Interviews// Crysis 2: Nathan Camarillo

SPOnG: You mentioned in the presentation that you kinda renewed the nanosuit, instead of latching new abilities to it. You've retooled it so that each element fits together more logically. Was there a danger of getting an imbalance there? What were the dangers of changing the suit up to such a degree?

Nathan Camarillo: Some of the challenges are just in fundamentally changing the way that we thought about the suit. The last iteration of the suit only came about a month or so ago (April) because we were internally exploring with having different suit modes and other stuff.

There were some previews that we gave in early January where we had a totally different control scheme, and we thought for sure that that was what we were going to do – turns out something about it wasn't sitting right with us internally. So we totally changed it.

We're always looking at our projects, trying to make them better and we thought 'what if... we did this?' It was a total departure to what we were already doing, but we realised that it would just make for a much easier experience for the player. We kind of sold ourselves on the concept of the control changes, and then spent the time implementing it and exploring it and realised that it worked so much better.


SPOnG: Has that affected the design of your levels at all? Did you make any changes to the controls or other mechanics mean you had to do away with other elements planned in the levels?

Nathan Camarillo: No, not really – we always had these concepts of mobility, stealth, armour and gathering information, so level design doesn't really change. It's more about how quickly you can get to the gameplay, how we can combine these elements together and what that means for the gamer experience.

It's hard to say that we're always trying to improve our products, but hopefully you can get an idea after hearing about the number of times we've changed up Crysis 2 so far! We're always trying to revamp this and make it better. Now that we're 100 per cent sure of where we're going, we're feeling awesome.


SPOnG: Crysis 2 seems like an entirely different game – it's on consoles, there's a different setting, new suit, new alien menace... How much of the game is built on its past success, and how much is it about taking the game into a completely different direction?

Nathan Camarillo: Well, the core nanosuit gameplay is the same as in Crysis 1, on top of the AI, really strong combat mechanics and the whole humans and bipedals thing. We did all of those things really well in Crysis - we had really good weapons in Crysis, but they weren't necessarily appreciated by the player.

A lot of what we're doing in Crysis 2 is simply highlighting those original elements a little more. We want to expand the range of the arsenal a little bit – some are very conventional, others are science tech, close to what the nanosuit itself is. We wanted to broaden that a little bit, along with the audio – that was good in Crysis 1. We wanted to continue to keep doing it and make sure players notice and benefit from it all.

The things that we really wanted to address required some drastic changes though, which is probably why that's all being highlighted. We couldn't just do Crysis 2 in a jungle with two new suit powers, that would make for a rather watered down sequel and if it was running on a console it would impress nobody.

We had to take some really bold steps because we're building a franchise, and if we can prove that we're able to do this and wow the audience still then we can take the franchise anywhere we want to. So we could even say that the third one could stay in an urban environment - or we could mix things up a bit because we've proved that this is a personal game can exist anywhere. Then it's up to us what kind of story we want to tell beyond Crysis 2.


SPOnG: I guess it's the new alien menace that gives that feeling of freshness, because not a lot of information is out there about them and after seeing them today they just seem entirely different. How deliberate was that - did you just want to create a totally different bipedal warrior with different tactics?

Nathan Camarillo: Partially. Some of it was based on criticisms from Crysis 1 as well, because the flying aliens weren't necessarily well-received. You spent half the game learning concepts of hiding and cover, gaining vertical advantages and things like that.

What happened was that you'd play through the game environment in this way, and then all of a sudden we'd introduce flying aliens which would just invalidate all of your cover and you can't really take cover from them – and then we threw you into this Zero-G environment with no cover at all.

So we wanted to leverage some of those systems a little better and introduce a new bipedal enemy that can take cover and challenge the player. But there are also other aliens that we haven't revealed yet – some of those are much more mobile, just like you are and can come into the environment in ways you wouldn't expect. They will jump up on things and challenge you for vertical supremacy, so if you're on the ground they're going to try and get higher and get the advantage on you.

And it is an advantage because it invalidates your cover. On the other hand, if you fight for vertical supremacy you lose whatever cover advantage you would have if you stayed on the ground.