Crysis 2 Executive Producer Provides Gameplay Tips, Talks 3D

Xbox 360 and PC owners may have already gotten a chance to check out the demo for Crysis 2, and thankfully PlayStation 3 users won't have to wait much longer to to download the demo on March 15. Executive producer Nathan Camarillo has provided us with a few gameplay tips to get the most out of your time in the Nanosuit.

Tips for Assault mode

"Assault is a game mode where one team has Nanosuit powers and only a pistol, and the other team are normal soldiers without Nanosuit powers, but have more powerful weaponry and laser pointers. It’s an intense experience because you only have one life per round, and if you have the Nanosuit powers and go into thermal vision/Nanovision you can see the laser pointers of the soldiers. People use tactics like pointing their guns to the ground or pointing it toward the nearest object. It’s a mode people graduate to. It’s not to say that it’s difficult, it’s just when you’ve mastered the powers of the Nanosuit and you understand what it means it opens up a whole new level of gameplay."

Be fast, be invisible

"The big thing is it’s often tempting to sprint all the time, but sprinting also uses suit energy. What you want to do is move from object to object, stop and catch your breath, and get your energy back. Distances are so well laid out in the game that you can do something like hide behind a car, and before you step out into the open, cloak, and then sprint across the open and go behind another car, cloak, get your energy back, then move forward. It’s about being invisible as much as you can. And being fast. We give you the ability to sprint, power jump, and slide so you can move around the environment much faster than in other shooters. What this does is make combat faster."

Kill cam: monkey-see-monkey-do

"You’ll have a lot of tools at your disposal and the tools turn into situational techniques you can use. You see other people using them. When you watch a kill over the kill cam you can see 'this guy killed me that way, I didn’t know I could get to that location, or I wonder how he got there.' Or 'man, I never thought about doing that before.' You start to take those as your own. There’s a lot of monkey-see-monkey-do gameplay when you watch someone do something and you mimick it. So you spend a little bit of time playing the game with the Nanosuit, then you learn a bunch of techniques from other people, then you start employing those techniques, and then after a few hours you start to elaborate and embellish in ways you can’t in other games. In other games you get a gun, you’re stuck on the ground, you shoot a guy, you get some experience points, you maybe take his gun, you unlock something, and you do the whole cycle over again. For this, it’s like really about showmanship. Knowing that you are perched up on this ledge or in a graveyard or on top of a mausoleum, a guy’s running underneath you, and you jump down and smash him from above, he’ll see it on his kill cam. There’s a lot of showmanship there and I can’t wait to see what people capture and put up on YouTube. Crazy kills and crazy streaks."

The 3D experience

"If you have the opportunity to experience Crysis 2 in 3D it’s a phenomenal experience to be able to play it. We've been researching the technology for two and a half years. It’s not something we wanted tacked on. We wanted it to be a really robust 3D implementation that really enhances the way you see and experience the game. We want you to play for a really long time without bringing eye fatique or strain. So instead of bringing things out of the screen at you, which causes you to near-focus on stuff, and then go back to looking into the distance because you’re trying to look at the game world, if you do it that way you’ll get eye strain fairly quickly. You’ll get really fatigued and only get to play a little bit at a time. What we wanted to do is start at the screen and then make everything 3D deep into the TV, so it’s a different kind of approach. We want you to experience Crysis 2 in that way."

"The TV is a window to the Crysis world and everything 3D starts after that. The cool part is it does feel very 3D. After a couple minutes you settle into it. It’s not that you ignore the 3D and it has no value, it’s just how it’s meant to be. You feel like this is how it’s supposed to feel. This feels real. It’s a really cool thing. We want you to play it in multiplayer, single-player for hours at a time. It helps me gauge distance on throwing grenades a little bit better, and it doesn’t necessarily give you a huge advantage, but you’re probably having more fun."

"It’s not only the technology implementation, but also the display of information. We give you a lot of information in Crysis 2 through the HUD of the Nanosuit, icons in the world, waypoints, everything, and you want these all in different depth. You get an objective update and text comes on the screen, and your eye has to focus on that and read that. We have layers and layers of information we put on certain places to make it easy on your eyes. If we just threw together a quick 3D implementation you would wind up with depth violations, which is you’re seeing something really deep into the world, but an object is actually in front of it and it really confuses your brain. We had to solve all these problems. All of the loading screens are in 3D, pre-rendered movies in 3D, in-game cinematics and cinematics themselves are in 3D, the main menu is in 3D, we have an awesome Nanosuit showroom where we show you all the Nanosuit powers in 3D. We want the whole experience to be in 3D. If you don’t have a 3D TV it’s ok. It’s still an awesome-looking game. It’s a lot of fun. Maybe you’ll hold on to that copy of Crysis 2 and when you get a 3D TV, if you’re still not playing it, blow the dust off it, play it again and it’ll blow your mind."

Crysis 2 will be available on March 22 in North America (March 25 in Europe). Check out the latest trailer.