Developer Interview

Get an overview of Crysis from the developers themselves.

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You'd be hard-pressed to find any jungle around Frankfurt, the sleek German city that's one of the major financial centers of Europe. But if you know the right building, you'll find a lush tropical isle infested with aliens and North Korean soldiers, not to mention one of the most up-and-coming development houses in the world. We're talking about Crysis, the next game from Crytek, the developer of 2004's acclaimed Far Cry. Since its debut earlier this year, Crysis has become one of the most anticipated games coming out on any platform thanks to some incredible visuals, though there's more to Crysis than just a stunning graphics engine. To learn more, we visited Crytek's offices to meet the developers in person and get a closer look at the game.

So, what is Crysis? First, it's in no way related to Far Cry, and it's not a follow-up or spin-off of that game. Instead, it's an original alien invasion story set in the Spratly Islands, a small group of islands that actually exist in the real world and whose ownership is disputed by various nations, though the island in the game is far larger than any of its real-world counterparts, which are more reef than island.

Crysis will pit you against mysterious aliens that have invaded Earth and want to turn into a frozen sphere.

The story begins with a mysterious meteor falling to Earth from space and "landing" on an island. Since meteors typically burn up in the atmosphere or explode on impact, the nations of the world know that there's something extraordinary about this meteor. However, the North Korean military gets there first and declares the island off-limits to everyone else. Your character is part of a US Special Forces team that's deployed to the island to find out what's going on, and the first part of the game will have you battling the North Koreans. Things take a change for the worse in the second stage, however, when the alien object opens up, "flash freezes" the island, and messes with Earth's weather. With a global climate crisis building, enemies will unite to try and stop the alien menace. And that will lead to the third part of the game, which is being kept tightly under wraps for now, though we can tell you to brace yourself for some zero-gravity combat at this stage.

If you played Far Cry, then you know that Crytek is a company that believes in open-ended gameplay. The beauty of that game was that you were plopped down on the edge of a huge island and you could pretty much go anywhere, which meant that you could also play your own way. If you felt belligerent, you could follow a straight path and go guns blazing, but if you were low on ammo and health, you could skulk in the jungle and take the long way around. The sense of immersion was incredible in Far Cry, and there were times that we really felt that we were in a jungle. Crysis offers to build and improve on that experience in a number of ways.

To understand Crysis better, it helps to understand Crytek--a studio founded by three brothers. The studio now has about 120 employees from around the world who attempt to bring different perspectives to their game development projects. Three of those employees, Faruk, Avni, and Cevat Yerli, had always dreamt of making games, particularly Cevat, who went from playing his Commodore 64 to collaborating online with others in college--collaborations that eventually resulted in a tech demo called X-Isle.

Before you get to the aliens, though, you must battle the North Koreans, who made it to the island first.

In an inkling of things to come, X-Isle featured a lush jungle island, though one populated by fearsome dinosaurs. Armed with this demo, the Yerli brothers took off for the 2000 Electronic Entertainment Expo having never been there before and with no idea what to expect. ("I guess we were the only people in the history of E3 who paid the entrance fee there," Cevat said.) Cevat barely knew any English back then, mostly cobbled together from American games and movies, and most of that consisting of swear words. Still, in a colorful way he managed to get someone at Nvidia to look at X-Isle, and Nvidia ended up using it as a tech demo for its newly introduced GeForce graphics cards. That led to a publishing deal to develop Far Cry, and the rest is history.