Talking 'Tek

In part one of our interview with Cevat Yerli, the Crytek boss discussed agile development and the differences in working with EA and Ubisoft.

Here, in part two, Yerli talks about forthcoming PC shooter Crysis, DirectX 10 difficulties and Crytek's plans for console game development.

A full preview of Crysis, exclusive screenshots and a video are now available to view on Eurogamer.net.

Cevat Yerli: The one thing they have in common is they're developed by Crytek. The gameplay in Crysis may represent Far Cry here and there, because we have a trademark gameplay which is about being smarter than the enemy.

But in Crysis... We push the non-linearity and the freedom of Far Cry way higher, tell a much better story and have a superior multiplayer. That's the bottom line.

For different reasons. We're still receiving drivers which are crashing, that's the main reason. We don't have a stable driver yet. We have drivers out there on the market but we are pushing the drivers so hard that we are getting all the time multi-core drivers, dual core drivers, or multi-threaded drivers essentially, with multi-threaded architecture.

Until we get it on Vista running on multi-threaded drivers we don't want to show any more, because we are getting performance impact on Vista. We don't want to make Vista look bad either, because it's not Vista's fault - it's the driver right now. So we're working very closely with Nvidia to resolve these last issues we have with systemic performance... There are a lot of driver issues on the market.

DirectX 9 just runs smoothly for us. We've been working with it for five or six years now. I would even say some DirectX 10 games out there won't look as good as ours running DirectX 9. Or as a competitor friend said, Crysis will be the zenith of graphics for probably the next two or three years. It's not me saying it, it's another guy saying it. I won't mention who...

Yes, absolutely. We will resolve them in the next two weeks actually.

Yes, absolutely. From a business point of view I think we'll see a return of investment, clearly. When I look at the forecast it works out already for us. Which is the reason we said at the beginning we wanted to focus on quality - because ultimately it's quality that makes sales. I don't believe in games which are shallow and sold by marketing only.

We said, 'If we'd buy Crysis ourselves, then we have done our job.' And if it sets new benchmarks in the genre - like visuals, like AI - and we have a sense of focus, we will see a positive effect.

The reason for no consoles is simple: any console development would have deviated from our efforts. It would have distracted us, it would have forced compromises because of memory limitations on those platforms. We'd have to design different levels, and it would have been more difficult to create the sensation of a living world.

The only way I can see Crysis on consoles right now is as a variation of it. And I don't have any plans right now for a variation of Crysis.

Actually we have one, but it's separate. PC and 360 are in one room. The PS3 room is separate because we have some secret technologies being developed there which are not related to CryEngine 2. Our PS3 development is going deeper than many people assume right now.

There are competitors right now who have PS3 technologies up and running. We had our initial version up and running, but we said there are too many compromises.

Yes, we could have commercialised the engine business et cetera, but we felt that if you want to make console games one day - if you want to get groundbreaking results and do things people think are impossible, you need technologies and solutions for that.

The platform itself has a lot of power, but the technology has to provide a framework for the developer so we can unleash that kind of gameplay.

We have Wii development but it's very small, it's more like testing ideas. We don't have a project at this stage.

We have a console game in development right now which won't be announced for a while. It's a complete departure from Crysis and Far Cry, it's not a first-person shooter. For that, we're optimising technology, but for another reason, the future in general, there is a dedicated PS3 team.

Nintendo Wii is certainly on the radar. We will do something for Nintendo Wii - the question is when. I think some time maybe in three or four years, but nobody knows when.

Cevat Yerli is CEO of Crytek. Interview by Ellie Gibson. Part one of this interview was published earlier this week. For a full preview of Crysis, visit Eurogamer.net.