CRYSIS POINT
Crytek has been forever blowing action bubbles
It took Crytek’s latest game, Hunt: Showdown, to teach me how to play its very first. The studio’s 2004 debut, Far Cry, had seemed like a devolved stealth game—a stunted halfway point between Doom and Dishonored. But there’s a satisfying throughline from where the company began to where it is now.
In Hunt: Showdown, a particularly brutal twist on battle royale, noise is deadly. Gunshots telegraph your position not just to the zombie mobs that roam the map, but to other players hungry for the same bounty you’re after. Yet sometimes you have to open fire to survive the toothy advances of a hellhound.
Far Cry functions according to the same principles. This was a time before silent melee takedowns—when your machete was a clumsy last resort, and silenced weapons were rare. Rather than attempt to ghost your way across the tropical rainforest, it’s better to pounce on patrols quickly and decisively—then dive into the cover of a nearby cave before reinforcements arrive.
BUBBLE AND SQUEAL
By its next game, Crytek had baked this phased play into its mechanics. Crysis was built around a muscular exosuit that made you look like an exhibit at Bodyworlds, but allowed you to switch between powers at will: Super speed, extra strength, and an invisibility cloak that required careful deployment to make best use of your limited battery. The studio had managed to codify its quiet-loud approach in level design, too: Read the interviews it conducted with press about the Crysis games and you’ll see mention of ‘action bubbles’. These pockets of noise were designed to give you space to maneuver; if Crysis asked you to infiltrate a North Korean base, it encouraged you to take the long way round, swimming downriver and storming through the less-protected side that is reserved for deliveries.
It’s impossible to separate the design of Crytek’s early games from its tech. The great draw of Far Cry was its draw distance—it was born from a demo that Nvidia shipped as benchmarking software with its graphics cards. And for many years, Crytek games served the same purpose for PC gamers: If their machines ran Crysis at the highest settings, that was a point of pride. But even as the sheen of those games faded through the years, the environments created to show them off remained. The studio had blown open the FPS, offering new scope and freedom of approach. The mountains and oceans once drawn into the background of shooters were finally within reach, and the genre would never be the same.
TIME TO CRY
You might imagine that a studio with DNA as distinct as this would protect it over generations of games, the way id Software has with Doom. But while Crytek had established CryEngine as technology to be reckoned with, it hadn’t produced a mainstream hit. The studio lost its nerve, following Call of Duty into more cramped, urban environments and scripted follow-the-leader sequences.
Far Cry and Crysis both have reputations for deteriorating returns—the former throwing up too many painfully hard corridor levels in its second half, and the latter not so much jumping the shark as splitting open a volcano full of aliens as it reached its finale.
For a while it looked as if Crytek itself might follow the same, sorry trajectory, failing to match its early promise as it reached maturation. Longtime CEO Cevat Yerli, whose first designed game had been an economics simulation, became a fervent fan of free-to-play. In 2014