Interviews// Crysis 2: Nathan Camarillo

SPOnG: How much stock do you put into Crysis as a product, in your personal view? When the game was announced Crytek's story writer went on to make some bold claims about the quality of Crysis 2's story over Modern Warfare 2's and other games.

Nathan Camarillo: Ask him (laughs).


SPOnG: What's your personal thoughts on that though? Do you feel the same way, that Crysis 2 is the very pinnacle of first-person shooters?

Nathan Camarillo: Well, my goal is simply to make the best possible product that we're capable of making. So yes, my lofty goal is to make the best first-person shooter ever, but how we go about that and how we accomplish that is subject to what we're able to do and how we approach it.

Is it all about having the best story? Yeah, that would be awesome. Is it about having the best weapons? Absolutely. Is it about having the best tech and visuals? Certainly. It's also about having the best aliens and AI. We strive for all of these things, and hopefully we hit all of those targets. Maybe it is all about those elements. Maybe it's not, and that still might make our product the greatest.

I'm not the kind of guy that's going to talk trash about other games – I'm a huge fan of games in general, and I love playing and making games. A lot of my friends work on some of our biggest competitors and we've worked together at previous companies, so badmouthing their games is badmouthing them and I don't do that.


SPOnG: On the other hand, Richard Morgan had some good things to say about a few games, like Uncharted 2 and Batman Arkham Asylum. Going on that, are there any titles that you would say have been a big influence to you and Crysis?

Nathan Camarillo: We're all inspired by other people's games. We don't make design decisions by looking at whatever is the flavour of the moment in games right now, or mimic other people's work, but we definitely get inspired.

The team here are great fans of team deathmatch and multiplayers games, and we've all put loads of hours into games like Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield: Bad Company... I even went back to playing Counter Strike again a few weeks ago. So on that level, we're definitely enjoying improvements and features that others take the time to implement in their games.

On another level, I really appreciate story-led games like BioShock... even platform games can give me some inspiration to create. It doesn't have to be a related genre either - I've learnt just as much from racing games as I have from FPS games.

Project Gotham Racing totally shook up the racing genre and made driving round in a circle fun. There's nothing inspired by Gotham in Crysis 2, but I'm very intrigued by the Kudos system for example, and where they got the idea to implement that into the game. And subconsciously it makes you think about other games, and how you can work trick systems and whatnot into other genres.


SPOnG: Finally, one of the best experiences found in playing the original Crysis has to be chucking chickens into the air, waiting for them to fall and avoiding them before they hit you and killed you. Is there anything like that in Crysis 2?

Nathan Camarillo: In the demo I showed, where you have to evade capture in New York city, you can take a guy and throw him out of the window. You can, if you like, switch to the strength power and chuck him really high into the air. I like to shotgun him before he hits the ground.

That's just one of many ideas. Another, in that demo, is on the rooftops there's a few lampposts that you can grab if they fall over. It's fun to pick one up and smack some guys around with it. It's better to throw the pole into the air, catch it on the way down, and melee a falling enemy before he hits the ground. It's stuff you don't have to do, but it's just really fun to experiment.

We wanted to keep having stuff like that in the game, because we love keeping an eye on what people come up with in the community. There's one particular mod that I love, where the story in the game has been changed and instead focuses on a chicken. It's so funny. We laugh at stuff like that and love the things our fans do.

They're probably not aware of this, but we sometimes have meeting of about 20 of us, and have a big projector running all kinds of community mods and tricks that we think are really cool. We just hope the community keeps doing stuff like this because we get really entertained by it.


SPOnG: Thank you for your time.

Nathan Camarillo: Thanks a lot!