Crysis: Warhead Interview

BT: What about the writing team behind the game – is it the same group for Warhead?

Ben: Yeah. There are some guys in-house and we’ve had some guys kind of look over it too, like Susan O’Connor who worked on BioShock.

Story is kind of a big deal here because we want the story to be as coherent – sorry, not coherent, though we do want that too – but we do want the story to be as cohesive as possible.

Crysis kind of felt a lot like a journey into the unknown a lot of the time, I think. With Warhead though, this is more of a straight start to finish kind of piece. Pretty much from the beginning of the game you’ll know your main objective throughout the rest of the story.

BT: How long is the game then?

Ben: Well, it’s hard to say because we’ve tried to go for this whole open world thing. Like the level you’re playing here, you could do that all on foot or whatever if you wanted and really take your time with it. That has a huge impact on the game time, y’see? So almost any game time you give could almost be completely wrong.


What I would say though is that Crysis was about ten levels. This is seven levels.

BT: Now…what about launch platforms?

Ben: PC only.

BT: No desire to do it on consoles?

Ben: At the moment the focus is totally on the PC, so that’s where we are right now.

Oh – and that there is another of our new mounted weapons by the way. It’s kind of like a really high-powered minigun. It sounds really nice. The .50 cal we have is great for destroying vehicles and kind of does things in one hit, but this is more about mowing down the ground troops.

BT: Who does Psycho’s voice by the way?

Ben: The same guy that did it in Crysis. With the voice direction we’re trying to make him less of a cheeky-chappy and more of a serious character. Keeping him along the lines of Jason Statham.


You’ve got a chopper above you by the way – you might want to deal with that before you go on. You’re just coming up to the harbour area and the submarine where the alien scouts are being kept.

Over on your right is a weapons cache also, with another new weapon. Some dual-wield SMGs. These are great for short to mid range and just lay infantry down in a heartbeat. Fire the left with the left mouse button, the right with the right.

BT: Cool. So, what’s the plan for multiplayer?

Ben: I can’t really talk about that too much right now as all that stuff is still being worked on, but what I can say is that there will be a full multiplayer suite shipping with the game. We’ll have more info on that nearer the time though.

…And it’s about there that we finished that section of the level and got booted back to the main menu – a cue that it was time to move on to see the next game. We’d like to thank Ben O’Donnell and EA’s UK PR team for their time.

If you’re interested in hearing our thoughts on the gameplay experience of Warhead then you can check out our hands-on preview of the game, of if you want to know more about the original then you can look at our ten-page review and graphical analysis of Crysis.

Or just let us know your thoughts in the forums, whichever works best.