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Mod this, dude

By Jon Peddie

Figure 6. Matto’s opening screen—welcome to hell.

In recent Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs story (rFactor encore), Ted Pollak, our super-duper, super gamer analyst, goes nuts for a racing game mod (and it is pretty damn spectacular, if I do say so). I, however, went for a FPS.

Not just any mod or any FPS, but Crytek’s “Farcry” and the Matto mods. If you haven’t played or don’t know about “Farcry,” don’t read any further.

If you know about “Frycry” and have played it, or tried to play it, you know the Crytek engine is very powerful. Crytek is a game developer company founded in 1999 in Frankfurt, Germany, and they have about 120 programmers, bragging that they’re from over 20 different nations. They’re best known for the game “Farcry” and the CryEngine that the game uses, which includes PolyBump, a version of normal mapping technology. Ubisoft publishes and distributes the game.

“Farcry” came out in 2004 and stunned people with the water quality and the rag-doll effects. Since then the company has been working on the much-anticipated “Crysis.”

For those who couldn’t wait, an energetic young programmer, also in Germany, Matthias Otto (who goes by the name of Matto), decided to save the world and started introducing map add-ons for the game. He logically named them Matto 1, 2, etc., and now we’re at Matto 4, the latest.

Matto assembled a team of like-minded volunteers consisting of Matto (level designer and scripter), Vok.ani ((that’s his code name, and he did most of the modeler and texturing), and Stringed Evil (sound design). And then the people who helped Matto with scripts were Ghost2006 and AlligatorJack. The voice actors were Henri Bujko (Jack Carver), Ivan Marker (Boris), Rina-chan (Ashley), Ethan Black (James and other roles), and Jamaal Ephriam). There were some other people who also helped with small jobs, but basically Matto, Vok.ani, and Stringed Evil did all the heavy lifting.

The story line is similar to the previous version: Jack Carver is trying to wipe out the mercenaries, but is suffering from a bit of amnesia. He’s aided from time to time by a seemingly bulletproof Russian who’s not a very good shot, and a cute new girl Ashley (Valery from the original game wasn’t that cute, Ashley looks far better). Matto’s modeler, Vok.ani, modeled and textured Ashley completely on his own from the original game. Like “Matto,” “Vok.ani” is just a nickname. Vok.ani, Viktor Ikkes, is a school friend and has worked with Matto on mapping and modding since “Farcry” came out.

Needless to say, if you liked Farcry, you’re going to love the extensions. And the best part is Matto gives them away (http://fc-kartografen.de.vu/).

It took Matto over a year and seven months to develop Matto 4. If you’re really good you can play it in about four hours; I’ve spent more than that and am only on level three, and there are seven impressively designed levels to work your way through. Also, the conventional “Farcry” cheats don’t seem to work, but Matto has given me a hint on that.

Matto is a 19-year-old student in Germany (I asked him where he was be-fore; he laughed and said, “I were nowhere before. I just started modding as a hobby and it became professional stuff.”

Matto3 and 4 are the first mods that really contained a story. Being a little modest, Matto said, “It was fun to image what could happen in the mission, but honestly the story isn’t that good.”

“Why did I this tremendous investment? Well, as I said, it’s a hobby. When I released the first map, it was just amazing to see people downloading and playing my map. Discussions in forums or even fanmails were my rewards. I continued with Matto2, bigger and better. Again, fanmails ...

“So I became kind of famous in the ‘Farcry’ community. With Matto3 I had the big breakthrough—top quality, great gameplay, and the graphics pushed to the limit. News sites with reviews and interviews followed.

“When I started Matto4 I didn’t expect it would became such a big project. Actually I can’t sell Matto4, because it’s copyrighted stuff from Ubisoft.”

To develop the mods and maps the Matto team used Crytek Sandbox Editor, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, 3Ds Max 8, RAD Video Tools, Paint, and stuff from the Cryengine SDK.

If you’ve played the Matto extensions, or plan to, you can make a dona-tion. I recommend you do so this brilliant developer can keep going until some giant studio discovers him, gives him a new Porsche, and hires him away.

What do we think?

This reminds me of the enthusiasm and crea-tivity we used to see in Finland from the Demo Group. Matto and the crew get a definite thumb up from this old FPS’er.

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