It goes without saying that Crytek has made a major impact on FPS titles since Far Cry was released over two years ago. While the title had its flaws, such as damn near impossible difficulty toward the end of the game and a save system that could've been much better, it was still a groundbreaking shooter in several ways. Since then, the team has been hard at work on their next title, Crysis, which made its debut at this year's E3 to a great deal of fanfare. Now, a few months later on their home turf, Crytek unveiled a multiplayer demo of their highly anticipated shooter on the showroom floor at Leipzig. Much to the hatred of roughly fifty-plus German youths, we went hands-on with a build specially created for the Games Convention and talked to a few members of the Crytek team.

For those unfamiliar with the storyline, Crysis takes place in a future in which the US and North Korea are the world's dominant superpowers. An alien asteroid has crashed on Earth, and the race to get a hold of alien technology begins. Players will take on the role of a top Delta Force agent equipped with a biosuit that enables a variety of customizations, including enhanced strength, armor, weaponry and speed, all of which can be switched around on the fly to suit the situation.


On the press-only day in Leipziger Messe, we got the chance to sit down with Senior Game Designer Bernd Diemer, who broke down a great deal about the project's progress, as he showed off the jungle level demo that we saw at E3. The game has advanced a great deal in the nearly four months since it was unveiled in Los Angeles. Most of the team's focus as of late has been on multiplayer and optimizing the frame rate and shading.

It turns out, according to Diemer, that the team took a strong look at not only the flaws of Far Cry and the means to fix them, but upon the environments in the game and how players will find themselves even more immersed in the game's intense situations. It turns out that in building the game's engine, the team had planned on implementing seemingly small things like breakable vegetation. However, upon further inspection, they discovered, just as gamers did worldwide during the E3 footage, that trees and foliage also easily doubled as both weaponry and barriers. It has become an even stronger portion of the overall experience since then, and the noises made by foliage work not only for and against gamers in the single-player game, but also in multiplayer.

Diemer emphasized the impact of Far Cry's user-created content on the project. Few at Crytek expected the mod community to adopt the title nearly as much as they did. Since then, Crytek has also been tweaking the development tools for users to create content, as another consequence of the previous title's map-making software was that it also became a calling card for many designers now working on the Crytek team. Diemer emphasized that he hopes that the Crysis dev tools encourage even more creativity in users, in that it helps them find new designers for the team. The game will allow modders to import their own models and textures, and it will support 3D Studio Max. Also, players will have the ability to not only affect the rules of their own maps, but will be able to tweak the AI as much as possible to their own parameters.