I
t 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,CRYSIS POINT
Crytek has been forever blowing action bubbles
SELF CARE Crytek isn’t alone in
naming games after itselfSENSIBLE
SOFTWARE
Remember Sensible
Soccer? Sensible
Golf? Sensible Train
Spotting? No really,
that last one
happened.YAGER
Before Spec Ops:
The Line, this Berlin
studio made a
combat flight sim
named, er, Yager.
Why overcomplicate
these things?TWO POINT
STUDIOS
This developer
dreams of an
integrated world of
management
games set in Two
Point County.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 2014BELOW: Glorious
vistas that you
can explore.
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