Developer Crytek has responded to that ambitious goal, not with boasts, but with how they’re trying to accomplish this ”difficult to attain” threshold.
”As a company, Crytek has a goal that we only ship high quality, high rated products. And that number starts somewhere,” said executive producer Nathan Camarillo. ”It’s definitely hard. It’s always difficult to release a high quality product. You can’t take a 60 rated team and make a 90 rated game. That’s probably impossible.”
”Let’s say you’re making a 90 plus rated game. Everything you do, every aspect that goes into the game, every person working on it, has to be 90 plus rated, or you don’t get to 90 plus rated,” continued the Crytek developer.
”You don’t make a 90 plus rated game with a 30 rated bush in the game. Everything has to reach this quality bar. Every person working on it has to put that kind of effort into it, otherwise you have to do some things that are at 94/95 to pull the average up to 90.”
”This threshold is so difficult to attain. That’s a really difficult task for any developer to accomplish. For a game like Crysis 2 that’s a full offering of multiplayer, a longer than expected single-player campaign – longer than what’s average right now for FPS games – that’s a lot of stuff to polish and make sure everything is as high quality as possible.”
Crysis 2 was due to release this Christmas but it was delayed until March 25th, 2011. It certainly wouldn’t have reached a 90+ Metacritic score if it did, feel the studio.
”It’s always a difficult situation to get that kind of score, but we have a lot of processes internally,” added Camarillo.
”And through the help of EA to make sure we’re hitting that quality bar, by having mock reviews and evaluation groups look at the game, as well as focus groups and looking at players playing, looking at their biometric data.” That last bit sounds fancy.
”Are the moments we’re trying to sell in the game resonating the way we want to with them, or where are they getting frustrated so we can improve the quality?”
”You can’t fix those things when it’s out the door and in someone’s hands. You can’t take a retail product, have them play it and go, ‘We actually wanted you to be scared there. Ah, crap.’ You want to find that out before it goes out. All these little moments add together to get you over that threshold.” …and that’s how Crytek is going on 90 with Crysis 2.
Crysis 2 releases on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC March 25th, 2011. Excited are you?
