Crytek On Board With Wii U?

Crytek, known for its PC games Far Cry and Crysis, was interviewed by NowGamer. Crytek licenses the CryEngine technology for game development, and is a company that is looking forward to upcoming games and consoles. NowGamer spoke to managing director Avni Yerli and CryEngine’s director of global business development, Carl Jones, to find out what they might have in store.

NG: Crytek’s interested in the Wii U. What do you make of the platform?

CJ: It’s something we’re really interested in. There are a load of Nintendo fans at Crytek, right up to the top of the company. We were unfortunately unable to support the last generation of Wii because it would have been quite an engineering effort to take the engine down to that level of hardware.

So we were quite excited to see a new level of hardware come out that we think we can support, do some good stuff with, and it’s something we’re currently experimenting with.

NG: So you’ve got Wii U dev kits?

CJ: I haven’t seen them myself.

NG: Is there a market for core gaming on Wii U?

CJ: I really hope so but I don’t think it’s a necessary part of their strategy. The Wii is great at the games people like playing on it. I’m not sure yet what Nintendo’s strategy might be for hardcore.

I don’t know if we’ll see flagship core titles on that platform – as a fan of Nintendo I’d love to see it personally, but I also enjoy playing the non-core titles a great deal.

Whether or not we need core titles as well, we’ll see. That’ll be up to the consumer. But if you can get the same visual quality from Wii U as from other platforms, then why not?

NG: So we could see a colourful, CryEngine 3-powered Wii U platformer from Crytek?

CJ: Well, never write anything off. We’re experimenting all the time; we have a large number of very creative people with a lot of great ideas at the studio. Never say never; we’ll have to wait and see.

NG: TimeSplitters was also mentioned in those reports. Is it still an IP you’re interested in?

AY: Crytek, in particular Crytek UK… obviously TimeSplitters historically was for them an important IP. From our perspective we always had a lot of fun playing TimeSplitters – TimeSplitters 2 was amazing fun.

Crytek and Crytek UK are interested in the IP; we are thinking about it but we’re trying to decide what we could do best with the IP, where we could bring it. There are no concrete plans yet.

NG: Everyone’s doing console HD collections at the moment. Any chance you might tide over TimeSplitters fans with the older games?

AY: That’s a good idea! [laughs] There are indeed a lot of games doing it but we haven’t thought about that yet. But it’s a good idea.

The full interview covers more than just the Wii U. Of course, please comment, and give us your impressions on Crytek.