Crysis Warhead: A Pseudo-Postmortem
Most of the recent conversation I had with Crytek’s Crysis producer Bernd Diemer wasn’t actually about the Warhead PC—we actually discussed in considerable depth the lessons the studio learned after developing Crysis, and how those lessons were considered to make Crysis Warhead a better game.
Today over at Gamasutra we published a feature based on that interview, which ends up kind of like a postmortem of the original game as as applied to its followup. For example:
“From a pacing standpoint, we switched almost entirely to alien combat at a certain point in the game, and from then onwards the expectations were set. The players knew, ‘From now on, it’s aliens.’ Forum posters talked about the first part of the game, and the second part of the game. The public perception was really driven by these design choices — there was ‘pre-alien Crysis‘ and ‘post-alien Crysis.’
“In Warhead, we tried to stay away from that. As a team, and as a company, we’re now a lot more familiar with the IP we created. Crysis‘ nanosuit actually came into development rather late, while we were building the game. As a game designer on Crysis before I moved into the producer rule, I had to convince level designers into changing levels to be more suitable to the nanosuit gameplay. If somebody had spent three months working on a level, it can be tough to accept a different mindset for that level. Now, as a team, we are much more comfortable with how levels have to be built. The nanosuit makes sense.”
It’s a pretty good read, if I do say so myself (and I can say so myself without feeling bad about it, since the whole thing is in Diemer’s words). If, like I was, you were a fan of Crysis but were also aware of its flaws, it’s encouraging to see that the Crytek team recognized those flaws as well. Diemer is straightforward and demonstrates a strong grasp of design, and I’m looking forward to playing the result of that.
Tags: crysis, crytek, electronic arts, gamasutra, pc gaming