and again in 2016, rumors circulated
that Crytek hadn’t been paying staff
at some of its studios, and it looked as
if the company was about to be on
the verge of collapse.
In the end, though, CryEngine
helped save its creators. Amazon
bought access to the renowned tech
for use in its own Lumberyard
toolset, in a deal that reportedly
topped $50 million. And Crytek
survived long enough to make its
modern masterpiece.
BACK IN HATS
You can find pre-echoes of Hunt:
Showdown in other games Crytek has
greenlit. Homefront: The Revolution
was sold off midway through
development, but its guerrilla fighting
style—in which you launched
hit-and-run assaults against an
occupying force, before scarpering—
they were going. With Hunt, that deprival of information
has come to the fore. Thick forest and night missions
mean line of sight is inconsistent. There’s no minimap, nor
a tally of players remaining. Even the enemies vanish into
vast barns full of abandoned farming equipment, leaving
you none the wiser about their position.
Yet the game is still to
gather information—it’s
simply the sense that’s
changed. Hunt’s maps are
filled with audio cues that
the discerning listener can
use to determine the
placement and status of
their enemies: Distant
splashing, the creak of a door, the nearby lighting of a
molotov. The form is new, but the plan is as it always was:
To observe, conquer, and then get out alive.
Crytek no longer leads the world in graphics. Nobody
does, really—PC gaming isn’t defined by shocking leaps in
photorealism the way it was back then. But its design
identity has endured longer than any rendering effect.
Jeremy Peel
ABOVE: Believe it or
not, both of us walked
away from this.BELOW LEFT: Two of
these squaddies later
starred in their own
games. One became
alien-food.BELOW: Not the glory
days for female
representation
in shooters.THE WAY CRYTEK PASSES
INFORMATION TO PLAYERS HAS
CHANGED, HOWEVERmade it clear the developer was experimenting with
action bubbles again. In Hunt, escape becomes more
important than the battle itself: You play with persistent
characters, and so it’s a valid tactic to pull out of a bounty
hunt that gets too dicey and ‘live to die another day’, as
the game puts it.
The way Crytek passes
information to players has
changed, however. The
studio practically invented
enemy marking, dotting Far
Cry’s postcard paradise with
towers you could climb to
survey enemy positions
with your binoculars. The
process only became more elaborate in the Crysis games,
where designers worked according to the mantra of veni,
vidi, vici: I came, I saw, I conquered. To succeed against
overwhelming odds, players would first have to observe
and plan before heading into action.
Yet Crysis also offered an intriguing alternative: Delta
mode, in which the enemies spoke in Korean, robbing you
of crucial information about what they’d seen and where