Greetings Community!
Welcome to the “Crysis Weekly Update #11”, an official status report from Crytek to the world-wide community in order to get you up-to-date on the progress of various Crysis related topics.
The today’s update includes a full post-mortem of the multiplayer session that took place yesterday. We also got news on the patch development and the Intel / Crysis Mapping Contest for you. Additionally we have prepared the last part of our Crysis Outtakes video series.
Crysis – Patch Development Update
The news about the new patch that is in development for Crysis will be rather short this time. Unfortunately the news on this patch did not make it into this week’s update. We are still working on that, but cannot release further information about it at this stage.
Crytek vs. Community – The Multiplayer Session Report
In yesterday’s public multiplayer session on Crytek’s official test server, the community had the chance to stand against the Crytek All-Star Multiplayer Development Team.
During overall four thrilling matches within 1.5 hours, the slightly rusty Crytek team stood its man against the very strong team playing community! Thanks to the support to the =[CrC]= Clan on some maps the Crytekkers have been able to win 2 out of 4 matches due to base destruction.
We would like to thank everyone who took the time participating in this session and we will definitely consider re-doing this at some point. J
Match Reports
The following you will find more detailed information on the different maps and their results. The whole session began with a small InstantAction warm up at around 7:30PM CET. The server began to fill quickly and the Crytek devs tried to catch up with the 1on1 skills of the community members, with partial success.
At 8.00PM CET the server changed the game mode to PowerStruggle and everyone was welcome to this gameplay session. Crytek took the North Korean side for all upcoming maps whereas the majority of the community played for the US Forces.
Four different maps have been played that included both close combat situations as well as wide range maps with heavy air and ground vehicle support.
The outcome of all maps was a tie! The community as well as Crytek where able to win 2 maps each, which definitely underlines the great average skill in the community. Find below the detailed match reports.
1. Map – Shore
Result: Win for Community (188 – 124 Frags)
Timelimit: 20 minutes
Report: With Shore being the first map things were a little bit confusing in the beginning, but it got sorted rather quickly. Unfortunately the community (US team) was able to re-capture the Prototype Facility in the beginning and hold it for a long time.
All efforts from the Crytekkers to either get the Prototype Facility back or capture the Alien Crash Sites have been thwarted. In the end it was almost total map control by the community. Even though the NK base has not been destroyed, the US forces always had the upper hand and finally won, well deserved, by frags.
Congratulations Community, but the war is not over yet!
2. Map – Refinery
Result: Win for Crytek (Base Destruction)
Timelimit: 30 Minutes
Report: The second map of this evening, Refinery, was a pure destruction of the US forces. Thanks to the great help of the =[CrC]= Clan the NK forces where able to keep the spreading of the community to a minimum.
Based on the ultimate tank control by the community member “Dark-ru” who did an outstanding job in keeping the spawn area of the enemies under constant fire the Crytek dev team was able to set up a total map control. In the end the US base got destroyed and Crytek scored for the first time.
Half-time score: 1-1 – nothing has been decided yet!
3. Map – Plantation
Result: Win for Crytek (Base Destruction)
Timelimit: 30 Minutes
Report: Plantation has been chosen as third map, and what else to say than Crytek won again! It seems like the community is more used to open range battles than close combat situations. Or maybe it is just the fact that the Crytek devs only hit in short range – we don’t know and we won’t investigate further on that. ;-)
Again it was pretty much a map control with leaving the US forces only one bunker for spawning. This match was pretty short and has been ended by the enemy base destruction already after around 15 minutes.
Crytek 2 – Community 1! Time to catch up or loose!
4. Map – Mesa
Result: Win for Community (163 – 158 Frags)
Timelimit: 30 Minutes
Report: Phew, what a fight – Mesa is the biggest map Crysis has to offer for multiplayer, but still there was always a lot of action going on nearly everywhere.
It was an ongoing fight between capturing and re-capturing all kind of factories on the map. Being attacked by strong air vehicles the ground units often had a hard time to move further, but each team had around the same amount of VTOL’s and Helicopters in the air, which was a very pleasing situation.
This match was very tough between the community and Crytek, but in the end there is only one (lucky) winner – the community! The match was probably the closest since there where only 5 points difference, but congratulations again.
A tie as result – what could be more self explaining! J
Multiplayer Session - Community Q&A
For those who haven’t had the chance to participate we have some questions answered that came up during the session and which we couldn’t reply to directly ingame.
How many people played from Crytek?
Overall we had 8 staff members of Crytek playing with the community on the server.
Who was playing from Crytek?
Here you find a complete list of all Crytekkers who played yesterday:
Cry-Eric Eric MP Producer
Cry-Korgoth Michael MP Lead Designer
Cry-Alex Alexander Community Manager
Cry-Steve Steven Gameplay Programmer
Cry-Bliss Christian Level Designer
Cry-Venom Marko Level Designer
Cry-Lowtec Jan Technical Designer
Cry-Sven[c4Te] Sven Community Manager
Where did the Crytek devs play?
We all met in our Multiplayer pit, which is a room set up with several machines (all kind of specs). Usually we test new multiplayer game modes there, but yesterday we abused this room for the game session.
What settings did you play on?
That heavily depended on the machine each of the Crytek staff members was playing on. Some had High-Spec machines whereas others played on Medium settings or even Low ones. Basically we tried to have a wide range of graphic settings being connected to that server from our side.
Do you play Crysis all day long?
To answer the question from our community member “Chris14465”: no, unfortunately not. Even though we would love to, we also have to work on that game to improve Multiplayer for the community. ;)
Purpose of the Test
This game session has not been set up just for fun and we did not want to see if we still can compete to the community, even though it was good to see that we are not that low-skilled.
With this test we wanted to get a very high server load over a specific amount of time. In addition we logged every single activity on the server itself, that might help us fixing bugs like crashes, client disconnects and others.
As conclusion it can be said that this test was a full success – we got a great server log-file and we also encountered a server crash perfectly timed at the end of the whole gaming session. We are now evaluating this data and hopefully it includes significant information that supports us in making the game more stabile.
Custom Map in World-Wide Top10 Multiplayer Maps
The first time since the release of the game a custom made multiplayer map has entered the Top 10 of the most played maps. Congratulations to our community member “GameFrame” who created the PowerStruggle map called El_Alamein_D1.
You can download this map from here. To show you what the most played maps are you can find below a small graph that is based on the multiplayer statistics of the last week provided by GameSpy.
Intel / Crysis Mapping Contest - Update
After the submission for multiplayer levels was closed some days ago it was about time to get the community involved in this mapping contest. This means you can play test the levels, look at them in the editor, review them and vote for them.
Based on your votes we will pick the top contributions of each category which will then get reviewed by the contest jury that consists of Crytek, EA, Intel, Crysis Leagues, Crysis Clans and pre-SDK teams.
The community voting will be closed April 15th 2008, at 6pm CET so make sure you have been voted for your favourite maps before that time.
Current Top 10 Rankings
Actually we are in the halftime of the voting process, so we wanted to give you a small status update which maps are the most favourite ones so far. There is still time for you to download the maps, test them and vote for them and don’t forget that every voice counts.
Instant Action
Rank Intel Visibility Gameplay Creativity
1 Slope Borderline Borderline
2 Deathroom Slope Slope
3 Borderline Illusion Whitehouse
4 Whitehouse Whitehouse Illusion
5 Illusion Red Planet Red Planet
6 Sun Eara Deathroom Swamp
7 Red Planet Sun Eara Sun Eara
8 Swamp Swamp Terminal Velocity
9 Resort Iceworld Resort
10 Factory Tor Terminal Velocity Deathroom
Power Struggle
Rank Intel Visibility Gameplay Creativity
1 PS_NesHem PS_NesHem PS_NesHem
2 Orangrey Orangrey Orangrey
3 Canyon Canyon Canyon
4 Anguish Anguish Anguish
5 Turbine Reclamation Turbine
6 Reclamation The Village Reclamation
7 The Village El_Alamein_D1 Battle Bulge
8 Project: 800 Turbine HighPS
9 Battle Bulge Project: 800 El_Alamein_D1
10 El_Alamein_D1 Battle Bulge Battle Bulge
Video Series – Crysis Outtakes #5!
Today we have prepared the fifth and also last part of our Crysis Outtakes video series. As usual it can be downloaded in a better quality as well. We hope you enjoy it!
The last video shows that even small people definitely can have a big mouth…
So that’s it for the eleventh Crysis Weekly Update from Crytek! We hope you enjoy the information and thanks for your continued support. Do not miss the next update on Wednesday! J
-Crysis Dev Team
To find more information and support visit Crytek’s official portal
www.crymod.com.
