Crytek has been in the news for all the wrong reasons of late, and when that's the case it's easy to forget that the studio is capable of making fantastic first-person shooters.
The next game in that genre that's in development at the studio is Homefront: The Revoltion, and we caught up with Fasahat Salim at E3 to find out more about the game, what it's all about, and what sets it apart from both its predecessor and other similar games.
"We decided to focus on the guerrilla warfare aspect of things," Salim told us, "but we wanted to push it into a free-roaming world, because that is kind of the DNA of what Crytek does in first-person shooters. With games like Crysis and Far Cry, these are games where we allowed the player to explore a big space. We gave them an objective, yes, but they could approach it however they wanted to, and that's something we wanted to bring into this Homefront."
The Crytek developer then summed up what we'll be doing in the game in couple of lines: "This is just bare-boned survival and trying the best that you can to take the enemy on and use the environment around you. So scavenging, utilise the world around you, building your own weapons. This was all key to what you're going to find in Homefront: The Revolution."
Later Salim told us more about the environment that the player will be exploring, and how the engine being used to create the game has opened up some very exciting possibilities.
"We just want to make sure that the player has options to approach every scenario in a different way. We want to give them as many options as possible, but the interesting thing is because of our engine - the CryEngine - it's very powerful and a lot of cool things going on under the hood."
He continued: "So one of the main things that it allows us to create these unique scenarios is, we don't actually have control over what is happening minute to minute on the street. The civilian population will do whatever they're doing, that's a living breathing world. We have no control over what is actually unfolding as that mission is taking place. So that's an interesting dynamic because it can change an experience for a player. So your experience of a mission could be completely different to my experience of a mission."
Finally we asked him to confirm exactly how the multiplayer would work in relation to the single-player, and once again the answer we're given sounds potentially very interesting indeed.
"So we've got a single-player campaign and then we've got a co-op mode. Now the co-op mode is the exact same city, the scale is the same, everything is available to you. It's just that you can share that space with your friends. So it's four player co-op, and everything in the city you can all play together. There's going to be missions, there's going to be all sorts of structures, cool guerrilla things to do, but you can also go apart and experience the city separately."
"But the thing is, like I mentioned, it's a living breathing city; everything you do will influence someone else's game. So for instance if one of your friends fires off an explosive device two blocks down the road and you're doing a mission somewhere else, maybe that will distract some of the guards in your area. So it all connects, it's a living breathing world and you just drop in it and try to be a resistance fighter," Salim concluded.
Homefront: The Revolution doesn't currently have a release date, although we do know it's heading to PC, Xbox One and PS4. Given the apparent troubles over at Crytek UK, let's hope they can get back to work on the game as soon as possible, because it certainly sounds like it has great potential.
