Crytek is not recycling the setting from Crysis 2 for the new game Crysis 3. New York is therefore created from the ground-up and has no ressemblance to the setting of the previous game.
“One thing I want to underline is that we did not do this because it’s easier for us,” Crytek’s director of creative development Rasmus Hojengaard said. “All of the assets have been created from the ground-up. There is nothing left of the New York you saw in Crysis 2. As you saw in the demo, there’s no resemblance to what we did before.”
“I mean, the example I’ve used is let’s say there’s a war, and your hometown is bombed, and so is your friend’s. Going to see your hometown is going to be completely different from your friend’s because you already have a connection to that place versus a place you’ve never been before. Although it’s obviously not the same [with Crysis 3], it’s still a little bit of that principle.”
Hojengaard announced that Crytek wanted to do something different this time around. “At the same time everybody was really in love with the idea of bringing heavy vegetation back into the game, like whenever you haven’t done something for a while, you want to go back and do that again. At the same time, there was also something cool about the urban situation, but we didn’t want to create something we had seen before. So we said why don’t we merge the two, and create an organic city, basically, an organic urban scenario.”
Crytek wants to push the barriers of the games graphical performance, according to Hojengaard . “We’re still in production, but we’re doing stuff far and above what we could do in Crysis 2. From a technical point of view, we’re prototyping render features now that have never been seen on consoles before from any studio. We’ll need to see what we can actually use in the final game, since it all boils down to performance, but it looks pretty promising.”
There will also be new vegetation and lens flare systems as well as “parallax occlusion mapping” on consoles which was only possible in the PC version of Crysis 2 because of the DirectX 11 update. “We actually managed to figure out ways to use that on console. Obviously it’s not in the exact same way as on PC, but the end result is largely the same. We’ll push as much as we possibly can in the hardware performance spectrum. We want to push the high-end benchmark of what’s possible on PC, but also on consoles.”, the developer said.
■ Jensen6
