LET'S GET TOGETHER
That's a bold claim if Crysis' single-player ends up being even half as impressive as it sounds. How on earth do Crytek hope to make the multiplayer every bit as good as the single-player then? The statistics seem sound enough: 32 players, America versus North Korea, four game modes (Tactical Deathmatch, Team Deathmatch, Tactical CTF and a new mode called Power Struggle), six to eight maps at launch and clever enough Net code to allow for the online destruction of jungles... But do they honestly think they can make people want to click the second button in the main menu just as much as they'll undoubtedly want to click the first?
"When we were designing Crysis, one of our key focuses was on the ability of the player to modify his suit, his weapons and his gameplay experience," explains Mamais. "We set the multiplayer basically as an epilogue to the single-player. Instead of making it a pocket universe which has nothing to do with the rest of the game, we're trying to tie it into the events of the single-player game."
HOME ECONOMICS
"Our multiplayer mimics the single-player in that objectives pop up that you'll be guided to," Mamais continues. "It'll be suggested to you to capture a vehicle factory, for instance. We want to have the same feeling in multiplayer as you get in single-player, that you're accomplishing things, goals are being done and that you're succeeding, rather than just this endless loop which we're tired of."
So what are these game modes? (To be honest, I'm just posing the question as a literary device, I already know the answer.) Deathmatch and CTF should be obvious enough - those are 'killing everybody' and 'running around with a flag' respectively - but the Power Struggle mode is what will make Crysis breach the canopy of online shooters. It's all about economics, you see.
"The economy model came about because we had the feeling that multiplayer gaming was kind of empty," states Mamais. "If you killed people you didn't get anything - there was no reward. Chris Auty was one of the early designers on Counter-Strike, and we always liked the Counter-Strike buying model. What we didn't like was that it ended - two rounds were over and you had your AWP or your twin pistols, there was no further to go. So we thought, why don't we just let it keep going? What if the player could buy weapons, modifications, suits, tanks, airplanes - what if those airplanes could have different weapons depending on your money? So we decided to attach points to everything the player does and let them spend those points how they want to."
That said, something like this could only be done in a game with massive, open environments, which is why there's only one foreseeable problem with letting the best players buy the best equipment - balance.
It's not something Crytek aren't aware of. "We've added a balancing mechanic to the game," explains Auty, sensing my concern. "Depending on the rank of the person you just killed, it will have an affect on how many points you'll get. If you're a General and you kill a Private, you're going to get fewer points than you would get if you were a Private killing a General."
Mamais interjects with an example: "We're still working on it but let's say you get 500 points, you'd become a Corporal and you're then worth twice as much to the enemy. Conversely, a newbie is then worth half as much to you. Now you're encouraged to fight on your own level, because you'd be risking yourself and your team if you present yourself as a target to a lower enemy."
BEST MADE PLANS
It's a plan that looks fine on glossy magazine paper, but it's something we'll have to see in action before we draw our conclusions as to whether or not such a balancing mechanic would actually work in practice. The idea of having to purchase everything is solid though, from special ammunition which can spray crazy purple knockout gas or track enemies, to the very suit that's modelled so gracefully on our front cover.
"You'll start off at the beginning of the game as a North Korean or American soldier with a very rudimentary form of exo-armour," explains Mamais. "This will give you a small armour boost. There are actually two versions of the suit; the prototype version that has some basic abilities like a little more armour and a little more strength, and the production model which we see in the single-player game - that's the full nano-suit. That's very expensive and gives you cloaking, speed and strength - basically it gives you everything, but it'll cost probably as much as a tank."
Not knowing exactly how much a tank costs, all I can do is feign an expression of mild shock. Presumably the suit will be one of the harder weapons to get your hands on, especially considering its powers in both single- and multiplayer. The suit's energy can be routed to either stealth, strength or speed at any time, offering Predatorlike invisibility, Hulk-like strength or Billy Whizz-like speed respectively.
There are two more pillars in this Acropolis-style monument however, the first of which is the inclusion of strategic buildings. Dotted around each map are factories, bases and airfields which can be captured by standing in a specific room inside each one for a predetermined amount of time, very much like control points in Battlefield 2. The importance of these buildings comes in the fact that, by controlling them, they enable you to build certain things. Capture a heavy vehicle factory and you can build tanks, for instance. Capture an airbase and you can build attack helicopters and VTOL jets. If you control the map's assets, you control the flow of production, and ultimately you will win the game. There's a tinge of the realtime strategy game on this side of Crysis' palette, and it all comes back to economics.
ALIEN CONCEPTS
The final aspect of multiplayer is easily the most exciting however, and one which you may have already guessed at - aliens. The remains of alien technology rather, seeing as the multiplayer setting serves the single-player's epilogue.
"The alien weapons come in three base forms," explains Mamais. "There's what we call a Molecular Accelerator, which is basically a gun which shoots ice flechettes with no ammo needed - it just charges off precipitation in the air; a Molecular Arrester which is a freeze gun which, if you hold it down long enough, can freeze things to the point that they shatter instantly; and a Singularity Cannon which is basically an alien tactical nuclear bomb.
"On each map there'll be one to five randomised alien crash sites," continues Mamais, warming to his subject (and perhaps inadvertently hinting at the game's ending). "You take a tool from your base called the stabiliser, bring it out to the field, recover the alien core from the crash site and take it back to whatever you want to upgrade. If you can bring that alien core back to a strategic building, say a heavy vehicle factory, you can produce tanks which have alien weapons. You can produce a tank that has the freeze gun, for instance - a freeze tank. Or create a tank which cloaks."
Rounding off a multiplayer package which seems to be careering towards the sort of gameplay which allows fantastic player-defined set-pieces, Auty goes on to explain how Crytek are striving to keep everything just as destructible as it is in single-player. The age-old conundrum will finally be answered: if a tree falls in the jungle, and there are 32 players mindlessly slaughtering one another around it, can the server send out accurate physics information across a limited bandwidth without affecting the ping?
"Yes," smiles Auty knowingly. "One of the key destructible things in multiplayer will be the foliage, which really hasn't been seen before. You'll be able to blow down parts of the forest like in Predator. Obviously there'll be other destructible stuff; the vehicles will be destructible too." That's two Predator references now, which can't be bad.
"The vehicles have component damage," adds Mamais. "For instance, a helicopter would have a fuel tank, weapon pod, front rotor, back rotor and a cockpit. You can take a hit to the back rotor and the helicopter will lose control, but it won't blow up - in fact, it's pretty hard to blow a vehicle up unless you hit it in the fuel tank or it crashes. We want to have crashes that the pilot can walk away from, so you could hard-land a chopper, get up and walk away from it."
BEST SERVED CHILLED
Imagine what beautiful form the culmination of all these multiplayer features could take. You kill a few enemies, you earn a few points. You capture a tank factory, you upgrade it with an alien reactor. You buy a tank with a freeze gun on the top, you start spewing ice-cold jets of frozen death at a sky full of enemy aircraft.
Now imagine this: you're flying your newly bought helicopter above hostile territory when a stream of icy doom splits the sky in front of you, running along your rotor blades and leaving your chopper in a right cold mess. You begin to spiral towards the jungle, struggling to keep your vehicle steady. You smash through the trees, ploughing through a good 30 metres of arboreal foliage, and maybe one or two team-mates too, before coming to a stop, hopping out and sprinting into the undergrowth. In that situation, everybody has fun.
As Chris Auty puts it: "We want to give the player the situations that they want to have in the game, and play it like they want to play it." It just so happens that the way we want to play it involves mounting massive alien weapons on the sides of VTOL jets and tanks, completely levelling entire sections of jungle in the process. The way Crysis multiplayer is shaping up, that freedom may very well be served to us on an ice-cold platter.
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