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If Crysis is your high maintenance, ridiculously demanding wife, then Crysis Warhead, the upcoming non-sequel, standalone PC-only parallel story is your easy to please, no strings attached one night stand.
What we mean by that is that Crysis, the original Crysis that is, was virtually unplayable on max settings when it was released in November last year. The game demanded a lavish rig just to play on high settings. Crysis Warhead, however, will demand much less from you, the PC gamer, when it’s released later this year.
“The fact is Crysis looked great on medium spec, high spec whatever. But any PC gamer wants to run it on super high spec,” says Ben O’Donnell, the associate producer on the game from EA’s side, as we sit down for some post-E3 hands-on time with Crytek’s follow up to the critically acclaimed but mega-pirated FPS. “Really super high spec you could only run if you were running it on Vista and had a DX10 card. That annoyed some people, that they might have had some great PC and just because they weren’t running Vista meant they couldn’t run it on the highest setting. But really it looks great on any setting. It doesn’t mean you’re getting any less of an experience.”
It’s a debate we don’t want to get in to. Whether Crysis ran or, for many of you, runs well on your PC or not is now history. This is the here and now, and what we know for sure is that Crysis Warhead won’t require a rig from the future to play on maximum settings. And it still looks absolutely gorgeous.
“Crysis didn’t do badly by any means,” Ben insists. “I don’t think that was ever a worry for EA, that it wouldn’t sell. But obviously trying to dispel the myth that you do need a super PC to run it has been important for us because we want more people to play it.”
And more people, we’re sure, will play Warhead, because every change and every tweak has been implemented with accessibility in mind. Driving the ASV, one of the new vehicles, halfway through the game’s second level, we get a sense of this new approach like a punch in the face.
We’re tasked with escorting a pilot called O’Neil to a safe landing zone after he was shot down. He’s driving ahead of us as we deal with enemy armour with the ASV’s mini-gun. Up to this point in the game players will already have experienced plenty of on foot jungle combat, so now is the time to get hands-on with the mega-destructive vehicles.
We speed the hulking armoured car along winding jungle roads and shoot enemy vehicles, planes, helicopters and anything else that gets in our way with the hugely satisfying 50 calibre mini-gun. It’s almost one shot kills – with beautiful explosions, screams and flying shrapnel a pleasing reward for our prowess. This is Crysis, yes, but Crysis with an arcade fuel injection.
“We tried to really focus on big bang moments,” explains Ben. “Where Crysis let you create your own moments of action this game is actually much more to do with providing a lot more set pieces around the open world environment. You can play the game how you like but there’s a lot of stuff going on, there’s a lot of eye candy. It’s a lot more exciting and in keeping with the character. He’s this big vocal high impact guy.”
The ‘high impact guy’ Ben’s talking about is Sergeant Michael ‘Psycho’ Sykes, who fans of Crysis will remember as the nut job cockney rebel squad member who popped up at various points in the first game. Warhead’s story runs parallel to Crysis’ – from the point where Sykes left you in the harbour (about halfway through the game) to where you met up with him near the end of the game. Warhead fills in the blanks.
Attentive fans will notice subtle tweaks to Sykes’ character. While Crytek has used the same actor employed for the first game, the voice direction has been re-jigged. It has tried to get away from the “cockney cheeky chappy kind of thing” as Ben puts it, and replace it with a more serious tone more along the lines of skinhead Jason Statham of The Transporter fame.
The tweaks don’t stop there. Based on community feedback Crytek has improved vehicle controls and durability. In Crysis you often felt very vulnerable in vehicles and spent plenty of time dying when they blew up. That’s been changed. The alien AI has also received a shot in the arm so that they appear more intelligent.
Back on mission, we reach the landing zone, jump out of the ASV and go in search of weaponry good enough to survive and defend against the mass of red dots quickly moving in on our hill top position. We pick up a precision rifle with a two level zoom and go to work. It’s here that Warhead feels at its most familiar. The on foot, run and gun solo style gameplay that worked so well in the original is recreated almost exactly. Sykes has all the same abilities as Nomad – he wears the same nano suit. So there’s lots of speed, strength, invisibility and shield boosts to enjoy all over again.
“It’s very tempting to add all these new features but because it’s happening at the same time it would completely break it,” explains Ben. “So we tried to add as much as we possibly can in terms of new content and new vehicles and new weapons while keeping the storyline believable and tangible.”
With the LZ clear, the next objective is to get back down the hill and to do that we jump into another ASV, this time with a different mini-gun turret, one better for taking out on foot soldiers than enemy vehicles. We make our way towards a heavily defended harbour where a submarine has an alien in tow. With O’Neil providing air support we go crazy on the enemy soldiers with Halo-style duel wielded SMGs – another of Warhead’s new weapons. Short to mid-range these bad boys pretty much do away with anything in a heart beat.
We enter a building and find another new weapon, the grenade launcher, which allows us to go to town on anything that moves. It makes a lovely ‘thum’ noise as the grenade leaves the barrel, and makes us feel like Arnie in that scene from Terminator 2 where he makes a mockery of the police force.
We also notice another gameplay tweak – in keeping with the greater focus on accessibility you don’t have to manually pick up pieces of ammunition any more – you can simply walk over it. A hugely useful time saving device. We kill what feels like hundreds of bad guys as we make our way to a computer terminal crucial to completion of the mission – it grants us access to the alien carrying sub. From there it’s a race to the docked vehicle, and the end of our hands-on demo.
We know Warhead isn’t revolutionising the Crysis series. It’s not an expansion, but it’s not a sequel either. It has the potential to be, in fact, a hugely satisfying shooter in its own right.
What’s puzzling, however, is that it’s a PC exclusive, especially given Crytek’s recent announcement that it will from now on focus on multiplatform development.
Ben himself remains tight-lipped. “Crytek have always got loads in the pipeline,” he says. “I couldn’t comment on what their plans are as a company. We’re publishing this title as PC only. That’s as far as we know.”
We can’t imagine Crysis Warhead, or at least the Crysis series as a whole, won’t be coming to the Xbox 360 and PS3 at some point in the future, especially given the series’ popularity so far. Until then though Warhead looks like it’ll fill the gap, not only in the original story, but also in Crysis-loving PC owners’ gaming schedule as they wait for a true sequel. And there’s still much to be revealed, especially concerning the game’s confirmed multiplayer features, something Ben can’t talk about because “it’s still being worked on”. Expect more from Games Convention next month.
Crysis Warhead is due out exclusively for PC this autumn.
