"Effectively the [fps] genre has been stagnating, even after Far Cry times", said Cevat Yerli, Crysis creative director. "We're seeing the same experience over and over again. But what I think was the big breakthrough in the first-person shooter genre was the AI."
"One of the things for game designers and creators is to make the user think before he does something. Then make him think through the options he has so he can choose something meaningful to overcome the challenge", Yerli explained. "That inherently asks for an AI that can compensate for your choice, or can challenge and counteract your choice."
But great AI is not the answer to life, the universe and everything. As Yerli puts it: "Usually, the assumption is that you can make intelligent games by just putting better AI in, but that's not the case. You have to make better AI and better environment design and better level design in order to actually make the choices happen.
That's really where shooters have been stagnating. They've been focussing too much on technology like middleware. "I have middleware. I have physics middleware. If I have physics middleware and AI and rendering, I should be fine." That's the assumption.
But the true power is to use it creatively through better level design, better environmental art, to stimulate the player to make the choices. That's what's been missing. The technology has been there, but people haven't been using it."
