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. (more…)

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.

[Update: EA has sent out final details on the PC. The full specs are as follows:
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 @2.66GHz
- Video card: Nvidia GeForce 9800GT 512MB
- Motherboard: G31 mATX
- RAM: 2GB
- Other components: 250GB 7200RPM hard drive, 16X DVD-ROM drive, network adapter, integrated Realtek audio, keyboard, mouse, Ultra X-Blaster ATX Mid-Tower case, one-year parts & labor warranty

Prospective buyers can sign up for updates over here.]

Original story: About a month ago, I reported that EA was planning to market a Crysis Warhead-ready PC. I have now learned that the machine—which, at least among the Crytek staff that specced it out, is called the “Warhead PC”—will be officially announced next week.

In my original post, I pegged the price to be between $600 and $800; as it turns out, it’s almost exactly in between, at $699, and it will apparently be coming in a single SKU. It will be sold by UltraPC, and unveiled by EA.  Crytek, Nvidia, EA, and UltraPC were all involved.

I spoke with Crysis franchise producer Bernd Diemer, who explained the history behind the machine. ”When we started working on Warhead, we decided performance was a big issue,” he said. “So we said, ‘Guys, we’re going to build a PC which has a maximum price of six or seven hundred dollars, and it has to run Warhead in high spec at an average framerate of 30.’ We built that PC—Crytek in the Budapest office [where Warhead was developed]—and we put it in the middle of the studio, and every review was on that machine. All the milestone presentations we did for EA, for the Yerlies [founding brothers Cevat, Avni, and Faruk], for the team, all the new prototypes, we showed on that machine.”

Eventually, they began referring to it as “the Warhead PC,” and used it as a way to force efficiency and optimization: if frames were dropping on the Warhead PC on a high graphics level, the team would tweak the game to better scale to the hardware. (I can attest to the results, having played through a full level today and being impressed by the consistent framerate and visuals, before being told it was a “Warhead PC.”)

“For us, it was really helpful, because we sort of had a hard cap,” Diemer told me. “You couldn’t say, ‘It works on my computer, looks great on my machine.’ No no no, this is the benchmark, guys. If it sucks on this, the whole thing sucks. For us as a team, that was really valuable. We had a tangible border we could bump our heads into.”

The Crytek team originally planned simply to give the Warhead PC’s specs to EA to use for the recommended requirements, but eventually Nvidia got involved and it became clear that there was no reason that such a machine couldn’t simply be sold straight to consumers looking for an easy entry (or re-entry) into PC gaming.

Though I don’t have every nitty gritty hardware detail, I did get the machine’s most important specs:
- CPU: Intel Core Duo e7300 (@2.66GHz)
- Video card: Nvidia 9800GT
- RAM: 2GB

I snapped a picture of the Warhead PC I used today. It had no external branding, and it wasn’t clear whether the final version (which can be preordered next week and will ship alongside Crysis Warhead on September 16) will, although a Crysis-themed desktop background will be preloaded. It’s a visually conservative rig, but I appreciated that there weren’t a dozen obnoxious blue neon lights swirling visibly through a plexiglass window—we’ll see what the shipping machine brings.

As Diemer was sure to point out, ”EA’s not getting into the hardware business, and Crytek isn’t either.” Rather, the companies are trying to practically combat the idea that to play high-end PC games at high levels of detail, you need to spend in excess of a thousand dollars. “The biggest thing for us is convenience,” Diemer added. “We want to make PC gaming convenient.”

[Update: For the full scoop on this story, including final price and specs, check out this update.]

At Electronic Arts’ Comic-Con booth today, an EA rep mentioned that the company plans to market pre-built PCs in conjunction with the release of Crytek’s upcoming PC-exclusive shooter Crysis Warhead.  The idea seems to be to try and circumvent some of the intimidation that exists for gamers who are either new to high-end PC gaming, or have been out of the scene for some time, and reassure them that it is not prohibitively expensive to acquire a machine that can tame something like Crysis and its followup.

Apparently, the rigs will come in various configurations, which will correspond to Crysis Warhead’s levels of graphical detail, with a likely price range being $600-$800 (I doubt EA will want to market a machine that meets only the game’s minimum spec), and they will probably be named accordingly–the Crysis Warhead Performance PC, and so on.

I like the idea of Electronic Arts looking for ways to make the PC platform more approachable, and this idea is sound–buy this PC that says Crysis on it; it’s designed to run Crysis, and you know that if it plays Crysis it’ll play anything else on the market.  I was also impressed that EA had no less than three PC exclusives–Crysis Warhead, BattleForge, and Warhammer Online, and other games on display like Mirror’s Edge and Dead Space are in development for PC as well–in its booth at Comic-Con, a mainstream show if there ever was one.

As the rep also mentioned to me, EA’s own internal analysis indicates the PC market is growing–publishers just have to learn how to capitalize on it.