» Mon Jan 31, 2011 12:14 am PC Roots Are Still Important For Crytek & Crysis 2
Posted March 23, 2011 by M.H. Williams
PC gamers have long felt like second-class citizens in the gaming world. With their wider audiences, consoles tend to get the development focus, followed by a slipshod PC port. More worryingly, developers who made their names on the PC are abandoning the platform. In an interview with Games.On.Net, Crysis 2 executive producer Nathan Camarillo says that Crytek has not forgotten its roots with its recently-released shooter.
“Our goal with Crysis 2 was to bring a Crysis experience to consoles. So that means fundamentally we’re starting from our PC roots and then wrangling the console to our will in order to create that kind of gameplay and gameplay experience on consoles,” said Camarillo, when asked about the focus of Crysis 2’s development.
“Consoles have been lacking the kind of gameplay experience that Crysis-style games offer. That’s what caused us to build CryEngine 3. We ripped the guts out of CryEngine 2 that we used for Crysis 1 and rebuilt it from the ground up to run regardless of whether you’re on a PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, or a PC. So it was a fundamental goal for us to create that Crysis experience and bring it to consoles, not the other way around. We’re not making a console game and bringing it to PC,” he explained.
When asked about any perks or visual differences that a PC player could expect, Camarillo noted that the current HD consoles are a few years old at this point. Players with newer PCs can expect to see vastly improved visuals.
“CryEngine 3 scales regardless of your hardware, so if you have a min-spec PC, you’ll probably get a gameplay experience equivalent to consoles. If you have a very, very high-end PC, we scale with that. So we support a higher resolution than HD on PC. We have higher texture resolution by default because there’s more texture memory available,” he said.
“[Consoles] look awesome, but it’s a five year old piece of hardware technology. The PC with everything maxed out is absolutely mind-blowing and it’s an amazing visual treat.”
