Far Cry, the ambitiously nonlinear tropical shooter released in 2004, was an uncommonly strong debut effort for German outfit Crytek. In stark contrast to most popular shooters at the time, Far Cry--particularly during its technically impressive wide open island coast segments--eschewed the heavily scripted, narrative-driven gameplay mentality largely championed by World War II-based games striving for cinematic immersion. Far Cry often put players in enormous, lush sandboxes, faced with a number of enemies and no predetermined method to take them out or avoid them. Partially as a result of this structure, and partially because of some heavily stacked situations, the game gained a reputation for being at times unforgivingly difficult. As for the sparse and barely-explained story, it had something to do with genetic mutation experiments, a b-movie Dr. Moreau kind of thing. That didn't much matter; the game's appeal was its open design approach, framed by extremely cutting-edge visuals. Far Cry's approach hasn't been much duplicated since its release, but fortunately for those who enjoyed the unique if flawed shooter, Crytek is back with Crysis, which the company claims will take Far Cry's inventive properties and ratchet them up another order of magnitude. During last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, I had the opportunity to meet with Crytek's Jack Mamais, lead designer on both Far Cry and Crysis. Mamais, whose prior credits include production, design, and QA on several MechWarrior titles as well as cult classic Interstate '76, spoke on Crytek's design philosophies and goals with Crysis.

Like its predecessor, Crysis takes place on a sprawling tropical island. As Crysis is not a sequel to Far Cry, I was curious as to the thinking behind this decision. Mamais was insistent that despite the similar locales, Crysis will not be a retread. "It is set on a tropical island, so you're not going to get away from that," he admitted, "[but] every mission basically has a different feel to it." He went on to describe the game's initial scenario to illustrate his point. "You start the game at night, something you haven't seen yet in the game," he said. "So there you drop in, and when it hits dawn you have thirty days. [Update: Further statements indicate that Crytek is still unsure about the in-game length; it is probably unlikely to reach 30 days.] It'll get darker as you get into the game. So in the first few missions, you might see some real nice beaches, and we've got a lot of locations. There's a lot of diversity in the missions." Some of the locations mentioned include a quarry, a harbor, mines, swamps, river area, and, as seen in a trailer from last year, the inside of an alien ship.

But what's the fascination with tropical islands? "It just so happens that we like tropical islands," he replied. "They're fun to build, they're pretty." Again, however, Crytek is striving to differentiate the game from Far Cry. It has a day/night cycle, uncommon in first person shooters. "The only thing really similar to Far Cry is that they're both set in a tropical area," noted Mamais, adding, "If you want to be semantic, Far Cry is set in Micronesia, and this is set in the South China Sea." The more you know!

These environments are rendered at what can genuinely be called a mind-boggling level of visual fidelity. Crysis may very well be one of the most--if not the single most--technically impressive fully playable game from a graphical perspective that we have yet seen. Running on a beefy DirectX 10-capable NVIDIA 8800, the game was never short of gorgeous. There were moments when, for a split second, my brain suggested that I may in fact be watching some kind of on-location modern combat documentary. Effective graphical touches include actually animating the player character picking up weapons or items, which can then be thrown to deal damage proportional to their weight and size. The game's subtle and well-implemented motion blur just pushes everything over the top. It is hardly worth describing in detail what can be demonstrated many times better in the screenshots and videos linked in the sidebar. Of course, even on the highly capable machines installed in Microsoft's Games for Windows booth, Crysis demanded a lot. The game looked to be running at a fluctuating framerate in the 20-30fps range--which, to the game's credit, was noticeably better than it was running when I last checked out the game in May 2006 at which time it frequently bordered on unplayable. It is also worth pointing out that a lack of foresight in booth design had led to all the display machines being cooped up in drawers barely bigger than the PC cases themselves, without sufficient airflow, which led to constant performance issues and crashes across many of the games on display. Plus, you may be interested to know it was being presented in a ridiculous resolution of 2048x1536.

Like many readers surely are, I was somewhat skeptical as to how scalable Crysis will be for those without top-end rigs. "Even more so [than Far Cry]," assured Mamais. "A three year old graphics card should be pretty good. You'll have to turn things down--shadows, particles--but people who get the big machines want to have everything so we're going to be really jamming on those big machines. But for the guys who don't have that kind of budget, they'll still have a really good experience and have fun. It won't be cutting edge with the graphics but it'll be super good. The gameplay is everything." Still, long time PC gamers are likely to be well familiar with the fudging that tends to go on with the minimum spec requirements printed on the side of the box. It remains to be seen how far down Crysis will scale, but it's probably safe to say that many gamers are going to be looking at an upgrade if they want to get the most out of the title when it launches some time this year.

Turn the page for more on Crysis' gameplay.