In a recent interview with DustyCartridge, Crytek producer Michael Elliot Read indicated that the launch of Crysis 3 won't be the end of the franchise despite the original trilogy-based design.
As Microsoft has demonstrated with Halo 4, a great FPS franchise doesn't necessarily have to end with the close of episode three despite the trilogy-based story arc. It may be that Crysis will head in the same direction, as towards the end of the Q&A, Read told the site that the universe Crytek created still has a lot of life left in it.
"Whether it’s in a different game type format, whether it’s expanding upon this, it’s hard to say," Read said. "That’s going to be up to the designers at the end of the day. But I think we’ve built… Crysis was always intended to be a trilogy and I think that over that time we’ve built a really cool universe."
"We haven’t really gone in and said 'Hey let’s put Nano suits and clown suits and stuff and completely violate and sell our IP,'" he added. "We’ve done a fairly good job at maintaining that, so I think in terms of the universe, we have a lot more life left in that to go back and try some unique stuff. Whether it’s FPS or not I have no idea, but there’s definitely a future in the franchise."
Earlier in the interview, Read said that Crytek still wants to "melt" PCs, referring to the ongoing joke that CryEngine is way ahead of current hardware, thus the highest settings could make the latest setup slow to a crawl when rendering each detailed frame. He said that when the original Crysis alpha was leaked and the tech sites got their hands on it, they were dazzled over how hard CryEngine pushed hardware. It was a game that no PC could run, he said, hence the "can it run Crysis" joke when referring to system configurations.
"So we’re able to do everything in tandem this time and not just focus on 'Yeah, let’s make a hyper pretty game,'" he said. "The teams we have put together handle so many different aspects of the game and it doesn’t always boil down to 'we can’t put that in because it’s not graphically feasible.' There are a number of things that play into it. But I think for the overall gameplay style – we wanted to maintain what we did in Crysis and Crysis 2. Find that middle ground between the two of them, but come back and do all these little things that will just make the overall experience that much better."
The interview goes on to cover topics like the battle of innovation verses iteration, and striking the perfect middle ground during development regarding the urban grid in Crysis 2 and the open plains in the original game. They also talk about the inspiration behind the Hunter mode, and the current state of the FPS landscape.
"It’s interesting where it’s going," he said regarding the landscape topic. "Because you’re starting to see, especially on the console market, you have games like Battlefield which are starting to introduce players to these larger maps and groups of people that PC people have had for ten years or more. I think it’s very cool to see that evolve."
To read the full interview, head here.
