An In-Depth Look at City Interactive's Enemy Front @ E3 2012

The CryEngine3 game engine is a rather robust and flexible engine that fully supports destructible environments in a manner that almost makes one think that this was the primary concern for its development, but of course in reality that capability is merely part of its focus, and it should be noted that Enemy Front is not the only game in the City Interactive stables that leverages it.

The original CryEngine, created by Crytek as a technology demo for graphics card manufacturer Nvidia, was positioned as an ideal drop-in for the First Person Shooter genre that was growing increasingly popular at the time (2004-2005), with the impressive impact of the engine causing Crytek to recast its demo as a game rather than a the basic format that demonstrated its capabilities, and as a result the engine was quickly licensed to NCsoft for their MMORPG, Aion: Tower of Eternity.

The following year when French game publisher and developer Ubisoft acquired the intellectual property rights to the Far Cry franchise (which included a perpetual license to use the Far Cry edition of CryEngine), thanks to the diligence of Crytek in keeping pace with tech developments in the graphic card arena that relationship helped the engine to move beyond being simply a viable choice for FPS game designers, transforming it into the first choice.

By the time the engine reached its third major version -- which Crytek announced at the 2009 Game Developers Conference -- word of both its incredible capabilities and that it was being developed for use on all of the major gaming platforms cemented its place as one of the top-three simulation and shooter engines, but it was the announcement by the Australian Defence Forces that RAN personnel would train on a virtual landing helicopter dock ship made using CryEngine 3 software that ultimately garnered attention both outside and inside the games industry, with a number of military-based training systems leveraging the game engine eventually resulting.

Following those announcements Crytek released a free-to-use version of CryEngine for non-commercial game development under the name CryEngine 3 SDK, and this was followed by the announcement that the engine would be used to bring the original Crysis series to game consoles, establishing it as a preferred engine for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and in recent months a number of developers have confirmed its choice for upcoming FPS titles for Nintendo's new Wii U console.

City Interactive confirmed that their choice of CryEngine 3 in Enemy Front was made in order to guarantee a level of visual detail and destructibility required for the creation of an immersive game world in which large crowd and enemy force engagements are a feature, and to facilitate the transformation of what might otherwise become a bleak landscape representing a war-torn Europe and transform it into a more vivid world in which the environmental damage system made possible in CryEngine 3 permits a more diverse, fully destructible set of maps.

Simply translated the engine permits the tracked and managed display of graduated levels of damage from sources that range from fences knocked down by a truck driven out-of-control to shell impacts, tossed grenades, and even the bullets fired from a large array of weapon types. At the E3 demo we were treated to an example of this in the form of several of the 25+ bullet-firing weapons that make up the armory selection in the game, a subject that we will cover in some detail momentarily but that presents a unique challenge in that the range of types spans everything from a hot pistol round to a heavy machine gun.

The destructible environments in the game fully compliment the different mission classes, most notably the espionage, sabotage, assassination and assault types, which can be accomplished in a number of ways that involve environment objects. For example creating a roadblock by destroying vehicles is one possible strategic element in an assassination mission, while setting charges on a stack of bombs in order to destroy a warehouse or ordinance storage area are yet others.

The to-be-expected blazing gun play and spray-and-pray close quarters combat that was part of the demo neatly illustrated the level of care and attention that was taken by the development team to ensure that the weapons were historically accurate -- and what that translates to is the reality that a character standing up from cover a hundred yards away and firing a single shot from a snub-nosed pistol is not really all that likely to hit what they are shooting at, let alone hit the detonator on a explosive pack of TNT, which is rather the point.

Many of the weapons that were present in the European theater of operations during World War II were notoriously unreliable, with accuracy that was often defined in very simple terms, with instructors at the various ally training bases often explaining it thus: "If your target is too far away for you to throw the weapon at them and hit them with it, they are too far away for you to make a targeted shot at a specific body part; better results will be found in aiming for their center mass than, for example, their head, since you are more likely to hit their head by aiming at their chest than the other way around!"

The AI for this title -- and remember that what we saw at E3 is an early Alpha Build -- is said to be class-driven, cover-based behavior, which makes sense. Certainly the enemy behavior was more realistic in that unlike many games in the genre, we did not see enemy soldiers who basically queued up to be killed, but rather used the available cover to their best advantage, making killing them more challenging and realistic, which is something of a refreshing change. That is not to say that the game and its weapons are strictly reality based, as after all this is an action-adventure FPS game with an underlying set of plots and a story mode that is worthy of your average war movie, complete with spies, Nazis, and secret uber-weapons!