Crysis 3 Dev: We're 'avoiding the stuff that didn't work'

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David Lynch

Crysis 3 is already impressing gamers with its stunning visuals, but we talk to Crytek’s Rasmus Højengaard, to ask how it’s taking Crysis to the next level.

Careful, it’s a jungle out there

Crytek’s Crysis series has always done things a little bit differently. It gave PC gamers something they couldn’t play on maximum settings for three years and on consoles, it managed to produce a game that looked stunning, but had some of the dumbest AI we’ve seen in years.

It was a contradiction many overlooked because of Crytek’s ability to create visuals of a jaw dropping nature. Without question, Crysis 2 looked amazing.

And, when its enemies weren’t dropping grenades at their own feet, the shooting melded the open sandbox styles of Halo, with the tight setpieces of Call Of Duty pretty successfully.

Crysis 3 is hoping it can take everything that worked (or didn’t work) in Crysis 2 and make improvements across the board. Amazingly, that even includes the visuals, as evidenced by the new footage. But for us, it’ll be how the third game evolves the sandbox gameplay that will make it a worthy addition to the competitive FPS genre.

We caught up with Crysis 3’s director of creative development, Rasmus Højengaard, to ask how Crytek is approaching this most unique problem…

360 Magazine: Crysis and Crysis 2 have a sandbox approach to gameplay rather than a liner one; how are you evolving this in Crysis 3?

Rasmus Højengaard: We do both more now. Sometimes there is validity to going along a liner path because you want the player to be in a certain place at a certain time, for those epic moments and so on.

Then, at other points you want to broaden out and ensure there are a ton of options and potentials presented to players – and it’s up to you [the player] to figure out what you want to do.

Each approach has validity and what we want to avoid now is that we do one or the other fully. If you’re going to have a really strong story moment, it’s going to be more linear; if you’re going to have a really strong gameplay moment where you need to pace yourself and take your time, well, then you need to have a big open area to explore.

We’re taking the best experiences that we got from Crysis 1 and 2, and learning from them. Then we’re combining them and hopefully avoiding the stuff that didn’t work and that’s our approach.

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