Crysis 2 on Paul Gale Network

CEO and President of Crytek, Mr. Cevat Yerli recently went into great detail on the making of Crysis 2 and why the development team decided to make their flagship sequel a multi-platform release and not just for the PC. It was a move that surprised a good amount of the original game’s userbase, out of fear that simultaneously releasing such a big title on both PC and home consoles would limit it from being the very best it could possibly be. Fortunately, Cevat and his team were satisfied with the end result and believed that it turned out as they intended…for the most part.

As with every game, there are always some pieces to the puzzle that a developer had to leave out (mostly due to time constraints), but it is impressive to know that Tiago Sousa (one of the main men on board) and crew tapped the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 pretty hard. Here are a few segments of the interview:

The process of moving across to a cross-platform workflow was an immense, time-intensive task for the developer. Tiago Sousa describes it as Crytek’s “biggest challenge ever”, but the directive from Cevat Yerli was clear: no lead platform, no single-format focus. Crysis 2 had to ship simultaneously on all three systems.

The first order of business for Sousa’s team was to get the CryEngine code up and running on console in order to better appreciate the magnitude of the task facing them, so straightforward ports of all of the PC features were carried out.

“When all basic functionality was in place, it was clear that a massive amount of low-level optimisation and re-factoring would be required across the entire project,” Sousa reveals.

For the full interview, please look here, and Eurogamer.net. Very cool stuff!

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