Crysis Warhead Post Mortem Q&A - Interviews

Crysis Warhead shipped not too long ago so we took the opportunity to conduct a post mortem Q&A with Crytek Producers Bernd Diemer and Eric Lagel and find out more about engine optimization, critical praise versus fan praise, why the multiplayer comes on a separate disc, and narrative in first-person shooters.

Thanks for your time Bernd and Eric!

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Crysis Warhead Post Mortem Q&A Conducted by Aaron Simmer

As always, some quick introductions! Who are you, how did you get into the industry, and what was your role on Crysis Warhead?

My name is Bernd Diemer and I serve as a Producer at Crytek. I started working in the games industry about 12 years ago, first as a game designer for various companies in Vienna and Berlin. I joined Crytek when Crysis was still called “Frozen Paradise” and have been very happy there ever since.

My name is Eric Lagel, and I also serve as a Producer at Crytek. I started in marketing and consulting, and then decided to join the games industry by passion 5 years ago. I lead the creation of the Crysis Wars brand and currently overlook the production and support of the game.

What was the most important lesson you learned from Crysis that was put into effect in Crysis Warhead?

We were building the CryEngine2 in tandem with Crysis; it was a completely new franchise with completely new features, like the Nanosuit, that was a huge challenge. By the time we started the development of Warhead, the team was a lot more comfortable with designing levels for the Nanosuit. We also had basically all

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technology working, so it enabled the Warhead team to start building prototypes right away.

We had something playable very fast, and that allowed a lot of iterations and also made clear which ideas were fun to play.

How important is critical praise from the enthusiast press to the development team? Do you pay more attention to what the fans are saying?

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We do try to pay attention to all feedback; no matter of where it comes from it is very valuable for us. When we started working on Warhead, we spent a lot of time going through forum posts, reviews and emails to identify the major gripes people had with Crysis, and tried to find solutions for them- Alien AI, performance, vehicles and the gameplay shift in last third of the original game received the most focus.

Feedback stings if it is negative, but it is extremely valuable and important to look at it. After all it comes from the players, and one general rule of game design is that the player is always right.

Crysis has a reputation of bringing a lot of PC hardware to its knees but most reviews of Warhead have noted better performance on the same hardware while managing to look better. If the code has been optimized in such a way, why shouldn't Crysis be portable to Xbox 360 and Playstation 3?

Crysis was designed and developed for the PC and its memory requirements from the start. As a company we are of course thinking about other platforms as well, we already showed a version of the Cryengine2 on consoles at the GDC in San Francisco this year. Its not only a matter of computation power, but also memory requirements. Consoles are not as providing when it comes to memory compared to PCs, even not if you employ a sophisticated cutting-edge streaming system as we have in CryEngine. However in addition to the technological aspect we believe that whatever game we do has to be designed with the specific strength a platform offers in mind to make a really good game.

What was the best part about working on Warhead?

My personal favorite was the creative challenge of building the levels and new weapons for it- we had a box of toys and had to put together a game that fits in with the Crysis core vision, and come up with a twist to keep it fresh. The focus this time was a lot less technical apart from the optimization process and graphical improvements we did. Personally I am very happy and proud that Crysis Warhead put our Crytek Hungary studio on the map.

Was Warhead's development all done in-house or were portions of it farmed out to contractors?

The major part of the development was done in-house by our teams in Frankfurt and Budapest. We worked with an external writer on the story and dialogue, which was very beneficial for us since it gave us a different and fresh angle on things we took for granted. But I would like to state for the record that my favorite line “I’m British, you muppet!” was written by our in-house writer.

First-person shooters have a reputation of poor narrative – some lines of dialogue between explosions – and Crysis Warhead hasn't been immune to this same criticism. For a high-intensity action game does the story really matter?

Story always matters. Even it is only a couple of lines they have to be well written, acted and implemented and contribute to the overall experience.

Many will download Crysis Warhead as a "non-physical" game. What's one disadvantage to the consumer of digital downloads?

Electronic distribution is fast and convenient. Personally I am always a bit torn between having a physical box for my collection and playing a new game one second after midnight on the release day. Quite often I end up buying both.

If there was going to be gratuitous product placement in the next Crysis game, where would that product be placed?

If it is done well, fits in with the game world or even adds to the credibility, it can be a good thing. It can also be used to make the world more believable. Games could learn a lot from looking at how movies use product placement.

Why is the multiplayer component installed separately from the single-player game? How many players are online?

Once it was clear that there would be multiplayer in Warhead, Bernd and I agreed that we wanted to allow each team (single player and multiplayer) as much room as possible to create the best game in their field of competency. Single player was made in Budapest, multiplayer in Frankfurt, so it was an obvious decision to make. At the time I write this, there are about 1,400 players online, and it’s growing every day, so we hope to see more.

Was Warhead always envisioned as a stand-alone expansion or was it simply an aspect that was cut from the original game due to time or budget constraints?

The first idea was to do a classic Expack for Crysis, but it grew and grew. We looked at the prototypes done in Budapest and changed it to a standalone, then we added Crysis Wars on a separate disc as well. I think the only thing we kept was the price point, which was a bit complicated but very important for us- we wanted to give our fans the best value we could.

All levels in Warhead are brand new and were built from scratch. Some elements from the original game can be found in Warhead, for example the frozen wave. We wanted to have it in Crysis, but the level it was in got cut during a story rewrite.

Releasing an expansion pack is nothing new, but stand-alone expansions seem to have gained popularity in the last few years. Is Warhead a stab at making Crysis "episodic" in that a small piece of the larger story is released every 12 months?

Doing stand-alone games in a franchise has its own appeal for a developer. As a team you learn with every iteration you do on a product and get better and better at creating content for its universe. Hopefully in the end it makes for better games, and quality is always paramount for Crytek.

Warhead was a premiere for Crytek- the first game we did ourselves in a franchise we created. How we progress from here also depends on how Warhead is received by our fans and the press.

Multiplayer vehicle combat can be a very tricky undertaking. What process was used to balance the maps and the attributes of each vehicle?

Playtest, playtest, playtest… it is important for us to play the game and understand its mechanics from the player’s point of view. So we’ve been tweaking the vehicles over and over, after playtest sessions where we figured out glaring imbalances. I keep saying: “a good cook tastes his own food”. The same goes for games.

What's next for Crysis?

I would love to tell you, but Cevat would get me for sure if I did!

(October 16, 2008)