This week, IGN brings us a lengthy Crysis Warhead Preview with first video footage of the game. Enjoy:
Consider the warhead, an object that is both explosive and incendiary. A warhead is about destruction, pure and simple. Recognizing that is one of the key things to understanding Crysis Warhead, a stand-alone follow-up to last year's acclaimed first-person shooter Crysis. Keep in mind that this isn't a direct continuation of Crysis; it's not one of the trilogy hinted at by Crytek's CEO Cevat Yerli. Instead, Warhead is an offshoot story that focuses on one of Crysis' supporting characters. And since that character's nickname happens to be Psycho, you could rightfully expect some crazy things to happen.
In many ways Warhead is a different game than Crysis. The easiest way to think of Warhead is that it is Crysis with the action ramped up to 11. This promises to be a much more muscular shooter, with no shortage of huge firefights and explosions. In fact, the original Crysis may come off as being a much more cerebral experience in comparison. That game was about cat-and-mouse in the jungle, whereas Warhead is going to be about blowing that jungle up.
Warhead is set during the timeline of its predecessor. You play as Sergeant Michael Sykes, aka Psycho, the British-accented commando who goes off on a mission midway through Crysis only to reappear at the end, standing atop the flight deck of the aircraft carrier with a captured alien war machine. What happened to Psycho and how he comes home with such an oversized trophy is going to be the story of Warhead in a campaign that the developers say will be about the length of Crysis'. And before you can ask, since this is a one-off from the core franchise, the designers say that Warhead will pack a fitting finale.
While Crysis has sold more than a million copies and garnered many awards and accolades, Yerli said that there's was also plenty of room for improvement, and that Warhead will address quite a number of issues. "Some people had some concerns about the ending of the game and the linearity of some sections, or could it be a bit more scripted with the environment? We tried to make with Warhead something that is a bit more accessible and mainstream in that regards."
The fact that Warhead is built around Sykes also helps with telling a better story. In Crysis you played the faceless protagonist, and everything that happened in the game occurred from a first-person perspective. In Warhead, the designers can shift to more standard third-person cutscenes that have Sykes in them. Plus, it also helps that Sykes is a very colorful character. "He's kind of a rough diamond, an unpolished diamond," noted senior game designer Bernd Diemer. "He's the guy who likes to blow up stuff, he's the guy who likes to the cut to the point very, very fast. He doesn't have time for chit-chat or doubts."
"You tell him to go over there and take out that pillbox, he goes at it with a butter knife or C4 or whatever he has. That's kind of his characteristic, and that's where the name Warhead comes from. That's him, basically. He's explosive, he's aggressive, and we wanted the game to portray that in interesting ways."
The designers gave us a view of one of early levels in the game, Ambush. Right off the bat it's intense. VTOL transports are coming in to drop off Marines, the radio is full of chatter, and jet fighters are dropping bombs left and right. Think of the opening of the Crysis level Assault, but with that amount of energy sustained throughout. It's all very loud and frantic, but this isn't an attempt to make a linear-game like Call of Duty. Warhead still embraces the series' philosophy of the nanosuit, the high-tech power suit that lets you alter your strategy and tactics on the fly. The battlefields are still large and open, and this gives you an incredible number of options when in a fight. You can stealth and hide to restore your health or ambush an opponent. Use strength to leap atop buildings and hit your enemy from above. Or you can use speed to zip from one location to another. "The core gameplay is still Veni, Vidi, Vici," Yerli said, referring to the Latin term "I came, I saw, I conquered."
Since Warhead takes place concurrent to Crysis, it's not too surprising that you'll see many of the same assets that you may have seen before, like tanks and helicopters. Still, Warhead will introduce some new vehicles and weapons. We noticed a new type of armored personnel carrier, as well as an advanced scout vehicle, which comes in several variants armed with different weapons. Then there's a new submachine gun that can be dual wielded, doubling your firepower. There's more, of course, but that's all we caught a glimpse of in this early level.
Yerli and the others see Warhead as sort of a relaunch for the Crysis franchise. For one, Crytek's programmers have spent the last year optimizing and tuning the engine to improve both performance and visuals. For example, Warhead will introduce a new particle system as well as a new global ambient lighting system that boosts the image quality "at almost no performance cost" according to Yerli. Some before-and-after shots show off the new level of detail now achievable, right down to being able to see the grain in a wood plank or pores in human skin. "This is being done in DirectX 9," Yerli noted, which is good news for those who haven't or are unwilling to upgrade to Windows Vista and DirectX 10. And that brings up Crytek's second point, which is that the rest of the PC ecosystem has matured quite a bit since Crysis shipped last year. Since then, Microsoft has released Service Pack 1 for Vista, which improved performance for 3D applications, and graphics hardware companies such as Nvidia have improved their driver support, which is critical for a game like Crysis.
There's also the fact that many gamers have upgraded their systems over the past year. The Crytek team wants to dispel the myth that Crysis or Warhead requires a high-end, expensive system to play. So they ran the Warhead demonstration on a $652 PC built with parts purchased online. Performance was astonishingly smooth and fluid even with a high level of graphical detail.
Then there's the other issue that Crytek wants to deal with: piracy. Yerli noted that for every copy of Crysis sold there were as many as 20 copies that were pirated. It's obviously a touchy issue with them, especially since quite a number of those pirating the game are willing to spend money to upgrade their machines. "I'm disappointed by the behavior of the gamers," Yerli said. "I'm not disappointed by the people who support us. I know there are a lot of people who support us, and I'm grateful and I thank [them] for that. But there are 15 to 20 times more people who don't care right now."
To combat this, Crytek plans to strengthen copy protection in Warhead, but how it will do so remains murky for now. Yerli admitted that it's a very difficult task. "If you want to have an anti-piracy mechanic, you have to spend a lot of time at the risk of incapability here and there. So you will annoy some people, but you will delay the amount of piracy. You will make 10 people angry for 1,000 more people who cannot copy… It's a dangerous walk to walk because the 10 people who are upset, they will get loud about it. And this is where we have to be good about it, and it's difficult."
While Yerli and other Crytek representatives have been quoted over the past few months that the company is flirting with no longer making games exclusive to the PC, Warhead will remain a PC exclusive. Warhead may be the litmus test that determines Crytek's future to developing PC-exclusive titles. "We'll look at how Crysis Warhead does," Yerli said.
Warhead is being developed by Crytek's new Budapest studio, and the developers there are bringing a fresh perspective to the series. Studio head Kristoffer Waardahl told us that many on the team are veterans of Hungary's real-time strategy development studios, which sounds like an odd skill to bring to making a first-person shooter, but it actually helps when developing the complex and scripted moments of the game. It also helps with improving the AI, and the developers promise better human AI and, more importantly, better alien AI.
Crytek has also learned a valuable lesson when it comes to developing games, as well. Yerli said that, due to delays, too much information came out for Crysis before it shipped. The long wait also built up huge expectations. Crytek is going to play Warhead closer to its chest, revealing a lot less than before. And there shouldn't be any long wait this time, as Crysis Warhead is on track for shipping this fall.
Source: IGN
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