With powerful graphics cards worldwide still being snapped up by cryptocurrency miners, it feels almost cruel for Crytek to announce another Crysis game. Today they confirmed they're returning to their supersuit FPS with a new instalment they claim will be "a truly next-gen shooter." They're not clear about what next-gen means to them. Will Crysis 4: a) require a £1500 graphics card; b) be a battle royale; or c) sell NFT hats on the metaverse blockchain cryptonet? Answers on a postcard, reader dear.
]]>All three games of the Crytek's super-powered shooter trilogy are now available fancied up with modern graphical bells and whistles, with Crysis 2 Remastered and Crysis 3 Remastered today following the first game's 2020 revamp. Given that developers Crytek were always years ahead of most shooters in shininess, the originals hardly look hideous but hey, you can pay for extra fancieness. The first game was always the best though.
]]>After a long sleep, Crysis appears to be waking up. Crytek have been busy in the meantime with the likes of Hunt: Showdown while Crysis took something of a cold-storage nap. The super serious super soldier FPS series added Crysis 3 to the stables back in 2013. Seven years later, the official Crysis Twitter account is broadcasting signs of life.
]]>Global illumination. Volumetric clouds. Sub-surface scattering.
These are words that make me hot.
But I know this feeling is forbidden. I should care about games, not the empty pursuit of photorealism. But oh my, it’s so exciting, and not empty. In fact, I think that right now photorealism is becoming crucial to games, and that we should celebrate it.
]]>Sooooo, Crysis 3 sure was a videogame. Its single-player had all the guns and all the graphics and all the armored land squids, but it still managed to fall well short of its predecessors' remarkably intelligent brand of sci-fi hyperdumb. Oh, and there was multiplayer too - because again, videogame. Unfortunately, glimmers of asymmetrical, suits-vs-skins potential were mostly paved over by a heaping gray load of blah. But hey, there's still some hope, because Crytek's injecting MP with a new dose of life via a DLC pack called The Lost Island. The mini-expansion leaves behind New York's mostly concrete jungle in favor of the regular kind while also adding multiple new modes and maps. And thus, the series comes full circle in a really bizarre, potentially upsetting way. Details after the break.
]]>Jim, John and Nathan are all out at GDC for RPS right now, but the lack of any news from them so far leads me to presume they are all either dead, kidnapped, hungover, hiding or trapped inside a branch of The Cheesecake Factory. So, while I've not been out there to see and thus usefully report on any of the following myself, I can at least once again do what is approximately 19% of my daily job, and resize video embed code to fit on our website.
This time it's looks at what we can expect from Crytek's Cryengine 3 and Epic's Unreal don't-call-it-4 Engine 4. I think you'll all agree that Golfzon (above) is what we most want from the game engines of tomorrow. And if you don't, some of the other stuff in there might well be more to your tastes.
]]>Crysis 3: a first-person shooter set in a post-apocalyptic, alien-invaded New York, in which you wear a Nanosuit which enables you to temporarily become invisible, damage-resistant or able to leap moderately-sized walls in a single bound. It has a lot of graphics. It's out now in the US, and tomorrow in the UK. Here is an opinion.
]]>Last week we sent Cara to an EA event to look at a few of their games. This spawned her splendid Crysis 3 interview, but the price was another day spent in the bemusing otherworld of videogame preview events.
Earlier, gazing around the room at massive screens with Army of Two and Fuse on them, I was experiencing a sense of huge disconnect with my industry. Unusually quiet, I said to Eurogamer’s Chris Donlan, “I don’t know what I’ll say for RPS. It all seems so... macho.”
]]>We sent Cara Ellison to EA to play some Crysis 3. We would like to formally apologise to Crytek and EA for having sent Cara Ellison to play some Crysis 3. Here is why:
]]>News collectors VG247 have a bunch of Crysis 3 footage, which I have cheerfully reblogged below. Producer-man Michael Read has a bit to say about it, too, explaining what makes that section - Swamp - unique. Well, it's swampy green and might murky, for a start. But also you get to kill men! Oh. Well, I am sure there is other stuff. Looks awesome, actually, but I am clearly Crytek's target audience: someone who looks forward to whispering MAXIMUM COCKNEY as my battle chum burbles in my ear. And just look at it!
In other news: I'm going to make some dinner. Mexican tonight!
]]>It is a wonderful week for insanely inventive videogames. The long-awaited Antichamber (which I'm splattering my feeble brain against right now) lands on Thursday, and 2013's Global Game Jam just forced a hand inside its own sternum and produced a glistening goldmine of bloody great games. But in between all that, I know I'll be needing a slightly more traditional palette cleanser. Enter Crysis 3's open beta. Men get shot, and they neither spray you with chunky metaphysical sophistries nor make you suddenly aware of the faintly fluttering organ that could stop sustaining your life at any given moment. They just, you know, stop shooting back. And so on and so forth. But oh, there are neat powers. And bows. And some - in the grand scheme of shooters - fairly novel modes. Study up on their mysterious ways after the break.
]]>In my more soulful, reflective moments, I can't help but look out into the vast sea of human suffering and ask myself, "Why? Why do we Crysis?" The answers, of course, are many and multifarious - like some kind of gigantic, infini-brained wisdom hydra - but they all boil down to one core: single-player. Case in point: Crysis 2's multiplayer wasn't terrible by any means, but it just didn't do enough to stand out. Crytek, however, seems to think the series has multiplayer greatness encoded in its nanomachine-bloated DNA, so it's once again aiming high with Crysis 3. And while things like the hunted-becomes-the-hunter, er, Hunter mode sound fun on paper, they're far from proven quantities. So that's where you come in, with your hideously calloused testing fingers and unrelentingly skewering skepticism. Details after the break.
]]>I do so miss the days when the majority of videogame weapons were completely outrageous. Sure, today's crop of Battlehomes and Medalfronts adore their reality-balking setpieces, but look up at their skies, and you'll see that even the sun has donned its most serious warface. Comparatively extinct, then, is the cartoony carnage of Doom's BFG - or, more recently, Painkiller's, er, painkiller. Heck, even Far Cry 3 kept its open-world madness grounded with a fairly tame arsenal. It's nice, then, to at least see its equally tear-prone cousin Crysis 3 go completely bonkers. The Typhoon apparently fires "500 bullets per second." Its alt-fire, meanwhile, looks to be some kind of flame catapult. Watch as it wreaks havoc on an icky, sticky squid swamp after the break.
]]>Watching the latest in Crysis 3's "Seven Wonders" series, I can't help but be reminded of totally amazing 7DFPS entry Vonneguts & Glory. No, Crytek's hardware-hemorrhaging squidshoot hasn't suddenly started dressing like Wolfenstein 3D, but it has slammed on the breaks and shifted into reverse for some reason. The effect is neat-looking, I suppose, but now I really just want a mega-budget backward shooter. Start at the end, un-shoot your victims and watch as they happily go home to their families, un-fire un-explosions from your un-gun, etc. Oh well, though. For now we'll just have to ponder what could've been while watching Prophet moonwalk through Wall Street. Take a peep after the break - unless, of course, real life's actually been in reverse the entire time and you already have.
]]>Crysis 3 has taken on a strange, amorphous shape in my head. I've not really been following it closely enough to really say all that much about it, and having gone back to look at all the previous materials to post this video - including Nathan's interview with Mr Crytek, in which he talks about a lot of things which are not Crysis 3 at all - I'm rather excited. I realise I am in a (handsome, intelligent and perceptive) minority in having had a great time in Crysis 2, but I can't help feeling that Crytek's mission is laudable. They really do want to make the shooter that covers everything, and is all things to all shooter-fans. Yerli's quotes in that interview suggest he's lost none of his ambition, and it's clear that all kinds of concessions have to be made in projects of this magnitude. And the very least they are aiming high. This new footage, below, contains some spectacular moments. Go take a look.
]]>If you have a perfectly pristine photographic memory for Adam's posts - and honestly, who doesn't? - you'll remember that he recently came across the first episode in EA's Albert-Hughes-directed "Seven Wonders" Crysis 3 series. He also said these things, "I think I’m supposed to care about the story here, but is it really anything more than an excuse to cram opposing forces into an interesting place so they can shoot each other? Nothing wrong with that but I’d prefer to see more of the weighty in-engine conflict and less of the build-up." Frankly, I share that sentiment, and apparently, so does Albert Hughes. Episode 2, you see, is all action. OK, and there's some cheesy narration, but you can ignore that.
]]>Crysis 3 isn't the first piece of entertainment to show us New York reclaimed by nature, but the city become prison-park could make for a compelling setting. The latest video advertisement for the game is the first part of the 'Seven Wonders' series, directed by Albert Hughes who you may know as one half of the Hughes brothers, mighty cinema-men of From Hell and Menace II Society. I think I'm supposed to care about the story here, but is it really anything more than an excuse to cram opposing forces into an interesting place so they can shoot each other? Nothing wrong with that but I'd prefer to see more of the weighty in-engine conflict and less of the build-up.
]]>If you climb to the top of Mt Videogameland, you'll see that Crysis 3 is just over the thoroughly tessellated, HDR-lit horizon. That, however, is hardly the only thing that's got Crytek's tear-powered mega-lair whirring along at maximum efficiency. There's also Homefront 2, Warface, Ryse, an entire F2P social platform, piracy concerns, and a brand new Crysis - which is totally not Crysis 4, but also kind of is. I spoke with Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli about all of this things and also asked him the question that's almost certainly been devouring your every idle thought for far too many months: why's it called "Warface"?
]]>In the future, nothing will cost anything. Ever. Well, except when it costs something. Which will be sometimes, but not always. Or ever, unless you want it to. Those are the sorts of wonderful logical fallacies somewhat - shall we say - misleading phrases like "free-to-play" conjure up, but there's no denying the business model's effectiveness. Even so, there are plenty of kinks to work out, which is why life's great big studio audience emitted a collective gasp when Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli announced that his company was closing up the non-F2P part of its shop as soon as possible. During a recent interview with RPS, however, he clarified that stance and noted, among other things, that it's "too early to say" whether or not Crysis 4 will be F2P.
]]>We don't usually do system requirements posts, but when it comes to Crytek they do have a history of basically telling us all that our PCs are rubbish and outdated. Granted, while once it was the high watermark of e-willy waving, the Crysis series hasn't of late been the technical Goliath/Mephistopheles it once was. Does that change with the upcoming Crysis 3? You know how this works.
]]>After watching six solid minutes of Crysis 3's "The Fields" campaign mission, I can pretty safely say that I don't play Crysis like Crytek plays Crysis. I tend to spend most of my time invisible, skulking and striking with my trusty shotgun. Which might sound like the most counterproductive thing since weight-loss soda, but there's nothing else quite like super-speed sprinting away, re-cloaking, and slowly but surely picking off increasingly confused baddies one-by-one. In this video, however, Crytek takes a much more, er, forward approach.
]]>Crysis 3 producer Mike Read has been talking about the new modes for the upcoming game, and you can see them in action below. I've no real idea how popular the Crysis multiplayer modes have been over the years. I've played all of them, but, well, I can't ever remember anyone talking about them after release. Mods yes, but vanilla multiplayer? No. Anyone out there actually play it? What are we missing?
And, ah, this makes me laugh, it shouldn't really, but "it's an adrenaline rush you'll want to experience again and again," he says with an unconvincing smile, and "lampposts can also be used as weapons." Yeah.
Anyway. Crysis 3 is out in February.
]]>More footage from the weekend's Eurogamer shindig. Crysis 3's 'infection type multiplayer mode, Hunter, is shown in a new video, demonstrating the Museum of Modern Art map. I'm not sure if everyone else already knew this but the Crash Site mode from Crysis 2 is back as well. That's all about reaching and securing a location on the map and made for some interesting use of space in the previous game. Both are explained and shown in the video below. The Hunter mode does seem rather weighted in favour of the hunters, perhaps making it an indictment of the killing of living things for sport. Those poor operatives, fighting invisible enemies, don't stand a chance.
]]>Among modern videogame story structures, "The hunter becomes the hunted" is a pretty big one. Crysis 3, however, is embracing the lesser-known but perhaps even more emotionally resonant "The hunter becomes the hunted, but then gets killed and respawns as the hunter - who then hunts the other former hunters who are now being hunted." In short, they, sir, are being hunted. So basically, it kicks off with two cloak-happy nanosuit supersoldiers attempting to prevent 14 Cell commandos from reaching an evac point. Then chaos ensues, lives are lost, and the cycle of reincarnation is set to "fast forward" and "hilarious irony."
]]>I approach engine tech demos with caution, as if they were primed to explode, or at least deceive me with their promises and lies. They're not necessarily representative of anything that will actually be seen in a game, unless you're one of those people who reckons iD games are tech demos, in which case they're the most reliably accurate tech demos of all. The new video advertising CryEngine 3 is utterly gorgeous, with lots of flashy pop-up text describing what's onscreen, whether its 'vegetation simulation' or 'tessellated toad tech', but take the embellishments away and there's still something impressive and that's the world of Crysis 3. Recognisable urban ruins being swallowed by the return of greenery, and water freed from pipes and cisterns. It's splendid and makes me want to do more in these surroundings than shoot people.
]]>Woo! It's almost like playing the game! Ah, sorry, yes: the possibilities for mockery when a scripted shooter chooses to promote itself via a trailer in which you just have a couple of choices and then you let the rest of it play out are basically pretty mean. So I won't go there, and instead point out how pretty the ruined jungled New York of Crysis 3 is. Yep, it's super pretty! It's not the first game to feature a future-New York taken over by jungle, of course, but this time you get a bow and arrow! The trailer shows off some neat features aside from prettiness, of course, including weapon modification and shooting people in the head. That always goes down well.
]]>It was the night before Crysis 2's launch, and all through Crytek, not a creature was stirring - not even a fry... tech. But then, in the midst of laying down for the extended cryogenic sleep that traditionally follows Crytek's development crunches, one developer bolted upright. "Everyone," he turned and said to the others, nestled in their infernal healing contraptions, "I feel like something's missing." Then his eyes bloodshot eyes went wide with horror. "We... we forgot the graphics." And so it was that Crysis 2 shipped with no DirectX 11 support and only a few preset graphics options. In time, however, Crytek sent PC gamers an apology basket filled with magical pixels, and all was (mostly) well. And happily, with Crysis 3, the developer plans to include more graphics than ever before.
]]>Many people set their furrowed brows to maximum anger (known in some places as a warface) and rallied against Crysis 2. I wasn't one of them. It was, in many ways, a far more directed experience than Crysis 1, but it was still far from being Modern Warfare in a snazzy pair of robo-pants. That said, when word got out that Crysis 3 was aiming to get back in touch with the series' more open roots, I may have done a little dance. But then, mid-awkward-convulsion-shuffle-step, I halted with a sudden sobering realization: could it all be too good to be true? Fortunately, this entire series of events took place at a Crysis 3 event in San Francisco yesterday, so I immediately turned and asked director of creative development Rasmus Hojengaard. Here's what he told me.
]]>The hunted becomes the hunter! The ruined city is reclaimed! Stealth, bows, arrows, BWAARRR, painfully pretty pictures of a world in ruin. Crysis 3 has all this and more. Granted, the 'more' is mainly guns (which are also the new guns), explosions and aliens being punched so hard and so far that the lead character might as well rename himself Punchy McFist Airlines. Heck, for all I know he is called that. I probably wouldn't even lose my monocle when a companion shouted to him, "McFist, these bugs are everywhere, you need to suit up and boot up!" I wouldn't know what any of it meant but I'm used to incoherence in shooterland. Here's the trailer.
]]>Yesterday brought official word that a profitable videogame would see a follow-up. Surprise! But while we got to ogle a few Crysis 3 screenshots, we didn't get to see it in motion. We still don't, because life is harsh and cruel and that's a lesson that we all need to learn at some point. Now go to bed without having any dinner. Once you wake up tomorrow, starving and miserable, we might just let you watch this footage of the latest update to CryENGINE 3, which might just offer some visual hints about what to expect from Thrysis. Included - more ear-shaped ears, diving fish-guys, a man with multi-coloured stubble, the kind of fantasy castles that we all wish Skyrim had, a lovely waterfall, a man taking out his existential rage on a window and a shed.
]]>Here is a poorly-kept secret: I'm not a very tall man. Here is another one: Crysis 3 is happening. Even before evidence turned up last week, a fourth nanosuited adventure seemed something of a given, but it's taken the EA-Crytek announcengine this long to formally confirm the next game. I've just played Press Release Bingo and I've got a "stunning", a "state of the art", an "unparalleled visuals", an "ultimate", a "leveraging the latest technology" and enough pre-order unlocks to kill a small horse.
Confirmed: we'll play as angry baldy man Prophet (those who've finished Crysis 2 can probably work out why that's the case), that bow and arrow is legit, it's due next Spring, it's using CryEngine 3, it's going to have "sandbox gameplay" and it's set in a New York trapped inside an Nanodome which has caused it to transform into an 'urban rainforest.'
]]>While struggling to think up a headline pun to accompany the unsurprising news that there's almost certainly going to be a third (well, fourth technically speaking) Crysis game, the 'crap rhymes' part of my imagination dredged up No Way Sis, who were at one time deemed the UK's premier Oasis tribute act and enjoyed far too much success of their own. Even a hit single. What a terrible, terrible world this can be.
Anyway, Crysis 3. A spot of digging by Neogaf and Eurogamer's German arm has turned up assorted hints that Crytek's third nanosuit oddyssey is due for a reveal soon. They even found a picture of a Crysis dude with a bow and arrow. Which seems sort of incongruous to the nanosuit, but maybe the Strength mode will enable us to shoot arrows that fly for over 20 miles. EXTREME HUNTING.
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.png?width=1200&height=630&fit=crop&enable=upscale&auto=webp "שחרורו של Assassin's Creed Shadows נדחה למרץ כאשר מועצת המנהלים של Ubisoft שוקל מכירת חברה")
