Engamer: Crysis 2: 'We want to compete with the top tier shooters'

CVG Home ? Interviews 30-Oct-2010 Executive Producer of Crysis 2 talks multiplayer...
The closure of Free Radical also meant the loss of a studio that consistently provided one of the most creative, unique and genuinely fun console multiplayer experiences.

However, when Crytek announced it had purchased Free Radical and renamed it Crytek UK fans of the of the studio and Timesplitters started to pay a lot more attention to Crysis 2.

We sat down with executive producer Nathan Carmillo and discussed the multiplayer in Crysis 2 and the Crytek UK's involvement in crafting it.

How was it working with Free Radical - or Crytek UK as they are now? They came onto the project quite late...

Yeah, Free Radical went into administration January of last year, and they were a great bunch of developers - going back to the last generation, when I was working on Red Faction.

Timesplitters is an awesome game, the multiplayer was really a lot of fun. And we said, "Well, maybe we should talk to these guys, you know, see if we can join forces, get them to help."

Because we really wanted to take multiplayer to the next level in Crysis 2. In Crysis, the multiplayer was fun, but we want to do more, to compete with the top tier shooters on the market, and these guys have an awesome pedigree.

They kept the core team of guys who had been there since the early days of Free Radical, a really strong roster for making better multiplayer, with years of experience of working together.

And they jumped right into the concept of what Crysis is about and what we want from nanosuited gameplay, and have really nailed that kind of experience.

How did the Crytek UK guys find working with the Crysis engine?

They really enjoyed it. They had some really strong internal tools that they'd been working on as well, from the time when they were still independent, and immediately CryEngine allowed them to learn quickly, and start right away contributing to Crysis 2 and developing the multiplayer - but then some of the really strong internal tools they had, they folded into the engine as well.

So the engine immediately benefited, because it extends very easily, they were able to add their expertise into making it even stronger.

Within a month or so, they were already off and running, improving the engine and making it better for everyone through Crytek, not just in Frankfurt, but all our studios.

So there's been a lot of collaboration between the teams?

We talk every day, we're always talking, sending builds back and forth, playing multiplayer between Frankfurt and Nottingham...

Something like the multiplayer reveal here at Gamescom, there was a lot of cross-collaboration between Frankfurt and Crytek UK - we all want to make it the best thing possible, so people were making it better any way they could, even if they weren't in the UK.

What other shooters on the market, from EA and elsewhere, do you guys admire?

I play everything - all kinds of games, especially multiplayer. People may consider them competitors, but I don't - we're all in the industry to make fun.

So anything that's fun I want to play, I want to learn from, I want to have a good time playing.

I have many hours logged in all of these games - Battlefield, Call of Duty... Even going back to when I was working on Red Faction, I was a huge fan of the Free Radical guys. And I wanted to work with them one day!

Many PC gamers accuse any game which is ported to 360 of being 'console-ified'; being dumbed down. Do you think that actually happens?

I've been in the situation before, having been a part of a company changing from being a PC developer to multiplatform, and what always happens is that it actually increases your focus on the decisions that you're making for the quality of your game.

The feature set is more reined-in, and things are more polished than on PC. Take a flight simulator, for example.

On PC, buttons are added just because you can, and for a feature maybe one guy in a thousand will ever use during the course of the game.

But you spend time developing it, de-bugging it... that was time that you could have put into another feature, like just your targeting system, you know?

When you switch over to multi-platform, you think broader, you start looking at your decisions and going "Is this really what our game is about?" You start weighing every decision against what is going to make the best experience for the gamer.

There's a lot of speculation that we are losing something going multi-platform, but we feel like, "No we're not, and actually we've added to it, and it's better."

It'll all come out in the wash when people actually play it. I think they will be more than pleasantly surprised.

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Monday, November 1, 2010

Crysis 2: 'We want to compete with the top tier shooters'

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