For all the traffic Crysis Warhead has inadvertently given me, I might as well share my final thoughts about the game itself now that I’ve bought and completed it.

First off: I was quite a fan of the original Crysis. It wasn’t a perfectly polished game by any means, and like most people I feel the team severely dropped the ball during the last third or so, when it turned into a surprisingly conventional tunnel shooter with aliens. But until that point, Crysis delivered some of the most open, player-driven, potentially deep gameplay I’ve ever seen in a straight-up shooter. To my mind, cries of “tech demo!” ring as falsely to me now as they did a year ago.

I say “potentially deep” because if you don’t really invest yourself into the freedom of the game’s open environments and the focus added by the game’s ability-boosting nanosuit and weapon customization, I can see where Crysis could come off as more conventional. It is also a very rare case where I consider playing on a higher difficulty level to go beyond being a personal player choice and actually becoming a crucial part of experiencing the game design in a fulfilling way. Recognizing your character’s vulnerabilities and being forced to consider your tactics carefully actually coax out depth in the mechanics—and, paradoxically, highlight your character’s suit-enhanced strengths—to a higher degree than is typical.

With that preface out of the way, it appears that Crytek decided to play it a little safer with Warhead. It is a much less “pure” expression of the design ethic demonstrated in Crysis before that game’s tonal shift. Gone—or, more accurately, significantly reduced—are the hours upon hours of pure tropical openness, in which you essentially began at Point A, then were given a Point B and little else. Those experiences still occur, but they are less frequent, and generally less sprawling. Here, they are less of the main experience and more like the occasional stretches of relaxing, open-road highway freedom between rest stops—if your rest stops consist of blowing a whole lot of shit up.

Between the release of last year’s Crysis and this month’s Warhead, Crytek learned a whole lot about gameplay pacing, in the Infinity Ward or Valve vein. You can take that as a positive or a negative. By an overwhelming margin, most gamers to whom I’ve spoken or whose opinions I have read have found it to be a plus.

I don’t mean to suggest Crytek has turned out a highly-scripted, linear experience this time around, not at all. There are a few segments that are fairly on rails—or at least which make you feel like you’re on rails until you take a moment to stop and try something else, and realize you can actually do so—but nothing that approaches the structural rigidity of a Half-Life or a Call of Duty experience (or, for that matter, Crysis‘ own zero-g levels).

What I mean is that Crytek has learned the value of variety, not variety in the sense of including different gameplay experiences over the course of an entire playthrough, but variety in a moment-to-moment sense. Your character in Warhead goes through a constantly-cycling smorgasbord of gameplay, strung together in a compelling way. It is much the same design evolution Valve struck upon going from Half-Life 2 to Half-Life 2: Episode One; the gameplay building blocks were retained, but they were packed much more densely and with much less filler, in a shorter total number of hours.

It’s a credit to Crytek’s design team to be sure, and the ability to see this kind of tangible design evolution in such a relatively short period of time is precisely why I love Valve’s not-quite-episodic-but-you-know approach. Seeing the blueprint laid in Half-Life 2, then experiencing the refinements and new considerations emerging in the two followups exposes the process of game design in what is to me a much more intimate and revealing way than does a traditional sequel, which can be buffered by more years of development and reinventions of the wheel.

I greatly enjoy that aspect of Warhead. The difference between the two franchises is that Valve’s episodes (as nearly all sequels do) retained the structure and gameplay tone of their predecessor. Warhead, while reusing many more art assets from Crysis than HL2:Ep1 or HL2:Ep2 do from HL2, noticeably changes the structure of its predecessor.

As noted before, most gamers have reacted positively to this change. Warhead is a more explicitly action-packed experience than Crysis; it is to an extent more comfortable in its own skin, with one game already have been out the door; its gameplay twists are more seamless, more organic, rather than coming at you like a brick wall. I myself reacted positively to it for being an extraordinarily well-crafted alternative take on the franchise’s mechanics.

I fully enjoyed my time with Warhead, and if you were to plot my average engrossment per second on a line graph, it would probably be both a straighter line that averages out above most of the points on the Crysis line, and Crysis’ low points would certainly dip below Warhead’s—but Crysis‘ high points would be highest ones on the graph.

When I played Crysis, after a certain point I started really inhabiting my character. I didn’t particularly care about the fiction, and I still don’t, but I became personally invested in my style of play in a way that I generally don’t with most straight first-person shooters, because few straight first-person shooters give you as open a canvas as Crysis. I became an invisible predator, stalking camps of my enemies and silently picking them off (or throwing them into frenzies) without ever divulging my location. I absolutely inhabited that suit.

There was arguably too much canvas at times (at least until there was suddenly too little of it), but it’s a framework you simply encounter in shooters almost never, and I remain impressed by it.

Warhead has those moments, and I relished them. But Crysis was defined by them.

In the end, I think Crytek made the right move. Those of us who really adored those aspects of Crysis above all else (and, commercially speaking, I’m guessing it’s not a massive group) can always play Crysis again—after all, the very nature of that enjoyment hinges on its unscripted, replayable nature.

And if you’re going to release a followup in only a year, which by its nature will contain fewer gameplay hours than the original title, the more effective development route seems to be to try and design to that limitation in a way that compensates for it, to try and balance out that reduced length with sheer variety, density, and refinement. At that goal, the Crytek Budapest team has succeeded.

Tags: crysis, crytek, electronic arts, impressions, pc gaming

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 11:59 pm and is filed under game design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.