Crysis Community Coverage : USS Hornet Media Event

[sxdemon]

The USS Hornet, a retired aircraft carrier which has been converted into a museum, is stationed in Alameda, California. It was a bright and sunny day when EA held a media event for EA Partners/Crytek title Crysis. As I stood at the beginning of a long plank used to board the ship, I looked to my left out onto the San Francisco Bay, straight ahead into the darkened entryway of the ship, and down many yards to the shimmering waters below. After a few deep breaths and a vow not to look down, I quickly but carefully scurried across the long, steep plank into the dark entry way.


After checking in, I was able to meander around the ship along with the 25-30 press representatives invited to attend. Dark and cool on the 85-degree fahrenheit day, the belly of the carrier went far in both directions and housed huge and comically-painted aircraft. Like larger-than-life cartoon sharks and birds these vehicles of war were menacing in their expressions and size despite there drawn-on faces. After a tour of the USS Hornet, which was active first during World War II, and has been under fire 59 times and never hit I was more impressed by its efficiency than its size. Rows upon rows of bunks made of a metal frame and matress pads meant to hold four or five soldiers at a time were particular striking to me as I imagined soldiers occupying the vessel for up to 18 months at a time during wartime. I was haunted for the rest of my visit by a humble respect for the massive machine of war I had boarded.

When the event was set to begin, we were ushered into a large space illuminated (ominously) in red light. Vice President of EA’s EA Partners organization welcomed the crowd and discussed the close working relationship between EA and Crytek before introducing Cevat Yerli.

Cevat Yerli, CEO and Executive Producer of Crysis began with a look back at Far Cry and the learnings from it that they have applied to Crysis. Key points he mentioned were the need to offer as much variety as possible in the gameplay while also increasing the depth of all environments so that each could stand alone as a game. Cevat was followed by Dan Vivoli from Nvidia, Bill Kirby from Intel, and Heidi Rademacher of Games For Windows who discussed their partnerships related to this exciting title.

After an exciting demo from Cevat, invitees were given time to play single player and multiplayer levels of the game in order to form their early impressions of the game. You can see the coverage here: http://www.ea.com/crysis/news.jsp?id=hornetcoverage

Some of you may remember my post in the forums prior to the event asking for your questions… Well, I used these questions to interview members of the Crytek Dev team in attendance at the media event. General gaming questions were answered by Cevat Yerli, multiplayer questions were directed to Eric Lagel, Lead Mulitplayer Level Designer and modding questions were answered by Felix Leyendecker, an artist on the dev team who was demo-ing SandBox 2 Editor at the event. A special thanks to community members Maximum Hype, SX Demon, Jonas NZ1, and BringThaPain who submitted questions answered in the Q&A.


http://www.ea.com/crysis/news.jsp?id=hornetcoverage http://www.ea.com/crysis/news.jsp?id=qna1022

-Jynx