Interview: We catch up with Crysis 2's executive producer at the recent GDC, and discover a bit about the game's multiplayer modes.
After some multiplayer hands-on time with Crysis 2 on our recent GDC trip, we got to sit down with Hasit Zala, executive producer of Crysis 2’s multiplayer (and formerly of Free Radical fame), and pick his brain about what can be expected from the soon-to-be-released first-person shooter. He talked to us about the importance of community feedback, how Crytek went about balancing the multiplayer for Crysis 2 and running that fine line between encouraging new players and rewarding those who stick with it. Check it all out below.
Atomic: How you doing?
Hasit: Hey.
Atomic: Do we just jump straight into it?
Hasit: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Atomic: What sort of feedback from the recent Xbox 360 demo did you guys take and implement into the multiplayer?
Hasit: Well actually, I mean, there was one of the really cool things was that there was this huge response to the demo so, as Nathan [Camarillo, executive producer] was saying, there was 1.7-million users who picked up the demo and there was such a large response with people giving constructive feedback on their experience. And we kind of took all of that vapour and then we kind of collated it all and we saw the things that people were coming back to and coming back to, and we looked at them and just addressed all of them. And then we went down and were like, ‘Okay, maybe this is something they’re not happy with or maybe this is something that jars slightly.’ So we kind of looked at all of that and thought about how could we make that experience better for them. That’s what we’ve gone and done; we’ve fed that all back into the game.
Atomic: Sure. So were there any technical specifics that were fixed? Because I know that the demo was having connection problems, there were dropouts and stuff like that.
Hasit: Yeah, I mean, I guess we were kind of the victim of our own success. There were just so many people sort of, like, in the servers themselves and so forth. So what we found was there was some tuning to be done from the kind of connectivity side of things; things that we were able to take from that and really tune the experience. And that’s the problem that we’ve solved now, which is really cool.
Atomic: Fantastic. Can you talk to us a bit about how you go about balancing a game that offers a whole bunch of upgrades, perks, as well as stealth and armour?
Hasit: Yeah, well one of the things is that this is a big multiplayer offering and not only is it a big multiplayer offering, it’s got this really extensive progression system. You can upgrade your guns, you can get new attachments, new weapons, you can get all these dog tag perks; and one of the key things is you can get these suit modules. And these suit modules upgrade your Nanosuit and the Nanosuit’s abilities. So you put all this stuff in the mix and you go, ‘Wow that’s a lot of stuff to tune.’ So how do you go about that? Which is pretty much your question. So we sat down and we thought about this for a long time and one of the key things to do was really to have a really strong telemetry system. So the game attracts everything. Within the code, we kind of put in the hooks all over the place, so we were tracking how people were using the suit, how were they getting their kills, how many people were getting melee kills, and all of these various things. And we kind of sort of thought, well we’ll just track everything and amassing all this data. Now that’s really cool as well, but within development—when we were making the game—we just went through a plethora of ways to make sure that we got all of the feedback we needed. And one of the key things from the development side was we play the game, we play the game and we play the game. So within our studio we had times when basically everyone has to stop and sit down and go, ‘Right, we’re doing our next test sessions now.’ And every single day throughout development, we’d just playing and playing and playing the game. And when you do that you just kind of hone it in and you suddenly go, ‘Woah, woah, this ability is way too exploitive.’ And then we tune it and tune it and tune it. Then we started getting in what we call these expert clubs. So we started getting these people in who didn’t play the game at all from the public, we formed these groups and they would come every week and they would sort of like come in and play the game. We gave them some free pizza and said, ‘Hey guys, play the game.’ And they were like, ‘Oh wow, this is great.’ And they’d come in and they’d play the game and then they’d give us the feedback of the game, as well as us taking all of the telemetry of how it played. And we listened to them and we listened to them and then we tuned it, and then we tuned something and got them in for another session and they were like, ‘Oh yeah, yeah, yeah that’s so much better,’ and so forth. And it kind of just went on and on with that process. So focus groups, expert clubs playing the game, playing the game and just taking all this telemetry data. We had our EPD and we’ve got our demo that’s just gone out, and all the time we’re listening to the community and the public, and that’s how we tune the game.
Atomic: Okay. I recently reviewed the single-player portion and it had a lean mechanic that doesn’t seem to be in multi.
Hasit: No.
Issue: 137 | June, 2012