Recent magazine stories on Crysis 2 reveal that Crytek is trying very much to preserve the free-form-style gameplay of the original, deliberately dispelling fans’ fears.
The Chief Executive Officer of Crytek told Finnish magazine Game Reactor that Crysis 2 will offer players larger environments and even more freedom than the first game did. “You are in charge,” Cervat Yerli told the official American PlayStation Magazine. “The world reacts to your plans.”
Yerli indicated that Crysis 2 might be entirely made up of levels like the first game’s mini sandboxes, laying out three major flaws he saw with the original Crysis. One of those was that the last portion of the game was overly linear.
Yerli and the rest of Crytek told Game Reactor and German site PCGames.de that the New York setting was chosen specifically to provide more freedom to players via verticality.
In this setting, Crytek said that a player might for instance want to jump into different floors or onto the roof of a building via a bus and observe enemies from above to make a plan of attack. Other tactics like jumping between buildings were also suggested.
Yerli also noted to Game Reactor how the Crysis style of sandbox level design should come as something new to console first person shooters. One of the flaws in the original Crysis he cited was that there were no console versions. Yerli specifically said that New York was not chosen because of the limitations of console hardware in developing Crysis 2 across platforms.
Ever since Crysis 2 was announced for both consoles and PC, fans of the original Crysis have worried that all versions might face compromises in graphics and level design because of differences in hardware. “I don’t feel we’ve compromised anything,” Yerli told PlayStation Magazine.
Crysis 2 is Crytek’s very first console game. Previous console spinoffs of their games were developed elsewhere and almost never carried the same sandbox level design Crytek is known for.
The first Far Cry was never ported to consoles in its original form. The Ubisoft-developed Xbox Far Cry Instincts games had their level design cut down to be more linear.
Neither the first Crysis nor its expansion pack titled Warhead were ever ported to consoles because both the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 lacked the necessary RAM to run its large, persistent sandbox levels. Crysis 2 is being developed on the entirely new CryEngine 3.0 to better optimize itself for consoles.
Ubisoft’s Far Cry 2 is the closest thing to this kind of sandbox first person shooter ever achieved on consoles, and even it has its considerable differences.
The last flaw of the original Crysis Yerli pointed out to GameReactor was its story, which amounted to little more than blowing up North Koreans and Aliens in the jungle. Crytek intended for there to be more, and plans to correct that in Crysis 2.
What is definite is that Crysis 2 will take place three years after the first game. This is likely to mark the three years between each game’s release.
Everything else is under tentative details and names. The main enemies in the game aside from the aliens are a paramilitary group currently called “CryNet Ops.” The main character uses the same codename as original Crysis protagonist “Nomad” but has been tentatively named Jake Dunn. Everyone in the game however mistakes him for “Prophet” – Nomad’s squad leader in the first Crysis.
Hard details on this story however won’t be revealed until the summer, possibly E3 2010. Crysis 2 is currently slated for release in Fall 2010 for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3.
