Discipline Kept Crysis Away from Consoles

Do you remember that way back in May 2008, more than a year ago, Cevat Yerli, the outspoken president and Chief Executive Officer of Crytek, announced that his company was no longer working on PC exclusive titles, mainly because of the piracy plaguing the platform?

It took all this time for the company to actually come up with a project that would arrive on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 in addition to the PC. That project is Crysis 2 and has no release window at the moment, with gamers only getting a short look at the title at the E3 trade show.

The question is why did Crytek wait until now when it could probably have brought a game like Crysis Warhead to gaming consoles as well as the PC? It seems that the answer is “discipline,” as stated by David Demartini, the general manager of Electronic Arts Partners.

He told Gamasutra that Crytek “have a reputation for not going to a platform just to exploit the platform, but they go to the platform when they have something that's as good as anything in the industry, if not the best on that platform, so I think what consumers can look forward to is them setting a new bar against any game whatsoever on those platforms.”

In other words, Crysis Warhead and the original game in the series were good enough for the PC but they were not good enough for console. No doubt Demartini can back up his claims by showing gamers at least one title that looks better than Crysis did on a high-end PC.

Crysis 2 is set to run on the new CryEngine 3, which was apparently built from the ground up with console development in mind. The results, as seen until now, are pretty impressive and if Crysis 2 manages to build on the legacy of the original game, then EA Partners will probably have a console and PC hit on its hands in 2010.