Developer commentary: Crysis

Korean speak
Sten: “We always wanted the Koreans to only talk Korean, but in the focus tests some people didn’t really understand the AI too well, or exactly what it was doing. So we made Delta difficulty mode for people who really want to get into the game, turning off elements that would suggest you weren’t actually physically there. For the easier difficulty levels we just said ‘OK we’ll do it that way’ and had them speak English. It was a compromise.”

Sexy woman suit vs gruff man suit
Bernd: “The suit voice is something that you listen to a lot, and we wanted to give people the choice to hear it in a particular way, or just turn it off. One of our guys from the team (a vehicle programmer, actually) recorded a placeholder voice, and it was so popular with the team that they were kind of sad to think of it going when the sound team were about to do the real recording. He was always the favourite with the team. But it also became a labour of love from the sound department, and they went to do the voice recording with one of our female actors recording the commands. And they said ‘Hey - we recorded it, can we just put it in? So people can switch? People will like that...’”

No mountain high enough
Sten: “With the cool stuff in that ship resting in the mountain, obviously we wanted to reveal things step-by-step in the levels leading up to it. Just suggesting at what might be to come. One of the ideas we had was to show the mountain falling apart. The problem with a shooter is that you can’t control where the player looks so, as there, you have to design it so the player follows the level and sees what you want them to see.”

Crytek best bit
Bernd: “One of the things I got to play rather late in development is the fight in the graveyard against the Koreans in the nanosuits. When I played the mission, I was completely taken by surprise. Before, in earlier builds, they were all placeholder - they looked like the North Korean nanosuit guys but they couldn’t do any special stuff. They couldn’t jump or cloak or whatever - then I played it and the new behaviours were in! Suddenly these guys are cloaking and jumping onto the graves - it was really my favourite moment.”

Stumbling foes
Bernd: “The thing I personally like most is that Koreans occasionally fall down when jumping over fences. When I saw that the first time I was laughing out loud. It’s something for me, from a design point of view, that gives a far greater sense of immersion and makes these people much more realistic. They try to do something perfectly, but mess it up like real humans do from time to time. These little extra things, for me, are what I’m most proud of. Away from the overall combat behaviour, which I hope people like as much as we do, we’ve added these little bits of behaviour. They flinch when you run at them in speed mode, if you cloak in front of them, they go ‘Woah! Woah! Where did he go?’. It adds a lot to the feeling of being in a living world.”