ould Crysis become the greatest shooter of all time?  That’s the goal of Crytek’s CEO and President Cevat Yerli.  We ask Yerli all about Crytek’s upcoming PC FPS, and get some exclusive gameplay details.  Plus, what is it like working with DX10, being Microsoft’s new flagship Games For Windows shooter, and what’s the possibility that Crysis will be moving over to next generation consoles?  All this and more is answered in our extensive interview.

Game Informer: How has the reaction been so far with Crysis?  The game’s multiplayer mode is on the show floor – what do people think?

Cevat Yerli: The reaction has been pretty phenomenal I have to say. To be honest, I’m a bit surprised about it. I expected some degree of positive feedback, but... the goals for the multiplayer have just increased.  We are shooting for single player and as well as the multiplayer at the same quality bar – the priorities are equal now, which means a lot.

GI: As far as the game’s development, are you splitting the resources 50-50 for single player and multiplayer, or does everyone work on everything?

Yerli: There is a dedicated multiplayer team within the single player team. But the rest of it is shared – art department, sound department, stuff like that. There are dedicated multiplayer designers, dedicated multiplayer programmers, network programmers.  There’s a team that’s dedicated to it. But there’s no dedicated single player team. There’s a dedicated team within the entire team, and then the other parts are also shared.  If I call for art, it’s the same results for multiplayer and single player.

Moreover, the goal is quality. It means that we are not going to ship a multiplayer element that does not achieve the same quality bar as we are looking for in the single player. So we are shooting for, in the single player part -- well, it might sound a bit arrogant to say this – but we are shooting for the best shooter of all time. So whatever it takes, we’ll try to achieve that. From the gameplay to the content, effects, innovations, technology – every aspect of Crysis is supposed to be leading. We cannot and will not look at Crysis as a game that potentially has a weakness. That is the way we are looking at it. We are looking at every part within itself – the storyline, dialog, acting, everything.

GI: That’s a pretty high bar to set.

Yerli: I know, but if we set it lower we won’t achieve anything.

GI: Well yeah, it’s not like somebody sets a bar – you know, “We want to make a mediocre game.”

Yerli: No, but people say, “We want to make the best shooter.” When I looked at Crysis, I took all those things we said back then with Far Cry. “We want to make the best shooter we can do. And we want to eclipse all the big boys.” But when we started development with Far Cry everybody said we’re doomed to fail. “You’re an unknown company, you’ve never made a game, you’re like three people, and your budget is ten times lower than competing teams.” It’s the crown discipline of gaming– the shooter realm.  The prized technology and gameplay at the same time.

Back then we were supposed to fail. We actually managed to ship Far Cry before all of the other next-generation shooters despite the fact that we started later. And so it worked out very well. But then again, we made so many mistakes that it lets me believe if we correct them in the future and do it right – and we don’t do everything right it’s just inevitable to make mistakes –  but if we do most things right and keep our innovations and features and technologies there and move the genre substantially forward – risk quality and quantity essentially, and deliver multiplayer which can be a stand alone product itself – package that all together and deliver that at the quality bar – then we could be the best shooter of all time. The odds could be there. But to achieve it, of course, the judges will be the gamers. We will try our best. Whether we achieve it or not, [this] will be judged by the gamers. We hope they will just the way we are dreaming it to be.

GI: For those who don’t know the storyline for the game, could you briefly explain it?

Yerli: The year is 2020 and an asteroid crashes on an island, and what happens is the North Koreans and Americans are dispatching units to claim ownership of the crash site. What happens at this time is the conflict between the North Koreans and Americans is rising up in tension, and as the player you have to fight against North Koreans in order to get to the crash site. When the ship opens, it flash freezes large sections of the island instantly into a large refrigerator. It starts the process of terraforming in order to create a space environment for the aliens for them to do their job. When I say to do their job, at a high level it’s an invasion, but at a low level it’s not just a simple invasion. There’s more going on that I cannot reveal. But the North Koreans and Americans unite to save mankind. The way it all develops – the characters, how we dramatize, how we do Americans and how they portray America itself, and how we do Koreans, why the aliens are here, and is it new or not? How is mankind going to survive? All of these questions are solved.

GI: Can you explain who your character is?

Yerli: Your character is Jake Dunn. The name derives from Jacob. Jacob in mythology is a name which derives from he who neutralizes the evil from the sky. Dunn wants to be the doer – The guy who gets things done. We played from the word D-O-N-E.  We said, that’s not a name. We derived the name Jake Dunn as a very average John Doe kind of name, but with a little more meaning. Jake Dunn is a soldier who has inherently a sacred wound. His wife has died in a certain event which all makes sense in the grand storyline.

It’s a little bit like Signs or The Village - M. Night Shyamalan. This gentleman does these great payoffs at the end of the storyline where he sets up events and then plays it off. I was inspired by that and we set out to make all of the events happen in parallel. Some of them make sense and some of them do not. But at the end everything makes sense. Even the death of the wife of Jake Dunn makes sense to a degree.

He’s a delta force who was kicked out of the military and then brought back again by Colonel Barnes. He doesn’t understand why he’s been recruited back, but Barnes knows that he has something in his natural ability which allows him to fight the aliens. How Barnes knows, and why he picks Jake Dunn, and how the nano-muscle suit plays in the fiction and why it has been developed in 2020 all plays out in his journey.

GI: One of the innovations that you’re are making with this genre is the nano-muscle suit . With the suit you’ve got powers such as speed, armor, strength, etc. Having those different powers has to make balancing a tricky issue.

Yerli: Yes, particularly because of multiplayer and single player. It has to do both. That’s the other thing.  It’s a hell of a lot of fun in multiplayer already. To be honest, we actually started balancing with multiplayer first because we can test the boundaries better there – and then we give it to single player.

So speed, strength, and armor, or being able to change into any of the tactics, is like a standard toolbox. My vision isn’t always to give the player means and tools to express intelligence over the enemy and the situation – not just be faster in reaction speed. Outsmart the enemy instead of just reacting to the enemy. Outsmarting, for me, is what we can give the player in terms of tools in order for him to do that. So we developed the nano-muscle suit, whose weapon system you can customize.

We developed that to give you speed, strength, armor, and there are updates as well.  It’s all for expressing your intelligence and it’s a little more detailed whenever it’s needed from the player’s point of view. Even down to the customizable bullets where you can customize the tactile bullet. You can give it up to four functions, where after you shoot up to four bullets and they stick, you can control their functions. So you can shoot three guys, for example, and then wait until they separate and then put them all asleep at the same time. You can coordinate your tactics that way. In multiplayer you could mark the pilot of the helicopter, wait till he’s in the air with passengers, and then put him to sleep to make them crash land. It’s a standard toolbox. It’s an immersion in gameplay that we have not seen before.

I have already seen things that I had not dreamed of. For example, one guy in testing shot the rotor of the helicopter, which is component damage.  What he actually did was mark the rotor and then in the air blew that up. I was like, “How did you do that?” and he said “Well, it’s component damage.” The helicopter has a rotor and a back rotor, and if you destroy those you can actually destroy or manipulate the helicopter remotely.

New gameplay emerges out of these systems. I was running with speed power towards an enemy and shooting and another person came across running as well towards me, and he jumped over me, and in the air increased his strength, landed, and punched me to death. I was like, “%*&# you!” (laughs) It was like life straight out of The Matrix.

Another really cool scenario was when I was in the harbor under the water, and under a boat. I had the pistol, and then switched on speed and literally, like a dolphin, jumped in the air, pow pow pow pow – killed him.  He was like, “What the #(*%!” He couldn’t see underwater because of the boat, but I could see him as an enemy on the radar.

This is an aspect that I’m proud of because the systems are working everywhere, and it’s not like it’s a scripted moment or event or just me versus a person or enemy. It’s always fresh. That’s the cool part of it and that’s what I mean when I say I want the player to express his intelligence in ideally the most wide range a shooter can offer.

GI: The game takes place in four main environments. What percentage is each part in?

Yerli: The game plays out in about 30% jungle – interactive, destructible, and bendable jungle (laughs). Then we go to the manmade home ship of the humans – it’s a carrier. It’s kind of a metaphor – homeland, home ship, homeland of aliens, home ship of aliens. The homeland of the aliens is essentially an alien-enriched environment – the frozen landscape, the frozen paradise. It’s the third aspect. The last part is in the alien ship where you go inside the ship. Inside the ship, you’ll encounter things that permeate through the entire game. In general destructible environments, which can change the gameplay like how the trees fall, or by how the bushes move, in order to reveal AI presence, but also you can sneak.

You can cloak with the suit as well, which I haven’t announced before but I will tell you now. You can go cloak and literally play Predator, and you be the Predator inside the jungle and that’s a hell of a good time. Then what you can do is wait, cloak, use strength, punch a tree, and kill a soldier. Out run the enemy and jump and punch him. This running and punching the enemy is so powerful, it’s one of the things where I don’t know how much power we give there. I’ve seen too many people sprint behind an enemy with speed and strength and punch.

The second aspect is in the carrier where we are have a defense situation where the carrier is under heavy attack and will be for about an hour and you have to defend. You’ll see a very cinematic and intense and epic battle. It’s about defending and surviving.

The third place is the cold environment where there will be shattering and breaking.  The first part is that you’re in a cold environment where you can freeze enemies and shatter them. You can also freeze tanks and stuff like that, it’s going to be very cool. I promise you it looks phenomenal and plays well.  It’s fun to freeze people and shatter them. For that matter you can see the enemy freezing things, grabbing them, and destroying the nano-muscle suit. Or free and slap the frozen parts towards you and you have to dodge the ice shards. Many cool things there.

The fourth part is inside the space ship which a zero-G environment, and you have six degrees of freedom and it is combat where we permeate the core gameplay into horror, essentially. When I say horror it can come from the bottom, top, left, right, front, and back. You have to watch your back, watch down -- you have to watch everywhere. You have to move very, very slow because you want to be very careful of where you move. The enemies are six degrees as well. You have to adapt to survive as well. Everything that we do is about adapting to survive.

GI: The game is heading to the PC this winter, but most likely you’ll be hitting before Windows Vista is released.  Are you going to have a DX10 patch for the game after Vista is released?

Yerli: No, it will be integrated. We already have DX10 footage – it was shown at the Microsoft Press Conference. The 360 trailer (shown in the EA booth) that’s DX10 as well. The video is captured from actual DX10 hardware.

GI: How close are you working with Microsoft with Vista and DX10?

Yerli: Very close. Actually we are so close that we get new drivers everyday, new hardware, and new builds. You know, our programmers are crazy about it. It’s an insult that they go crazy because what happens is that everyday potentially a new thing has to be rebuilt. Since it’s Vista we are working with Alpha versions of Vista, we are working with drivers that get updated everyday with new source code, we work with hardware that are prototypes, everything is just unstable.  And then our game is unstable in development. We want to understand where it crashes, and why and who caused it.

So it’s a nightmare, but, it just means that we are working so state of the art it means we are able to put in DX10 rendering inside the game before DX10 is available. DX10 is available as a SDK, it’s not that it’s not available, but DX10 rendering or DX10 hardware.

GI: There’s been some confusion on someone who said that Crysis runs better on Windows XP and DX9 than Vista and DX10.  Can you help clarify that?

Yerli: What I said was DX9 on Vista runs better than DX9 on XP. So if I have a gaming PC, and I’m comparing DX9 on XP versus DX9 on Vista, Vista runs better. The operating system is optimized for graphics drivers and optimized for gaming. It’s optimized for more controller functions – the game simply runs more smoothly.  Just seeing Far Cry - it runs better. That’s a hell of an achievement because for me that’s reason enough to change operating systems. Also there’s a gamer score support, rich game saves, many game aspects supported. You can literally save your game and see a screenshot of that save in Explorer. That’s just fantastic.

GI: How scalable is Crysis going to be for lower end PCs?  Do you have a low end benchmark right now?

Yerli: We didn’t do a low end benchmark. What we are aiming for is going two years back in the hardware specs, and we will go one and a half years in the future. That literally means we can support the future before its here. We will support two year old hardware in every aspect and make sure it’s available.

GI: Microsoft has been using Crysis to promote their Games For Windows initiative pretty hardcore lately for Vista as a gaming platform.  Do you think Vista will create a resurgence in PC gaming?

Yerli: Yes, I completely realize and understand what Microsoft is doing. Their strategy in Windows gaming will not only affect the Windows side but if you look at Dell, and HP, and the others investments in hardware and other gaming devices is huge. I think with Vista particularly because it’s a community online. Its more tangible and more direct to the consumers. I think it’ll grow because if you look at the launch of Vista, it’s going to be the biggest software launch in the history of software, not only in gaming, but as software. Which is good for us.

If you look at, the features which are shipping with Vista are all gaming related. So Marketing - and Microsoft is going to hate me for saying it - but Marketing is going to have to focus on gaming. They [gaming functions] were already a part of the operating system [in XP] but now it’s almost all what Vista is about. Which is great for gaming and PC because it just puts more emphasis on it, and more investment on the Microsoft side in the future. I’ve seen gamers react to it positively, and we’re reacting to it positively as developers. It’s a typical chicken-egg thing, which would not been the result if the other part wouldn’t have shipped.

GI: Are you looking to implement any of the Live Anywhere features?

Yerli: That unfortunately came too late for us. We had something similar planned, but at this stage because we don’t have any cross platform interoperability – we don’t have a Xbox 360 version, PS3 version, or mobile phone version. We don’t have the needs for that. We have a multiplayer component that we potentially can scale.

GI: You’ve originally brought Far Cry to the PC, and then released it on consoles, and right now your plans are for Crysis on PC only. What are your plans on releasing this for consoles?

Yerli: (laughs) There is no possibility.

GI: Could there be?

Yerli: Let me rephrase that to be a little bit more precise. Crysis, and what it is supposed to be on PC, until that’s the case, and I mean at a very high quality bar - what I told you about at the beginning – until we achieve that it’s not going to be [on consoles]. Once we achieve that, our next step might become to do the same goal again for another platform.  But we will never go multiplatform just because we have to.  Are people asking for it?  Will we go for it? As a goal we will deliver that experience, but we’ll have to optimize for that platform as the same goal as the PC version. It wouldn’t be just a conversion; it would be a very specific Crysis experience for the gamer.

It is not started. We did not do anything. We are researching the potential of console games as far as development. We have research on going on console technologies and what they can do, so at Crytek we will do console development, but if it’s Crysis or not at this stage, no.

GI: It’s assumed that if you do console development it’ll be on the most powerful systems – Xbox 360 and PS3.  What do you think of Wii?

Yerli:   I love the Wii (laughs). When I was at E3 and playtested it, I loved it. I thought about how we could do games for this platform and what kind of games they would be, and what kind of shooters we could do on it, and work it to our own needs here. Yes we’ve had some thoughts, but Crysis is not part of the plan at this stage, but that may change.

We are a company that takes one step at a time, and once we achieve the goal that we want to achieve then we take the next step and see what the next platform we go with next. We did not decide if we’ll do PS3 at all.  We have all of the development kits, and we have research going on.  We have the Wii, Xbox 360, and PS3, we work as researchers and test them, essentially. We have parts of these systems running because there is going to be console development in our company, but if it’s going to be Crysis or not is a step ahead of us.  Because if we go to fast we sacrifice quality on PC, and I want to make sure it’s the best PC shooter we can do. With our company our goal is to make it the best shooter of all time. Once we achieve that, our achievement is we do our best and that’s it. Whether we do it our not is to be determined. Once we are there, then we’ll take the next step.

GI: Crytek is known to have made stunningly beautiful games, and while you can sort of experience them on lesser hardware, if you have the quad-SLI setup, and three gigs of RAM and a super fast processor it’s going to look incredible. With looking at what the Wii has under the hood, does that discourage you as a developer?

Yerli: No, not at all, because I think we can make great visuals by different means. Look at the PS2.  Some PS2 games still look fabulous. And there are games that are just stylized perfectly. You can achieve anything with every hardware. I think it’s a matter of artistic direction, how you use the limitations. That ultimately is the experience you want to give. The experiences in Crysis drives the art direction. The experience of the frozen environments, the experience of interactivity, then we decide how we want it to come across visually. What do we need to do, how far do we need to go? With the Nintendo Wii the approach will be similar. We have this great controller, we have the limited power of the console, How we can make a confined space or large outdoor level, whatever, how can we make the best out of the controller that’s giving the experience that we want to give? Completely fluid interactivity – how can we do that? I think it would be a completely different approach, and it deserves to be as well. So, if it our decision to make Crysis for Wii, if and I don’t want to be quoted saying we’ll do it. But if – if we would do it, it would have to be a completely optimal version, but it would be great. (laughs)