TGL Interview: Nathan Camarillo Executive Producer Crysis 2

TGL recently caught up with Crytek’s Executive Producer Nathan Camarillo in London to discuss their forthcoming FPS, the highly anticipated Crysis 2. Will Crysis 2 set a new benchmark for 3D gaming? How does the Nanosuit define the gameplay experience? And how tough was it bringing Crysis 2 to your home console? Nathan left no projectile taxi unturned and debriefed TGL on all things Crysis 2. Here’s how we got on:
 
TGL: The first Crysis was defined by its visual aesthetic and the strength of its graphics. What was the most difficult component of the Crysis package to transfer to the home console?

NC: So the big challenge that we set out for ourselves when making Crysis 2 was making a game that would be multiplatform for console and for PC. Not only did we have that goal but also re-establishing the Crysis franchise as the continued visual benchmark for PC gaming. So it’s a tall order to work with five year old hardware while simultaneously setting a new benchmark for yourself. So we ripped the guts out of Cry Engine 2 and created Cry Engine 3 to scale appropriately what hardware was available and what platform we were playing on and it posed a lot of challenges, but the main thing was that we looked at those as challenges and not as things we couldn’t do. We weren’t willing to give up any ground anywhere so we had to find innovative ways to push visual fidelity even further and not having huge disparity between the visual quality of the PC version and the visual quality of the console version. So we’re doing a lot of things on consoles that a lot of people aren’t able to do and would have never thought possible and quite honestly we thought they were the same as well but we didn’t give up and we just kept trying and trying and trying. So if you’re playing on Xbox 360, PC or PS3 your going to get an awesome experience. You know you can see today that it’s running 30FPS on Xbox 360. Its looks amazing. Its looks phenomenal. If you play in 3D on 360 you don’t lose anything. The visual fidelity looks even better because you don’t lose any frame rate. It’s an awesome experience on console. If you have PC you can crank the resolution up and you know it looks amazing. It’s quite an achievement. We really can’t wait for people do experience it no matter what platform they choose to play it on.
 
TGL: The market is becoming more and more saturated with FPS game but for the most part the quality and integrity of FPS games increases all the time. What is it about Crysis 2 that makes its stick out from the crowd, particularly with a number of high profile shooters about to launch in the next couple of months alongside it?

NC: There are three main things for us. Obviously there’s the Nanosuit. The Nanosuit is the core of the Crysis intellectual property so the fact that we make you the ultimate super soldier with stealth and armour gameplay, plus motilities like sliding, sliding and shooting, ledge grabbing, all different types of melees, kicking taxis and creating booby trap. So we have that aspect, that’s the first one. The second one is being set in New York and creating an authentic and visual appealing version of New York. And the third one is the sandbox gameplay. Its different than most first person shooters which all tend to be linear these days. So we have the combination of all these awesome elements. Sandbox gameplay in New York with the Nanosuit, I think, is a hard one for anyone to compete with. On top of that, just the core technical competence and visual fidelity that we’re able to offer, I mean, it’s a very solid package. It has a very much longer than average single player campaign. The average single player campaign is about 6 hours these days and we’re significantly longer than that. It wasn’t something we planned for. We didn’t know how long it would be. But then when we got all the A.I in and everything else, we were quite surprised and quite shocked at how long that game wound up becoming. But I mean it’s intense throughout that entire time and it’s fun and your always playing with the Nanosuit and with sandbox. It’s always fresh and you have this awesome story throughout the campaign that you get to experience that traverses New York. Then beyond that, having multiplayer, like, 50 hours of multiplayer to unlock everything first time through and then being able to reboot the Nanosuit and do that multiple times, I mean, you’ve got a massive game in one box.


TGL: How do you hone that experience? There’s so much to Crysis 2’s gameplay that some gamers might find it intimidating at the entry level. How are Crytek making Crysis 2 accessible to not only the hardcore shooter fans but the shooter gamers who don’t usually except that much depth from their FPS?

NC: It is quite challenging. But that’s the beauty of sandbox gameplay. You can find as much game in there as you want. So when you’re playing the first levels of that game, if you’re playing it like most linear first person shooters, like moving cover to


cover and being cautious and creeping your way ahead, you won’t find yourself overwhelmed. You won’t find yourself lost, you’ll just find a lot of opportunity for you to play the game and explore and when you have confidence you’ll look around and realise that you can pick things up and throw stuff. Then you start to find sandbox gameplay elements and then as you get into the campaign and the game, you start to master these sandbox elements and recognize opportunities for them. So you teach yourself. The beauty of sandbox gameplay is that you’re not forced to do any of this. You can find it and create opportunities yourself and just start to think like a soldier, this ultimate solider on the battlefield going ‘you know what? I could shoot the guy behind the car, but I could actually blow the car up or I could sneak over to the car and kick it at him’. You just start to invent and improvise and find things to do. The game educates you as you play it. It’s unique in that way cause we don’t force a mandate on you to play in a particular way.

TGL: With the first Crysis, people were blown away by the visuals. Nowadays there’s a shift towards complementing these visuals with 3D gaming. Is it true that James Cameron has played Crysis 2 in 3D?

NC: I don’t know if I can comment on that. That’s a news story that hit in the last couple of days. I don’t know what I can say about that.

TGL: Is Crysis 2 going to be the definitive 3D gaming experience?

NC: We’re taking 3D extremely seriously at Crytek. It’s technology we’ve been working on for the last couple of years. We have collaborated with a lot of people on 3D technology and have been exploring it not only as an aspect of Cry Engine 3 but as an experience that we can offer games as well. What’s really important for us is to make sure we have a solid 3D experience that isn’t straining on the eyes, that it’s a very pleasant, pleasing and very accurate experience that doesn’t negatively affect the frame rate. It’s a type of magic that we’ve been able to do. It’s not a simple process; it was really through a lot of iteration. We want you to have a solid 3D experience from the beginning to the end, from the cinematics in the game, to the gameplay, to the interface and the main menu. We have 3D all over the place and we really want that to be recognised in Crysis 2 as a very prominent feature, not just something that we tacked on.