This is a concept for Pandora’s Box, a submachine gun that takes the form of an innocent-looking box that opens when activated - hence the name.

Finally, we have a concept image for a new kind of nanosuit that the aliens will be wearing.

Suit Shock!
One of the features in the mod will give you the ability to temporarilly overload your nanosuit, releasing a strong electric pulse, which will instantly kill anything it touches. The caveat is that it will drain your suit energy and health, so this is best used when the enemy is closely huddled together. Here’s a video showing how it works.

Team Q&A
As mentioned before, we’re introducing a new Team Q&A session, in which we interview the team about the mod itself and the development process. From Wolfpack Designs, we interviewed Taowolf and Ultimarage.

Radcliff: Where exactly did you get the idea for your mod?

Taowolf: It’s actually kind of an interesting story. This mod was originally supposed to be just a standard level mod designed by me using the demo editor. I wanted it done as soon as Crysis came out, and I put a bit of a story in it, nothing major. As you can tell, it never saw the light of day, but as time went on, I continued to develop the story, I don’t exactly know why, but it started getting good.

Radcliff: So it was actually a project to learn the new editor?

Taowolf: Basically, yes. It was a huge map, but it was really crappy to today’s standards. You could probably find the thread on Crymod still.

Radcliff: Is there a target release date you guys are hoping to meet?

Ultimarage: Not at this time, no.

Radcliff: How far along are you?

Ultimarage: It’s hard to put a percentage with that. We just recently got a really good programmer; so things are finally progressing faster than before. Of course, I have the vegetation, texturing, object placement, and terrain all at about 95% in the second level that I am working on. Mecius, our other mapper, is at about 40% with those said things - but he’s working at breakneck speed.

Taowolf: Well, the level aspect of it is very far along. We are in the middle of doing a lot of C++, LUA, and XML stuff, we are getting models, textures, and the like done.
But the first act has the longest development time, since the whole TC has to be put on. I can’t put a number on it, but we have gotten a lot done, but we have a whole lot more to do.

Radcliff: The TOD settings in your maps, from what we have seen, are incredibly realistic. Are they in any way inspired by the skies around your respective areas or stock photos?

Taowolf: Well, we get inspiration from a lot of things. I created the popular config “Luxus Silentium”, and Ultima was the .tod creator in the CCC, so graphics became a very important part of the mod. When both of us collaborated, it worked fantastically. We get things from our own locations, I also went to Florida and checked out how everything worked. We also used pictures of islands, and the like. It uses a modified version of Martz’s Auto Focusing DOF mod.

Ultimarage: We’re also going for realistically darker nights.

Radcliff: I noticed your sleek-looking Alien Nanosuit. For the aliens, are you using a mix of Crysis models and custom-made models? Because your mod, at least to me, seems to be at least loosely based on the story of the original game. (Correct me if this isn’t the case.)

Ultimarage: This mod is actually a complex reinvisioning of the events that take place after Crysis. So, it’s basically our own little Crysis 2; but most likely extremely more in-depth than Crysis 2 will be. Yes, part of our story is that the Aliens had to merge with Human DNA to adapt to the environment. Seems they had bigger plans for us than just ‘exterminating’ us, so they chose to adapt to our environment instead of changing it to fit their needs.

Taowolf: The game is based around the Crysis universe, but it extends it to an extreme level. The story is very much different from Crysis’s story. We are going to use a mix, but noticing that one of the big complaints about Crysis was the alien fights, we decided to work on the game’s biggest strength, creating this new class of alien that allows for more enjoyable gameplay.

Radcliff: You mentioned something about a new balance system for the suit powers. Would you care to elaborate?

Ultimarage: Basically, we’re going to have a system that allows certain things to be increased, both for nanosuit functions and stuff you learn as you get better. The more you reload, the faster you reload. The more you shoot, gun sway is steadily reduced. Probably going to make it so each time an enemy hits it adds to this invisible meter that slowly reduces gun sway. It’ll be very slow, and it’ll also have a cap off point for everything in the learning system. For nanosuit functions, the more you use strength, the stronger you get. The more you use speed, the faster you get. The more you cloak, the longer you can cloak, and armor will be made a little stronger progressively. There will be no falling deaths at all, which is a testament to the suit’s true power. Speed, Strength and Cloak will have more armor than they do now as well. Speed and Strength especially seemed useless in Crysis since they made the chracter much weaker in a way. We’ll make the savegames from the end of an Act carry over your learning system data to the next Act and so on.

Taowolf: This is a new function of the new nanosuit that you are using. It is an adaptive learning system, where if you are a person who loves to cloak, your cloak gets more effective throughout the game. It learns what you like doing, and helps you along with doing it. Slowly. Of course, levels will get harder to compensate. So not only will you get better at the game, the main character and the suit will get better at the game as well.

Radcliff: What kind of abilities can we expect from the alien nanosuit in your concept image?

Taowolf: We have a completely different nanosuit. The alien nanosuit will be a nanosuit for actual aliens. And we will have Creation abilities like the slowed time, and some other tbd things.

Ultimarage: Still - the palyer’s nanosuit is influenced by alien technology on the inside for it’s functions, but not on the outside like the genuine alien nanosuit.

Radcliff: Will you be putting in a stealth kill system? And if so, how is it going to work?

Ultimarage: We actually have two aspects of that right now. First, we are going to have knives that are attached to both forarms of the player’s suit, completely retractable. They will be used for both your Melee attack and silent kills. Obviously your cloak will be necesarry for this in most situations to silently take down an enemy without alerting others.

Radcliff: Will there be multiplayer gameplay in your mod? And if so, what can we expect from it?

Ultimarage: If we do decide to do MP, we’re going to focus on the SP aspect of the mod first and foremost.

Taowolf: Because of the very unfortunate size of the multiplayer community for Crysis (Crysis MP is my favorite MP game) we do not have a current MP design. If the MP community changes, we may make an MP aspect later on, because we all love the Crysis MP.

Radcliff: That will be all. Thank you for taking the time to answer these questions.