Shack: Was Warhead always intended to be a $30, stand-alone expansion?

Bernd Diemer: It's kind of a complicated history, because Warhead started out as your basic vanilla expansion pack. Back in the day when we were still handling Crysis we thought, "What are we going to do next?" And the most obvious thing was, "Hey, let's do an expansion pack."

Back then it was single-player only, and you needed the original game. It was more what you expected an expansion pack to be. Then it got more and more, it kind of grew grew grew to this complete single-player campaign, and then we decided to add multiplayer as a separate SKU, and also we wanted to improve a lot of things to the original game.

And basically the only thing we kept from the classic expansion pack was the price. It was something that was important for us, to keep this price point to allow more people to get into Crysis by offering a great value.

Shack: Is Crysis still being thought of as a trilogy?

Bernd Diemer: Still is. [Warhead] is not a sequel, this is a separate story, stand-alone. It's not meant to conclude all the things in Crysis. It sort of fills into a couple of blanks in the original story, but it's not Crysis 2 or Crysis 1.5.

Shack: This is a little off-topic, but do you guys enjoy seeing those crazy physics videos that people make using Crysis?

Bernd Diemer: Of course. Yeah, yeah. Personally I greatly enjoy that. On our internal mailing list we always post these kinds of things. If you miss it on a forum, you just have to check our internal fun mailing list. We even made an explosion contest to have people make the fanciest explosion.

This is great--we love that, we love our community and the great stuff that comes out of it. And we also do hire a lot of guys that come out of the community. CryMod, which we kind of support, and our community team is working on CryMod. And we love that.

As a designer, as a creative person, I enjoy if people do fascinating things with a system I created, and not necessarily the things I wanted them to do, but you know, if they come up with creative ways of playing the level, building the level, or if it's just spawning a billion barrels and blowing them up, that's fine.

Shack: Obviously you can't talk about Crysis 2 yet, but what is the status of the project? Are you heavy into development yet?

Bernd Diemer: Lots of ideas, but nothing definite or concrete we can talk about yet.

Shack: But it's going to be multi-platform?

Bernd Diemer: We're examining all platforms. As a studio, we want to get into other platforms, but with what project, still up in the air, we're not sure yet. It has to be the right idea and the right technology, otherwise we don't want to do it.

Shack: Can you tell me about how the Crysis-branded PC came about?

Bernd Diemer: Back in the day, when we started working on Warhead in Budapest, we said, "Guys, we have to make sure that the game runs better on reasonable hardware." The thing we came up with, the trick, was to build a PC which we used as a reference.

We bought the components, which were back then like $700, and built a PC, and that was the platform we used for all presentations, milestones, new features, everything had to run on that machine as a benchmark. Because we have in the editor, all kinds of smart things which tell you that you've exceeded the budget, but the problem with designers and artists is that they don't care. [laughs]

So on this machine, it has to run on the High setting, which we now call the Gamer setting, at an average of 30 frames. After we did that for a while, we got talking to our friends at EA, because they were asking what's this Warhead PC all about? And we said this is our benchmark PC. And they said hey wait a minute, why don't we actually build this PC and make it available? And so we started talking with our partners a couple of months ago, with Nvidia, and EA, trying to find a system builder. And we found one, which is Ultra PC in the United States, it'll be different in different territories.

For us, Crytek is not in the hardware business obviously, we do games. But for us it's a very important statement. On the one hand, to get across the message that you don't need a $5000 PC to play Warhead. We still, you know, we're tech happy, so you can max out everything, we're prepared to bring down all the hardware you can throw at the game as well. But we also wanted to focus on the middle segment, the high spec, and make that a great experience with fantastic visuals, and so I think it still holds up really well.

And also it was a lot about convenience. We don't expect everybody to actually go and buy the PC, but if they want to, they can just click on the webstie and juts buy it. Or they can compare the specs to their own machine, and they will know because it's our recommended setup that this machine will run Warhead on the high settings an average of 30 frames, and there you are.

Shack: Are reasonable system requirements something that you would say Crytek is more focused on now as a company?

Bernd Diemer: It is in a way. For us, it's always a balance. Because we do like doing the latest and greatest in graphics.

Shack: Yeah. Because that's what you guys are about, but at the same time..

Bernd Diemer: We want to cover [the high-end], but in Crysis, looking back, the focus was a bit off. Because we from the beginning focused on the highest range, and then over the development we scaled it back.

So what we did here [with Warhead] was focus on the mid-range, on the High setting. Not medium, but High. We're Crytek, so it's not Medium, it's High. [laughs] So then we scaled it up, and we said, "This is running, so now crank it on."

For us that's a different way of focusing on things, you're right about that. And that's one of the things we took from Crysis, that we have to focus on this as well.