference between the two is the technologies they use. The Clan’s have far superior technology and are genetically bread to be superior soldiers; however, the Inner Sphere is no easy conquest as the “free borns” are free thinkers and persistent people.

In Terms of Gameplay we are currently working with 2 unique game modes. One is called Trial of Annihilation and the other is called Solaris Arenas. Each has unique variables with it and more details will be provided as we come closer to beta.

Want to read more? Click Here!