Another IGN preview on Crysis: Warhead w/ Cevat Yerli.Oh, and Yerli again talks about piracy.
Cevat Yerli Q&A
Crytek's CEO looks back at Crysis, talks about the new game Warhead, and discusses the company's future as a PC developer.
by Jason Ocampo
US, June 26, 2008 - With the recent unveiling of Crysis Warhead, German developer Crytek wants to expand its acclaimed first-person shooter franchise in new directions. As our recent preview notes, Warhead promises to be a much more action-heavy game than last year's Crysis. You'll play as Sergeant Michael Sykes, aka Psycho, one of the supporting characters in Crysis as you experience a whole new set of adventures. During our visit to Crytek's Budapest studio, where Warhead is being developed, we had the chance to sit down with Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli. We asked him about Crysis, Warhead, and the company's future as a PC developer. Excerpts of our conversation can be found below.
IGN: How well did Crysis do?
Cevat Yerli: Well, commercially, we had hopes that were not met. But the real expectations were actually met. As a developer we made a profit, so we're happy. Critically, we achieved goals. The [reviews] were slightly under the critique-level that we wanted to have, but that's life. We may have failed a little here and there, but overall Crysis I would say it didn't do excellent, but it did good.
I thought as a game, Crysis was awesome.
If only it performed better...
Yerli: We are upset at ourselves actually, because we miscommunicated some of the things. We labeled certain things wrong inside the game, like configuration for example. We could have labeled it more efficiently, saying that very high [detail] should have been ultra high, and high should have been very high, because our high compared to other games' high was a generational difference. But the perception from the gamer was that if he qualified for medium, he said, "Hey, I'm playing other games at high. Why don't I play Crysis at high, too?" And it's a fair enough question.
It was just a naming convention issue, because our medium could easily compete with any high, and very high should have been ultra high as a means of futurizing. Then we might have received less critiquing about configuration issues, and this created the feeling of, "I will not play this game until I have the right PC because I don't want to spoil my experience." This kind of excuse happened even between my friends. I said, "Guys, play the game now. Don't wait for it like three months, six months, because it's out now."
I think we are fixing a lot of this with Warhead.
I hope they optimize the hell out of Warhead, myself.
And it'd be great if they do later re-patch the original Crysis so that it runs a hell of a lot better than it currently does.
Yerli: The other critique outside Crytek was the fact that the PC industry is really, at the moment, I would say the most intensely pirated market ever. It's crazy how the ratio between sales to piracy is probably 1 to 15 to 1 to 20 right now. For one sale there are 15 to 20 pirates and pirate versions, and that's a big shame for the PC industry. I hope with Warhead I hope we improve the situation, but at the same time it may have an impact on [our] PC exclusivity in the future.
But really -- how many of those 15-20 users are trying to pirate Crysis over and over b/c their gets banned? Or b/c their downloaded copy failed to work?
Yes, piracy's an issue, for sure. But also, it don't help making games that have ridiculously high requirements upon its release. So, yes -- that's two problems right there.
IGN: There are different approaches to online verification, server-side stuff like EA's. Are you looking at that or thinking about that?
Cevat Yerli: Effectively, if the game isn't an online game or multiplayer game--there are challenges regardless of what you do--the game can be cracked. The effort is to make it more difficult to crack, and certainly we're going to make it more difficult this time with Warhead.
I wish he'd be more specific on that.
If it's Securom w/ revokes, I might bite.
If there's NO revokes, I won't look at Warhead until it's dirt cheap.
Yerli: But at the end of the day, I think our message is if you're a PC gamer, and you really want to respect the platform, then you should stop pirating. We will see less and less games appearing on the PC, or less and less games pushing the boundaries of PC gaming. Or, in other words, speaking in terms of PC exclusivity, we would only consider full PC exclusives--if the situation continues like this or gets worse--I think we would only consider PC exclusive titles that are either online or multiplayer and no more single-player.
I liked both Far Cry and Crysis a lot (especially Crysis) -- I'd really hate to see Crytek stopping with making SP-components from shooters.
IGN: At GDC you were showing CryEngine working on different platforms. Was it on the 360 there?
Cevat Yerli: PS3 and 360.
IGN: And you are working on a separate console game at Crytek?
Cevat Yerli: Yeah.
IGN: But it's not a Crysis game.
Cevat Yerli: Yeah.
IGN: You kind of went over this already, but was there anything else you learned from Crysis and applied to the development of Warhead??
Cevat Yerli: We said you can do three things: You can add more, fine tune, or revise completely. And with Warhead, we revised some of the mistakes we did with Crysis in terms of where we forced players to do certain things that felt linear and contrived. And we removed these kinds of positions; we said Warhead shall never force the gamer to make certain decisions in terms of how he should [proceed] because Crysis was all about do how you want to play. And when we broke that law it was criticized. I would say probably critiqued too harshly, because I felt my intention using these tools wasn't about forcing, it was about pacing. It was about creating rhythm and difference, but people criticized us for forcing the player. I can say the customer is right by definition, so if they think we made a mistake then we should correct it, even if the intentions were benevolent, it doesn't matter. So we revised these decisions and we made sure Warhead doesn't make these kinds of mistakes.
So the level design is now also fine-tuned and the AI is fine tuned, the alien AI was revised earlier. We definitely made sure that you can play around with the alien AI more. It's more intelligent, more readable, more sandbox. Now human AI got fine-tuned to a degree that it's even more perfect, because for me the Crysis AI and human combat was the experience of the last eight years, sort of. Seven years since we started the company and now it's even more refined.
We added, within the theme, more explosions, more tools of destructions, weapons, but also a vehicle set that is also very interesting to play and it has power to it. That's sort of the things we did.
Interesting.
IGN: With Crysis do you think that you revealed too much of the game too soon?
Cevat Yerli: Oh yeah, with Crysis for sure. There were two issues there. First, we were supposed to come out earlier, but we screwed that up. And we communicated towards a plan, but even then I think we were probably six to eight months too early. I think that broke our necks to some degree because I heard in a lot of reviews, or people when they talked about it, that they already had seen it two years ago or they had their hands-on already two years ago, but I remember their eyes when they saw it for the first time. They were blown away by it. But by the time they saw it four or five times, they were already, let's say, used up with it. The first impact effect was missing, and hence I think a lot of reviews didn't look over that fact.
A lot of reviews did not rate it as if they had not played it for the first time, and across the industry they didn't rate it at that level. They were rating it more like a checkbox ticking. "Okay, two years ago, we have seen this, we wrote this, let's see what they did." I think this was an issue for us. We revealed too much of the mission, we revealed almost everything of the game previous to release, and I think that was a big mistake certainly not to be repeated ever again.
IGN: Do you there's the perception that it's back to the jungle again. Sure, it's Psycho, but you're in a nanosuit again. It's the jungle again. Is that a concern?
Cevat Yerli: Not really. Because it's clear we're talking communication of Sykes within the Crysis franchise, but also we get to see more of the other environments from what we hinted at in Crysis. But there will be jungle fights for sure; we're still playing in the same geographical location. But there is also variety, too. Variety wise, it'll be rich enough.
IGN: Is this going to be a stand-alone story?
Cevat Yerli: Completely.
Okay.
IGN: There's not going to be a cliffhanger when you say that?
Cevat Yerli: Yes, and I think the ending is more satisfying than Crysis, that I can say too. [laughter]
I know that the ending of Crysis was a bit of a downer for a lot of people. Actually, it was probably one of the biggest critiques we had, in fact. And I'm sorry for that, what happened there. We really thought we contained it there, but what happened is if the time passes and you look at it again, we said, "Yeah, you know we just threw a nuclear bomb there, and are left to the island. [Then] black. And it's like, okay, to be continued."
IGN: I screamed.
Cevat Yerli: Warhead is contained. Warhead has its intro, its own story, and you don't have to know Crysis. So if you didn't play Crysis, Crysis Warhead is completely relevant. It's a new installment within the franchise, and it does tell a story from A to Z, from beginning to end.
Okay.
IGN: This brings up the question: What the hell happened to Prophet? Because he went to the island and he came back and he's using that alien gun. Are we looking forward to a Prophet game?
Cevat Yerli: Might be [he smiles]. You never know. We might be thinking about that already.
Hmmm...interesting.
Maybe if Crysis: Warhead is successful (commercially and critically), there'll be a bunch of Crysis spin-off game by their secondary Crytek Studios (like Crytek Budapest), while the original Crytek Germany works on Crysis 2.
IGN: You haven't talked about multiplayer for Warhead. Is there anything planned?
Cevat Yerli: Yes, there are multiplayer plans, and I think you will see our strategy being consistent with Warhead's strategy in terms as it was for Crysis. There was critique around Crysis in terms of the play modes, and we will feature play modes in Warhead that are positioned also toward something that is not one extreme which is too simple, or the other extreme. We will address it carefully, but we will tell more about multiplayer at another time.
Cool.
IGN: You're going to be one of the few PC exclusive games--the big ones--this year. A lot of PC games are multiplatform now.
Cevat Yerli: There's a lot of critique about this decision, "Why don't we just go for console?" And yes, it could be done; it could be done pretty straightforward. But I still want to have Crysis on the PC; the dominant platform should be PC. And Crysis should be on PC. This is a philosophical decision here. We'll see how it holds up here, and we see if our exclusivity is not rewarded, it will have consequences.
IGN: A lot of people I know are waiting to build a new PC and then they'll buy Crysis. Does that mean, compared to Far Cry, do you think the sales have been steadier for Crysis?
Cevat Yerli: Yeah, I think our lifetime is definitely longer and more steadier. Sales wise we're outperforming Far Cry still. The sales are good; they're not really bad.
IGN: There's just a perception...
Cevat Yerli: Well, the perception is of course like this because equally rated games on multiple platforms sell three to four times more. That's the reality. And this wouldn't be like this if it was not for piracy to some degree. I don't think we would sell three to four times more. If piracy were to a certain degree reduced, I think we would double the sales, and doubling the sales would be a drastic impact for us to say, "Yes, we remain completely PC exclusive." If we could double the sales, then hell yeah, we would be platform exclusive because we love the PC platform. But I have my doubts that the PC industry will retain that level, and we will see what happens with Warhead.
IGN: Thank you.
