SPOnG: Were PC players concerned with the move to multi-platform for Crysis 2, and do you think there will be a similar reaction with Crysis 3?

Rasmus Hojengaard: Yes, and yes. I mean, PC players, fundamentally only want Crysis to be on PC, right? And, you know, that’s kind of understandable when you consider how the original game - and even Crytek itself - started out. But, we’re definitely pushing this game a lot from a visual standpoint, and for sure there’s going to be visual goodies in it that you can only get if you have a super-high-end PC.

At the same time, we want to ensure if you don’t have a super-high-end PC, the game will still look amazing. On top of that, we want to make sure the experience is not different from platform to platform.

The challenges nowadays are a little bit different, to be honest. Five, maybe eight years ago, the challenges developers faced were rather broad. Now, the challenges are more specific in terms of technical features. Can you do area-based soft shadows? Ray-traced area lights? Bounce lights? All this memory-heavy stuff that build up the subtleties of photo-realism - these are the things that take up all the computational cycles.

And it’s not like we have a little switch where can you flick this sort of stuff on and off. It all takes a lot of resources from either the CPU, or the graphics memory. So it’s a different world now with different challenges than there was five years ago.

SPOnG: Let’s flip that question around to consoles. How are you pushing the graphical fidelity on PS3 and Xbox 360, given that these platforms must be hitting a performance ceiling some seven years after launch?

Rasmus Hojengaard: In theory, you can go infinitely far. It depends on how you can translate that while managing resources for each platform. A lot of the fancy DX11 stuff that we’ve done for the PC platform has been translated into console versions that looks almost as good. Or at least, we’ve introduced a fidelity that hasn’t been present in any other console game so far. Right now, our challenge will be how much of it we will actually be able to implement and to what extent, without stealing too much memory or too many cycles. But for sure, we put a lot of push on that - we have a lot of brilliant R&D guys and they spend a lot of time figuring out how to translate these high-end features into console platforms.