It's hard to imagine Crysis 3 without the Predator Bow, a flexible and stylish weapon that ended up defining much of the game's combat sandbox. In a new documentary, developer Crytek explains that the iconic bow goes back to one of the most important shooters in all of PC gaming: Team Fortress 2.
"I was playing a lot of Team Fortress 2 at that time," says gameplay director Dennis Schwarz, "and one of the things I was really, really enjoying was playing as the Sniper class but using the bow, which meant that you cannot play very aggressively because it's a shorter range. And I really, really enjoyed it, and I thought there has to be some room also in Crysis for something like a bow."
Schwarz must be talking about the Hunstman bow, a primary weapon unlocked for the Sniper. Valve understood the secret sauce that makes bows fun to use in video games: projectile time that adds a satisfying bit of drag, arc, and weight in place of hitscan bullet immediacy. (The Huntsman also has a reputation for being a little wonky.) TF2 did have the Fortified Compound bow as well, but while it is much closer to Crysis 3's Predator Bow design, it was only released in 2014, after Crysis 3 itself.
"We kind of got together with one of the main weapon guys we had back then and thought about, how cool would it be having a really cool, modular, folding composite bow that you can bring and carry along?" Schwarz continues.
"Very quickly, when we would try and prototype and play with it, it turned out to be a pretty cool thing to do. It became a signature weapon. The most rewarding for me in Crysis 3 development was seeing the first concept of our box art, and it was the nanosuit standing with the bow. I was like, yes!"
Earlier in the video, Crytek shares snippets of a few other weapons it prototyped for Crysis 3, including: a "Bubble Weapon" which could lift enemies into the air and then crush them into meatballs, an "Aliensplitter Weapon" which splits aliens, and my personal favorite, the "Vacuum Cleaner V5 Weapon," which implies the existence of four other vacuum cleaner weapons.
Please also enjoy this high-security, mind-bending, newly unsealed screenshot of top secret tessellated toad tech that definitely isn't 12 years old:
