Black smoke–spitting skyscrapers, charred automobile husks, and the abandoned streets of a once bustling metropolis impressively swallow up the movie theater-size display in Tribeca Grand Hotel’s private screening room in the heart of New York City. The visual feast being served is none other than the first sneak peek at Crysis 2, the ambitious first-person shooter follow-up to developer Crytek’s 2007 horsepower-gobblin’ hit. Crysis—and its 2008 expansion, Crysis: Warhead—famously pushed the limits of even the highest-end PC hardware, ensuring only an elite few could truly enjoy its groundbreaking graphics. Despite that notoriety, though, and Crysis 2’s new multi-platform focus (Crysis was PC-only), Crytek isn’t shying away from breaking new visual boundaries. In fact, the folks that first raised the bar with their postcard-pretty tropical shooter Far Cry are now intent on taking that same bar and sending it skyward like an Olympian-tossed javelin…

New York City not only serves as a pretty city to blow up, it also supports Crytek’s fresh focus on rich storytelling. The developer’s well aware that the first game’s narrative was not exactly its defining feature, so, while still remaining tight-lipped on specifics, they’re building plenty of buzz on how they intend to make the storytelling as memorable as the pulse-spiking exchanges of hot lead. They’ve announced famed sci-fi author Richard Morgan (The Steel Remains) as the title’s lead writer, and have stressed the importance of NYC’s iconic status and emotional relevance in popular culture.

In fact, at the screening, Crytek CEO and President, Cevat Yerli, made the following statement. “If I would pick one city to protect, it would be New York.” And based on the brief glimpse of action they’ve shown, it would appear Mr. Yerli would be taking up arms against some not-of-this-world beasties whose menacing facades make them look as though they might have swum in the same gene pool as Halo’s Hunters and Jackals. In addition to battling alien baddies on Wall Street, players— reprising the role of Crysis’ protagonist Nomad several years after the events of that game—can expect to lock and load against Crynet System’s own private army of souped-up soldiers. So, while weaving an engaging yarn is a top priority for Crytek, it seems FPS fans won’t find themselves wanting for things to fill with deadly projectiles.

Of course, the fact that PCs needed enough juice under their hoods to power the Death Star in order to run Crysis certainly isn’t lost on the developer. “Even two years after the release of Crysis, the sentence, ‘Can it run Crysis?’ is still in gamers’ heads,” says the sequel’s Executive Producer, Nathan Camarillo. And while the detailed specs that you’ll need to run Crysis 2 in all of its glory are still shrouded in secrecy at Crytek HQ, he assures us that this won’t be an issue for the follow-up. “The first game set an incredibly high benchmark, especially in terms of graphics. Thanks to our new technology, CryENGINE 3, and all its new features, we’re convinced that we can do it even better with Crysis 2. It’s a game that will not only be fun to play, but also amazing to look at, and we expect to reach a broader PC market while still being the premiere showcase piece for high-end PC rigs.”

Crytek’s daunting goal of providing an equally eye-melting presentation to all gamers—even Xbox 360 and PS3 owners—is anchored by what they’re calling “catastrophic beauty,” an artistic approach that intends to strip the title’s Big Apple setting down to a post-apocalyptic core, which you see illustrated throughout this story. The flame-engulfed structures and smoke-stained NYC skyline that took center stage during our demo gave us a taste of this design philosophy.

“ ‘Catastrophic Beauty’ refers to the look of Crysis 2,” Camarillo elaborates. “We are trying to capture an epic human drama, set in the frame of the most recognizable city in the world, New York City! We used the power of CryENGINE to deliver beautiful, natural, dappled lighting and an elegant, stylized reality, while trying to avoid the obvious clichés of just portraying doom and gloom. ‘Catastrophic beauty’ stands for stark beauty, offset with an acidic palette that supports the drama of an alien invasion.”

On the surface, this boils down to a beautifully destroyed city that makes Fallout 3’s Capitol Wasteland look like Disneyland’s Main Street. Achieving this artistically pleasing Armageddon relies on a technological “perfect storm” of sorts. “In simplified terms, it is a combination of strong art assets, art direction, time-of-day settings, color grading, volumetric fog, sun rays, particles, SSAO, deferred lighting, complex shaders, depth of field, dynamic shadow maps, and many other visual goodies in our bag of tricks,” explains Camarillo. “We can change many of these values, even in real time, to completely change the mood and feel of a scene. In some cases, for example, a drastic change makes a more choking and suppressive atmosphere that suddenly transforms the battlefield into a gameplay area [that is] more mysterious, but—at the same time—very believable within the game fiction.”

[For the rest of our massive 14-page story on Crysis 2 please pick up a copy of the Summer issue of NVISION, available on newsstands now.]