LogInThe team wanted to create a cinematic experience.
Crytek
Crytek is known for the first Far Cry and the breakthrough that was Crysis, and you can learn about their development evolution in a series of videos aptly called Our Story that Crytek started releasing on its YouTube channel.
Part 1 starts with the basics: how the Yerli brothers started their venture and created X-Isle: Dinosaur Island. Then came Far Cry, endorsed by Ubisoft, with its huge terrains and advanced AI, powered by the studio's own CryEngine.
The scope grew unbelievably with Crysis, and the developers basically repeated what Michael Khaimzon, former art director at Crytek, said in May.
With Crysis, Crytek aimed for cinematic realism, its vegetation legendary, partly because the team actually went to a tropical island to gather references and "had a very strong vision after the field trip."
"Towards the end, it was clear, okay, we're setting a new standard here. You could drop over the palm trees, they had like a bending mechanism. When the leaf was falling over, there was a bone in it, and every leaf would move individually. That was from Crysis 1 already."
Crysis looked (and still does) insanely good with its realistic jungle visuals and a new approach to lighting. The developers introduced light scattering, simulated the color shifts of leaves, used vertex color and bone rigs for lifelike vegetation.
And, of course, there was Nanosuit, which "wasn’t even planned until a year into production," as we know from Khaimzon already.
"A very early version of the Nanosuit was ... just a piece of equipment that you can get a little bit through the story but you actually start as being a regular soldier and it's just somewhere along the upgrade path that you can get to that. So instead, for the Nanosuit design, we went into extremes. So it's like maximum speed, maximum armor. ... That sandbox feeling that the Nanosuit provided was, I think, a super empowering and fascinating mechanics that you're really only, as a designer understand it as you go and think about all the different options it has, it can have."
Crysis's stunning looks came with a hardware price, which gave birth to the "Can it run Crysis?" joke. "The aim was really to set another benchmark, which Crysis ... has achieved because [the 'Can it run Crysis?' meme] has been used for almost two decades. Every time a new hardware was launching, Crysis was the referenced game."
As Crytek founder Cevat Yerli explained in January, the team "want[ed] to make sure Crysis does not age, that [it] is future proofed, meaning that if I played it three years from now, it should look better than today."
Crytek decided it couldn't be "a typical German game company" that makes strategy and RPG games. "So our idea was to offer an experience ... where you can also see the environment, walk around, experience everything."
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